China accounts for one sixth of the world population. About 1.3 billion people are living in a land of 3,750,000 square miles, but almost half of them are inhabitable. Two thirds of the population concentrate along the coastline. The population pressure is tangible everywhere.

The explosive growth of Chinese population started right after the communist party took in charge of the government in 1949. There was nothing wrong with the government during that time. The country was stabilized and foods were secured. The great improvement in health, especially in perinatal care, significantly reduced the infant mortality. More and more babies were born healthy and able to live to their adulthoods.

Malthus in “An Essay on the Principle of Population” (1798) warned that the exponential growth of population might exhaust the linearly growing food production. Yanchu Ma, a professor of the Beijing University, wrote a letter to Chairman Mao suggesting that the government should consider population problem seriously. However, Chairman Mao, being ignorant and arrogant, deliberately dismissed Ma’s advice. Instead, he proposed a famous slogan—the more people, the stronger the manpower.

The population problem emerged quickly even before Mao died. He tried to solve it by sending millions of urban young people to rural areas under the name of re-education by peasants. In addition, in the middle of 1970s, he started a campaign to dissuade the third or more childbirth. But the tough job had to wait after his death.

In 1979, the family planning policy has been constitutionalized. The law strictly forbad second childbirth for majority of Chinese. After more than 20 years, although the real growth still surpassed the predicted growth, the population growth has indeed been controlled. Nevertheless, the “One child family” policy became the most attacked policy by human right groups since its inception.

But questions remain. What if there is no such a family planning policy? Most industrialized countries have very low population growth rates without any birth control policies. Even East Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea which have higher population density than China but don’t have any family planning policy, their population growth rates are lower than that of China. It is likely that with the economic development, the population growth will slow down by itself.

Furthermore, in the 1990s, several floods in the rural areas revealed that the family planning policy hadn’t been strictly enforced. Many peasant families still had more than 2 children. These children might not appear in the census, thus causing an underestimate of the real population growth.

More importantly, small family structure may lead to a social problem, namely, there will not be enough young people to support their parents in the near future. Given that China has no national social welfare for majority of Chinese, old people may be neglected by their next generation.

In 2002, a revised family planning policy was issued. The new policy still mandates the “one child family” policy but with an explicit loophole. For those families whose first birth is a girl and who have genealogical difficulties, they can have a second baby. This loophole was created because of three facts: first, too many female fetuses and female infants were killed; second, no matter what, people will have a second baby if the first birth is a girl; third and the most important one, the sex ratio is highly skewed towards man in China with a man vs. woman ratio of 119: 100.

The highly skewed sex ratio is due to selective kills of female fetuses and infants. Although mathematically the above policy will not create more girls, practically it can reduce the selective kills, thus increasing the number of girls and reversing the sex ratio.

The skewed sex ratio in China occurred not by accident, but by the sex discrimination among Chinese people. Similar to other countries, the low status of women in China derives from the structure of pre-industrialized society in which manpower is the basis of human resource. This is also why the discrimination is deeply rooted in rural areas. Women are viewed as “money-wasting things” in most rural areas.

The persistence of the sex discrimination in modern China, however, is due to the low education level among Chinese. Most Chinese peasants are functional illiterate although they may be able to read plain newspapers. Even young people can’t write. They lack basic scientific knowledge and resist modern ideas but stick to “traditional values.” They are superstitious and more likely to believe rumors. For them, education is useless because they will end up cultivating the same land if they can’t get into colleges.

In this sense, the new family planning policy only scratched the surface of the problem. Furthermore, for most under-educated people, the new policy gives them an implicit message that women are not as important as men. The sex ratio may be normalized by this policy, but the sex discrimination may become worse in the long run.

Women may be different, but they have their own role in the society, which deserves men’s respect. The ultimate solution to the sex ratio problem is to educate the common people and liberate women to be financially independent. China needs another policy to ensure the equal opportunity for all people.