Published on The Embryo Project Encyclopedia (https://embryo.asu.edu ) Home > China's One-Child Policy China's One-Child Policy [1] By: Jiang, Lijing Keywords: Fertility [2] Reproduction [3] Government [4] Reproductive rights [5] In September 1979, China?s Fifth National People?s Congress passed a policy that encouraged one-child families. Following this decision from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), campaigns were initiated to implement the One-Child Policy nationwide. This initiative constituted the most massive governmental attempt to control human fertility and reproduction in human history. These campaigns prioritized reproductive technologies for contraception [6], abortion [7], and sterilization [8] in gynecological and obstetric medicine, while downplaying technologies related to fertility treatment. In the late 1980s, one of the consequences was the reorientation of the rationality of governmental funding for research on human in vitro [9] fertilization [10] (IVF) and embryo transfer [11]. Since the establishment of the People?s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the Party has been concerned with potential problems related to China?s population growth and has introduced a series of policies for population control and regulation [12]. The fear of a looming population explosion in the 1970s led to the Party calling for a solution to curb, and eventually halt, China?s population growth. The recognition that China?s large population might be a threat to the wellbeing of the country resulted from an influx of Western demographical literature as well as CCP?s political reorientation. During the 1970s, the CCP governmental philosophy shifted from Mao Zedong?s emphasis on ideological class struggle to an effort to incorporate science into policy making advocated by the Deng Xiaoping leadership team. Informed by a neo-Malthusian population theory that regarded population growth as the most serious problem of the modern world, the leadership began to associate a large population with the many problems that China was facing: poverty, inadequate education, pollution, and unemployment. In 1974, the Office of Population Theory Research was established in the Beijing College of Economics. Experts on population were commissioned to intensively examine Western demographic studies and the population reality in China, with aims of designing a policy solution with sufficient scientific support to address the impending population crisis. Although available alternatives suggested milder tactics for population regulation [12], the Party gradually leaned toward a proposal from a group of cybernetics scientists who suggested an immediate and stringent control of China?s population. From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, western countries witnessed the rise of a neo- Malthusian school of thought that predicted mass starvation as the inevitable consequence of rapidly growing populations. The Club of Rome, a prominent think tank based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [13], espoused this alarmist thought. The name Club of Rome thus became synonymous with the neo-Malthusian formulation among Chinese experts versed in population sciences. Song Jian, a systems engineer who was working in missile and aerospace science at China?s