China's Population Problem-A Chinese View

Abstract

M OST Western scholars are extremely pessimistic about China's ability to solve its population problem. The American historian John Fairbank, for example, cautions that all efforts toward reform may prove tragically futile if babies continue to arrive faster than resources are developed.' According to Claude Hutchison, who headed the joint China-United States Agricultural Mission to China in I945, most, if not all, of China's present-day problems arise basically from the fact that too many people have to depend on too little land for their subsistence. Gerald Winfield, a public health expert formerly on the faculty of Cheloo University, also paints a grim picture: the root cause of ... abject poverty [in China] is overpopulation.... Paucity of land in China, combined with a vast population almost entirely dependent on agriculture, has caused an overwhelming pressure of population on the land.3 Contrary to the belief commonly held in the West, overpopulation is not the cause of China's impoverishment, but merely a reflection of that deterioration in Chinese society which began under the rule of the alien Manchus. The real key to China's population problem lies in the persistent decline in productivity of the land: as productivity decreased, the peasants tended to offset the loss, not by means of capitalconsuming devices such as an intensified use of fertilizers, but by a proportionate increase in the application of labor. Agricultural productivity declined in terms of both land and labor. Output per unit of land fell off because the clearing of upland areas for cultivation resulted in disastrous deforestation and erosion; output per unit of labor dwindled because of the intensification of cultivation in terms of labor