Policy or Development? Determinants of Low Fertility in China

This paper deals with a debatable issue on the determinant sources of fertility decline in the world’s most populous country where, over the last three decades, fertility has declined consistently and substantially to the below-replacement level. Main forces shaping such fertility change and their impacts on the adjustment of population-control policy have been debated in academic circles. Taking cases of the universal two-child policy, a group of academics have asserted that China’s current low fertility is not simply a result of the one-child birth-control policy and its various permutations. Based on a closer investigation of these two-child programs, which have been perceived as an unique case of birth-control experiment for almost thirty years, this paper demonstrates that such programs are an “adapted and adjusted” but tenacious continuity from the national population control process in terms of the timing of marriage, the number of children, and the childbearing interval. Our analysis demonstrates that fertility outcomes in China are largely a function of birth rationing.