AN EXAMINATION OF THE CHINA’S ONE CHILD POLICY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

People’s Republic of China is not only the fastest growing economy in the world, but with the largest population.A large population is an asset for national economic development. When the new government was established in 1949, Mao Zedong asserted confidently that population growth would never cause problems for china because the productivity of the masses after revolution would be almost unlimited. It has a draconian population control policy. Current birth planning program of China, featured by the one-child-per-couple policy (the one child policy), has been one of the largest and most dramatic population-control campaigns in the world, receiving both praise and sharp evaluation over the past quarter of a century. It has been so successfully implemented in China that the nation’s population growth rate dropped significantly. This paper will provide an overview of the history of China’s one-child policy and review the existing literature on the degree of compliance with the onechild policy in the past three decades and the reaction of the people. We will also review existing literature on the family values of contemporary Chinese people.Key Words: Population, Policy, Economy, Social Life, ChildFor full paper: fmscresearch@sjp.ac.lk