After much deliberation the Chinese leaders opted for an intensive programme of birth control during the 1970's in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. This scheme was so successful it reduced the number of births by 10 million when comparing the years of 1971 and 1979. This can be seen in the diagram below.
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China's policy in the 1970's owed much to a variety of variables, but was pursued with vigour though a government sponsored family planning programme. The government spelt out its three reproductive expectations in the slogan wan-xi-shao (later, longer, fewer), meaning later marriage, longer intervals between births and fewer children. At this point few meant 2 in the urban areas and 3 in the rural areas but this was further lowered to 2 throughout the while of China on 1977. The reason attributed to this early success was the unique way in which the Chinese birth programme was organised with the government policies dictated from local bodies and not reliant on mass distribution.
Thus far the Chinese government have introduced family planning programmes with great success but they were to increase the stringency of the policy, this caused the necessity to offer incentives and decentives in addition to the policy, as they knew it would be extremely difficult to enforce. The incentives and inverted decentives that were applied by the government made it to good an offer to turn down, or too high a penalty to break it. The basic outline was to offer those families who had one child a ten percent portion of their wage in addition to their basic salary and a ten percent fine on those who exceeded the one child arrangement, and these economic sanctions were to be in place for the first fifteen years of the child's life. Improvements in education and health, income and the changing role of women in society combined to make a very positive contribution to the goal of reducing fertility in China.
