The Rise and Fall of China’s One-Child Policy. 3. Did It Work?

The claim that the policy “prevented 400 million births” has been unanimously rejected by scholars as false.

By Massimo Introvigne

April 3, 2025

Article 3 of 4. Read article 1 and article 2.

*A paper presented at the conference “Giornata della vita nascente” (Day of the Nascent Life), organized by UNEBA (National Union of Social Assistance Institutions and Initiatives), Pisa, and by the Fondazione Madonna del Soccorso, Fauglia—Ponsacco, Italy, March 25, 2025.

“Taking contraceptive pills serves the revolution.” Propaganda poster. Source: chineseposters.net.

Did the one child policy “work”? China has repeatedly claimed that, while it was in force, it prevented 400 million Chinese from being born. This claim is often uncritically repeated in the West, including by opponents of state-enforced birth control and by literature on climate change, which sometimes takes at face value the Chinese argument that the one child policy caused the reduction of 1.3 billion tons of carbon emissions in China.

However, the 400 million claim is false. It is based on the old flawed assumption by Malthus that births increase in geometrical progression, ironically something that both Marx and Mao had dismissed as bourgeois and capitalist propaganda. Projecting data from the 1950s and 1960s, and assuming that the population growth will continue through a Malthusian sequence, China’s National Population and Birth Planning Commission arrived at the number of 400 million. 

We do not need Marx or any other 19th century critic of Malthus to conclude that the projection was wrong. It is enough to compare the population growth of China with other countries that were demographically similar in the 1960s such as Thailand, South Africa, or Brazil. None of these experienced Malthus’ geometric progression of birth. And in all of them the birth rate declined with economic progress (remember, capitalism is the best form of birth control), as it would have happened in China even in the absence of the one child policy.

The official projections also ignore that the most spectacular decline in the Chinese fertility rate occurred, as mentioned earlier in this series, between 1970 and 1980, i.e., before the one child policy. Between 1980, when the one child policy went into effect, and 1988 the fertility rate decreased from 2.81 to 2.73, which is not very impressive. It went down more significantly from the end of the 1980s and 1990s, and in the 21st century, until it reached 1.67 in 2015, a rate that the authorities acknowledged was too low. They switched from the one child to a two child policy, which by the way still involved massive human rights violations against women who would have liked to have a third child, then after switching to a short-lived “three child policy,” abolished it altogether in 2021.

However, scholars such as Whyte argue that these results did not derive from the one child policy implemented from 1980 but were long-lasting effects of the “later, longer, and fewer” campaign of the 1970s. “The drastic pre-1980 decline in China’s actual birth rates had far-reaching consequences. The contraception, abortion and sterilization campaigns that resulted in the rapid decline in the birth rate during the 1970s had long-lasting effects well beyond that decade. The smaller birth cohorts of the 1970s that resulted from this decline laid the foundation for smaller numbers of births 20 years later and beyond, when those smaller birth cohorts entered reproductive ages.”

Poster for the “later, longer, and fewer” campaign. Source: chineseposters.net.

I am not arguing that the policy was totally ineffective. After it did not significantly reduced the fertility rate in its first decade of application, China introduced, according to the same study, a “change in the system of enforcement. Instead of the primary burden for enforcement falling on grass-roots birth planning workers, most of them middle-aged women, major responsibility shifted to more powerful actors—local Party secretaries and other officials (overwhelmingly men). Achieving success in keeping the number of births down became one of the key criteria used in the annual performance ratings of local officials. Under the ‘one-veto rule,’ an official who failed to meet birth-control targets in his locality could be denied promotion or even lose his post, even if the local performance was acceptable regarding economic growth and other evaluation criteria.” Still, the study argues that this was not the main reason of the fertility rate decline in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The main reason was economic growth. 

Be it as it may be, the birth control policy and attitude created since 1970 made it difficult to reverse the trend when the authorities decided they needed more births. From 2021, when the policy was officially abolished, to 2025, notwithstanding the incentives given to couples at the birth of each child, the fertility rate only grew from 1.70 to 1.71. Substantially, it stayed the same.

Men and women alike were indoctrinated on birth control. Source: chinesposters.net.

It should be noted that, even after 2021, provinces can still impose quotas for the births. This is particularly true for minorities such as the Uyghurs and the Tibetans. While other population groups receive awards for giving birth, birth control is still imposed to these groups. Studies have documented their effects in Xinjiang, where the aim of the regime is to reduce the number of Uyghurs and other Turkic citizens, believed to be mostly “separatist,” and increase the number of immigrant Han Chinese. 

Forced abortions and IUD insertions, and sterilization of Uyghur women, thus continue in Xinjiang, with the declared aim of raising the percentage of Han Chinese with respect to the Uyghurs. For example, according to German researcher Adrian Zenz, between 2017 and 2019 the fertility rate of Uyghur women experienced a decline of 48.7%. In the same period, the fertility rate in China stayed the same and even had a small growth from 1.68 to 1.69 after the two child had replaced the one child policy.

Source: bitterwinter.org