ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with the importance of population control policies in China and India, the world’s most populous nations, explaining their demographic transitions and economic development. Filling a gap in our understanding of China’s and India’s place in the world, the book, Population Control Policies in China and India: Comparisons with Social and Cultural Factors, will make a fundamental and badly needed contribution to world’s population research and socioeconomic development. This chapter also explains why China and India are comparable, for both had been great civilizations but fell behind Western nations after the Industrial Revolution and both obtained their independence in the later 1940s. Since then, both adopted socialist economic development plans and both reformed their development strategies in the 1970s and 1990s. Most important, both implemented their population control policies. After sketching the two nations’ comparability and the social and cultural factors that have affected the adoption and implementation of their population control policies, the chapter lays out the book’s structure and coverage in each of the following six chapters.
