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The "one-child" policy has reduced population growth Population control was anathema to the Mao regime in the 1950s and 1960s, although contraception was encouraged on health grounds. Improvements in healthcare pulled the death rate down while births continued to soar: the classic "population explosion" phase of demographic transition. Birth control measures were promoted in the early 1970s and these succeeded in bringing down the birth rate from 33.43 in 1970 to 18.21 by 1980. The implementation of the "one child" policy in the early 1980s coincided with the coming of age of the "baby boom" generation, so the birth rate slipped back up to 23.33 in 1987 before subsiding steadily to reach 16.03 by 1998, pulling the natural growth rate (birth rate minus death rate) down from 16.61 to 9.53 over the same period. Official figures understate total population... The official total population figure of 1,307.6 million people at the end of 2003 is widely acknowledged to be an underestimate. In addition to the difficulties of counting so many people over such a wide area, China faces additional problems as a result of the one-child policy. Although the policy has been relaxed in rural areas to allow couples who have a daughter to try for a boy, many people still seek to have more children than allowed and some families use various means to avoid registering their extra children, such as fleeing to the anonymity of a big city. Deliberate avoidance of census takers is therefore likely to be higher than in other countries. ...and urbanisation The urbanisation process characteristic of developing economies has intensified during the past two decades of economic reform as controls on population movement have been eased. The figures show this trend quite clearly, but the urban proportion may be understated for definitional reasons. |
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| Total population (million people) | Growth rate (per 1,000 |
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| Source: China Statistical Yearbook 2003; National Bureau of Statistics plan report.. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||