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China's one-child policy has come to be widely regarded as an effective piece of government legislation that saved the country from a Malthusian fate. The Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 was the crowning achievement of Mao Zedong, chairman of the Communist Party of China (CPC) from 1945 to 1976. This social-political movement aimed to remove all capitalistic and traditional elements from Chinese society and to enforce the Maoist orthodoxy of industrialization.
The Cultural Revolution itself functioned as a type of backlash against the failure of China's Great Leap Forward of 1958-60. Mao initiated the latter campaign to transform the agrarian society into a modernized industrial one by way of the complete collectivization of the economy. One of the defining features of the revolution was that private agriculture was prohibited and violators were persecuted as counterrevolutionaries. Lackluster economic growth and social strife during this period provided the impetus for Mao to initiate the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Although the Cultural Revolution did lead to some reforms necessary to get past the setbacks of the Great Leap Forward, it also had more than its share of shortcomings. Chief among them was the beleaguered economy's inability to adequately provide for its burgeoning population.
The death of Mao Zedong in 1976 opened the door for more serious reforms. The family-planning policy, more commonly known as the one-child policy (1CP), was the first such reform to be carried out on a wide scale. Broadly stated, the 1CP made giving birth to more than one child illegal, thus fostering a generation of only-child families. It also had the effect of reducing the birth rate and, without significant immigration into the country, the rate of population growth. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Chinese population grew by about 2 percent per year. By 2007, the rate of population growth had slowed to 0.7 percent per year, roughly the same as that of the United States excluding immigration.
The rapid expansion of China's population from 1949 to the late 1970s stoked the flames of neo-Malthusian demographers. Most popular among them was Paul Ehrlich, who opened his wildly popular book The Population Bomb with the warning that "[t]he battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will...