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The One Child Policy And Its Impact On Chinese Families Essay

Decent Essays

THE ONE CHILD POLICY AND ITS IMPACT ON CHINESE FAMILIES Current birth planning (jihua shengyu) program of People’s Republic of China, featured by the one-child-per-couple policy (the one child policy), has been one of the largest and most dramatic population-control campaigns in the world, receiving both praise and sharp evaluation over the past quarter of a century. It has been so successfully implemented in China that the nation’s population growth rate dropped significantly. This policy has been intensely criticized internationally for violating fundamental human rights evidenced by the forced sterilizations and abortions, and the widespread abandonment and neglect of baby girls. As the policy has recently been extended through new legislation as the nation’s demographic strategy in the future (Xin Hua News Agency 2001), we will highlight some of the significant challenges confronting Chinese families in the 21st century as the consequence of this policy. Social policies and programs often work differently from their proposed goals and implementation. An overdetermined view of policy shifts may attribute all changed behavior and outcomes directly to policy and program inputs. Multiple sets of variables and relationships may be needed to explain and account for both those outcomes that were anticipated and those that were not as expected. This review attempts to unbundle these concepts to suggest implications for policies and programs in future. Fertility and child

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