The Financial Times (FT) has recently reported on Chinese
demographics.
China’s aging population has been brought about by its
zero-growth population policies that have been in place since the 1970s.
The most well known aspect of these policies is the infamous
“one-child policy” which mandates forced abortions and sterilizations.
In a recent FT article, Simon Rabinovitch, presented
population data obtained from the Chinese health ministry:
Since 1971, doctors have performed 336m abortions and 196m
sterilisations.
They have also inserted 403m intrauterine devices, often
forced on women in China by local family planning officials.
The magnitude of these figures is truly staggering. By comparison, at present there are 315
million people living in the United States. Rabinovitch does not really tell where the data came from
within the Chinese government, but these are pretty specific numbers that make
sense. In short, we are talking
about a maximum of 336 million Chinese who would be under the age of 42 – the
peak working years.
China’s one-child policy has been the subject of a heated
debate about its economic consequences as the population ages. Forced abortions
and sterilisations have also been criticised by human rights campaigners such
as Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal activist who sought refuge at the US
embassy in Beijing last year.
China first introduced measures to limit the size of the
population in 1971, encouraging couples to have fewer children. The one-child
rule, with exceptions for ethnic minorities and some rural families, was
implemented at the end of the decade.
See also LifeNews report
