Chinese Population Issues, Part 2

In examining the historical population trends of China, there are some key events that illustrate the current issues with managing the population. The Chinese people have over the centuries employed various means to manage the exponential growth of population. A paper written by Lee and Wang indicated the following cultural dynamics that have been used to regulate growth beyond what Malthus understood:

“The Chinese demographic system, in other words, was characterized by a great deal of human agency and individual choices that balanced marital passion and parental love with arranged marriage, the need to regulate coitus, the decision to kill or give away children, and the adoption of other children. Chinese families constantly adjusted their demographic behavior according to their familial circumstances to maximize their collective utility. Such demographic adjustment allowed them to prosper even under stress, if at the cost of considerable individual sacrifice. This deliberate decision making thus gave rise to low female survivorship and low marital fertility, which in turn enabled China to maintain low population growth at the aggregate level until modern times.”

These circumstances were how the Chinese people manage the growth before last few centuries, until the population started to rapidly increase during the eighteenth century. Lee and Wang indicate when the first major rise occurred between 1750 and 1950, when it tripled to 580 million. The second increase took place from 1950 to 2000 when it rose to 1.2 billion (1).