This paper gives a brief overview of the family planning policy of China which, although being recently relaxed, still controls a large swath of the population. Unofficially known as the “one-child policy”, the policy resulted when the social strife of the 1970s coupled with a Malthusian...

By the 1970s, China’s communist government faced a looming resource constraint in “caring” for its nearly 1 billion citizens, necessitating a policy to alleviate the crippling aftermath of nearly 30 years of rapid population growth. The one-child policy of 1979 was the result, and it has...