China's One-Child Policy and its Unintended Consquences on Chinese Society and Gender Ratio

Abstract

Since 1978, China’s One-Child Policy has been decreasing the nation’s population numbers to make way for China’s economic reform and modernization. Today, China boasts that with the help of this policy, the government has prevented over 300 million births. Though this has positively affected China’s economy in the short term, there is a myriad of consequences only beginning to manifest, including a highly imbalanced gender ratio, a progressively older population base, and a decrease in the work force numbers. If China hopes to lessen the fallout from these imminent situations and the consequences they carry, it needs to abandon the one-child policy and continue with social campaigns promoting the benefits of having daughters.