Human and Cultural Contexts

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, China’s population has risen above 1.3 billion, accounting for more than 20 percent of the global total; it is nine times higher that of Japan, five times that of the USA, and three times that of the entire European Union. The dynamic mechanism of population growth has been substantially influenced by China’s population policies. When the PRC was founded in 1949, the population of mainland China was about 450 million. Since then China has experienced two major peaks of population growth. From 1949 to 1958, when the Great Leap Forward movement was launched, the birth rate was as high as 3 to 4 percent while, in contrast, the death rate decreased significantly. This dramatic growth in population was largely encouraged by the government in line with Mao Zedong’s thought “the more population, the easier are the things to be done.” China’s population began to grow rapidly once again after the famine period (1959–61), during which many people died from starvation.1 The birth rate peaked at 4.3 percent in 1963 and then decreased gradually but still stood at more than 2 percent until the early 1970s when the government realized the importance of population control (see Figure 3.1). Figure 3.1 Birth, death and natural growth rates