Population Planning in the People's Republic of China: Prospects for the Future

This article describes present attitudes and future prospects of population planning in the People's Republic of China. New knowledge available since China has broadened its contacts with the rest of the world permits the drawing of a fairly detailed picture of the family planning program developed there over the past 18 years. Family planning is an integral part of a national health services system. Integrated with all administrative and production units and including virtually the entire population, this system makes extensive use of “barefoot doctors” selected from local communities as well as a large and growing corps of professional health personnel organized to serve effectively both the cities and the countryside. Family planning is achieved by social and medical methods of fertility control including late marriage, use of contraceptives, abortion, and sterilization. The analysis of reasonably reliable data on family planning in six city, suburban, and rural communes with a total aggregate population of 170,500 located in three parts of the country, shows some startling results. Late marriage has lowered the proportion of married women of child bearing age to 14 per cent. A surprising 68 per cent of these women are practicing birth control, and almost two-thirds (65 per cent) of these are protected definitively by sterilization. The third who are using reversible methods are further protected by the availability of abortion on demand. It may well be that about 35 per cent of all potentially fertile women in China are now practicing family planning. It seems probable that this effective mix of methods can be fairly rapidly extended to cover the whole nation and that it will make enough of a contribution to slowing population growth to have a significant effect on the ability of China to meet its economic and security objectives and to raise its standard of living.