Final Research Paper

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