China and Saudi Arabia family
policy
This research paper is aimed to compare the government
family policy of two different countries – China and Saudi Arabia. As family is
important to the socialization of children, it plays an important role in the
development of children’s intellect and personality. In order to control the
country’s population, China has implemented the one child’s policy for the last
two decade. Today, over 90% of all urban children, and over 60% of rural
children have no brothers or sisters.
One-child family policy of China
has had a great effect on the lives of nearly a quarter of the world`s
population for a quarter of a century. It was so successfully implemented, that the nation’s
population growth rate dropped significantly. This policy has been intensely
criticized internationally for violating fundamental human rights evidenced by
the forced sterilizations and abortions, and the wide-spread abandonment and/or
neglecting of baby girls. China's total
fertility rate, a measure that states the number of children born during a
woman's life, has dropped from about six to below two during the last
half-century. Meanwhile, China has been enforcing family planning policies
(FPP), which intend to control the size of population, since 1960s.
Over time, FPP has experienced four periods: the period without FPP
(1949- 1963), the period with mild and narrowly implemented FPP (1963 - 1971),
the period with strong and widely enforced FPP (1971 - 1980), and the period
with the strictest one-child policy (1980 – until now). The strength and
enforcement of FPP differ between urban and rural areas and vary from the
ethnic majority, known as Hans, to the minority, denoted by non-Hans. Based
upon the historical policy variations over periods and across groups, most
studies assembled easily obtainable variables, such as birth year, living area,
and ethnicity, to create a measure of FPP.
While the one child policy was stated as a
voluntary-based birth-control program, it was implemented through a grass-root
political mobilization and a set of strict administrative controls such as
residential registration, certificate of birth approval, and birth
certification (White, 130). Coercion in terms of sterilization, forced abortion,
and sanctions in terms of housing and economics have been used and provided a
major leverage for world criticism of the policy (Mosher, 76).
In general, urban couples were easier to persuade and
control, because most of them worked in state owned enterprises where the
political control and administrative forces were strong. Only under few
exceptions, urban residents could have a second birth.
The successes of Chineese policy of one child should not be underestimated. It slowed down
the population growth from 11.6% in 1979 to 5.9% in 2005 and reduced the
population on nearly 250-300 million.
The total fertility rate fell from 2.8 in 1979 to 1.8 in 2001 well below the
replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman (Festini and de Martino, 358). On
the national level, the one-birth rate rose from 20.7% in 1970, to 72.4% in
2003 (White, 74). Over 95% of preschool children in urban areas, such as
Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, were the only children (Rosenberg and Jing, 51).
These diminutions in fertility have simplified some of the community pressures,
the environment and the state, in a country that still stands on the fifth
place according to population in the world.
Several unintended consequences of the one child
policy have had an impact on the social and economic situation in China and on
the family processes and dynamics.
Among the immediate consequences of the policy are:
· Unbalanced sex
ratios. The main international criticism concernig one-child policy is its
consequence of promoting discrimination against female newborns, who could be
abandoned, unregistered or aborted and who are most likely in disadvantaged
status of health care and education.
· Urban-rural
ratios of newborns. Since the one child policy was implemented with different
standards for urban and rural residents, the fertility rates of rural residents
were higher than that of urban residents, because there are great urban-rural
differences in economic development levels.
·
Adoption. Adoption as a social possibility,
both internationally and domestically, is considered in the society as
feasible. The one-child policy included discouraging adoption by regulations on
whom and in what circumstances one may adopt. Officially registered adoptions
increased from 2,900 in
1992 to 55,000 in
2001. Many more informal adoptions occur in rural areas and now they are more
common everywhere. While adoption is not so frequent in China as in the
developed world it is less stigmatized than previously.
By launching a nationwide policy of limiting each couple to only one
child, China, of course, established an unprecedented level of government
control of births.
History will remember China’s
one-child policy as the most extreme example of state intervention in human
reproduction in the modern era. History will also likely view this policy as a
very costly blunder, born of the legacy of a political system that planned
population numbers in the same way that it planned the production of goods. It
showcases the impact of a policymaking process that, in the absence of pubic
deliberations, transparency, debate, and accountability, can do permanent harm
to the members of a society.
The policy of one child will be added to the other deadly errors in
recent Chinese history, including the famine in 1959–61 caused largely by the industrialization
and collectivization campaigns of the late 1950s, and the Cultural Revolution
of the late 1960s and early 1970s. While those grave mistakes both cost tens of
millions of lives, the harms done were relatively short-lived and were corrected
quickly afterward. The policy of one-child, in contrast, will surpass them in
impact by its role in creating a society with a seriously undermined family and
kin structure, and a whole generation of future elderly and their children
whose well-being will be seriously jeopardized.
Completely other attitude to
natality and family policy has Saudi Arabia. Today the population size of Saudi
Arabia counts approximately 27.3 million people, comparing with 9.8 million in
1980. It is expected that the population will keep on increasing to reach
approximately 40.4 million in 2050. The proportion between nationals and
foreigners is 19.6 million to 6.4 million respectively. The total work force of 11
million consists of 5.8 million foreigners and 5.2 million natives. Of this
workforce, less than 20% are women with only one in ten of these being Saudi
nationals. Only an estimated 2% of female Saudi citizens are employed. This
lack of women in the workforce puts the Saudi national contribution to the
workforce at a mere 21-22%, less man half the average for the Middle Eastern
region whose workforces are made up of almost 50% of their total population (Wahab, 74).
The difficulty in tracking
population growth rates and per capita GDP trends of Saudi Arabia lies within
its closed society. Throughout the 1970’s and 80’s the official Saudi
government census reports were inflated to represent a population that didn’t
exist.
The majority of Saudis people are Arab ethnically, because according to
statistics most of inhabitants come from Arab countries and Subcontinent. Also
a lot of Arab people from neighboring countries are working permanently in the
kingdom. It’s important to mention as well significant amounts of Asian
expatriates mostly from Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Philippines and
Bangladesh. In the period of 1970s and
1980s in Saudi Arabia there was a great community of laborers of South Korean
origin. Their amount could be counted in the hundreds of thousands, but at
certain time the majority of them came back to their home country. Now,
according to statistic of 2005 only 1200 of South-Koreans live in the kingdom.
Also it’s important to mention 100,000 Western migrants that are living and
working permanently in Saudi Arabia (Hyunho, 91).
The topic of birth control has not
yet entered the public domain in Saudi Arabia where abortion is illegal. The
fertility rate in Saudi Arabia by 2000 stood at 6.4 children per woman; in 1999
Saudi Arabia had the 20th largest growth rate in the world with Afghanistan
being the only country with both more people and a higher growth rate.
In addition to continued high
growth rates, it is interesting to note that over 50% of the population in
Saudi Arabia is now less than 25 years of age with 42% of it being under the
age of 15. These figures are double those of 1980 and are projected to almost
double again by the year 2020. More disturbing than a growth rate above 3% is
this upcoming generation of Saudi youth who will reach childbearing age within
the next five years.
As noted above, Saudi Arabia’s
problem is no longer one of under population but of native Saudi participation
in the work force. Independent reports estimated that less than a million Saudi
nationals, including women, participated in the Saudi workforce in the late
1970’s. The native Saudi work force made up only 10% of the total population of
8.6 million in 1978; 3.6-4.0 million of the work forces were estimated to be
foreign.
The government in Saudi Arabia
today is attempting to replace foreign workers with Saudi nationals by requiring
all foreign and domestic businesses to ensure their employees are made up of
25-30% Saudi nationals.
To conclude, it’s necessary to say that on the example of those two
countries we can see completely different government birth and family policies,
each of which has their own pluses and minuses. Their detailed analysis shows
that country has to be maximally responsible in adopting any laws or
regulations, because it can have great impact in the future on history, life,
traditions and culture.
Works cited
Festini, F., and M. de Martino, Twenty Five Years of the One-Child Family
Policy in China, Journal of
Epidemial Community Health, 58, 2004.
Mosher, S. W., China’s One-Child Policy: Twenty-Five Years Later, The Human Life Review, 2006
Rosenberg, B. G., and Q. Jing, Revolution in Family Life: The Political and
Social Structural Impact of China’s One Child Policy, Journal of Social Issues 52, 1996.
White, T., China’s Longest
Campaign: Birth Planning in the People’s Republic, 1949-2005. Cornell
University Press, 2006
Wahab, S., It’s another kind of Saudization, Arab News, 2009. Retrieved 13
January 2011.
Hyunho, S., Korean migrant workers to the Middle East. In Gunatilleke, Godfrey
(ed.). Migration to the Arab World: Experience of Returning Migrants. United
Nations University Press. 2009
