One Child Policy

The immediate cause of the birth control policy was the demographic bump of people born in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1949, the population of the PRC was about 600 million. In 1970, the population was 870 million. Although the PRC had suffered through several famines and economic disruptions in the interim, its population had continued to demonstrate incredible net growth for several reasons:

Infant mortality fell dramatically as Western medical knowledge spread from the coastal cities into the vast interior (for example, the fundamental realization that both mother and infant are extremely sensitive to infection during and after childbirth, so everything in contact with both must be perfectly sterile)

Chinese couples have always attempted to bear many children in the hope that several will be males who will survive to adulthood, carry on the clan name, and care for their aging parents (and continued to bear many children even as infant mortality rates fell)

The PRC government formerly had a policy under which it encouraged couples to procreate

In the late 1970s, the Chinese leadership was alarmed by the fact that the "demographic bump" would soon begin entering childbearing years; the obvious danger was that if China's population exceeded its