China’s “one child per family” policy has led to myth, international upset, human rights abuse allegations and general dismay. The policy has been in effect for 30 years, but economic growth and change may be creating enough pressure for the government to consider a new policy. A major and historic change of government is coming in late 2012 that will lead China into a new era of government. The one child rule and heavy Communist Party control will be on the minds of many people during the change of government.

According to the New Yorker, an aging and declining population will not be able to sustain the growth that China wants. An aging population will present more demand for support services at the same time that the population fails to provide a generational “supply pipeline” of productive and younger workers. At the same time, Chinese citizens have become better educated and richer. They may trend toward voluntarily having fewer children.

According to a 2005 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, China implemented the one child policy in 1979 to control the baby boomer population as it was entering the reproductive years. The population control was intended to help raise the quality of life and standards of living after the Cultural Revolution created a period of overall stagnation. Only 7 percent of the arable land was occupied, two thirds of the population was under age 30, and China hosted a quarter of the world’s humanity.

Contrary to popular belief, China’s one child policy is not universal. It only applies to a specific segments of the population, including urban residents and government employees. For those families, the policy is strictly enforced, but even then, there are few exceptions such as when the first child has a disability or both parents work in high-risk occupations like mining. Also, if the parents come from one-child families and live in certain areas, they might be exempted.

The one child policy also enforces rules that govern and may restrict family size, late marriage childbearing, and spacing of children when a second child is permitted.

Preferences are given to rural families and toward male children. A rural family, for example, may be allowed a second child after 5 years, and in some cases where the first child was a girl.

Abortion rates are low in comparison to other nation’s abortion rates. Total sterilization rates are declining. Women engage in long term contraceptive use, but are often directed to use specific contraceptive methods by family planning clinics. 

Parents who comply with the program are given benefits that range from almost comic to very lucrative in their incentives. According to the UK Guardian, “Rule-abiding parents can get a monthly stipend, extra pension benefits when they are older, preferential hospital treatment, first choice for government jobs, extra land allowances and, in some case, free homes and a tonne of free water a month. Their children are even given bonus points in middle school entrance exams.”

Fines are supposed to be the only real punishment for violating the rules, but are hideously high when they are imposed. The fines amount to three years of the violating couple’s annual net income.

The bureaucracy that administers the one child system is huge, and the current levels of intrusiveness are at the maximum. Most of this is due to extensive Communist Party control over government. But the bureaucracy must work with a population that is becoming richer and better educated. The program costs the government about four percent of the annual budget, or 4 billion yuan (£400m).

With a richer and better educated population and women who are entering the professional workforce, the policy may become unnecessary. Couples who have grown up with family planning, contraception and strict rules may prefer not to have many children. Projections are that the Chinese population will peak in 2030, and some consider that, right now, the one child policy is already a useless policy.