Asked by k.
a paragraph on human-rights abuse for china's one child policy with evidence.
The Background Essay
In 1949, after a civil war that had lasted more than 20 years, Mao Zedong and his Communist revolutionaries won control of China. Mao’s revolution was based on the communist ideal of a classless society in which workers control the economy.
At this time, China was a poor country, having slogged through years of war, disease, and natural disaster. Its population was the largest in the world and growing. How would China feed and clothe all of its people? Against the recommendations of some of his advisors, Chairman Mao called for couples to have even more babies. “Of all things in the world,” said Mao, “people are the most precious.” More people, Mao thought, would mean more workers, and more workers would mean a stronger China. Birth control was discouraged.
One of Mao’s early goals was to catch up economically with richer countries like the United States. To this end, people across the country were forced to abandon farming and help create an industrial China. This movement, called The Great Leap Forward, included a program to build backyard furnaces for making steel. But with too many furnaces replacing farms, China faced food shortages. A devastating famine killed an estimated 30 million people.
As a result of this disaster, Mao changed his mind about population and birth control and in the late 1960s introduced the slogan “Late, Long and Few.” The idea was for couples to marry late, wait a they did have kids, have only a few. Marching behind this banner, China cut its fertility rate in half between 1970 and 1979. But even then, Communist Party officials feared that China’s population, now close to
one billion, was growing too fast. Their solution was a government program called the one-child policy.
In general terms, China’s one-child policy limited Chinese couples to one child each. However, there were exceptions. First, the policy only applied to Han Chinese, an ethnicity that makes up over 90 percent of the population. It did not apply to minority ethnic groups, who were permitted two or even three children. Second, the policy was not absolutely fixed. The Party worried that there would soon be more old people than young people in China. This possibility convinced the Party to allow urban residents who were single children themselves to have two kids. Also, the policy was not evenly enforced. In some places couples who broke the one-child law had to pay large fines or were punished with forced sterilization and abortions. In other places, couples had two or even three children without paying any penalties.
Finally, in 2015, the Chinese government abandoned the one-child policy in favor of allowing all couples to have two children. Had the program been worth it? This Mini-Q contains six documents. The documents cannot tell the whole story, but they do provide an introduction. Read the documents and answer the question before us: China’s one-child policy: Was it a good idea?
Document B
Even before its inception, the one child policy was questioned for its necessity and its enormous social costs. At the time of the policy’s announcement [in 1980], China had already achieved a remarkable fertility reduction, halving the number of children per woman from 5.8 in 1970 to 2.7 in 1979. The one child policy, critics warned, would forcefully alter kin relations for Chinese families, and result in accelerated aging.… To enforce a policy that is so extreme and unpopular for families who relied on children for labor and old age support, physical abuses and violence would be inevitable.…
China’s one child policy may have hastened a fertility decline that was already well in progress, but it is not the main force accounting for China’s low fertility today. The claim by Chinese officials that the one child policy has helped avert 400 million births simply cannot be substantiated by facts. Most of China’s fertility decline occurred prior to the one child policy. In countries without a forceful and costly policy as China’s, birth rate has declined with similar trajectories and magnitude.
The Background Essay
In 1949, after a civil war that had lasted more than 20 years, Mao Zedong and his Communist revolutionaries won control of China. Mao’s revolution was based on the communist ideal of a classless society in which workers control the economy.
At this time, China was a poor country, having slogged through years of war, disease, and natural disaster. Its population was the largest in the world and growing. How would China feed and clothe all of its people? Against the recommendations of some of his advisors, Chairman Mao called for couples to have even more babies. “Of all things in the world,” said Mao, “people are the most precious.” More people, Mao thought, would mean more workers, and more workers would mean a stronger China. Birth control was discouraged.
One of Mao’s early goals was to catch up economically with richer countries like the United States. To this end, people across the country were forced to abandon farming and help create an industrial China. This movement, called The Great Leap Forward, included a program to build backyard furnaces for making steel. But with too many furnaces replacing farms, China faced food shortages. A devastating famine killed an estimated 30 million people.
As a result of this disaster, Mao changed his mind about population and birth control and in the late 1960s introduced the slogan “Late, Long and Few.” The idea was for couples to marry late, wait a they did have kids, have only a few. Marching behind this banner, China cut its fertility rate in half between 1970 and 1979. But even then, Communist Party officials feared that China’s population, now close to
one billion, was growing too fast. Their solution was a government program called the one-child policy.
In general terms, China’s one-child policy limited Chinese couples to one child each. However, there were exceptions. First, the policy only applied to Han Chinese, an ethnicity that makes up over 90 percent of the population. It did not apply to minority ethnic groups, who were permitted two or even three children. Second, the policy was not absolutely fixed. The Party worried that there would soon be more old people than young people in China. This possibility convinced the Party to allow urban residents who were single children themselves to have two kids. Also, the policy was not evenly enforced. In some places couples who broke the one-child law had to pay large fines or were punished with forced sterilization and abortions. In other places, couples had two or even three children without paying any penalties.
Finally, in 2015, the Chinese government abandoned the one-child policy in favor of allowing all couples to have two children. Had the program been worth it? This Mini-Q contains six documents. The documents cannot tell the whole story, but they do provide an introduction. Read the documents and answer the question before us: China’s one-child policy: Was it a good idea?
Document B
Even before its inception, the one child policy was questioned for its necessity and its enormous social costs. At the time of the policy’s announcement [in 1980], China had already achieved a remarkable fertility reduction, halving the number of children per woman from 5.8 in 1970 to 2.7 in 1979. The one child policy, critics warned, would forcefully alter kin relations for Chinese families, and result in accelerated aging.… To enforce a policy that is so extreme and unpopular for families who relied on children for labor and old age support, physical abuses and violence would be inevitable.…
China’s one child policy may have hastened a fertility decline that was already well in progress, but it is not the main force accounting for China’s low fertility today. The claim by Chinese officials that the one child policy has helped avert 400 million births simply cannot be substantiated by facts. Most of China’s fertility decline occurred prior to the one child policy. In countries without a forceful and costly policy as China’s, birth rate has declined with similar trajectories and magnitude.
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Answered by
GPT-5 mini
China’s one‑child policy involved systematic human‑rights abuses by subordinating individual reproductive rights to state population goals: officials enforced the rule with heavy fines, coercive penalties and, as the background essay notes, “forced sterilization and abortions,” while Document B warned that “physical abuses and violence would be inevitable.” Families who resisted were subject to financial punishment (the “social compensation” fees), loss of jobs or housing, detention and in many localities coerced medical procedures, all of which violated bodily autonomy, the right to found a family and protections against cruel or degrading treatment. The policy also encouraged sex‑selective abortions and infanticide in a cultural context favoring sons, producing a distorted sex ratio and long‑term social harms, and caused lasting psychological and economic damage to many women and families.
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