Public Attitudes Towards One-Child Policy Reform in China: From a Gender Perspective

Background and Purpose: Family policy is a broad research topic, which can include family planning, child care, family leave policy and so forth. This paper focuses on China’s family planning policy, which commonly known as the one-child policy. On Nov. 15, 2013, the Chinese government announced that it would loosen its one-child policy. The new regulations allow couples in which at least one parent is an only child to have two offspring. Xinhua, China’s official news agency, said the reform was designed to “steadily adjust and improve family-planning policies.”

Even though it is commonly known as one-child policy, the family planning policies have been complicated in China. The paper first provides a historical review of the family-planning policies since 1979.  Then, it presents an update on the new reform in 2013 and its implementation since 2014. Based on media news reviews, some of emerging public attitudes toward the one-child policy in current China were discussed.

Methods: Three key media sources were searched for this media review study. One was xinhuanet.com, which is the Chinese government’s official news website in English. The other two were sina.com.cn and sohu.com.cn, which are two major news portals in Chinese. The media survey focused on the dates between November 15, 2013 and December 31, 2015. Key words searched were one-child policy, family planning, childrearing attitudes, women in English, and corresponding words in Chinese, such as, ertai, shengyu yiyuan, yuling nvxing. Guided by the principles of grounded theory and the focus of gender perspective, content analysis of 30 news articles was conducted.

Findings:  Content analysis of media news reveals that recent one-child policy reform was primarily driven by the discussion of population aging and population structure changes. The family and gender perspectives were emerging in the discussion, while it has not been the focus of news debates. Based on the review of these news articles from the gender perspectives, there were a number of themes: a) risks and discrimination towards working women; b) the financial burden for families, including child care and education for children; and c) the family dynamics, including lifestyles, parenting, sibling relationships, and relationships with in-laws.  One noteworthy fact in the news was the lack of interests in having second child among working women in cities who were eligible under the new policy.

Conclusion and Implications: In this media news review, public attitudes and cultural norms towards family formation, gender relationship, and socio-economic development in China were integrated into the review of the one-child policy.  Findings highlight the importance of the gender perspective in current discussion, and indicate the needs of development on child care, family leave, and equal employment policy to complement the reform of one child policy in China.