Thomas Scharping, Birth control in China, 1949–2000: population policy and demographic development, London and New York, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, pp. xvi, 406, £65.00 (hardback 0-7007-1154-6).

Abstract

China's one child family policy has received considerable attention in the west since its introduction in 1980. Reports on China's efforts to control population growth have described the insistence that couples should limit themselves to a single child, and the coercive attempts by officials to enforce the limit. They have covered the worsening sex ratio at birth and the “missing girls”, phenomena that reflect the absolute determination of most couples to have a son whatever the official policy. Few people, however, are aware that China achieved an extraordinary reduction in fertility in the 1970s before the single child family campaign began. This success was all the more remarkable as a quarter of a century ago rates of urbanization and consumption were low, the population was less literate and peasants were reliant on their children (as they still are today) to support them in old age. Thomas Scharping's meticulous study covers every aspect of Chinese population policy from 1949. He shows how the idea that a growing population was good for national power and defence gave rise in the early 1950s to a tendency to deny access to contraception and abortion even to those who wanted them. This gradually gave way to concerns that China's rapid population growth and poor resource to population ratio were obstructing economic development. As these concerns grew, the leadership moved first to promote contraception and small families, and then to insist on limits of one or two children. After this historical overview, the book deals with the extraordinary organization necessary to impose the policy in the world's most populous nation, with regional variations, with the popular response to the policy including widespread non-compliance, and with demographic results such as fertility levels, sex ratios, marriage ages and birth spacing. It is possible to see China's population policy as an attempt to accelerate the normal process of demographic transition. This has involved persuading people who are still living within a traditional rural setting to abandon the family size preferences that are closely linked to traditional family culture and adopt the lower ones usually associated with industrialization and urbanization. Scharping argues that, although family size preferences have clearly dropped, most Chinese parents would still prefer at least two children. If all couples were free to have two children, however, son preference would then produce an average of more than two births as those who produced daughters defied the regulations and tried again for the boys they wanted. Maintenance of the current comparatively low fertility rates in the countryside is dependent on state control. Even in the cities, where socio-economic development has led people to abandon the large family ideal, state control is still important in enforcing the limit of one. It is the strength of son preference that makes the single child policy so difficult to implement. As the policy took effect in the early 1980s and reports began to come in of an increasing ratio of boys to girls at birth and even of female infanticide, a great concession was made. Rural parents were in many cases allowed a second child after a suitable gap if their first had been a girl. Despite this concession, the sex ratio continued to rise, reaching 111.8 boys to 100 girls nationally among those under one year in the census of 1990. It seems that the main mechanism at work is the sex selective abortion. This is a difficult issue for the Chinese Party-State. As in other East Asian countries, in China there is little moral or ethical debate about the practice of abortion itself. However, in keeping with official policy against sexual discrimination, prenatal screening and sex selective abortion are forbidden. Scharping points out that if sex selective abortion were accepted it would help to lower fertility although the sex ratio at birth would certainly rise, exacerbating subsequent problems in the marriage market. As long as sex selective abortion is forbidden many people are tempted to have unauthorized births and thus fertility is pushed up. Population policy in China involves a great variety of complex and sensitive issues. Scharping has dealt comprehensively with them in this nuanced and scholarly study. It will become the standard work on a very important subject.