China’s New Population Policies

This chapter is concerned with certain aspects of China’s single child family programme (SCFP) with particular reference to its operation in the countryside. This programme marks a profound change in the population control policies adopted by China, and is unique to the experience of developed as well as developing countries. The SCFP has been fashioned with a keen eye to inter-sectoral, inter-regional and inter-community differences, and even within these variations, room has been left for interpreting and implementing general provincial guidelines in the light of local specificities. Nevertheless, these remain variations around the general theme of a policy which represents a fundamental break with past efforts at coming to grips with the vexed population question. The SCFP has an enormous developmental significance both when considered within the Chinese context itself as well as when viewed through the window through which other developing countries eagerly, and often expectantly, scan China’s development experimentation. As such, much interest attaches to the success or failure that this programme is meeting even in its early stages of implementation, and information is building up from a variety of sources on this score. But apart from documenting regional and community variations in the population norms adopted, the central focus has really been on the rate of adoption of the SCFP by couples; their subsequent ability to keep within their pledges; on the behaviour of various demographic variables; and on the specific incentive and disincentive structures that have accompanied the SCFP to assist its adoption and implementation.1