ABSTRACT
In 1949, as the Chinese Communist Party was poised to establish its new regime, China’s population numbered nearly half a billion, a staggering number that many believed would prove an unbearable drag on attempts to develop. It was two decades, however, before China began to make population control a state priority. In the early-1970s, birth limits were set at two or three children. By 1979, however, China’s post-Mao leaders had become so concerned about the likely impact of population growth on their new development plans that they took the extreme step of launching a one-childper-couple policy-the most extensive, aggressive and effective attempt ever made to subject child-bearing to direct state control and regulation.
