ve the life quality of the population a basic state policy on the basis of a wish to make the state strong and powerful, the nation prosperous and the people happy.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China, due to the stability of the society, the development of production and the improvement of medical and health care conditions, the people lived and worked in peace and happiness. The death rate was reduced markedly, while the population increased rapidly, thus the situation then was characterized by more births, fewer deaths and high growth. It should be pointed out that this was an inevitable phenomenon at that time. But, just as the international community then was not responding promptly to the question of swelling global population, China lost the chance to solve the problem of over-rapid population growth in the first birth peak period after the founding of New China.
In the 1960s, China's population entered its second peak birth period. From 1962 to 1972, the annual number of births in China averaged 26.69 million, totalling 300 million. In 1969, China's population exceeded 800 million. Beginning from the 1960s, the contradiction between the population on one hand, and the economy, society, resources and environment on the other had become gradually apparent. In view of the situation, the Chinese government issued a call for family planning and advocated the use of contraceptives. However, as there was still the lack of a deep understanding of the seriousness of the population problem and the government still had not worked out a clear population policy, family planning was not effectively carried out throughout the country.
From the early 1970s, the Chinese government had become increasingly deeply aware that the over-rapid growth of population was unfavourable to economic and social development and decided to energetically carry out family planning in both urban and rural areas and integrated the plan for population development into the plan of national economic and social development. Consequently, family planning work entered a new phase of development.
At the end of the 1970s, Deng Xiaoping, the chief architect of China's reform and opening to the outside world, made an in-depth analysis of China's basic national conditions on the basis of the experience and lessons of socialist construction since the founding of the People's Republic, pointing out that, to accomplish the goal of the four modernizations in China, it was imperative to take into consideration the basic features of the Chinese environment, that is, the vast scale of the country, its weak foundation, its massive population and the low ratio of cultivated land, and this demonstrated the objective need for the development of population to be coordinated with the development of the economy, society, resources and environment. The major contribution Deng Xiaoping made to the solution of China's population problem is: To study and deal with the population problem in the overall context of the national economic and social development and clearly point out that China's population policy is an important policy of strategic significance. In accordance with Deng Xiaoping's thinking, the Chinese government has made it a basic state policy to carry out family planning and population control and to improve the life quality of the population, and has clearly incorporated it in the Constitution of the People's Republic of China, thus establishing the important position of family planning programme in China's overall task of national economic and social development.
By February 15, 1995, China's population had reached 1.2 billion. Over the past few years, the annual births have averaged about 21 million, with a net annual increase of 14 million. Such massive total population and annual population growth constitutes a heavy burden for China, a country that has a weak foundation and little cultivated land, whose economic and cultural level is rather backward and where development is regionally imbalanced. The negative impact of China's overabundance o