Matt Soniak
How Does China Enforce Its One-Baby Policy?
by Matt Soniak - January 5, 2012 - 12:00 PM

© Roy Hsu/Blend Images/Corbis

Most people have heard that in China, you’re only allowed to have one kid. But does that apply to everyone? And how is that enforced?

How did this whole thing start?

When Mao Zedong declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, he envisioned China as a superpower. A great nation would need lots of manpower behind its army and economy, so Mao encouraged the Chinese to multiply. The new communist government condemned birth control and banned imports of contraceptives, and the population almost doubled under Mao’s reign.

This growth quickly strained the country’s food supply, and in 1955, the government reversed course and launched a campaign promoting birth control. Over the next two decades, during which China went through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the government flip-flopped on population control and ran propaganda campaigns promoting or condemning it, depending on their need for a labor force. The population rose and fell accordingly, but by the mid 1970s, it had leveled off, and China had a quarter of the world’s people living on just 7 percent of world’s arable land. Growth was just around the corner, with the majority of the population under 30-years-old and getting ready to have children. Another Mao-style population boom would have been disastrous, straining resources and threatening standards of living. Birth control propaganda wouldn’t cut it, and the government sought a more forceful method of population control. In 1979 they introduced a policy that limiting some families to having only one child.

Does it apply to all 1 billion+ Chinese?

No. The one-child policy (or, translated from the Chinese name, “policy of birth planning”) only applies to 40% to 63% of the population, depending on whether you’re talking to China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission or American academics. Specifically, the policy applies to urban married couples who are part of the nation’s Han ethnic majority.

Who gets an exemption?

Wang Feng, a sociologist at UC Irvine who’s studied the policy and its effects, says that the system of exemptions is about as complex as the American tax code. Among those who pretty much have blanket immunity to the policy are all non-Han ethnic groups, anyone living in Hong Kong or Macau, and foreigners living in China, .

Since the policy is enforced at the provincial level, other groups can get exceptions in certain areas. In some rural areas, families are allowed a second if the first is a girl or is mentally or physically disabled. Some provinces allow couples to have two children if neither partner has siblings, or if either is a disabled military veteran. After an earthquake devastated the province of Sichuan on 2008, the provincial government extended an exception to parents who had lost children in the disaster.

Some provincial exemptions can get a little bizarre. The New York Times reports that couples in  Zhejiang can have two kids if the wife has one sister and her husband lives with her family to help take care of her parents. The sister doesn’t get an exception, though. Beijing makes an exception for couples where the husband’s brother is infertile and does not adopt a child and both husbands have rural residence permits. In Fujian a couple can have a second kid if the provincial population density is less than 50 people per .38 square miles, or one person per 11 acres at the time, or if each spouse farms at least an acre and a half of land.

How is the policy enforced?

Population and Family Planning Commissions exist at the national, provincial and local levels of government to promote the policy, register births, and carry out family inspections. Provincial governments are responsible for enforcing the policy and do so through a mix of rewards and punishments doled out by local officials. In most provinces, having a an extra child gets you a fine, the amount of which varies across provinces. In some places, the fine is a set amount (usually in the thousands of dollars), and in others it’s based on a percentage of the violator’s annual income. In some provinces, policy violators can also have their property and/or belongings confiscated and lose their jobs.

Couples who delay having a child, or who voluntarily follow the policy even if they’re exempt, get some perks for playing along.  Depending on the province where they live, they may receive a “Certificate of Honor for Single-Child Parents,” a monthly stipend from the government, special pension benefits, preferential treatment when applying for government jobs, free water, tax breaks, or bonus points on the child’s school entrance exams.

Are there any loopholes or workarounds?

Nature always finds a way, and in China, money helps nature along greatly. In many rural areas and even some urban ones, couples can pay a fee to the local government and receive a permit to have a second, third or even fourth child.

Couples can scam the government, too, and hide extra kids by registering the birth under a false name or in a different province. If a province allows second children in the event of the first being disabled, couples might be able to stretch the definition of “disabled” in their favor. In Hunan, for example, some people got exemptions because of first borns with problems as minor as nearsightedness.

Has the policy been effective?

This graph of the country’s birth rate certainly suggests so, and Chinese authorities claim the policy has prevented roughly 400 million births between 1979 and 2011. The government says that the population controls have kept air and water pollution down and lessened the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by some 200 million tones (versus the amount that would have been released with an unchecked population).

When the government introduced the policy in 1979, they were shooting for a target population of 1.2 billion by the year 2000. That year’s census recorded just over 1.29 billion people, which is pretty close. But studies both from China and the U.S. have suggested that the official numbers may be an underestimate because of unreported births and other policy violations and manipulation by government officials.

We’ll be here answering questions all day.

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Comments (19)

  1. The problem with this is that China is going to have a lot of old, retired people compared to young, working people. China is going to face the same growth inhibiting problems that many developed nations face when their populations age, probably before becoming a high-income country. The policy might have seemed like a good idea in the short-term, but they have really shot themselves in the foot in the long term.

    posted by John on 1-5-2012 at 12:31 pm

  2. I agree. They’re screwed in the long term, but at least they receive the short term consolation that they’re reducing their carbon footprint. There is a reason why Japan is offering incentives for young couples to have children.

    posted by John Nguyen on 1-5-2012 at 12:36 pm

  3. I want to know how they REALLY enfore the rule, not how they say they do, and what happens when a couple has multiples? I saw a documentary about women from different parts of the globe giving birth. They woman in China was having twins, and the documentary said that she would only bring one home. It was never mentioned again, so I have no idea what was going on. Was one still born? What happened to the one that didn’t get to come home? An orphanage? Something terrible? This was several years ago, and I’ve never forgotten it.

    posted by Renee on 1-5-2012 at 12:56 pm

  4. The article should address the gender-specific abortions, abandonment of female infants, and the growing gender imbalance that the one-child policy has introduced.

    posted by n2y2 on 1-5-2012 at 1:00 pm

  5. I think that the reducing carbon number is flawed as I’m sure to pump up the number China uses their population growth stats from the days of birth control being banned, instead of a more normal/natural progression of birth rate.

    posted by Wayne Stevens on 1-5-2012 at 1:06 pm

  6. Forced abortions is one more way this awful regime “fixes” the problem.

    posted by Will on 1-5-2012 at 1:20 pm

  7. My supervisor is from China. She very casually mentioned one day that she had had three abortions, the way you would say three root canals. I’m strongly pro-choice, but as Canada is basically a conservative country, it was still very shocking to hear it. I know that sounds odd, but as polite Canadians, we permit things on a legal level that we may not necessarily discuss freely at the lunch table for fear of offending our more conservative peers. Another example – gay weddings are legal, but it still may raise eyebrows if you say you went to one.

    posted by Mare on 1-5-2012 at 1:29 pm

  8. This seems like an overly tame article, as opposed to a book I read one time about what really happens. Horrific things happen to prevent couples from having another child. I’m no expert on this, but this article doesn’t seem to tell it like it really is. I hope I’m wrong.

    posted by Jamie on 1-5-2012 at 10:45 pm

  9. There’s a great “stuff you should know” (how stuff works) podcast on this, I think it’s a year old or so but I was just listening to it last night.

    Very interesting stuff!

    posted by kalie on 1-6-2012 at 12:28 am

  10. Lisa Ling addressed the, “what happens to…” in her documentary, “China’s Lost Girls.” It’s sponsored by National Geographic.

    posted by helenann on 1-6-2012 at 4:04 pm

  11. You can watch it in its entirety when you click on my name.

    posted by helenann on 1-6-2012 at 4:05 pm

  12. Like others said, this is an interesting article but it has left out the forced/coerced sterilizations and abortions. Apparently this is illegal but routine in many places because local officials have quotas to fill. The blind human rights activist Chen Guangcheng remains isolated under house arrest and has experienced beatings and having his house ransacked and even his blind cane seized, because he defended women’s right not to be forced to have an abortion. The number of abortions in China is MASSIVE (girls especially) and by definition most are coerced since there are serious penalties to giving birth without permission. There is no need to wonder why China persecutes Christians especially Catholics (and other religions) so much, they promote human rights and family.

    posted by Elizabeth D on 1-9-2012 at 6:10 pm

  13. This article left out the fact that the One Child Policy is enforced by mass forced abortions and sterilisations. Women who are pregnant without a birth permit are routinely aborted by forced, even when their babies are full term. This is one of the greatest human rights injustices of our day. Please go to http://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org to learn more. This terrible injustice must be stopped and educational sites like mentalfloss can help by telling the truth about what is happening in China.

    posted by Amy on 1-9-2012 at 9:23 pm

  14. And here’s what happens when the methods stated above don’t work:

    “In 2005, a family-planning squad targeted the city of Linyi and its surrounding rural area, in the Shandong Province, because the population had far exceeded the Party’s child quota. The agents kidnapped 17,000 women, forcing abortions on those who were pregnant—in some cases, immersing seven- to eight-month-old fetuses in boiling water—and sterilizing those who weren’t. The agents tortured the Linyi men until they revealed the hiding places of their daughters and wives.”

    City Journal, Spring 2007
    http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_2_china.html

    posted by Janet on 1-10-2012 at 9:31 am

  15. This book shows what is happening in China as well as world wide on sex-selective abortions. The author is pro-choice so her assertions and the facts she states do not hold up her position.
    Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men by Mara Hvistendahl. The book also covers the development of contraception and the marketing of it.
    Another source, from someone who once believed in the China polcy, lived in China then not only changed his mind but impassioned him to do something about it – Steven Mosher at http://www.pop.org/projects/stop-tax-funding-population-control-china

    posted by Monica on 1-10-2012 at 11:53 am

  16. This is just one example of a nation taking a lazy shortcut to “solve” a problem — instead of becoming energy efficient, let’s eliminate a few million people here and there, so that the rest can more or less go on using what they’re accustomed to. Their brutal manipulation has worked too well, and disaster is imminent if they do not change course.

    posted by enness on 1-11-2012 at 7:39 pm

  17. I live in China. A few days ago I walked around outside and I counted 24 children. Out of the 24 kids, only three were girls! That is a sex ratio of 8 boys to 1 girl! Now I know the official rate is 5 boys to 4 girls, but this is ridiculous. Who are these beloved sons going to marry in 20 years?

    I am aware that China has a one child policy, has a historical preference for sons, a lack of a social security plan, and is backwards and undeveloped, but aborting females for males is beyond cruel. Estimates say that there will be a surplus of 60 million males in ten years.

    http://www.economist.com/node/15636231

    Chinese I have talked to say the imbalanced sex ratio is not a problem because parents can have another child if they have a girl, but not if they have a boy. Chinese, however, often ignore the law, abort the girl, and have two sons. I am also told that China will import women from Russia, Thailand, Japan, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines to make up for the lack of wives in China. However, these countries do not have an extra 60 million women and India, Pakistan, Nepal, Vietnam, South Korea, and Taiwan also have a severe shortage of women. An imbalanced sex ratio is a serious problem and could lead to social instability and even war.

    If you ever go to China, count the kids you see yourself. I bet you won’t find the sex ratio is better than two boys to one girl. If you are concerned about this problem, try to raise awareness by discussing this issue with others and ask them if they want to live in a world where everyone has an unmarried son.

    posted by jess on 1-16-2012 at 8:12 am

  18. I think it is great to have only a one child policy. I don’t see why any one would be angry over that. Look at all the children in the world today that don’t have nice parents and others who don’t even get food to eat. People make the claim, God said be fruitful and multiply. But he never said over multiply the earth. We don’t even have the ability to supply the needs for all the unwanted children. Now most of us are living like bunny rabbits in cages because of over population. Oh, and the lucky ones get a cages. God said in the bible there would come a time when men kind would say, bless are they that never bore children. Maybe, because there would not be away to take care of them after the resources dry up.

    posted by carolyn on 2-3-2012 at 2:37 am

  19. I think the one child policy in China is way over the top. Furthermore, I don’t understand how anyone can agree with it. I also think forced abortions and sterilizations violate basic human rights – how can a government possibly enforce such sickening tactics?

    posted by katie on 2-8-2012 at 7:19 pm

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