The Rise and Fall of China’s One-Child Policy. 1. Malthus, Marx, and Mao
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Marx denounced Malthus’ enforced birth control as capitalist oppression. Mao could not but agree with Marx—but later changed his mind.
April 1, 2025
Article 1 of 4.
*A paper presented at the conference “Giornata della vita nascente” (Day of the Nascent Life), organized by UNEBA (National Union of Social Assistance Institutions and Initiatives), Pisa, and by the Fondazione Madonna del Soccorso, Fauglia—Ponsacco, Italy, March 25, 2025.
China’s one-child policy was introduced in 1979 and became effective from 1980. It was converted into a two-child policy in 2015 and officially abolished in 2021. It was the largest social experiment in the history of humanity. It was also the cruelest, and one that spectacularly backfired.
To understand the policy, we should start with the expression “Malthusianism” and with a very old book, “An Essay on the Principle of Population” published in 1798 by the Anglican cleric Thomas Robert Malthus. His father was a British country gentleman sympathetic to the Enlightenment and a personal friend of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The younger Malthus wrote his book to criticize his father’s optimistic view that, after the triumph of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the world will enter into an era of sustained prosperity.
Not so, said Malthus. On the contrary, economy will decline because of the growth of the population. He claimed that population was multiplying at a geometric rate: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and so on. By contrast, food production was growing only at an arithmetic rate: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… The unavoidable conclusion was that soon there would not be food enough for all. The solution Malthus proposed, which became known as “Malthusianism,” was to compel the poor to birth control, if necessary by detaining them in special houses and preventing them from procreating.
In the 19th century, scholars almost unanimously concluded that Malthusianism was wrong. The Anglican pastor based his theory on statistics for England only, calculated births but ignored deaths, and did not consider that, while land was in fact limited (in the British isles, but not internationally), the growth in population also implied a growth in the number of available workers, thus in agricultural production. The latter will also grow due to technological progress.
Interestingly, among the most vitriolic critics of Malthus were Karl Marx and his associate Friedrich Engels. They concluded that the British clergyman basically blamed the poor for being poor. They were responsible of their poverty since they procreated too many children.
Engels stated in “Outlines of a Critic of Political Economy” that the economically advanced European countries could in fact produce enough food for their population but deliberately decided to produce less. Engels wrote that, “Too little is produced, that is the cause of the whole thing. But why is too little produced? Not because the limits of production are exhausted but because the limits of production are determined not by the number of hungry bellies, but by the number of purses able to buy and to pay.” Marx added that capitalism likes to have a mass of unemployed starving poor, who may be mobilized for cheap labor when capitalist cycles are expanding.
Both Marxist and non-Marxist critics of Malthus dominated population studies until the mid-20th century. Then some “progressive” think tanks, most notably the Club of Rome founded by Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei that produced in 1972 a famous report, “The Limits to Growth,” started arguing that Malthus’ theory was not true for 19th-century Europe but accurately described the situation of 20th-century Third World. The Club of Rome and others created a “neo-Malthusianism” advocating for birth control, if necessary mandatory, in developing countries. Just as Malthus, the neo-Malthusians did not consider the expansion of agricultural production due to technological advancements and the shrinking of births that comes naturally when economic conditions improve. Rich societies produce less children—unless parents have strong religious or ideological motivations—as many citizens prefer to invest their money in enjoying life rather than in children. As it has been said, capitalism is in fact the most effective form of birth control. This is not only true in Europe, and in fact South Korea and Japan are among the countries with the lowest birth rates in the world.
Neo-Malthusians also did not consider that state birth control policies backfire in many ways, most notably because the progress of medicine means that people live longer. A reduced number of workers will end up having to support a larger number of elderly retirees. Some neo-Malthusians propose to solve the latter problem through parallel policies of euthanasia for the elderly, but happily these proposals are opposed by the majority of population everywhere.
Now we move to Communist China. Most books about the one child policy tell you that Chairman Mao was against it and it was introduced only when he was ill and about to die. The policy was enacted in 1975 and Mao died in 1976. However, more recent scholarship has concluded that this is only partially true. Mao was an orthodox Marxist and when confronted with a problem he consulted the works of Karl Marx before relying on contemporary scientists. Population tends to grow after a war, as families delayed having children until the war’s end. After the Civil War, China’s population grew spectacularly from 542 million in 1949 to 807 million in 1969. Coupled with rapid collectivization of the land, this growth did produce food shortages in several areas.
Mao’s initial reaction to proposals that the problem might be solved through enforced birth control was to look in the writings of Marx, which told him that Malthusianism was wrong. In 1949, Mao wrote: “The absurd argument of Western bourgeois economists like Malthus that increases in food cannot keep pace with increases in population was thoroughly refuted by Marxists long ago, It is a very good thing that China has a big population. Even if China’s population multiplies many times, we are fully capable of finding a solution; the solution is production.”
In fact, Mao’s answer to the population growth was more collectivization through the Great Leap Forward campaign of 1958–1962. Although he believed this would increase agricultural production, the opposite happened. The campaign was a failure and created the greatest famine in human history. China did everything possible to keep death statistics secret but, based on different scholarly assessments, the Great Leap Forward caused the death of 15 to 55 million Chinese.
As a result Mao, who had been ambivalent on birth control even before, decided that perhaps Marx’s criticism of Malthus was not applicable to China and in 1964 established the Birth Planning Commission within the State Council. The Five Years Plans for 1970–1975 and 1975–1980 included the goal to dramatically reduce the annual rate of population growth. In the 1975–1980 plan the target was 1 percent in rural areas and 0.6 percent in cities.
Source: bitterwinter.org
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