In October 2015, China announced the end of its one-child poicy, marking the end of the three decades long government intervention into Chinese family planning. The controversial policy was first introduced in 1979 to help slow down the population growth. It is estimated to have prevented approximatly 400 million births, which effectively bought four years before the world population reaching the critical 6 billion. Nevertheless, China’s rising social issues have forced the Chinese government to re-assess it’s position and eventually abolished the policy after 30 years’ experiment. How would this U-turn in national strategy affect the Chinese population? Would it help solve China’s other social problems such as labor shortage, gender imbalance and female infanticide?
Xinran Xue is a British-Chinese journalist, author, speaker and advocate for women’s issues. She started her career in Beijing as a radio journalist in 1980s. After a successful career as a radio journalist in China, Xinran moved to London and became a writer. Xinran has conducted lots of field research into a number of China’s complicated social issues and their policy implications, like the one child policy and migrant workers’ integration into urban Chinese society. In 2004, Xinran set up a charity The Mothers’ Bridge of Love, reaching out to adopted Chinese children and helping them better understand their adoptive and birth culture. Xinran is the author of The Good Women of China (Vintage, 2002), Sky Burial (Chatto and Windus, 2004) and China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation (Chatto and Windus, 2008) amongst others.
