China's One Child Policy Essay

China’s One-Child Policy had detrimental effects on the social and cultural aspects of the country. This paper is going to discuss the implementation of the one-child Policy in China and the cultural and social impact it had on its country. Chapter 1, History of the one-child policy, will cover how and why China took action towards the problem of population growth and the ways in which the government enforced this law. Chapter 2, The social impact, will reveal the social impacts created by the one-child system and how the governments plan of solving population growth started a chain of other issues. Chapter 3, The cultural impact, will focus on the family structure and traditions in China and how the one-child policy negatively impacted this

China, which has a large population and a strong command economy (= government owes all factors of production + total control over distribution goods and services), took an entirely different and extreme approach to resolving this conflict. China initially implemented a birth control campaign under the slogan “Late, Long and Few.” This campaign was initially successful, cutting population by half the size in just 6 years. Although, at the end of the 1970s, China was still facing the issue with food shortages which killed over 30 million people in the early 1960s.

The Chinese government took another step towards resolving their conflict with population growth and introduced a policy requiring couples from China’s ethnic Han majority to limit themselves to one child. The policy was officially implemented in 1980s, with an open letter issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.

The letter outlined the population pressure on the country and set out a goal of curbing population growth, bringing the nation’s total below 1.2 billion at the end of the 20th century. As reports from the time noted, the nation’s 38 million Communist Party members were told to use “patient and painstaking persuasion” to teach the rest of the population how important it was to practice family

It is a moral relationship relevant to fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. Filial piety is assumed to be a manifestation of natural human nature within the traditional Chinese family structure.

In China, many families are structured as 4-2-1 since the first generation of only children has reached their age of marriage. The "4-2-1" family structure means that after a married couple who are both the only child of their respective family has a child, the family will consist of four seniors (each of their parents), one child and the couple themselves. However, it is not possible for Chinese families to follow their Xian ideology and take care of their elder’s while living under the one-child policy.

The one-child policy interferes with the 4-2-1 family system because the only children will have to bear the responsibility of supporting both of their parents and, sometimes, all four of their grandparents in their old age, as they cannot rely on siblings to help them care for their aging family. Furthermore, if the only child dies before his grandparents, they would have to rely on the government for retired benefits and pension plans. The one-child policy does not only affect the elders of a family, but also the child