Are you an only child?

China’s One Child Policy (OCP) has been in effect for some time now. Some of the consequences of it are clear and expected, but what are the unexpected consequences? Researchers from three Australian universities have combined to do some analysis and have come to some interesting conclusions.

According to the World Bank, the population of China today stands at 1.34 billion people. The Chinese government has stated that it will keep the population under 1.45 billion by the year 2020, and a significant part of this population control is the OCP. Although the OCP officially came into being in 1979, the roots of it go back much further.

Soon after the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, government officials began to grapple with the issue of population control. At that stage, however, they faced a conundrum: a burgeoning population was leading to problems with food supply, but also a need for more labourers. So, initially, they did little to reduce the nation’s fertility rates.

In the 1950s, however, laws banning birth control, sterilisation and abortion were repealed, and China started to mass produce and distribute contraceptives, including condoms, diaphragms and spermicidal jelly. This was not a very successful campaign. After the Cultural Revolution of 1966-69 though, a campaign of “Late, Long and Few” (having a few children later in life) was successful, and by 1976 the population growth rate had been cut in half. However things stabilised, and by 1979 the need for further measures was apparent. Accordingly, the One Child Policy came into operation.

The policy worked via a carrot and stick approach. Couples who volunteered to have child received “certificates of honour” and receive extended maternity leave, while those who had more than one child could be fined thousands of dollars. Sanctions could also be quite aggressive. TIME magazine reported that, in 2007, bureaucrats reportedly took sledgehammers to a half a dozen towns, threatening to smash holes in the homes of people who had failed to pay fines for having too many children. Elsewhere, officials were accused of forcing pregnant women without birthing permits to have abortions and increasing the fines for families disobeying the law.

Certainly the OCP has reduced births, perhaps by between 250 and 400 million, but what are the long-term and unforeseen consequences?

Researchers from Monash University, the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne have analysed data to see what effect the OCP may have had on the character of the Chinese people.

The researchers compared behaviours of Chinese people born before the advent of the OCP to those born after. This was done by having the people play an array of games and analysing the results. The analysis showed that people born after the OCP came into effect are less competitive, more risk averse, less conscientious, less trustworthy and more pessimistic.

Although differences in the era of birth could have been a factor, after taking this into account the researchers believe that the OCP is the prime driver of this difference. These differences, of course, are in addition to the more obvious effects like a reduction in female births, with there being about 32 million more males than females in China under the age of 20.

Newton’s third law of motion states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Laws of physics don’t just apply to the physical world, in instances like you pushing a stone with your finger, they apply to the nature of the world in general. When you act, there will be a reaction, somewhere, somehow. You do not act in a vacuum. The OCP is an action and the consequences are the inevitable reaction. It’s a lesson for policy makers but also for individuals: you can’t know the ultimate consequences of your actions; so focus on the qualities and integrity of the action, not the hoped-for outcomes, and the outcomes will look after themselves.