China must draw the right lessons from the failures of its one-child policy

In 1983, the UN gave China and India awards for their efforts to control the population. The recipient for India was its then prime minister, Indira Gandhi. She famously pushed for a compulsory sterilisation campaign and even suspended elections in order to enforce it. Her programme failed miserably, and one of its enduring effects is a pervasive distrust of India’s health care system, which still plagues public health efforts today.

By contrast, China’s one-child policy was in place for 35 years until this October, when the government announced a shift to a “one couple, two children” policy.

The contrast in duration between the Chinese and Indian population control policies cannot be sharper, and it is this, among other differences, that prompted some Western observers to argue that the authoritarian Chinese system is more capable of enforcing politically tough but economically rational policies.

The reality is much more complicated. It is true that India has a higher fertility rate than China and it is also true that India could not enforce population controls as effectively as China has. But there are many other differences between China and India that would account for a lower fertility rate in China, regardless of policies. Chinese women enjoy a higher socio-economic status than Indian women. Chinese basic education and public health are far superior to those in India. All these factors would have led to a declining fertility rate in China even if China did not have the one-child policy in place.

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Chinese officials often make the claim that the one-child policy was responsible for preventing 400 million births. Many demographers question this claim on the grounds that the fertility rate had already begun to decline even before the policy was put in place. Worldwide, declining fertility has followed economic growth, rather than the other way round, and Chinese growth would have driven down the Chinese rate substantially on its own. Notwithstanding the suffering and emotional toll the policy has inflicted on Chinese people, to add insult to injury, it might not have been necessary in the first place.

But why did the Chinese government feel the need to resort to such a draconian policy in 1978? The simple fact is that China missed ample opportunities to adopt far less intrusive, more humane and more modest population controls in the 1960s and 1970s. The reason is that the one-party system – later lauded for its ability to enforce draconian policies – suppressed and killed off initiatives and ideas that could have led to a lowering of the fertility rate earlier on.