China Boom CMS

<p>And so, you had this concern about the population, it extended during the Mao era as well. There had been different attempts to manage population growth during that time, but the one-child policy was, really, a radical departure from anything that had been tried before. And the argument made by its advocates, which was originally a group of rocket scientists who came up with this, was that they used their computers and ballistic formulas to project how the Chinese population might grow and they had access to sort of Western thinking about population studies at that time and at that time, it was commonly thought that the world faced a population disaster. So, they had access to these ideas, they combined it with their mathematical formulas that they had, and the access to computers which most other policy makers didn&rsquo;t have access to, and they came up with these projections and they presented it to the leadership essentially as, &quot;If we don&rsquo;t do anything, this country is ruined. The economy cannot grow fast enough to sustain the population that we have and not only that, but the environment won't be able to sustain the population that we have. And the half measures that we have taken previously will not be enough. The only way to move forward is with the one-child policy.&quot; They presented it as the only viable option. The leadership accepted this and implemented it. Sometimes, people forget that the one child policy was devised by the same people who endorsed the party retreating from so many other aspects of people's lives and embraced these market reforms. At the same time, they are stepping in and really regulating the most private decisions of families. So, it was sort of a contradiction.</p>