Make childbirth great again: China’s demographic crater forces U-turn from limits to pleas — but nobody’s listening

In the 1970s, China was going through hard times. The country had only begun to overcome the consequences of the Cultural Revolution, the economy was depleted, agriculture was inefficient, and memories of the mass famine that resulted from the Great Leap Forward had not yet faded. At the same time, birthrates remained extremely high: almost six children per woman. One measure aimed at combatting the crisis involved the implementation of demographic controls.

At the beginning of the decade, Beijing launched the nationwide campaign “Later, longer, fewer” (wan, xi, shao), which promoted later marriages, limits on the number of children per family (no more than two in cities and three in rural areas), and three–four-year gaps between births.

For the first time, the state deployed a whole set of tools: free contraceptives, mandatory consultations with specialists, and fines for failing to follow the state’s recommendations. But these measures did not produce the desired results. By the time Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, China’s population had reached 960 million people, while income levels and labor productivity remained extremely low.