We have been given the topic of environment to research, we are going to look into the topics within environment and choose one to research further into as a group.
- Human overpopulation
- Intensive farming
- Nuclear issues
- Climate change
- Pollution
- Genetic engineering
- Nuclear issues
After briefly researching into each category we have decided to research further into Human Overpopualtion as we feel this is going to be the most interesting subject.
China's one child policy
China's one child policy has been in place for over 30 years
Who introduced the one-child policy and
why?
During Chairman Mao’s rule, China’s
birthrate was as high as four children per family and there were food shortages
that led to famine.
At the beginning of the 1980s, the
Communist party decided to restrict China’s population growth in order to
stabilise food and water supplies and improve individual prosperity.
In September 1980, an open letter to the
country was issued by the Communist party calling for “one child per couple”
rules to “keep the population below 1.2 billion at the end of the 20th
century”.
How large an impact has it had?
According to the Chinese Health ministry,
doctors have performed 336 million abortions and 196 million sterilisations,
since 1971 and inserted 403 million intrauterine devices.
By contrast, in the United States, which
has a population a quarter of the size of China’s, there have been 50 million
abortions since 1973.
Chinese officials believe the one child
policy has reduced the population by 400 million but demographers, citing
falling birth rates across Asia, believe it is closer to 100 million.
Are there any exceptions?
The policy has been a patchwork of
measures. China’s ethnic minorities, such as Uighurs and Tibetans, are exempt.
Families in the countryside are permitted
to have a second child if their first is a girl and recently couples that were
only children themelves were allowed to apply to have more kids.
What are the punishments for breaking the
policy?
Women are regularly inspected to check if
they are pregnant, even well into their 40s and 50s. Those who are found to be
in breach can suffer forced abortions and even sterilisations.
In millions of cases, families have been
successful in hiding new children. The 1990 census recorded 23 million births
but the 2000 census put the number of ten-year-olds at 26 million, suggesting
at least three million babies had escaped the notice of family planning
officials.
Those who are caught can also opt to pay a
“social upbringing fee”, usually a multiple of the average income in the city
where the child is born, designed to cover the cost of education and
healthcare.
When will China stop the one-child policy?
Demographers have warned the Communist
party that it must take drastic action to encourage more babies or face a
rapidly ageing society. By 2030, a quarter of China’s population will be over
60. However, in March 2008 officials predicted the policy would stay in play
for “at least a decade”.
In the late 1970s, the Chinese government
introduced a number of measures to reduce the country's birth rate and slow the
population growth rate. The most important of the new measures was a one-child
policy, which decreed that couples in China could only have one child.
In 1950 the rate of population change in
China was 1.9 per cent each year. If this doesn't sound high, consider that a growth
rate of only 3 per cent will cause the population of a country to double in
less than 24 years!
Previous Chinese governments had encouraged
people to have a lot of children to increase the country's workforce. But by
the 1970s the government realised that current rates of population growth would
soon become unsustainable.
The one-child policy
The one-child policy, established in 1979,
meant that each couple was allowed just one child. Benefits included increased
access to education for all, plus childcare and healthcare offered to families
that followed this rule.
Problems with enforcing the policy:
Those who had more than one child didn't
receive these benefits and were fined.
The policy was keenly resisted in rural
areas, where it was traditional to have large families.
In urban areas, the policy has been
enforced strictly but remote rural areas have been harder to control.
Many people claim that some women, who
became pregnant after they had already had a child, were forced to have an
abortion and many women were forcibly sterilised. There appears to be evidence
to back up these claims.
Impact of the policy
The birth rate in China has fallen since
1979, and the rate of population growth is now 0.7 per cent.
There have been negative impacts too - due
to a traditional preference for boys, large numbers of female babies have ended
up homeless or in orphanages, and in some cases killed. In 2000, it was
reported that 90 per cent of foetuses aborted in China were female.
As a result, the gender balance of the
Chinese population has become distorted. Today it is thought that men outnumber
women by more than 60 million.
Long-term implications
China's one-child policy has been somewhat
relaxed in recent years. Couples can now apply to have a second child if their
first child is a girl, or if both parents are themselves only-children.
While China's population is now rising more
slowly, it still has a very large total population (1.3 billion in 2008) and
China faces new problems, including:
the falling birth rate - leading to a rise
in the relative number of elderly people
fewer people of working age to support the
growing number of elderly dependants - in the future China could have an ageing
population
Couples have to now apply to have a second child
Recent article by the telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/11374267/China-struggles-to-loosen-one-child-policy-as-couples-urged-to-apply-for-second-child.html
Plan and develop a graphic response to address / resolve the issue
We want to
Raise awareness of over population
We are going to go for shock tactics to make people more aware of over population and hit them with the facts.
- Harsh ways of removing girls from the population
- Why boys are favoured over girls
- Birth credits
- Abortion
We have come up with a few visual ideas as a group, one that could be quite interesting is maybe looking into wheres wally but a Chinese version to hit the audience a illustrative visual.
Also we are thinking a poster with baby pink and blue on would work well to get the message across about abortion, the poster would include a lot more blue than pink as there is more men than women in China.
As we are going for the shocking ratio facts we have found out that for every 1 girl in China there are 12 other boys making the human population in china very uneven.
How our research has developed:
- Environment
- Overpopulation
- China's one child policy
- Sex-selective abortion
Something that was on my Instagram today from National Geographic in relation to the research that we have carried out today about over population in China.
Photo by Micheal Yamashita
Hordes of travelers passing through Shenzhen Railway Station during 'chunyun', the worlds largest annual human migration. This 40 day high traffic period begins in the weeks leading up to the Chinese New Year as millions od migrant workers travel to their hometowns to spend the holidays with their families.
