What were the main reasons for huge increament in population of china?
Answers
Answer: China’s one-child policy has come to be widely regarded as an effective piece
of government legislation that saved the country from a Malthusian fate.
The Cultural Revolution of 1966–76 was the crowning achievement of
Mao Zedong, chairman of the Communist Party of China (CPC) from 1945 to 1976.
This social-political movement aimed to remove all capitalistic and traditional elements
from Chinese society and to enforce the Maoist orthodoxy of industrialization.
The Cultural Revolution itself functioned as a type of backlash against the failure
of China’s Great Leap Forward of 1958–60. Mao initiated the latter campaign to
transform the agrarian society into a modernized industrial one by way of the complete collectivization of the economy. One of the defining features of the revolution
was that private agriculture was prohibited and violators were persecuted as counterrevolutionaries. Lackluster economic growth and social strife during this period
provided the impetus for Mao to initiate the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Although
the Cultural Revolution did lead to some reforms necessary to get past the setbacks
of the Great Leap Forward, it also had more than its share of shortcomings. Chief
among them was the beleaguered economy’s inability to adequately provide for its
burgeoning population. The death of Mao Zedong in 1976 opened the door for more serious reforms.
The family-planning policy, more commonly known as the one-child policy (1CP),
was the first such reform to be carried out on a wide scale. Broadly stated, the 1CP
made giving birth to more than one child illegal, thus fostering a generation of onlychild families. It also had the effect of reducing the birth rate and, without significant
immigration into the country, the rate of population growth. Throughout the 1950s
and 1960s, the Chinese population grew by about 2 percent per year. By 2007, the
rate of population growth had slowed to 0.7 percent per year, roughly the same as
that of the United States excluding immigration.
The rapid expansion of China’s population from 1949 to the late 1970s stoked
the flames of neo-Malthusian demographers. Most popular among them was Paul
Ehrlich, who opened his wildly popular book The Population Bomb with the warning
that “[t]he battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions
of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.
At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate”
([1968] 1975, xi). Though Ehrlich was the most popular of the neo-Malthusians,
he was far from alone. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, there was widespread belief
that famines would become more commonplace as limited resources were strained
by the world’s growing population (Gardner 2010, 130–31). Ehrlich’s pessimistic
forecast was proved wrong, though due mostly to the increased crop yields from the
Green Revolution, not to an imminent reduction in the global population.
The 1CP had the immediate effect of alleviating scarcity among the Chinese
population. It was also heralded as a success story and an instrumental piece of policy
that has contributed to China’s rapid economic growth over the past two decades.
Although there is no doubt that China did face significant problems feeding its
population in the 1950s and 1960s, several questions are rarely addressed in the
literature on the 1CP. First, did China’s population grow faster than other comparable countries, and if so, when? Second, and more importantly, why did China’s
population grow so quickly over this limited period?
We address these questions first by explaining the economic state of affairs in
China in 1979, the year the 1CP was implemented, and giving a brief overview of
the policy, who it affected, and its results. Next we address how China’s population
growth rate compared with that other countries, arguing that the rapid population
increase from 1949 to 1979 was largely the result of Maoist pro-natalist policies as
well as of the Communist regime’s peculiar remuneration scheme. We conclude with
an explanation of why high population growth rates were uniquely damaging to
China and not to other countries.
China, 1979
In 1979, China was at the cusp of two different periods. The thirty-year-old People’s
Republic of China (PRC) had already suffered under various political movements,