Preface
I believe that everyone has read the population data report in 2023, and the number of births in the country last year was 9.02 million, a decrease of 2.08 million from the population of the previous year, that is, the population of a medium-sized city. I also found that many people are now discussing the issue of family planning, and family planning is still our basic national policy.
In fact, family planning is not unique to China, countries such as the United States, Brazil, Iran and South Korea have all experienced "family planning", and it is originally a "foreign product".
If we really want to trace the origin, the concept of family planning comes from Western countries, and Chinese population experts have always opposed the one-child policy. In his discussion of the population issue, he explores the background of the formation of China's one-child policy. He said that 100 years ago, under the influence of the West, articles began to appear in some newspapers and periodicals in coastal cities to promote and encourage the people to control childbirth, and there was also a heated discussion in China at that time.
How did the concept of family planning enter China 100 years ago? Since the 1910s, the feminist movement in the United States has been active, and some women believe that women should have control over their own bodies. A female nurse named Margaret Sanger was a socialist activist and a radical feminist.
Sanger
In those days, she wrote articles on sex education and published them in newspapers and magazines. Given the moral standards of the world at the time, these things could not be discussed publicly. It can be seen that he was a very rebellious person, and later he really founded a magazine called Rebellious Women. She also runs a birth control clinic that sells contraceptive manuals.
Later, she was even arrested for this. Sanger is a very controversial figure, and some consider him a feminist, women's liberation movement hero. Others think that he is a sinner who promotes the corruption of society. I think what he thinks about it depends on how each person perceives something differently. However, just after he was released from prison, there was a person who found her, and this person was John Rockefeller.
He expressed his willingness to contribute money to fund Sanger to continue fighting. In 1921, with the funding of Rockefeller, she founded the American Birth Control Alliance and began to preach the ideas and methods of poverty in various countries around the world. In 1922 she traveled to Beijing and Shanghai, China, where she lectured at Peking University and the Zhonghua Vocational School in Shanghai.
Her speech advocated birth control as a demographic issue and advocated for a small family system to address poverty and education. He advocated the concept of racial improvement, that is, eugenics. Doesn't that sound like a no-brainer? Mrs. Senger's speech was widely published in this newspaper and magazine in China at that time, and many of the publications devoted special sections to the topic of the holiday.
It can be said that there is a whirlwind blowing in China. Of course, there are those who oppose it, and there are those who agree. In fact, Sanger's visit to China coincided with the boom of the May Fourth New Culture Movement in China, and some people returning from studying in the West began to discuss population and eugenics. At that time, the New Youth launched a special album on population issues in Volume 7, No. 4, and Chen Duxiu proposed seven ways to solve the Chinese population problem in his article on Malthes's population theory and the Chinese population problem, the last of which was to limit the population.
In the same year, Zhang Jinsheng, a doctor of philosophy who had returned from his studies in France, approached Chen Jiuming, the governor of Guangdong Province, and handed him a report he had written on his way back, suggesting that China should limit population development, implement contraception and birth control, and improve the quality of the population. First, the implementation of these discussions from Guangdong became a prairie fire after Sanger's visit to China. Sanger's visit to China, accompanied by Zhang Jinsheng and Hu Shih, was of course a lot of opposition.
Eugenicist Pan Guangdan believes that the composition of the population problem is very complex, involving many fields such as biology, economics, sociology, etc., and cannot be solved strictly by simply controlling births. There is also a view that without birth control, men and women are still immoral, and if there is a method of birth control, the atmosphere of male and female immorality will spread.
Hu Jing, an educationalist, believes from the rise and fall of the nation that as soon as I push it, not only will I shudder and shudder, but the result will be the phenomenon of chest toes and the destruction of the family. He believes that Mrs. Sarrow's birth control method is more popular, one person and one child is the heel of one person, and more family and one child is popular. If it is really popular, the whole country is afraid of the emperor of 5,000 years, and his descendants will never be extinct.
He thinks it's genocide, and I think everyone has different opinions on what to think of these ideas. I believe that there will be different views even now, unlike those of those days, because social morality has changed. There are many moral issues that people thought were in the past, but they are no longer a problem in the eyes of modern people. Still, there is talk of genocide today.
The American Alliance for Birth Control, which we mentioned earlier, was renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942. Wen Linyan, a Shanghai-born Chinese doctor, became president of the Planned Parenthood Federation in 2018.
Back in 1969, Rockefeller III was appointed chairman of the Commission on Population Growth and the Future of America. That same year, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America proposed to repeal all types of anti-abortion laws.
At the instigation of Rockefeller III, in 1974 U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger drafted the National Security Research Memorandum No. 200, which packaged a plan to drastically reduce the population of developing countries as a project of free choice and sustainable development. Some scholars estimate that from 1965 to 2004, the United States spent a total of $17.3 billion to control the population of developing countries. The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 to reduce the growth of the world's population, and in 1972 it published a study entitled "The Limits to Growth" based on a numerical model.
So how did family planning start in China, it's actually quite complicated. In China's fifties, the state advocated that there should be more people and more people should be encouraged. In 1959, Ma Yinchu, president of Peking University, was the first to put forward the theory of population control. Because it was contrary to the policy at the time, he was dismissed for a time. In 1978, after visiting Europe, Chinese rocket expert Song Jian discovered the aforementioned "The Limit to Growth" book, and he used this book as the basis for suggesting that the central government implement a family planning policy.
In 1979, the Rockefeller Foundation-funded United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) signed an agreement with China to provide $50 million in aid. You know, China's foreign exchange reserves were only $140 million that year. Subsequently, until 2006, a total of $200 million was provided. In 1983, the United Nations awarded the World Population Award to Qian Xinzhong, director of China's National Family Planning Commission.