IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-17900-8_3.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Single-child Family Policy in the Cities

In: China’s One-Child Family Policy

Author

Listed:
  • Penny Kane

Abstract

It has long been recognised that family size tends to decrease in cities or urban areas earlier and more widely than it does in the countryside. Demographers often describe ‘urbanisation’ as a major factor in fertility decline, but that overall term covers a wide range of social and economic processes which may or may not affect the choice of individuals about the number of children to have. Definitions of the word ‘urban’ are not easy, and in China the difficulties are compounded by the existence of the overlapping category of suburban communes, which are generally grouped administratively within the sphere of cities and towns. Such communes are primarily agricultural but they are influenced by their proximity to a town and tend, in their fertility patterns, to reflect some of that influence, exhibiting rates which are between those of the truly urban areas, and those of the countryside. They are included in this chapter both because they thus exhibit some of the earlier changes in fertility seen in the towns, and because Chinese statistics for urban areas generally include suburban communes. The Chinese define an area as urban if it has a population of more than 2000 at least one half of which is working in non-agricultural pursuits.1 (See also H. Yuan Tien’s discussion of this definition in this volume.) It is this definition which will be used here.

Suggested Citation

  • Penny Kane, 1985. "The Single-child Family Policy in the Cities," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Elisabeth Croll & Delia Davin & Penny Kane (ed.), China’s One-Child Family Policy, chapter 3, pages 83-113, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-17900-8_3
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-17900-8_3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-17900-8_3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.