Challenging Myths About China's One-Child Policy

China's controversial one-child policy continues to generate controversy and misinformation. This essay challenges several common myths: that Mao Zedong consistently opposed efforts to limit China's population growth; that as a result China's population continued to grow rapidly until after his death, necessitating the switch to mandatory and coercive birth limits; that the launching of the one-child policy in 1980 led to a dramatic decline in China's fertility rate; and that due to the one-child policy, China and the world benefited from 400 million births that were thereby prevented. Evidence is presented contradicting each of these claims: that Mao Zedong at times forcefully advocated strict limits on births and presided over a major switch from voluntary to coercive birth planning after 1970 (not 1980); that as much as 3/4 of the decline in fertility in China since 1970 occurred prior to the launching of the one-child policy; that fertility levels fluctuated and even rose in some years after the one-child policy was launched; and that most of the further decline in Chinese fertility since 1980 can be attributed to economic development, not to coercive enforcement of birth limits.