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Essay on Chinese Women and the Impact of the One-Child Policy

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When one thinks of China it is common to conjure up images of rice fields and of the great wall, but also of crowded cities teeming with people and bicycles and cars. One rarely thinks of a nation populated mostly by men and boys, with a noticeable yet surreal absence of women. While this is a bit of an exaggeration, it has been noted over the past several decades that there is an alarmingly imbalanced sex-ratio. The policy has clearly contributed to the nation’s unnatural gender imbalance, as couples use legal and illegal means to ensure that their only child is a son. There are 117 men to each 100 women in China (Goodkind, 2004). In the 1979, when the one-child policy was enacted, the intention was not to create this imbalance, but to …show more content…

Overall this movement was successful and China's population growth decreased from 1970 to 1976 (Fitzpatrick, 2009). Eventually this decrease slowed, and leveled off, prompting the government to take further action to slow the booming population. In 1979 a policy, known internationally as the one-child policy but more delicately called the “policy of birth planning”, was introduced requiring couples from China's ethnic majority to have only one child (Cai & Lavely, 2003).
While it seems somewhat reasonable for a government to encourage family planning, and to provide the population with access to birth control, it seems a bit out of line for them to ask a family to have only one child. The pressure of only having one child, in combination with a cultural favoritism toward males is what makes the one-child policy so gravely concerning. It is clear that the excess female infant mortality is directly attributable to the birth-control policy, which caused the pre-existing prevalence of son preference to escalate. In China, son preference is the product of ingrained social norms. Girls and women still occupy a lower social status in society (Zilberberg, 2007). The one-child policy requires authorization for each birth- children are required to be reported to receive documentation that allows them to be part of society- to attend school, to hold a job in adulthood, and to marry. Women are consistently

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