One child per family is the birth control policy of the People's Republic of China. This is enforced rather strictly in the urban areas, but rather loosely in the rural areas, which account for a good portion of the country.

The reason that this is needed is because there was a huge upsurge of population when Mao was in power because Mao encouraged people to have as many kids as possible. Like zealots, the people obeyed. So now we have too many people. To remedy this, the rate of growth of the population must be cut down as close to 0 as possible.

The enforcement of this policy ranges from harassment from your neighbors, neighborhood association, to forced abortions, to stories of killing newborn babies by lethal injection post-partum.

As a consequence of this policy, children born of the newer generations don't have brothers and sisters. They are then spoiled by their families and grow up to be selfish individuals. Also, eventually there will be only 1 child to support a pair of parents, who then support two pairs of grandparents. With life expectancy increasing all the time, this could cause a lot of problems.

An interesting effect of this one-child policy is the change in the kinship terms that people call each other in Chinese. Some people I know call their cousins by what before, you would call your brother or sister.

An example would be a friend of mine, who originally told me that he was an only child. Later we were talking about someone who he referred to as his "older brother" ("gege") and I was like "hey wait, didn't you say that you were an only child?" To which he replied, "I am, I am talking about my older male cousin on my mother's side" ("biaoge")

Examples of this phenomenon are numerous to the point that if someone young (born after 1980, say)tells me about one of their siblings, I will take it that they are cousins unless they say otherwise.

It was really strange discussing this topic with a Norweigan girl, a Lithuanian guy, and a Hong Kongese guy today at breakfast (me representing America). The idea of forcing women to have abortions in order to enforce this policy is inexcusable to me, and explained using a foreign mindset, a foreign value system, foreign personal experiences. I realize that I am approaching this issue from afar- if China's population did grow to be 2 billion tomorrow, my day-to-day life would be unaffected, at least for the next few years or so.

But nevertheless, I still can not follow the logic of it, can not imagine the pain of so many women... Isn't it interesting that western women consider abortion to be an issue of empowerment, that they should be given the choice, whereas in China women are expected to 'know better,' because after all, the resources would soon be depleted in China if the population kept growing. And this sounded logical to the 3 students I was talking with. What of the phenomenon of parents aborting or deserting their babies if they are born girls?

That is just a cultural thing, a tradition, that boys inherit the business/farm, they work harder, and girls are more expensive- you have to pay a dowry for them.

oh, phew, it's just cultural. Nothing I need to worry about, then. Just like them Africans and that problem with, what is it again? AIDS? And starvation? And land mines? Yeah, must be cultural. So we'll just let them be, because we wouldn't want to encroach on their traditions, on their long-standing beliefs, now would we? Those changes take time, you know?... but I digress.