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One-Child Policy and Population Aging in China

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Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging

Synonyms

1.5-child policy; China’s birth control policy; China’s family-planning policy; Only-child policy

Definition

The one-child policy refers to China’s birth control policy and its evolution over the past four decades, beyond the literary definition of one child per couple policy. It is generally considered that the policy was one child per couple policy when it was first officially launched in 1980 and was modified to a more lenient 1.5-child policy in the mid-1980s due to strong resistance (Liang 2014a; Chen 2015). Under this 1.5 child policy, urban couples in most provinces were allowed to have only one child, whereas couples with rural household registration fell into several categories: in six provinces, rural couples were allowed to have only one children, and in 19 provinces, rural couples were allowed to have a second child if the first one was a girl, and in some other provinces, rural parents could have two children (Gu et al. 2007). Therefore, throughout most of the...

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Correspondence to Quanbao Jiang .

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Jiang, Q., Tai, X., Wang, L. (2019). One-Child Policy and Population Aging in China. In: Gu, D., Dupre, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_652-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_652-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-69892-2

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