The Single-child Family Policy in the Cities

It has long been recognised that family size tends to decrease in cities or urban areas earlier and more widely than it does in the countryside. Demographers often describe ‘urbanisation’ as a major factor in fertility decline, but that overall term covers a wide range of social and economic processes which may or may not affect the choice of individuals about the number of children to have. Definitions of the word ‘urban’ are not easy, and in China the difficulties are compounded by the existence of the overlapping category of suburban communes, which are generally grouped administratively within the sphere of cities and towns. Such communes are primarily agricultural but they are influenced by their proximity to a town and tend, in their fertility patterns, to reflect some of that influence, exhibiting rates which are between those of the truly urban areas, and those of the countryside. They are included in this chapter both because they thus exhibit some of the earlier changes in fertility seen in the towns, and because Chinese statistics for urban areas generally include suburban communes. The Chinese define an area as urban if it has a population of more than 2000 at least one half of which is working in non-agricultural pursuits.1 (See also H. Yuan Tien’s discussion of this definition in this volume.) It is this definition which will be used here.