China has been the most populated nation in the world since 2000 when it had 1.26 billion people, almost 10 times the population of the United States. And all of these people live in a country that is slightly smaller than the United States.
Shandong alone accounts for 90.79 million people.
According to the China Population Information and Research Center, the Chinese government didn’t officially address the problem of the country’s huge and growing population until the 1970s.
“In 1971, the slogan of ‘One is not less, Two is good, Three is too many’ was put forward and in 1973 the family planning concept of ‘Later, Spacing and Less’ was introduced. With the adoption of the national population and family planning policy, the fertility of Chinese women “declined dramatically from 5.81 in 1970 to 2.24 in 1980,” an article from the center states.
In 1979, the government imposed its one-child-per-family policy. Although China may have controlled its rapidly increasing population with the “One-child policy,” other problems have sprung up as a result.
Since Chinese couples are only supposed to have one child, most want a boy — a son to work for them now and care for them in their old age. As a result, millions of girl babies have been aborted, abandoned or put up for adoption.
Boys outnumber girls
According to a recent article from the British Broadcasting Corporation, for every 100 girls registered at birth, there are now 118 little boys. Nearly one seventh of Chinese girl babies are unaccounted for.
“This is a huge problem for China. We already have about 20 million boys who will never be able to marry because there aren’t enough women,” said Professor Zhai Zhenwu of Beijing’s People’s University. “Not to mention the problems Chinese girls face.”
Susan Greenhalgh, an anthropologist from the University of California at Irvine who has studied this situation, described it as “frightening.” In a paper she co-wrote with a Chinese demographer, Greenhalgh said that little girls were being eliminated from Chinese society “on a massive scale.”
Besides the horrifying treatment of baby girls, there are other population-related issues.
With the declining fertility rate and increasing life expectancy, the proportion of the elderly in the population is growing.
According to China’s 2000 census, there are more than 88 million people over age 65, which makes up almost 7 percent of the country.
Scientists project the number of elderly will surpass 300 million by the middle of the century and will create significant social security burdens, reports a recent article from the People’s Daily, a Chinese newspaper.
In an attempt to rectify the population imbalances, the Chinese Population Information and Research Center reports that the government is now decentralizing the birth planning policy from the national level to the local provincial level.
“The trend toward a slight relaxation of birth planning is observed in these local regulations. [Most] provinces allow families in which both husband and wife are only-children to have two children,” the center states.
“The Chinese government has realized the negative impact of its current birth planning policy and would like to adjust it,” the center said. “However, because of the huge population size, the incredible number of births annually, and because of the lessons learned, China has to reform its birth planning policy step by step and with great caution.”
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