One Child Policy
...factors such as tradition, religion, or other personal beliefs, the population of a country can be its greatest asset or its greatest liability. A country’s population is able to determine how much a nation is able to produce within a given period of time and to influence the country’s economy in the long run. On the other hand, a country’s population also draws on limited resources of a nation such as investments in education, healthcare, and government welfare programs.
Fundamentally, the three basic economic factors of production are land, labor and capital. While it is true that the higher the population, the more the labor which in turns increases production, it has led some leaders to believe that their countries' birth rates should rise as much as possible. One of these leaders was Mao Zedong; the Communist China under Mao’s leadership had considered its rural population as an asset.
The people’s commune system did very little to limit child-birth; in fact it might have even promoted higher birthrates. With the size of the family as the measure for distributing food and allocating ‘private plots’, at the same time, households did not have the limiting factor of farm size since production was collectivized. There was thus no individual incentive to restrict child-birth out of fear that the land could not feed the family. Finally, the care of the rural elderly was still a matter for the individual family, and so there was a strong incentive to want more children to give support in one’s old age.
Faced with such glaring problems, the level of available labor had significantly surpassed China's other resources. The factors of production have become unbalanced, leading to a labor surplus. This created problems for China’s strained resources in supplying quality education and providing high quality healthcare to such a vast population.
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