China To 'Loosen' Its One-Child Policy

China: One-Child Policy Explained

Updated: 11:27am UK, Friday 04 October 2013

By Mark Stone, Asia Correspondent

China's efforts to control its population began in 1971 with couples encouraged, but not forced, to have fewer children.

The official "one-child policy" was introduced at the end of that decade.

According to official Communist Party data, released in March 2013, Chinese doctors have performed 336 million abortions and 196 million sterilisations since 1971.

That number includes procedures carried out at the request of the mother, albeit to comply with the law. But it also includes an unknown number of forced abortions.

The Chinese government, under decades of international pressure to scrap the law, has repeatedly argued that it is an effective policy to control the country's soaring population.

They claim that, without the restrictions, the population of China, currently 1.3 billion, would be 30% larger.

Officially the policy is supposed to be achieved through financial penalties and not physical coercion. In many cases, it is, but the implementation of the policy and the zealousness of local officials differs from province to province.

Since the 1970s, the policy has been relaxed in various provinces. In some, couples can now pay a lesser fine as a penalty for having a second child. Another relaxation of the policy allows couples in some provinces who are themselves both only children to have a second child.

However, the targets set to keep the population numbers down have not been raised to bring them into line with the increasing number of couples "permitted" to have a second child.

The result of that is a perception that provincial family planning departments are failing in their task of keeping within their birth quota.

It is clamed, though extremely hard to prove, that the forced abortions - which occur even among those willing to pay a fine - are the result of over-zealous local officials striving to keep the birth rate within government targets.

Officially, forced abortions are illegal across China. However, the law appears to be interpreted differently from province to province with a fine line between financial coercion and physical force.

Although figures for the number of abortions across China are publicly available, it is impossible to break that down into those which were entirely voluntary, those which were financially coerced and those which were physically forced despite willingness to pay the fine.

Among those who have gone public about their forced abortions, all said they were also forced to sign papers claiming that they had agreed to the procedure.

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