China has been growing rapidly for a decade or two now . But this was not the case half a century ago when it was over-populous and poverty-stricken . So the Chinese Leaders came up with the largest social engineering experiment in human history in the form of the one-child policy . But what seemed to be a miraculous solution is now turning out to be China’s biggest concern .
The One Child policy has had a long term effect . The immediate effect being the large reduction of the working population and China,being dependent heavily on cheap labour, has been hurt gravely by it . The policy has also resulted to a decrease in the sex ratio with nearly 25 million extra males . The chief reason for it was that parents , as per the Chinese tradition of preferring sons over daughters , ensured that their only quota is filled by a son . The concern of how these males would be able to find their life partners could be given lesser priority right now .
The Chinese Leadership , while implementing the policy , had , of course ,not thought about all these consequences .Taking all these issues into consideration, the Communist Party has announced relaxation in the policy with families now being allowed to bear two children . However , its too late to act now . The majority of the educated middle class families prefer only one child regardless of the relaxations given because of the high cost of upbringing of a child. Parents treat their only child specially providing him/her proper education and a good lifestyle . This has resulted into youths seeking white collar jobs thus abandoning the blue collared jobs that their parents were into . In the coming years , China is expected to have a distorted population with too few youths, too few females and too many elderly with each youth having to bear the responsibility of six elderly persons .
Issues of obscure demography are have also been faced in developed countries . However these countries have the resources necessary to handle them . But China is a growing economy and would not have faced these issues previously . This might become a major hurdle in the miraculous growth rate that it has shown till now .Many economists and socialists have urged that the policy be totally scraped . Irrespective of what steps are taken now , it looks like the Chinese game plan has backfired . In other words , we can say that China has aged out even before its youth .