On Changes In China's Population And Family Planning Policy And Law

Family planning is a fundamental national policy that China has been adhering to, which concerns the livelihood of all Chinese. For quite a long time, China's law study has focused on the family planning policy.From the 1960s to 1982, research centered on whether China should implement the family planning policy. The population reached the peak twice, in the 1950s and 1960s respectively, posing threats to urban employment and rice supply and also leading a large number of city-bred educated youths to go to the countryside. In early 1960s, some cities including Tianjin, Shanghai and Guangdong took the initiative to propose their family planning measures, stirring a big debate. Later, in August, 1972, the Health Department put forward the guideline of "late, rare, few"; in February, 1979, Chen Muhua, China's Vice-Prime Minister then, proposed the "one child" policy at the meeting of the State Council. During this period, the law field focused their attention on whether China should practice the family planning policy and they mainly argued about its feasibility in terms of resources, population and environment, especially in economic terms. Rarely were there any legal monographs on this issue.From 1982 to 2002, research focused on the necessity of legislating China's population and family planning policy. In 1982, "the state advocates family planning" was included in the constitution, since when "practice family planning, control the population, enhance the population quality" had been regarded as one of our fundamental national policies to establish the high status of the policy in China. For the twenty years afterwards, this fundamental national policy was implemented and promoted by national guidelines, policies and local legislation. For this period, the law field mainly revolved around acute social problems such as legislation of family planning, local child-bearing policy, family planning in minority nationalities, family planning management in floating population, maternal care and illegal gender determination. Finally, the research focus was on the necessity of legislating China's family planning.From 2002 till now, the law field has focused on human right and social security in the legislation of family planning. On September 1, 2002, the state enacted a series of laws and regulations corresponding to Population and Family Planning Law. Based on the state legislation, local legislation almost completed its linkage to the state legislation. Meanwhile, new population issues in the new period cropped up and social conflicts like aging population and gender disproportion in newly-borns became increasingly acute. With the enhancement of China's international status and its increasingly close exchange with the world, the international standard imposed on the legislation of family planning has become higher and higher. Such issues as human right and social security that draw the world's attention today has stepped into the sight of law researchers in China. Thus, there is an overflowing law studies discussing real problems and exploring feasible solutions.Overall speaking, China's law studies on changes in the population and family planning policy and law are sparse and partial. Most scholars just focus on a certain respect or a certain point of changes in China's population and family planning policy and law. Even though there were a few literatures involved the policy of population and family planning and the changes in law in China, they tend to describe and analyze the legislation process of our population and family planning, rather than study the development and future tendency of China's legislation of family planning and summarize the characteristics and criteria of the legislation from the perspective of system development and change.This paper tries to focus on changes in China's population and family planning policy and law, discussing it with three sections:The first section will use a inductive method to sort out reasons for changes in the population and family planning policy and explain alteration in law as well as its whole development. Such beginning will give a description to the introduction and legislation of China's population and family planning policy, the background and reasons for changes in the policy and relevant laws.The second section will mainly analyze and evaluate the status-quo of our population and family planning policy and relevant laws. It will also use the inductive method to sort out and summarize the development of existing family planning policy, existing population and family planning system structure as well as existing legal system for population and family planning. In the first place, it will adopt the diachronic method to study the development of our family planning policy, chronologically associate with social changes, summarize the developmental features in various stages, thus forming a timeline of existing family planning policy development. Then it will, on the basis of the summary, study the fundamental system of population and family planning in an integral manner, categorizing the systems and summarizing its content. Last but not least, it will sort out and summarize existing laws, regulations and rules concerning population and family planning to clarify our existing legal system in this regard. In this section, we will also associate with our social changes, the international tendency as well as reasons for changes in family planning legislation philosophy and its system to evaluate the achievements and shortfalls in the legislation of China's family planning. In addition, we will look into the future development of China's legislation of family planning.The third section will concern the types and influence of changes in family planning policy and law. Based on work done by the preceding sections, this section will enhance the existing research results to the height of theory. Thus, it will, by combining domestic and foreign development trends, summarize the types of our legislation of family planning, discuss the existing types and further analyze the practical significance of such changes in population and family planning policy and law. Finally, it will point out what effects that changes in legislation system of China's family planning will exert on the administrative body as well as on people therewith.