Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: How Did We End Up Here?China's one-child policy started in 1979 and closed in 2015.China's population had been quickly increasing up to the policy's start-data from the United Nations shows China's population around 540 million in 1950, then grew to more than 800 million in 1970.The Chinese government believed that this initiative would halt population growth.Grant Miller, an economics professor at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, found through his research that as of 2016, there were now 33.6 million more men than women in China and that "population control strategies have human costs and unforeseen consequences."These unforeseen consequences come largely in part due to Chinese society favoring men.D Li, an academic scholar for China Popular Daily, discusses in his article, "Preference for Sons: Past and Present," that the preference for sons rooted all the way back to 500 B.C., where men were considered superior to women.He explains that sons were expected to carry on the family lineage and the last name, so a lack of sons was a sign of humiliation for a family. Introducing the International Adoption ProgramThirteen years after the one-child policy went into effect, China's international adoption program opened in 1992 and closed September 2024.Through this program, the U.S. Department of State reports that over 160,000 thousand children were adopted out of China, with more than 80,000 going to the United States.In 2000, China signed the 1993 Hague Convention and ratified it in 2005.The convention aimed to prevent the abduction, sale of, or trafficking of children in intercountry adoptions.The signing of this convention provided a lot of promise within China's international adoption program; U.S.
Author: Anna Bedell
Institution: University of Colorado Boulder
Language: English
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4409906850