dube's presentation

Hi Folks,

Apologies for not getting to the family planning question today. The short story is that the program was, in retrospect, unnecessary and came at great cost. China's population growth was already slowing. With urbanization, industrialization and continuing education of females, that decline would have continued - as it has everywhere else. China's leaders at the time the program was implemented (Deng Xiaoping and others) can be cut some slack, however, since no one could have anticipated the rapidity of China's economic transformation. They literally feared a population catastrophe if they didn't intervene in a drastic way. The best academic studies of this are by Susan Greenhalgh and and Neil Diamont. An excellent journalistic account on the consequences of the policy is Mei Fong's One Child. (Watch the videos on our site of her discussing the book.). The key slide showing that the trend lines in the late 1970s were good is #66.

You're free to use this presentation with your students, but please do not post it to the internet or otherwise distribute it.

I've also attached digital copies of the three handouts from today.

You've got info on the 1950, 1981 marriage laws. Here's a link to the 2001 marriage law: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Marriage_Law_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China_(2001)