On 25 September 1980 the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party published an open letter addressed to all its members and to the members of the Communist Youth League. It asked them to take the lead in having only one child per couple, and it explained that the request was temporary, that it would last perhaps a generation, and that without it the country’s plans for economic modernisation would be overwhelmed by the sheer number of people being born. The letter is usually taken as the formal beginning of the one-child policy, the most ambitious attempt by any modern state to control the size of its own population. Over the next thirty-five years the policy was revised many times, enforced with very different degrees of severity in different provinces and decades, and finally replaced on 1 January 2016 by a rule permitting every married couple to have two children. Its history is a history of demography, of politics and of daily life in hundreds of millions of households, and it cannot be understood without beginning some years before the open letter was written.
Population and planning before 1980
When the People’s Republic was founded in 1949 the official view of population was shaped by Marxist theory, which treated the idea of overpopulation as a bourgeois error associated with the English economist Thomas Malthus. A socialist economy, it was argued, would always be able to employ and feed its people, since every new mouth also came with a pair of hands. The first national census, taken in 1953, counted a little over 580 million people, considerably more than planners had expected, and in the following years a small number of officials and scholars began to argue that rapid growth might slow the accumulation of capital. The most prominent of them was Ma Yinchu, the president of Peking University, who in 1957 published a “New Theory of Population” calling for birth control. Within months the Anti-Rightist Campaign had made such arguments politically dangerous. Ma was criticised, removed from his post in 1960, and not rehabilitated until 1979, by which time his arguments had been adopted by the state that had condemned him.
The years between were marked by violent swings in births and deaths. The famine that followed the Great Leap Forward, between 1959 and 1961, caused tens of millions of excess deaths and a sharp fall in births; recovery was followed in 1962 and 1963 by one of the largest baby booms in recorded history, with the total fertility rate, the average number of children a woman would bear over her lifetime at current rates, rising to about six. Those children would themselves reach marriageable age at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, and it was this coming echo that worried demographers and planners more than any other single fact.
The state had already begun to act. In the early 1970s, under Zhou Enlai, a national campaign known by the slogan wan, xi, shao, meaning “later, longer, fewer”, urged couples to marry later, to leave longer intervals between births and to have fewer children in total. The campaign set target ages for marriage in the mid-twenties, encouraged an interval of about four years between births, and from about 1974 suggested that two children were enough for urban couples and three for rural ones. It relied on the dense network of neighbourhood committees, work units and rural collectives that already organised almost every aspect of life, and it was combined with a large expansion in the supply of contraceptives and intrauterine devices. Its effect was dramatic. The total fertility rate fell from close to six at the end of the 1960s to under three by 1979, one of the fastest falls ever observed in a large population, and it happened almost entirely before the one-child rule was introduced. This fact has become central to later debates about what the one-child policy itself achieved.
The decision of 1979 and 1980
By the end of the 1970s the political situation had changed. Mao Zedong had died in 1976, the radical leaders associated with the Cultural Revolution had been arrested, and under Deng Xiaoping the party committed itself at the Third Plenum of December 1978 to the “Four Modernisations” of agriculture, industry, national defence, and science and technology. Deng and his colleagues set a target of quadrupling gross output by the end of the century and of reaching a per capita income of around 800 to 1,000 United States dollars. Population growth was now treated as a variable that could be placed inside the plan. If the economy quadrupled while the population also grew rapidly, the gain in living standards would be modest; if the population could be held to about 1.2 billion by the year 2000, the gain per person would be far larger.
The intellectual case for a very strict limit came from an unexpected quarter. Song Jian, a missile scientist who had trained in the Soviet Union in control theory and who worked within the defence research establishment, had encountered in Europe the systems models associated with The Limits to Growth, the 1972 report commissioned by the Club of Rome. Song and his colleagues applied similar mathematical techniques to Chinese population data and produced projections showing that, if fertility remained at around three children per woman, the population would reach more than four billion within a century. Only if fertility fell immediately to one child per woman, they argued, could the population peak at a manageable level and then decline toward what they described as an optimum of 650 to 700 million. The projections were presented at a population conference in Chengdu in December 1979 and to senior leaders in early 1980, and their apparent precision, together with the prestige of the defence scientists who produced them, carried great weight. The anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh, whose research in the 1980s and later in party archives remains the most detailed reconstruction of these events, has shown how the social scientists who favoured a more gradual approach were outmanoeuvred, and how the projections became the basis for a rule rather than one input among many.
The decision was presented carefully. The open letter of September 1980 used the language of appeal rather than command, and it acknowledged openly that the policy would cause difficulties: a shortage of labour in some families, an ageing population, and fewer people to support the elderly. It argued that these problems lay decades in the future and could be solved, while the problem of rapid growth was immediate. The national marriage law adopted in the same month set the minimum age of marriage at 22 for men and 20 for women and stated that both husband and wife had a duty to practise family planning. The constitution of 1982 went further. Article 25 declared that the state promotes family planning so that population growth may fit the plans for economic and social development, and Article 49 stated that both husband and wife have the duty to practise family planning. In September 1982 the Twelfth Party Congress described family planning as a “basic state policy”, a phrase that placed it among the small number of commitments with the highest political standing.
The campaign of 1983
The early years of the policy coincided with the dismantling of the rural communes and the introduction of the household responsibility system, under which farm families contracted land from the collective and kept what they produced above a quota. The reform raised rural incomes quickly, but it also weakened the old collective structures through which the state had organised daily life, and it gave peasant households a renewed economic interest in having sons, who would work the family’s land and support their parents in old age. Rural resistance to the one-child rule was therefore strong from the start, and in many villages births continued at levels well above the target.
The leadership’s response was a national mobilisation in 1983 that remains the most intense episode in the history of the policy. Local officials were instructed that women with one child should be fitted with an intrauterine device, that one partner in couples with two or more children should be sterilised, and that pregnancies outside the plan should be terminated. Official statistics later published by the Ministry of Health record roughly 21 million sterilisations, 18 million insertions of intrauterine devices and more than 14 million abortions in that single year, figures far above those of any year before or after. The numbers reflected targets set by higher levels of government, which local cadres were obliged to meet, and the methods used to meet them ranged from persuasion and the withdrawal of benefits to coercion. The campaign produced a sharp fall in births, but it also produced widespread anger in the countryside, and by early 1984 the leadership had begun to retreat.
Opening a small hole: the policy is adjusted
In April 1984 the Central Committee issued a document, known as Document 7, that instructed local governments to make the policy “fair and reasonable” and to “open a small hole” by allowing exceptions in order to “close a large hole”, meaning to prevent the uncontrolled births that the anger of 1983 had threatened to produce. Over the following years most rural provinces adopted what became known as the “1.5-child” policy: rural couples whose first child was a girl were permitted to have a second child, usually after an interval of four or five years. Couples in which both partners were only children, couples in remote mountain or border areas, families whose first child was disabled, and couples in several other categories were also allowed a second birth. Members of the officially recognised ethnic minorities were generally permitted two children, and in some regions three or more, and the policy was barely applied in Tibet and parts of Xinjiang for much of the period.
The result was not one policy but a patchwork. Each province wrote its own family planning regulations within the national framework, and by the 1990s the rules differed considerably between the strict cities of the east coast, where almost all couples were limited to one child, and the rural interior, where most families could have two. Demographers who later calculated the overall effect concluded that only about a third of the population lived under a strict one-child rule, about half under the 1.5-child rule, and the remainder under rules allowing two or more children. The phrase “one-child policy” is therefore something of a simplification, though it reflects accurately the norm that the state promoted in its propaganda and the rule that applied in the cities, where the policy was most visible and most effective.
How the policy was enforced
The policy was administered by a large bureaucracy. A State Family Planning Commission had been established in 1981, and it built a network of offices that reached down to the township and village, where family planning workers, usually women, kept records of every married woman of childbearing age, her contraceptive method and her pregnancies. Births were allocated through a system of permits. A couple wishing to have a child within the plan was expected to apply for a birth permit, and a birth without a permit was classified as “out of plan”. Local governments received annual quotas of births and were judged in part on whether they met them, so that family planning became one of the small number of “veto” targets by which the career of a local official could be decided. An official who failed to meet the birth target could be denied promotion regardless of success in economic growth or other fields.
The instruments available to local governments were both positive and negative. Couples who signed a pledge to have only one child received a “single-child certificate”, which in cities brought a monthly allowance, priority in housing and kindergarten places, and in some areas additional pension benefits. In the countryside the rewards were smaller and the penalties more important. Couples who had a child outside the plan were fined, and from 2002 the fine was formally called a “social maintenance fee”, typically set at several times the average annual income of the local area. State employees risked dismissal, and for the urban population, most of whom worked in state enterprises or government offices until the late 1990s, this threat alone was usually sufficient. Children born outside the plan could find it difficult to obtain a household registration, the hukou, which determined access to schooling, health care and other public services, and some of them grew up as unregistered persons with limited rights.
The severity of enforcement varied greatly by place and period. In many villages it was a matter of negotiation, in which local officials who were themselves members of the community balanced the pressure from above against the wishes of their neighbours. In others, especially during campaigns, it involved the confiscation of property, the demolition of houses, the detention of relatives and the forced abortion of pregnancies late in their term. Such abuses were documented by journalists and scholars inside and outside China, and senior officials repeatedly stated that coercion was contrary to policy, while the system of targets created strong incentives for it. In 2005 the self-taught legal activist Chen Guangcheng attempted to bring a class action on behalf of villagers in Linyi, Shandong, who had been subjected to forced sterilisations and abortions; the local officials responsible were later disciplined, and Chen himself was imprisoned on other charges. The case attracted wide international attention and illustrated how much the experience of the policy depended on local administration.
The law of 2001 and the policy in a market economy
By the 1990s the conditions in which the policy operated had changed again. Economic reform had moved from the countryside to the cities; state enterprises were being restructured and their employees laid off in large numbers; and tens of millions of rural people were moving to the coastal cities in search of work. The migrants who built the factories of the Pearl River Delta, described in the post on how the Pearl River Delta became a megalopolis, were difficult to monitor for family planning purposes, since their registration remained in their home villages while they lived and worked hundreds of miles away. At the same time the spread of private employment meant that the threat of dismissal from a state job no longer reached a growing part of the urban population, and the rising incomes of successful entrepreneurs meant that for some families a fine was simply a price to be paid.
The legal framework was consolidated in the Population and Family Planning Law, adopted by the National People’s Congress in December 2001 and in force from 1 September 2002. It confirmed that the state encouraged one child per couple, left the detailed rules on second children to the provinces, introduced the term “social maintenance fee” for the payments required for out-of-plan births, and stated that officials must not infringe the lawful rights of citizens in the course of enforcement. The law marked a shift in emphasis, already under way in the late 1990s, from administrative campaigns toward a combination of economic incentives, information and “quality of service” in reproductive health. In the same period the government began to provide pensions to elderly rural parents who had only one child or two daughters, in recognition of the fact that these families would have fewer people to support them in old age.
Sons, daughters and the sex ratio at birth
The most widely discussed demographic consequence of the policy was the change in the balance between male and female births. In most human populations about 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. In China the ratio was close to this norm in the census of 1982, at roughly 108, but it rose steadily through the following two decades, reaching about 111 in 1990, about 117 in 2000 and a peak of around 120 or slightly higher in the middle of the 2000s. In some provinces, especially in the rural centre and south, the ratio among second and third births was far higher, reaching 150 or more in some places at the peak.
The causes lay in the meeting of an old preference with a new constraint and a new technology. In much of rural China a son remained the main source of support for elderly parents and the person through whom the family line, and the rites owed to ancestors, would continue; a daughter, on marriage, traditionally joined her husband’s family. When couples were limited to one or two children, the desire to have at least one son led some families to act on the sex of a pregnancy. Ultrasound scanners became widely available in county hospitals and clinics during the 1980s and 1990s, and although the government prohibited the use of ultrasound for sex determination and the sex-selective abortion of female foetuses, the prohibition was difficult to enforce. Demographers have also shown that part of the apparent imbalance in the official figures reflected the under-registration of girls, some of whom were informally adopted, raised by relatives, or simply not reported, and who appeared in later counts. A smaller but real part reflected higher mortality among infant girls, through neglect or, in a minority of cases, abandonment.
The long-term effect was a surplus of men in the generations born from the late 1980s onward. Estimates of the number of “excess” men of marriageable age vary according to method and assumptions, but are commonly put at between 30 and 40 million over several decades. The imbalance is concentrated among poorer rural men, since women have tended to marry men of equal or higher status and many rural women have migrated to cities. The term guanggun, literally “bare branches”, came to describe men who would never marry and have children. The government launched a “Care for Girls” campaign in the early 2000s, and the ratio began to fall gradually after about 2008, returning toward 111 to 113 by the census of 2020.
The policy also changed the lives of the girls who were born. In the cities, where most families had only one child, a daughter received the full investment of her parents’ resources, and scholars have described how urban only daughters of the 1980s and 1990s were educated at rates that their mothers’ generation had not known. Women’s enrolment in higher education rose rapidly, and by the 2010s women made up a majority of undergraduates in Chinese universities. Whether this change was caused by the policy or merely accompanied by it, in a period of rapid economic growth and educational expansion, is a matter of continuing debate, but the experience of the single daughter became one of the characteristic features of urban China in the reform era.
Only children and the four-two-one family
The generation of only children born in the cities after 1980 attracted a great deal of public discussion inside China. Newspapers and popular books in the late 1980s worried about the “little emperors”, children said to be spoiled by the attention of two parents and four grandparents, and a number of psychological studies were carried out to test whether only children differed from children with siblings in sociability, self-reliance or academic performance. The findings were mixed. Several early studies reported small differences, while later and larger studies generally found that differences between only children and others were slight and tended to diminish with age. A study published in Science in 2013 by Lisa Cameron and colleagues, using behavioural experiments with adults born just before and just after the introduction of the policy in Beijing, reported that those born after it were on average somewhat less trusting, less competitive and more risk-averse, though the authors were careful about the limits of the evidence.
What was not in doubt was the change in the shape of the family. A couple who were themselves only children, and who had one child, formed what came to be called the “four-two-one” family, in which four grandparents, two parents and a single child depended on one another. The arrangement concentrated resources on the child, but it also meant that a single couple in middle age might in time be responsible for the care of four elderly parents, a burden that the Chinese state, with a pension and social care system still being built, has increasingly sought to share. The death of an only child left parents without any children at all, and families in this position, known as shidu, literally “lost an only one”, became the subject of particular attention in the 2000s and 2010s, when the first generation of single-child parents reached the age at which they had expected support from their children. The government introduced special allowances for such families, which were increased several times.
The policy also produced large numbers of children who were registered late or not at all, and a smaller number who were adopted abroad. From the early 1990s China permitted international adoption of children from state orphanages, the great majority of them girls, and by the mid-2010s well over 100,000 Chinese children had been adopted by families in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. China ended most international adoptions in 2024.
Propaganda and the public face of the policy
The policy was promoted through a long and inventive propaganda effort. Painted slogans on village walls, some gentle and some severe, became one of the most familiar sights of rural China in the 1980s and 1990s, urging couples to marry late, to have one child, and to remember that a daughter was as good as a son. Billboards in county towns showed a smiling couple with a single child, usually a girl, standing before modern apartment blocks, factories or green fields, a picture of the comfortable future that smaller families were supposed to bring. Posters, films, songs and school lessons carried the same message, and family planning workers were encouraged to present themselves as advisers on health and household welfare as well as enforcers of the rules. The tone of the slogans changed over time. Those of the early campaigns were often blunt, and some later became notorious for their harshness; from the late 1990s the national commission instructed local offices to replace them with milder wording emphasising the benefits of small families, the equality of daughters and sons, and the availability of reproductive health services. In the 2010s, as the policy was relaxed, many of the older slogans were painted over, and some villages replaced them with messages encouraging couples to have a second child.
What the policy achieved
The question of how much the policy reduced births has been examined by demographers in China and abroad for many years, and the answers depend on the comparison chosen. The government stated on several occasions that the policy had prevented about 400 million births, a figure first given in the early 2000s and repeated in later official statements. That estimate was derived by comparing actual births with those that would have occurred if fertility had remained at its level of about 1970, before the “later, longer, fewer” campaign. Demographers including Wang Feng, Cai Yong and Gu Baochang argued in an article in Population and Development Review in 2013 that this comparison attributes to the one-child policy a fall in fertility that had largely taken place before it began. In their view, the decline from about six children per woman to under three in the 1970s, together with the rapid economic and social change of the following decades, would have led fertility to fall to low levels in any case, as it did in other East Asian societies such as South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand, none of which had a coercive birth limit.
Other researchers have argued that the policy did have a significant additional effect, particularly in holding fertility below replacement level, about 2.1 children per woman, during the 1990s, when China was still a relatively poor and largely rural country. The total fertility rate fell below replacement around 1991 or 1992 and remained there, reaching perhaps 1.5 to 1.6 by the end of the decade according to most estimates, though the true level was uncertain because of under-reporting of births. By comparison, many other countries at a similar income level had fertility rates of three or more at that time. What the counterfactual would have been is impossible to establish with certainty, and the debate is likely to continue. It is generally agreed, however, that the figure of 400 million is an upper bound rather than a measured result, and that the policy accelerated and stabilised a transition that was already under way.
The economic case for the policy had rested on the idea that fewer births would raise income per person. In the following decades China experienced what economists describe as a demographic dividend: a period in which the share of the population of working age was unusually high relative to the young and the elderly, so that a large labour force supported relatively few dependants. The working-age share rose from the 1980s to a peak in about 2010, and this coincided with the years of fastest growth. Most economists regard the dividend as a product of the fertility decline as a whole, of which the one-child policy was one part, and they note that the same demographic structure that favoured growth in the 1990s and 2000s would later produce rapid ageing.
Relaxation and replacement, 2013 to 2015
By the late 2000s the arguments for relaxing the policy had become strong within China itself. The census of 2010 recorded a total fertility rate of about 1.2, an exceptionally low figure even allowing for under-counting, and the working-age population began to shrink in absolute terms from about 2012. Wages in the coastal factory districts were rising quickly, in part because the number of young people entering the labour market each year was falling, and the share of the population over sixty was projected to rise to more than a quarter by the 2030s. Demographers and economists, including some who had worked within the family planning system, published research and open letters calling for a two-child policy.
The first significant change came in November 2013, when the Third Plenum of the Eighteenth Central Committee announced that couples in which either the husband or the wife was an only child would be permitted to have a second child. The policy, known as dandu erhai, came into effect in most provinces during 2014. About eleven million couples were thought to be eligible, but the number who applied to have a second child was far lower than official projections had assumed, at a little over one million in the first year. The weak response suggested that for many urban couples the cost of raising children, the pressure of work and the expense of housing and education had become more important constraints than the policy itself.
In October 2015 the Fifth Plenum announced that every married couple would be permitted to have two children. The National People’s Congress amended the Population and Family Planning Law in December 2015, and the two-child policy took effect on 1 January 2016. The State Family Planning Commission had already been merged with the Ministry of Health in 2013 to form the National Health and Family Planning Commission. Births rose in 2016 to about 17.9 million, the highest figure since 2000, but then fell in each subsequent year. In May 2021, after the seventh national census recorded a total fertility rate of 1.3, the party announced that couples could have three children, and in July 2021 it removed the remaining limits on family size and abolished the social maintenance fee. The main data of the seventh census, published by the National Bureau of Statistics, recorded a total population of 1.412 billion.
The policy in the longer perspective
China’s population reached its peak in 2021 and began to decline in 2022, when the National Bureau of Statistics reported the first fall in the national population since the famine of the early 1960s. In 2023 India overtook China as the world’s most populous country, according to estimates by the United Nations in its World Population Prospects. The number of births fell to about nine million in 2023, roughly half the figure of 2016. The government has since introduced a range of measures intended to encourage childbearing, including extended maternity leave, housing subsidies for families with several children and, from 2025, a national childcare subsidy for young children.
The fact that these measures have so far had limited effect is often cited in discussions of the one-child policy, since it suggests that the low fertility of contemporary China has causes that extend well beyond the policy. Very low fertility is also found in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, societies with high costs of education and housing, long working hours and strong expectations that mothers will bear most of the burden of child care. In these societies fertility fell to very low levels without any state limit, and in South Korea it has fallen further than in China. Demographers therefore tend to describe the one-child policy as one factor among several in China’s fertility transition: the most visible and the most politically significant, but not the only cause of the population’s present shape.
The policy’s place in Chinese memory is complicated by the fact that it touched almost every family. For tens of millions of urban parents it meant the experience of raising a single child with a concentration of hopes and resources that had no precedent, and for many of those children it meant an upbringing without brothers or sisters. For rural families it was more often a matter of negotiation, fines, migration or concealment, and for a minority of women it involved procedures carried out against their will. Official accounts have described the policy as a necessary measure that contributed to the country’s development and lifted pressure on resources at a critical time. Scholars of the policy, including those who have worked closely with Chinese demographers, have generally described it as a product of a particular moment, when a technocratic faith in planning, inherited from the defence sciences, met a political leadership determined to achieve rapid growth and possessed of the administrative means to reach into every household. The rules that governed reproduction in China between 1980 and 2015 have now been abolished, but the generations they shaped, and the age structure they helped to create, will remain a central feature of Chinese society for the rest of the century.
References
- One-child policy, Grokipedia
- Deng Xiaoping, Grokipedia
- The Limits to Growth, Grokipedia
- Hukou, Grokipedia
- Sex-selective abortion, Grokipedia
- Two-child policy, Grokipedia
- Main Data of the Seventh National Population Census – National Bureau of Statistics of China, May 2021
- World Population Prospects – Population Division, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs
