ABSTRACT

Since 1979, Chinese Party and state organs have issued a multitude of instructions and regulations on birth planning. 1 In many cases these build on much shorter, less systematic and less numerous rules promulgated in preceding decades. During the entire period from the beginning of the first birth-planning campaign in 1954 to the start of the one-child policy in 1979, the average province issued only some four to five documents with overall birth-planning guidelines. Whereas in the 1950s these mostly pertained to rules for contraceptive use and surgery, in the 1960s and 1970s they laid down the increasingly stringent state demands for late marriage and limited childbearing.