One Child Policy

China’s One-Child Policy: Should It Be Abolished? After the People’s Republic of China had been founded in 1949, the improved sanitation and medicine promoted rapid population growth. Before long, the population boom started to take a major toll on the country’s food supply. Officials launched a campaign to promote birth control in 1955 in order to deal with the overpopulation. Their efforts were reversed though, in 1958 by the Great Leap Forward, which was Mao Zedong’s attempt to rapidly convert China into what he thought would be a modern industrialized state. By 1962, there was a massive famine in China that caused about 30 million deaths. During the aftermath of the famine, officials tried multiple times, with several different campaigns, to reduce the population. One of these campaigns was successful, using the slogan “Late, Long and Few.” China’s population growth fell by half from 1970 to 1976. The population growth then proceeded to level off, causing officials to seek more drastic measures to reduce population growth. This resulted in what is now known as China’s One Child Policy, which was introduced in 1979 (“Brief History”). The One Child Policy restricts urban couples from having more than one child. There are exceptions for rural families and ethnic minorities, officially anyway. There are many problems with the policy and it has been implicated in forced abortions and female infanticide. One of the biggest problems with the policy is that it is a violation to every person’s human rights. It violates not only a person’s right to privacy of information and their body and it also violates the basic human right to choose the size of one’s own family. The gender imbalance is another big problem with the policy and it is leaving many men without the option to get married and is affecting the crime rate in a negative way. There is also the relatively smaller issue of having an entire generation of only children and the possible social