ABSTRACT
China's period of economic recovery was the postwar baby boom. Population grew rapidly as the economy of the newly established state enjoyed rapid recovery under political stability after the long war. Period of natural disasters is the period of the so-called three consecutive years of natural disasters following the Great Leap Forward. From the period of economic adjustment that began in 1962 through the first half of the Cultural Revolution, in the context of growing political disorder, the birthrate rose substantially. A birth control system was instituted during the second half of the Cultural Revolution, and the effects of state-mandated birth control began to surface. In the first half of the Deng Xiaoping era, starting in 1978, a fairly coercive one-child-per-family policy was implemented. According to the United Nations midrange population projection for China, China's population will peak at 1.6 billion in 2050. China itself forecasts reaching the 1.6 billion peaks in 2030, declining thereafter.
