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Child Policy in China

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Child Policy in China
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Child Policy in China
Around the late 1970’s the Chinese government introduced a policy to regulate the birth rate of the country’s population. This was because the rate at which the population was ballooning indicated that in the near future, the government would not be able to sustain the population in many ways. The previous governments encouraged many families to give birth to many children so as to increase the country’s work force. The government therefore enforced a policy that each couple should have only one child so that it could efficiently provide services such as access to education and proper healthcare for all children among other services. Managing population change, (2014)
The policy was imposed on the Chinese population using barbaric measures. The communist party came up with family planning officials who regularly inspected the women to check if they were pregnant. The women who were found to have breached this regulation were made to forcefully abort the children they were pregnant with. At times the women were forcefully sterilized to prevent them from having other babies (Moore, 2014).
This policy countered stern opposition especially in the rural areas in China where families were traditionally big. Most couples tried to hide their babies from the family planning official so as to escape the strict penalties that would be mated to them if found. Some couples preferred having boys so they ended up killing their baby girls, aborting the girl fetus or abandoning them after birth. This led to many girls in China to be homeless and end up in orphanage. The fact that boys were more preferred than girls implied that there was an imbalance in China’s population.
In the recent years, the policy has been slightly relaxed to allow parents to apply for a second child if they would like to have one (Moore, 2014). This was mostly for the parents who had daughters as their first born. Parents can also have a second child if they are willing to pay extra tax to the government to support the child’s service delivery by the government.

References
Managing population change. (2014, January 1). Retrieved March 8, 2015, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/geography/population/managing_population_rev3.shtml
Moore, M. (2014, October 30). What is China’s one-child policy? Retrieved March 8, 2015, from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/11197594/What-is-Chinas-one-child-policy.html

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