The infamous one-child policy in China is certainly familiar to many, and people may have seen the forecasted, devastating effects it will have on China’s population over the next 100 years. But what do you know about where China’s family planning all began? What about Mao Zedong’s attempts to influence China’s vast population? This article will take a look at what he tried and how successful he was in that aim. Can he be blamed for the chaos that came after him?
China is such a large country that its population has long been a source of great concern for the government. During Mao’s initial period of reign, since the establishment of the PRC in 1949, he had a clear view that China needed to increase its population. Mao actively encouraged Chinese people to have many children. This wasn’t just through speeches, as there was his crucial ‘remuneration’ scheme that this article will touch on later. Birth control, however, was somewhat encouraged in 1953, although ultimately Mao decided against Ma Yinchu’s (the father of Chinese population control) proposed family planning; he was unenthusiastic about the idea and believed that China would not have a population problem until they hit 800 million (reached in 1970), while the population in ’53 sat at just 582 million.
So what were Mao’s motivations for these policies?
Well, Mao’s reasons are not as simple as they first appear. He said, “the more people, the stronger we are,” suggesting
that this is an ideological decision about communism and the power of the people; he could also just be talking about manpower. But these might not have been his only reasons. An article from the US National Library of Medicine has a more cynical take as it suggests that this strong encouragement was more of an attempt at a morale boost than any fulfillment of a grandiose communist vision. Ultimately, though, his motives are not as important as his results, and he definitely had some results:
The birth numbers continued to rise steadily over his first six years from 1949-54 from 19,000,000 births per year to 21,000,000, before dropping in one year to 19,000,000 (perhaps in response to this birth control push).
Ultimately, under Mao’s leadership, despite slight changes in encouragement over birth control, the population was allowed to grow pretty freely with some financial encouragement to help it along the way. This financial encouragement, however, turned out to be incredibly effective and deeply economically flawed.
When we’re looking at how effective this policy was, we can see that population growth was strong, but the ‘baby boom’ just after WWII was not especially impressive at first when compared to the rate in Japan or the US in the same period. China was, in this period, unremarkable and just another post-war ‘baby-boomer’. We also have to factor in the Great Chinese Famine in 1960 resulting in an overall population change of -3,000,000 that year, and a total death toll across the famine of as many as 45,000,000, with Mao’s Great Leap Forward clearly working against his pro-natalist policies here. It is after this period, however, where China’s birth rate takes off.
Here, the birth rate is clearly different from Japan and the USA, the other post-WWII ‘Baby Boomers’. The 1951-60 and 1961-70 periods are the only two decades where China’s population growth (2.0% and 2.1% respectively) was greater than the world average (1.9% for both). This is the period of great boom.
Interestingly, China actually lagged behind the rest of the world in decreasing the infant mortality rate right up until the late 1960s. This is a black mark against Mao’s effectiveness in his goal; he failed to keep up with the rest of the world in what is a key factor for increasing population. However, this also shows that Mao’s other policies worked amazingly as he was able to achieve such great growth, despite this significant problem. Through a relatively poor infant mortality rate, Mao made his vision of high population growth more difficult, and yet still achieved great growth despite this.
As mentioned earlier, Mao was unenthusiastic towards family planning when it was first proposed by Ma Yinchu in the early 1950s. His objections prevented it from being put properly in place.
Mao actually became more pro-natalist; one of the reasons for the Great Chinese Famine is overstatements of food production by local authorities which meant that more food was taken from the countryside than they could afford to lose. It’s these overstatements that Mao saw and interpreted as a statement of China’s unfulfilled population potential. It looked to him as if population was lagging behind their food production and so needed to be upped.
The policies that encouraged child growth were crucial. Under the communist structure, remuneration (compensation for children, in this case) from the state meant people didn’t have to worry so much about cost as a reason not to have children; in fact, it ended up actively encouraging them.
Families received handouts based on how many children they had, which became a massive incentive to have more and more children. Handouts got smaller over time as the amount the state had to pay increased with all the new children while the state’s income didn’t change quickly enough because these children generally couldn't contribute to the economy. For families to maintain their standard of living they could just have more children to receive more handouts. Families who chose not to have more children would see their standard of living decline; this is because the scheme’s resources were spread out further to deal with other families’ children.
There are other factors for the huge growth such as the idolisation of Mao as a leader and therefore some people wanting to obey his wish for more children. There was also a strong tradition of wanting many children and this played a part in the growth. Medical advances decreased the death rate, which, on average, (excluding the famine) fell to just 300,000 deaths a year under Mao’s reign.
Mao had an overall goal of great population growth, and he achieved it; the population grew from 540 million in 1949 to 940 million in 1976. The remuneration scheme caused serious economic problems, but it still succeeded in pushing people to have more children. Mao’s policies of encouraging population growth were not the most sustainable or reasonable way to go about it. He should have focused on decreasing the infant mortality rate, which lagged behind the rest of the world for a large portion of his reign. However, he ultimately achieved his goal of giving China power through its impressive population; we can all see this today as China is one of the two global superpowers. Were his policies so wise given the problems that population has caused the Chinese government since Mao and the problems it will cause them in the future? On the whole, no, but this population growth was undoubtedly a reason for China’s massive economic growth and Mao can at least be credited with being successful in achieving his goal.
