China: Taking up the reproductive health and rights agenda
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development. Copyright © 2003 Society for International Development (www.sidint.org). 1011-6370 (200306) 46:2; 80–84; 033506. NB When citing this article please use both volume and issue numbers. SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)
Local/Global Encounters
China: Taking up the reproductive health and rights agenda QIQI SHEN
ABSTRACT Qiqi Shen outlines the major shifts in population policy in China particularly since the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development and its acceptance of a reproductive rights health agenda. KEYWORDS Dalian Centre for Gender Studies; family planning; law; population; training; women’s NGOs
Introduction In China reproductive rights have been inextricably linked to population control. China’s entry into the global market has stimulated enormously rapid economic growth in the cities. International investment is flowing in and already China is by far the largest source of manufactured goods in the world. China has huge undeveloped resources, particularly of fossil fuels and minerals, but also severe constraints on essentials such as water. The resolution of the tension between development needs and individual rights will largely determine the future of not only China but also the world and the global environment. After all, one person in four in the world is Chinese. Population policy in China: 1950s and 1960s The story of official population policy in China has three phases. The first phase, in the 1950s and 1960s, was the encouragement of very high population growth. China followed the Soviet Union in rewarding women who had many children as ‘heroic mothers’. Mao Zedong’s population policy was based on the traditional idea that more people meant a richer and more powerful country. The result was a rapid swelling of the population before and even during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Shen: China: Taking up the Women’s Health Agenda 1970s and 1980s The second phase, in the 1970s and 80s, was the recognition that population growth was undermining economic development and thus the introduction of coercive population control policies subordinating individual rights to the imperatives of collective development. China began a Family Planning Programme which imposed a rule of only one child per couple. In this period, family planning was an obligation that overrode any personal preferences of married couples. The programme aimed to decrease the population but it generated severe conflict between administrative commands and individual reproductive rights. Coercive methods were used to implement family planning policy. The policy took for granted that women were solely responsible for reproduction and targeted women’s fertility as if that was the problem. Authorities employed forced sterilization (mainly of women) as a major tool. This impacted particularly severely on women in economically and culturally marginal regions. A woman would be looked down on by her parents-in-law or
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