China's limited child policy
By Chris Reames
What is it?
During the 1970's the people of China were encouraged by the Chinese government to have only one child and they were given many benefits or they were punished for having 2 or more children. Benefits of one kid would be something like, higher wages, interest free loans, retirement funds, got better housing and their child was more likely to be accepted into a better school but if the had two or more children they could be forced to have and abortion, fines that were ridicules and could barely be paid off, they would be fired, and they could have things like their possessions taken by the government. So as you could tell the people of China were very strongly encouraged to have only one child. But, the law only was applied to certain people though. It was not applied to people that were living in rural areas, have a child with disabilities, children born overseas, ethnic minorities, and people working in high risk jobs. Also if the first born child was female then they could have another child but they couldn't have 3 if there was another girl. This may sound like a very cruel law but 76% of people in China agreed with this law and it was very effecting. This was a very effective policy as it prevented over 400 million births and they were only .07 billion people over there target for 2000 at 1.2 billion. This policy has slowed Chinas growing problem of over-population. Without this policy China would have an extra 400 million people which is more then the whole United States population.
Two Child Policy
The one child policy was just very recently removed and raised to two in October 2015. There was a slight two child policy while the one child policy was in place. There were certain scenarios that allowed you to have multiple kids , like having twins, or lived in certain locations. Even though people are now able to have two children instead of one most current young adults in the child bearing years are still going to only have one kid not two because this has because the cultural norm. Because the norm is to now only have one kid the population will slowly decrease because there total fertility rate isn't at the magic number of 2.1. Even if they have two kids it still won't be at 2.1. So the population there may not be that all of a bad thing because ever population leads to major issues that could extend from just a nations problem to a world wide issue.
Without it? My Thoughts
I think that even though the one child policy was forcing people to only have one child that it did a lot of great things for their population. It prevented 400,000 births. If those 400,000 births were to happen then those people would have had kids bring the total of birth even higher. So without the one child policy China's cities would be wildly overpopulated even more then they are now. The one child policy may have not been the right thing to do but It really did prevent a lot of births and did help China's population problem, and without it China would be facing a lot of major problems like overpopulation, and major health issues related to smog and pollution form the very crowded cities.