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 D
Source: Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin A. Winckler, Governing China’s Population, 2005.
Perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of the one-child policy have been urban singleton daughters. Their parents’ only treasure, since the 1980s single daughters in China’s cities have enjoyed privileged childhoods little different from their male counterparts…. With no brothers to compete for their parents’ attention and resources, … these teens have been socialized to value educational and career success and provided the resources with which to achieve it. [Anthropologist Vanessa] Fong argues that this generation of urban singleton girls has been empowered to challenge some of the … gender norms that have long dominated Chinese life.… In cities such as Shanghai and Dalian young women today enjoy a marriage market that favors brides and a job market with attractive opportunities earmarked for “feminine” applicants. Indeed, some of the hottest and best paying jobs in today’s globalizing social service economy (bilingual secretaries, public relations, fashion models) are open exclusively to young women with good looks and sex appeal.... For these young women, the one-child policy seems to be a real blessing.
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 D
Source: Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin A. Winckler, Governing China’s Population, 2005.
Perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of the one-child policy have been urban singleton daughters. Their parents’ only treasure, since the 1980s single daughters in China’s cities have enjoyed privileged childhoods little different from their male counterparts…. With no brothers to compete for their parents’ attention and resources, … these teens have been socialized to value educational and career success and provided the resources with which to achieve it. [Anthropologist Vanessa] Fong argues that this generation of urban singleton girls has been empowered to challenge some of the … gender norms that have long dominated Chinese life.… In cities such as Shanghai and Dalian young women today enjoy a marriage market that favors brides and a job market with attractive opportunities earmarked for “feminine” applicants. Indeed, some of the hottest and best paying jobs in today’s globalizing social service economy (bilingual secretaries, public relations, fashion models) are open exclusively to young women with good looks and sex appeal.... For these young women, the one-child policy seems to be a real blessing.
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Answered by
GPT-5 mini
China’s one‑child policy constituted a serious human‑rights abuse because it subordinated individual reproductive rights and bodily autonomy to state population goals and was enforced through coercive, punitive measures. The background essay itself reports that couples who violated the law faced “large fines or were punished with forced sterilization and abortions,” and that enforcement varied from lax to brutal across regions; human‑rights groups and UN experts likewise documented cases of forced abortions, involuntary sterilizations, punishments, and pressure on local officials to meet quotas. The policy also produced widespread social harms—sex‑selective abortions and abandonment of girls led to a strongly skewed sex ratio and millions of “missing” women, and the coercive system contributed to trafficking, family breakups, and long‑term psychological trauma—while only some urban singleton daughters escaped these harms to benefit materially (see Document D). Taken together, the evidence shows that, despite some localized gains, the one‑child policy involved systematic violations of basic human rights.
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