ABSTRACT
The review of Chinese population policy and the country’s demographic record over the past fifty years testifies to the violent ruptures in modern Chinese history: political and legal birth-planning norms, the social response evoked by them and their problems of implementation document the sharp volte-face of the Mao era, the policy cycles and recurrent upheavals shaping Chinese society during that period. Moreover, they continue to reverberate with the disasters shaking the country in the preceding epoch. Finally, they document the impact of two recent decades of reform policies with the profound transformations produced by them. The fertility indicators resulting from such a complex interplay of divergent forces tell the same story in another way.
