China: one of the most powerful countries in the world and the biggest risk to global overpopulation. China’s population currently peaks just over 1.3 billion inhabitants. In comparison to the United States, the two countries have roughly the same area of 3.7 million square miles, however, China’s population exceeds the United States’ population over one-billion people. Even if the United States tripled their population of 323-million Americans, the population of China would remain the greater of the two.
The first attempt at population stabilization in China was in the early 1950’s. In 1953, a consensus founded that there were nearly 600 million Chinese people. (p171) In an effort to slow birth rates, the Chinese government distributed condoms and cervical caps to the public while urging families to have children later in life, and those who currently had a child, to wait several years before having another.
Overpopulation can disrupt a country in many ways from food and healthcare to de-foresting and land degradation. The overpopulation of China has been a growing issue for a lot longer than many may think, but due to lack of resources and technology, population stabilization in China wasn’t a topic of discussion until the 1950’s.
The discussion, or lack thereof, may in part be to blame of the rulings in China. During the early 1900s, China went through a series of political uprisings that changed the way of life for the Chinese, from the Boxer Rebellion, to the Cultural Revolution. It wasn’t until the ruling of Mao Zedong, that China, or the Great Republic of China, truly began to consider the future of the environment and economic development.
“In the 1950s, Chinese people didn’t know about the environment. To the Chinese way of thinking we are a huge country, rich in resources, so we don’t need to worry about that. Until of course 1958. The Great Leap Forward, you know.” Stated Jiang Zhenghua in an interview stated in Weisman’s novel.
Prior to our Postmodern Era, the Chinese lived agrarian lifestyles, focusing on the cultivation of the land and the importance of having sons to carry on the cultivation of the land after the parents have passed. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong fueled China’s movement from the agrarian lifestyle to the “industrial age” of modern living. Comparable, perhaps, to the Progressive Age of America, in which a country is prosperous in metals and machinery to increase production speeds. In doing so, Mao, through many instances, attempted to limit, stabilize, and control the population of China. Mao frequently switched viewpoints on overpopulation, at one point believing that “population was strength, not a hindrance”, while realizing the increased growth in the Chinese population was out of hand. During The Great Leap Forward, Mao proposed state birth planning, but later abandoned it.
Ironically, by the end of Mao’s ruling in 1976, the population in China was over 900 million people. However, the Cultural Revolution paved way for a policy that worked for China. Next in charge, Deng Xiaoping made the move to put in place the one child policy. Gradual plans were made in effort to slow fertility rates, from involving incentives for voluntary limits, birth spacing, and postponed childbirth. (p178) But none of these plans compared to the astonishing mathematics provided by Song Jian.
Song Jian predicted, that if there were only one child per couple for the next few decades, the generation will die off, peaking at just over one billion Chinese. He expected that population moment would be reversed and shrinking back to the optimum number of Chinese population of 650-700 million individuals. By 1980, the one child policy was officially in place.
“I didn’t want to apply harsh rules to people,” states Jiang Zhenghua, “But we were shocked by the numbers we saw. Numbers of resources, numbers of people…My hope was for a China in which everyone could prosper. Lowering fertility seemed the best way to achieve that…” (p179)
However, the one-child policy brought a multitude of morally-questionable practices by the military and higher officials to meet the quotas of a one child policy. These practices included dangerous, forced late-term abortions to horrific gendercides of daughters. Most times, even before the cultural revolution, Chinese parents would prefer to have a son in order to continue the father-son line, a tradition dating back to their Confucian beliefs, and to inherit the land to continue farming.
In gendercide, often times infant girls were drowned or simply left in the woods to die, in order be able to try and conceive a son. Changes were made within the one-child policy law to restrain the unpredicted repercussions that the country was dealing with. Infanticide was rare, especially after the policy passed that if a Chinese couple had a daughter as the first born child, they would be able to apply for a license to have a second child. Banning sex-selective abortions was another policy that was put into place after the one-child policy, becoming illegal in 1995. Although changes have been made, there is still a wide gender gap in China. The imbalance is an annual average of 118 male babies for every 100 girls. Typically, the average birth ratio around the world is 105 male babies per every 100 females. (p180)
China’s Sloping Land Conversion Program was one of the country’s most ambitious and expensive environmental projects the government of China has ever attempted. Whenever the land had sloped more than 25 degrees, the government paid each family 8,000 yuan or rice to move away from their farmlands for ten years. (p188) This occurred mainly in the mountainous regions of China, replacing the farmlands with native trees and grasses, some of which grew back on their own.
The project itself cost China 40 billion U.S. dollars, a well-paid cost that should save China from much greater suffering in the future. In fact, If the Chinese had never cultivated these lands for farm use, they may have not experienced such lengthy droughts in the mountainous rural areas. The lower Yellow River dried up for 267 days, making water supplies to the Northern China region inaccessible. Another issue also occurred in the Yangtze River when the basin overflowed. The flood killed thousands while millions of houses and a billions of yuan were lost. If the Chinese had not deforested the slopes, they may never have fun into the issue.
Another issue that the Chinese government hopes to control with the Sloping Land Conversion Program includes the reproduction of pandas and reentering them into wildlife. By replanting vegetation where it once was, the Chinese can begin to recreate the habitats that drove out pandas and leopards, since losing two-thirds of their original forest habitats. But what complications as the Land Conversion Program brought on for China?
When the government chose to move over 30 million Chinese individuals from their farmlands and into cities, that meant providing urban jobs and homes to 30 million more Chinese people in the cities. This also meant, finding the means to feed 30 million people who were no longer growing crops, which only solution is to somehow grow or purchase foods elsewhere to feed the citizens. China’s strategy was to follow industrialized Japan and South Korea, favoring factories over fields and buying more food from the rest of the world. (p189)
A great effort to assist the economy with the overpopulation now found in the urban areas after the Land Conversion Program, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection created EFCA’s: Ecosystem Function Conversion Areas. These EFCAs were design to secure biodiversity, soils, and water to store carbon and prevent sandstorms. With this effort, the country hopes to preserve 60 percent of China and to assist in alleviating poverty in the remaining 40 percent.
As the Chinese found they were too late in dealing with the issue of overpopulation, even now they are taking precautions for the future. The aging population is expected to have over 100-milion eighty-year-olds by 2040. Where will China find the means to feed and care for over 100 million elderly people, after such efforts to decrease the population that will be caring for them. China is already making the preparations needs to get ready for this shift in the older generations they will soon be needing to deal with.
It is without a doubt that in recognizing the overpopulation in China, the Chinese have been able to alter their lifestyles and push forth in modernization faster than any other country in the world had thought possible. In these efforts, the Chinese were successfully able to decrease the rate of growth in their population, in attempt to get closer to the suggested population number of 650-700 million Chinese.