China is a land that contains an overpopulation crisis. With a current estimated 1.4billion people living in China, something needed to be done in order to lower the birth rates and control the fast growing population. The solution the Chinese government came up with was the one child policy. They set up a number penalties and benefits in order to encourage the Chinese people to cooperate with this policy. The predicted outcome was to reduce the birth rates and reduce their population, which was ultimately affecting the Chinese economy. However, the one child policy created an unexpected crisis of its own, the creation of unequal demographics of gender and the start of a new cultural and economic trend. This paper is going to study the demographic changes between males and females as well as the cultural impact it has had in present day China due to the enactment of the one child policy in 1979.

The reason to why China came into the population crisis was that people in China chose to have such large families because of the high mortality rates of their kids; they would not even live past the age of five. Families perceived that out of those ten kids only half of them would live, opted to have as many as they could to ensure that at least some of their kids would survive. As time passed people still held these beliefs, however medical innovations and better health care helped elongate the lives of those kids, consequently those families that decided to have many kids in order to ensure the lives of a few kids were now realizing that all their kids were living and they were left raising all six to ten kids. This is how the population in China became an excess and ultimately started to affect the country. In the beginning, the whole policy was voluntary where the families chose to use birth control and where educated on the different methods of preventing pregnancy. However, this did not seem to cure the government's crisis, and population was still a real...