Please join us for the next WDS discussion, Thursday Dec 11 at 5:00 PM, at the offices of the Population Reference Bureau, fourth floor, 1111 19th Street NW, Washington DC.
A Program, Not a Policy: The Minority Role of One-Child Limits in the Transformative Consequences of China's Great Malthusian Campaign (1970-2021)
Daniel Goodkind
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https://forms.gle/T2ziTWV5znQZe6su6
Daniel Goodkind was at the Population Division (International Programs Center) of the US Census Bureau for nearly 27 years, retiring in March 2025 as a Senior Demographer. He conducted a year of fieldwork in Vietnam, the centerpiece of which addressed its "one or two-child" policy. At the Census Bureau, among many special projects, Daniel published papers examining the North Korean great famine, the Chinese diaspora, and worldwide sex ratio patterns across the life course. He was also heavily involved in international population estimates and projections and in technical assistance to demographers around the globe.
Abstract:
Recent debates about the impact of China’s half-century campaign to limit its population obscure ambiguities about what to call it. At face value, 'the one-child policy' denotes just one feature of a 35-year sub-era (1980-2015), a misnomer that defines away the broader program of birth ceilings and other regulations along with evolving enforcements (1970-2021). The best-known international comparator implies that Malthusian intervention, independent of developmental forces, had reduced China’s population by more than 600 million people upon concluding in 2021. This exploratory analysis indicates that one-child limits accounted for no more than 166 million of that reduction if, as is often assumed, at least half of one-child era singletons resulted instead from development. However, that estimate nearly triples when the one-child era’s enhanced enforcements of all birth quotas and regulations are taken into account. A companion analysis of China’s missing daughters suggests unwitting acceptance of the comprehensive definition – although everywhere associated with 'the one-child policy', only 12 percent of that era’s 24 million missing female births were first births (whose parents faced one-child limits). Intuition fails because decades of one-child images, along with each utterance of the underlying phrase, narrow attention away from the broader program.
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