Born out of a legacy of extensive state planning, China’s one-child policy is regarded as the strictest family planning program in modern history. Formulated as an emergency measure to increase per capita living standards at its inception, the experiences of comparative countries provide strong evidence that the policy provided limited value relative to economic growth, which remained the primary driver of fertility decline. Above all, the one-child policy will be remembered not only as a policy that overstayed its necessity, but as an unprecedented state project that came at too high a cost for its people.

Formally implemented  in 1980, China’s one-child policy (OCP) is recognized as the strictest family planning program in modern history, the ramifications of which continue to affect Chinese households today. How, in a society that has traditionally placed at the center of its cultural identity the importance of family, kinship and filial piety, a policy that subjected the family unit to such a degree of state interference could begin is therefore of great interest in understanding Chinese policymaking and the context in which the policy emerged.

China today confronts a rapidly aging population, sub-replacement fertility and male-female demographic imbalances—all of which could constrain economic growth. Marriages in China plunged to 6.1 million in 2024, the lowest figure since record keeping began in 1986. The Chinese government has sought to increase births—of which marriages are naturally an important component. The OCP is often blamed as the primary reason for the demographic issues China fronts today. How true that claim is is disputed. China’s neighbors Japan, South Korea and Taiwan confront similar birth rate and aging population concerns without having witnessed a family planning policy like the OCP.

Taken together, the evidence suggests that the OCP’s legacy can be best understood as one of limited success in curtailing rapid population growth but, more consequentially, as one that inflicted deep costs on women, children, and the family — not only of the only-child generation, but of successive generations to come. 

Critical in understanding the emergence of the OCP in the late 1970s are the complementary international and domestic contexts in which it emerged. In the second half of the 20th century, challenges brought by rapid population growth across both industrialized and developing nations would lead to the emergence of a global movement for birth control. The 1974 World Population Conference at Bucharest, coordinated by the United Nations, became the first global conference to confront such questions, illustrative of a growing consensus that rapid population growth, unchecked, would undermine economic growth and political stability. Such was the international context in which the OCP emerged: a world under the Malthusian shadow of a “population bomb.” 

Note, however, that while this context explains the tendency for national authorities to practice family planning programs, it does not explain the unique disposition of the Chinese leadership to establish the degree of state interference characteristic of the OCP. Indeed, competing views of birth control existed during this period: one centered on the provision of contraceptives for voluntary use and the other, legitimating the role of government to interfere in individual reproductive freedom to control population growth. The conscious decision to employ one of history’s most draconian projects in social engineering can thus only be understood by considering the distinct nature of Chinese policymaking. 

The Chinese state’s mindset towards birth control can be well understood even from party rhetoric in the 1950s, when Mao remarked in early 1957 the necessity for birth planning: “Reproduction needs to be planned… It (humankind) has plans for production, in factories for producing cloth, tables and chairs, and steel, but there is no plan for producing humans.” Here, it is worth noting the ostensible contradiction such rhetoric might reflect with Mao’s belief that “the more people, the stronger we are.” To reconcile Mao’s “pro-natalist record” with his willingness to pursue increasingly coercive means of birth control in the 1970s, one ought to observe the way in which such statements serve ideological rather than policy purposes and were thus more frequently employed in ideologically driven contexts. For instance, the Chinese delegation at Bucharest denounced the West’s call for population control as imperialist even while authorities had launched a nationwide birth control program at home. 

Ultimately, Mao’s post-1949 approach towards family planning needed to be more pragmatic than ideological, faced with the political necessity to address mounting pressures of feeding the population and to maintain domestic stability. Over 36 years, China would thus launch four distinct birth control programs, the first two of which were relatively limited, interrupted by the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. The latter two, the “later, longer, fewer” (LLF) campaign and the OCP, would carry far-reaching consequences, and best exemplify the bias for the planner’s mentality inherent in Chinese policy making. 

Launched in 1971, LLF policies were designed to encourage households to postpone marriages, increase spacing between births and to have fewer children. Such policies began in the context of China’s fourth Five-Year Plan (1971–1975), which set targets of reducing annual population growth from 2.5% to 1970 to 1% in cities and 1.5% in rural areas by 1975. Beyond illustrating the planner’s mentality at work, the LLF campaign provides the necessary context to understanding the coercive, campaign-driven nature of the OCP that would soon follow; many of the notorious enforcement techniques of the OCP era can be traced to the LLF campaign. 

Characteristic of the campaign was the degree to which the bureaucratic state apparatus was employed to subject women’s bodies to an intense level of scrutiny, as grassroots birth planning workers across each village, work unit and neighborhood kept comprehensive records on women’s reproductive details, including their past births, contraceptive use, and menstrual cycles. Certain factories held quotas for production as well as reproduction, as women employees were required to receive birth allotments to get pregnant. 

Overall, women were found, on average, to have postponed their first birth by an average of 28 months over the period 1970 to 1980, while between 1970 and 1978, China’s total fertility rate for all regions declined from 5.8 to 2.7 per woman. Both figures demonstrate the highly effective nature of the LLF campaign. While the OCP would turn out to be more coercive than the LLF campaign that preceded it, the OCP ultimately can only be meaningfully understood as a continuation of China’s ongoing experimentation with family planning policies. 

Here then, a critical question arises as to why the Chinese leadership determined there was still the need to implement an even more coercive program through the OCP in the aftermath of the LLF campaign. In fact, the magnitude of post-1979 fertility decline was significantly smaller than during the LLF campaign: between 1979 and 2005 under the OCP, fertility rates only decreased from 2.8 to 1.8 per woman. One view advanced by scholars including Susan Greenhalgh and Chinese demographer Liang Zhongtang states that this need ultimately stemmed from the urgent desire by Deng and other post-Mao leaders to find any conceivable way to increase per capita economic growth. According to this view, the OCP, which began in the wake of Mao’s death in 1976, was pursued as a flagship policy of the post-revolutionary regime that sought to make economic development the fundamental basis for its political legitimacy, and thus effective birth control a vital component of its success. That a ready, ostensibly scientific rationale for such a policy by scientists in high positions of the Chinese state hierarchy were offered, further provided the academic greenlight for the OCP. The OCP thus began as an emergency measure to promote China’s economic modernization, with an accompanying population target of 1.2 billion by 2000 to quadruple GDP per capita to $1000 (later revised to $800). 

Before evaluating the consequences of OCP, a final observation of China’s distinct political context can be made. That is, the OCP, uniquely, could likely only have been launched and sustained in a political system like China’s, where bureaucratic institutions treat individual citizens as instrumental subjects of the state and thus population as simply figures in the pursuit of policy goals — in this case, per capita growth. Therefore, where India’s mass sterilization campaign during 1975–6 ultimately led to the collapse of the Indira Gandhi government, the statist, authoritarian tradition that defines Chinese institutions is fundamental to understanding the resilience of the decades-long OCP that came with enormous human costs.

These social costs are most evident in the lives of Chinese women, whose reproductive lives became the primary object of the state’s birth control enterprise. From unborn babies to mothers, women became victims of deep-rooted, patriarchal norms which reflected themselves in both policies that placed the primary burden of birth control on women, and discriminatory practices which undermined the state’s ideological commitment to gender equality. In 1983 alone, China performed 14 million abortions, 21 million sterilizations and 18 million IUD insertions. Botched operations and a lack of post-operative care led to lifelong disabilities in some women, while some mothers, under great duress, had to hide their pregnancy and avoid public healthcare facilities. 

The strong bias for a son in China’s patrilineal society led to sex-selective abortion, widespread abandonment and adoption of female babies, and in what can be seen as the state’s reaffirming of such biases, couples in rural China were allowed a second birth if the first was a girl after the late-1980s. Physical abuse against mothers and first-born daughters stemmed in part from a cultural belief that the failure to have a son was the ultimate unfilial act and uprooted man’s sense of purpose in life. In a country where women purportedly hold up half the sky, Chinese women were perhaps the greatest victims of a policy that ultimately deprived a large proportion of families from having a second child. The OCP revealed long-standing gendered biases in Chinese society, which, in the long-term, would produce demographic concerns in the aggregate by creating an artificially high sex ratio. 

This distorted sex ratio, a direct consequence of prenatal discrimination during the OCP era, led to imbalances as high as 150 boys per 100 girls in parts of China. The “missing girls” of China exemplify the ill-conceived nature of a birth control policy that forced changes in fertility behavior without addressing underlying social preferences. Today, the male population exceeds the female population by about 30 million, as Chinese leaders grapple with the concomitant social issues such demographic imbalances entail: a stark male surplus in the Chinese marriage market that threatens not only the ability for Chinese men to have a family, but has further driven males to commit financially rewarding crimes to appear more attractive in a more competitive marriage market. 

Beyond uprooting the patrilineal bearings of Chinese society, the family unit underwent substantial change during the OCP. Between the early 1980s and 2010, the average Chinese household shrank from more than four persons to barely three, while the share of small family households (of one to three persons) nearly doubled from 34% to 62%. Key to understanding the degree to which the Chinese family was reconfigured is the crucial role the family unit has traditionally occupied as the source of social security, as parents provide jobs, training, spouse and estate to children in return for support in old age. The OCP uniquely uproots this reciprocal balance of duties by reducing the likelihood of a son and by supplanting the role of parents as providers, as children primarily derived benefits from the state or work units (danwei) under the OCP. 

In response to the weakening of the family unit, the Chinese government introduced a “filial piety law” in 2013 mandating children to provide support and to pay regular visits to elderly parents, demonstrating the difficulty of maintaining the familial, private system of old- age support. However, perhaps most glaring is the reconfiguration of family structures. The four (grandparents)-two (parents)-one (child) household structure was a direct outcome of the OCP, one that places an unprecedented degree of parental and societal pressures on the only child, but simultaneously has given rise to a generation of “little emperors” who are less trustworthy, more risk-averse, more pessimistic, and less conscientious. Such are the unintended side-effects of a policy enforced in contravention of cultural norms, but which were ultimately justified in the pursuit of raising per capita living standards. 

To evaluate the claim that the one-child policy was ultimately successful at reducing fertility levels and raising per capita living standards, one ought to ask what would have occurred in a counterfactual world in absence of such a policy. Notably, the experience of China’s East Asian neighbors thus presents a serious indictment of the Chinese record, as countries like Japan and Taiwan were able to achieve rapid declines in fertility via economic growth and voluntary family planning campaigns, avoiding any of the abuses of the OCP.  South Korea and Thailand comprise a comparison pair of Asian developing countries that had high rates of fertility akin to China’s in the 1960s, but which unlike China, saw rapid declines via voluntary programs. Given that China witnessed growth rates higher than its peers from 1979, it is likely the case that even in absence of the OCP, China’s fertility rate would have declined substantially. In fact, based on pre-OCP fertility trends and fertility trends in other countries, it is estimated China would have seen substantial fertility declines such that by 2010, fertility would have reached the actual observed level of 1.5 children per woman even in the absence of the OCP. 

In a 2010 study, differences in OCP implementation intensity between urban and rural residents in Jiangsu and Zhejiang — areas of similar socioeconomic development — are exploited to show that OCP intensity cannot account for the disparities in fertility levels. Like its East Asian neighbors, socioeconomic development, instead, is found to be the decisive factor in China’s transition to below-replacement fertility. While such evidence does not imply the OCP had no impact, it largely diminishes the value of the OCP as a policy instrument specifically designed to reduce fertility. At best, we may conclude that the OCP accelerated the existing decline in fertility for several years, although economic development remained the chief driver of China’s depressed fertility levels in the long-term. To the extent that the OCP was technically successful in facilitating China’s fertility decline after 1979, it would be inaccurate to attribute this to the OCP specifically. 

Given that the OCP likely only had a marginal contribution to China’s fertility decline, it is important to evaluate the rise in per capita living standards within this context as well. Specifically, although the OCP is often credited with raising the level of human capital invested in children, such an argument is weakened if families organically would have opted to have fewer children and thus devote more resources per child in absence of the OCP. That is, although there exists a significant tradeoff between number of children and child quality in China, the OCP’s contribution was modest at best, as even in absence of the OCP, families would only have increased by an estimated 0.25 to 0.33 children. Moreover, existing studies find minimal effect of OCP-induced fertility changes on children’s education, consistent with the experience of other developing countries.

While a study by Choukhmane et al. argue that the OCP “significantly fostered human capital accumulation for the only-child generation”, it is crucial to note the assumption under which the study’s counterfactual scenario is based. That is, the study finds human capital accumulation to be significantly higher under the OCP relative to a “natural fertility rate” scenario which only declines to 2 children per household in the early 2000s. If the experience of comparable Asian developing countries is to be indicative of what would have occurred in absence of the OCP, Choukhmane et al.’s counterfactual scenario overestimates what China’s fertility rate would likely have been in early 2000s, thus biasing upwards the contribution of the OCP to human capital investments. Taken together, the OCP’s contribution thus ought not be overstated, but acknowledged as having had a positive but limited impact on human capital investments in children. 

In 2022, the Chinese population declined for the first time in decades, and in 2023, India overtook China as the world’s most populous country. Projections of a dependency ratio in China of as high as 89 dependents per 100 people of working age by around 2085 speak to the urgency of a looming demographic crisis. Below-replacement Chinese fertility rates have created one of the world’s fastest aging populations — in part, a deleterious effect of the OCP publicly acknowledged in the Open Letter in 1980 that marked the beginning of the OCP. But by the same token that improvements in per capita living standards or human capital investments cannot be fully attributed to the OCP, one ought to evaluate the demographic crisis without placing undue blame on the OCP. This is not to absolve the OCP of any degree of accountability in hastening China’s population decline, but simply recognizes economic growth as the fundamental driver of declining fertility and thus population aging, as was the case in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, which have each faced declining birth rates and an aging workforce in the absence of coercive birth planning campaigns. 

Given the primacy of economic growth in driving declining fertility, we ought to consider alternative policies that could have existed in place of the OCP. We previously said that in absence of the OCP, China would likely have seen substantial fertility declines reaching similar levels to what is observed in the data, suggesting a family planning program as systematic as the OCP would have been unnecessary. But even if we could only consider systematic, state-initiated programs of birth planning, there existed far more humane alternatives that would likely have achieved similar demographic effects. 

Liang Zhongtang’s “two-child-plus-spacing” policy, for instance, was designed as a modified LLF policy that would have led to less severe social and human consequences. Peasants, who would already have come to accept the idea of having only two children through the LLF campaign, would simply be made to wait longer before having a second child and thus would have demonstrated less resistance compared to the OCP. A proportion of individuals, over time and with work, would gradually come to accept one-child families. Such an alternative would likely have allowed China to reach its population targets by the end of the 20th century at lower human costs. A two-child policy would ultimately increase the degree of voluntary compliance on the part of Chinese families, contrary to a one-child policy that has been difficult to implement, “most fundamentally because it runs counter to the desires of individual families.”

In a statist regime like China’s, the protracted pursuit of the OCP created a regime which legitimized itself in effective birth control, an entrenched birth control bureaucracy, and a government reluctant to acknowledge the deleterious effects of its flagship policy. Only in 2015 were the realities of a looming demographic crisis imminent, that the OCP was officially abandoned, and families were told they would be allowed to have two children. For 35 years, the traditional Chinese family unit underwent unprecedented change, while women underwent forced abortions, botched sterilizations, and domestic violence under the tyranny of a policy that prevented families from having the number of children they desired and was especially violent against females. Such women are forced to confront a reality of physical and psychic scars that will persist far beyond the end of the OCP, while the legacy of sex selection reflects itself not only in cases of female infanticide and abortion but also, today, in the hundred thousand families across the West who have daughters adopted from China. As changes at the household level percolated upwards to produce changes at the aggregate, China today grapples with a distorted sex-ratio, a rapidly aging population, and economic stagnation while facing enormous public welfare costs in terms of family support for aging parents.

In 2021, China announced its current family planning policy, the three-child policy (TCP), enabling families to have three children, while simultaneously removing penalties on couples who exceed this limit. While the policy effectively empowers couples to have as many children as they desire, it has seen limited success in lifting the birth rate. The TCP thus captures a unique nuance of Chinese family planning today: it mistakes the supply-side issue, that of whether families are allowed to have children, with the demand-side issue, that of whether families want to have children. High living, housing, and child-rearing costs, accompanied by an increasingly individualistic female populace, collectively constrain the demand for larger families. Experiences of other countries show that raising fertility is more challenging than reducing it. In China’s unique context — a top-down policymaking regime marked by lags and rigidities in responding to structural challenges — the OCP, if not a driver of, has thus at least been extremely counterproductive to alleviating the demographic crisis.

Born out of a legacy of extensive state planning, the OCP is regarded as the strictest family planning program in modern history. Formulated as an emergency measure to increase per capita living standards at its inception, the experiences of comparative countries provide strong evidence that the OCP provided limited value relative to economic growth, which remained the primary driver of fertility decline. Above all, the OCP will be remembered not only as a policy that overstayed its necessity, but as an unprecedented state project that came at too high a cost for its people: of physical and psychic abuses at the household level, and multigenerational demographic distortions at the aggregate. 

Image credits: Flickr/kattebelletje

The author has requested to remain anonymous.