Fertility trends and population growth in China
During the 1950s and 1960s, China's total fertility rate (TFR) was at a level of around 5 to 6 children per woman (National Bureau of Statistics, PRC 2005) As a response to the rapid population growth of close to 3% per annum, the Chinese government launched a nationwide family planning programme in the early 1970s. The programme was incorporated a strategy of 'wan' (late marriage and late childbearing) 'xi' (longer birth spacing) and 'shao' (fewer children in life) along with the free provision of modern contraceptives to all citizens. As shown in Figure 1, the decade of the 1970s witnessed a dramatic decline in China's fertility, from 5.79 in 1970 to 2.75 in 1979, a reduction of more than half in a period of less than a decade (National Bureau of Statistics, PRC 2005) Most of the reduction in fertility was due to the reduction of unwanted childbearing at high parities, particularly in urban areas, as well as the postponement of marriage and childbearing. Encouraged by the achievements of the family planning programme and while facing an economy at the edge of collapse, the Chinese government decided to tighten its fertility policy further. In September 1980, in an Open Letter, the members of the Communist Party and the Youth League were called to restrict their fertility to one child per couple. Subsequently, this policy was applied to the majority of Chinese couples. While China's total fertility rate stayed around 2.5 children per woman during the 1980s (National Bureau of Statistics, PRC 2005) an analysis of parity progression ratios revealed that reductions occurred, particularly among the high parities both in urban and rural areas and in remote regions. It is estimated that if all the Chinese citizens would have followed the fertility policy specified for various population groups, the overall fertility for the country would be at 1.47 (Gu et al. 2007) This would imply that two thirds of Chinese families would have ended up with only one child. By the early 1990s, China's fertility had fallen to a level below replacement. The 2000 census reported a TFR of 1.22 (National Bureau of Statistics, RPC 2002) and the 2010 Census reported an even lower fertility (TFR 1.19) (National Bureau of Statistics, PRC 2011) This extremely low fertility, reported from the national statistics, caused heated debates about the quality of data and questions about the true fertility of Chinese women. Nevertheless, even taking into account all the possible statistical errors and underreporting, there is no doubt that Chinese fertility has fallen to a level well below replacement for more than two decades, and most scholars agree that the current fertility in China is around a level of 1.5 (Guo and Gu 2014)