Reading 2/2:
PART 1: Read the text and choose the correct answer
23456
In 1979 the Chinese government introduced a policy that no other country had ever introduced before. Each couple was restricted by law to having to only one child. This one-child policy, although highly controversial, is believed to have helped prevent the rapidly growing Chinese population from becoming unsustainable.
In 2015 the one-child policy was finally relaxed, allowing couples to now have two children. According to the Communist Party of China, 400 million births have been
prevented since the policy was introduced, and the Chinese population has become sustainable. Meanwhile, other developing countries like India and Nigeria,
where such a policy has never been nationally enforced, continue to struggle with population explosions.
On a statistical level, it is easy to suggest that the one-child policy has been rather successful in China. It has lessened the negative environmental impact that rapid industrialisation and population growth have had on China since being implemented. However, there are plenty of grounds for criticism, especially from human rights activists, as well as advocates for freedom of choice. The main question raised by such a move is should a government be allowed to control family size, or is that too much control over individual liberty?
Next Question
Next Reading
<
Exll
1
In the poorer rural areas of China, where life has changed very little for hundreds of years, farmers often used to rely on their children to help out on the farm. It was common for couples to have many children because infant mortality was high and the burden of work could not be handled by just a few people. It was generally considered that a girl was bad luck in this case because she would not be able to do as much manual labour. However backwards this way of thinking may seem to many people, the sad reality was that the instances of infanticide of female babies began to rise rapidly in the 1980s in China, as a result of the one-child policy.
Despite this raising other important concerns such as gender inequality in China, the growing problem of infanticide did lead to change, the government relaxed the one-child policy so that a couple could have a second child, but only if their first child was a girl. On the other hand, the government has also faced heavy criticism of its methods of trying to enforce the one-child policy in the past. In rural areas, it was very difficult for the government to enforce the policy, and so only really applied in urban areas of the country.
In extreme cases, the government in China would force pregnant women who already had one child to have an abortion. However, they were also forced to introduce laws in 2005 outlawing sex-selective abortions, which were increasingly common choices being made by couples who knew the sex of their baby to be
<
vat fini
