ABSTRACT
In the last two decades, China has been a major focus of demographic study. This has occurred not only because China has the largest population of any country in the world, but also because of the dramatic demographic transition China has experienced since the late 1970s. As was noted in Chapter 2, China’s total fertility rate (TFR) dropped from 6.5 in the 1960s to 1.8 in the year 2000 (China Population Information and Research Center: https://www.cpirc.org.cn/). Although socioeconomic development has been a contributing factor, scholars generally agree that much of the credit is due to the central government’s family planning programs (Poston 1986; Wolf 1986; Feeney and Wang 1993).
