Assignment 16- Osburn

Annotated Bibliography

Feng, Wang, et al. “Population, Policy, and Politics: How Will History Judge China's One-Child
Policy?” Population and Development Review, vol. 38, 2013, pp. 115–129. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/23655290.

Wang Feng is former director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy who specialized in Foreign Policy Program at the Brooking Institution. He is well known in both the United States and China for his research in China’s demographic changes. In this essay, Feng examines the role of politics in the implementation of China’s population and birth control policies. The analysis of the unique one child policy discusses China’s circumstances that called for the need of such a policy. He compares the Green Revolution and family planning programs as well. The essay addresses the country’s negative outcomes of all of these programs and policies. Feng’s work is a highlight of the political causes and effects of China’s strategies for population control on a global scale. This piece provides details on China’s steps to establishing population administrations, specifically the one child policy. It also questions the longevity of the strict one child policy. 

Feng, Xiao-Tien, et al. “China’s One-Child Policy and the Changing Family.” Journal of
Comparative Family Studies, vol. 45, no. 1, Winter 2014, pp. 17–29. EBSCOhost,
doi:10.3138/jcfs.45.1.17.

Xiao-Tien Feng has a PhD in Sociology from Peking University. Feng is currently a distinguished professor and researcher at Nanjing University who specializes in China’s one child issue, population, and family sociology. This essay studies how the introduction of the one child policy drastically changed the structure of Chinese families. Feng illustrates the shift in family relationships after the policy’s implementation in 1979. He discusses the problems presented as the family dynamics altered. For example, the structure of Chinese families was simplified and the focus turned to children rather than parents. Feng also explains how family support for the elderly generation is weakened as a result of fewer children. This essay is useful in examining the social and cultural aspects that are transformed by the one child policy. It focuses on generational lifestyle changes of traditional Chinese families that the infamous population control policy causes.

Kuo, Lily and Wang, Xueying. “Can China recover from its disastrous one-child policy?”.
The Guardian, Mar. 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/.

Lily Kuo was formerly the chief of the Guardian’s Beijing bureau and now holds the position of China bureau chief for The Washington Post. She has been covering reports of China for nearly ten years. Kuo describes difficulties that Chinese parents face in raising children in the aftermath of the one child policy. Following the termination of the one child policy, parents are urged to have more children, but the majority have no desire for more than one kid. She explains the attempt of Chinese policymakers to engineer a baby boom as birthrates rapidly decrease. With the predicted population shrink and widening generational gap, this article questions whether it is too late to reverse the damaging effects of the one child policy. In turn, it studies the economic and social reasons that parents are not having more children, as well as the measures the government is taking to restore the population. This piece is useful in observing real life accounts of the one child policy’s consequences and the challenges it has presented for the parents economically and socially.

Wang, Nanfu. “The Dark Legacy of China’s One Child Policy.” First Person, Foreign Policy,
August 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/09/china-one-child-policy-nanfu-wang

-film-sundance-one-child-nation-amazon-films/.

Nanfu Wang, director of One Child Nation, was born during the one-child policy generation. Wang speaks on a podcast episode produced by First Person of her family's experience with the one child policy.  In her story, she talks about family problems such as her grandmother’s desire for a baby boy and her aunt’s involvement with human trafficking. The podcast explores China’s cultural eagerness for male children and the dark consequences. Wang also discusses her film, One Child Nation, that evaluates the lasting impacts of China’s policy. This piece provides a first hand account of the extreme social and cultural changes that developed in families after China enforced the one child policy. Wang contributes an inside perspective of Chinese citizens under the policy’s strict control. 

Whyte, Martin King, et al. “Challenging Myths About China’s One-Child Policy.” China
Journal, vol. 74, no. 1, July 2015, pp. 144–159. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1086/681664.

Martin Whyte is a sociology professor at Harvard University, best known for his research in Chinese society. He evaluates the controversies and addresses misinformation about the application of China’s one child policy. Whyte challenges commonly told myths about the policy, for example, that Mao Zedong was an opponent of the country’s population control efforts. His essay provides evidence to properly debunk such myths that inform readers of the realities surrounding the population control policies. This essay observes that China’s decline in fertility rates since the employment of the one child policy can be attributed not to birth control efforts, but rather the development of the nation’s economy. Whyte’s work is useful to scope out the facts and actualities in both causes and effects of the one child policy from several different lenses.