China's one-child rule covered only about a third of people by 1984
China's one-child policy is remembered as near-universal, and a strict limit was imposed in 1980 and written into the constitution in 1982. Yet exceptions multiplied so quickly that by 1984 only about 35.4 percent of the population remained under the original restriction.
The policy reversed earlier thinking. After 1949, leaders saw a large population as an asset for building socialism, and until the 1960s families were mostly urged to have many children. Health improved dramatically: infant mortality dropped from 227 per thousand births in 1949 to 53 in 1981, and life expectancy rose from about 35 in 1948 to 66 by 1976. The Great Chinese Famine of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which killed around 30 million people, convinced leaders that rapid growth threatened resources and food security.
Global debate fed the worry, notably The Population Bomb of 1968 and a 1972 Club of Rome study warning of limits to growth. In the early 1970s China promoted later marriage, at 25 or older for men and 23 for women, longer gaps between births and fewer children. Although fertility fell faster there than anywhere else that decade, officials judged it still too high. Deng Xiaoping backed the one-child approach, telling a British delegation led by Felix Greene on 15 October 1979 that couples promising a single child would be rewarded. At a 1980 meeting in Chengdu, aerospace engineer Song Jian helped shape its scope.
Enforcement, run nationally by the National Population and Family Planning Commission and locally by specialised bodies, varied by period, region and status, and relied on heavy propaganda and fines. It also included coercive contraception, abortion and sterilisation. From the mid-1980s rural families could have a second child if the first was a girl, and ethnic minorities of under 10 million people were exempted.
The effects remain debated. A cultural preference for sons skewed the sex ratio toward males, leaving a generation of missing women, though more women joined the workforce and some daughters received greater investment in education. The Communist Party says the policy prevented 400 million births, a figure some scholars dispute. The limit rose to two children in 2015, to three in May 2021, and was scrapped in July 2021 amid new incentives to have more children.
Source: One-child policy
