From last week study, the professor mentioned that working families are not exempted from poverty, partly because the unstable job caused by the low education, partly because of the composition of the family. Too many children are risking the family to be poor. This reminds me of Chinese One Child Policy which, I believe, could be regarded as a remedy for eliminating China’s poverty.
China Current Population and Comparison with world
As you all know, China had and still has the largest population in the world. There are in total 1,317,442,552 people including China Hong Kong, Macaw, and Taiwan, (according to the 6th national population census in 2011), accounting for nearly 21 percent of the world whole population which is 6,302,309,691. A more close example is that China’s population is more or less 124 times than Portugal’s which is 10,637,000 , based on a report revealed by World Bank in 2012.According to some data, if there was no policy related birth control, till 2005, Chinese population would have exceeded 1.5billion.
China’s success in reducing poverty
Across China, there were over 400 million fewer people living in extreme poverty in 2001 than 20 years previously. By 2001, China had met the foremost of the Millennium Development Goals of reducing the 1990 incidence of poverty by half — and it had done so 14 years ahead of the 2015 target date for the developing world as a whole. (1)
The World Bank attributes China’s success in reducing poverty to the reform in 1987, and no mentioning of the One Child Policy, due to the fact that, to some extent, this policy violates human right. However, at eliminating poverty degree, I believe it has made a lot of contribution.
Different from some developed countries, China was under control of 5 thousand years of feudal system during which agriculture was the mainstay in this country. Even after founded of the People’s Republic of China, a large part of the workforce was employed in agriculture. Nowadays, China has transferred and become the largest labor-intensive manufacturing however, this manufacture is low profitable since there is no core-tech included. (2) No matter mainly relied on farming or non-core technology manufacture, they are all labor-intensive economy.
Chinese people are famous for diligent and hardworking, but they were still living under the poverty line. Why? We have to think about the population and family composition. Back before 1971 when the One Child Policy was issued, almost every Chinese family had more than 5 children. A family with 10 children was not abnormal because most of them relied on farming or worked on labor-intensive industries. More population means more workforces. More children in the family, less opportunity to offer them better education. Less educational background made them hard to work on some technology-intensive field, so they still work hard with low income and then tried to make more children to ensure their future workforces in the family. This leads to a vicious circle. This one child policy was aiming to limit the quantity of children but increase the quantity. Through the subsidy from the government, a family can give the only child better living environment and better education. More and more children go to university, find a better job and then they dispose the ingrained idea that having more children is the way to ensure the family income. They would like to have one child offering better education environment rather five with low living standard.
He Yanan
http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=359&catid=9&subcatid=61
http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/0,,contentMDK:20634060~pagePK:64165401~piPK:64165026~theSitePK:469382,00.html
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