Socialism and Fertility in China

Abstract

Current figures indicate that China's 1990 population is in the area of 1.1 billion, 200 million less than the 1.3 billion predicted in the early 1970s. What will happen to fertility in China in the 1990s? To answer this question this article looks closely at the forces underlying the fertility decline of the 1970s and early 1980s. It argues that the success of the later-longer-fewer policy of the 1970s and of the one-child policy of the 1980s can only be explained by reference to the larger socioeconomic and sociopolitical context in which the policies were carried out. The construction of a socialist society in the first decade of Communist rule restructured social institutions and state-society relations in ways that fundamentally altered both the economics of childbearing, reducing the attractiveness of children to parents, and the politics of fertility decision making, giving parents little choice but to comply with restrictive fertility policies after they were introduced. The direction of fertility change in the 1990s is likely to hinge on developments in rural economic policies, whose future, the past has taught, is hazardous to predict.