ABSTRACT
In December 1978 the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Congress of the CCP Central Committee adopted the pivotal decision to structurally reform the Chinese economy. Chinese leaders were determined to push the country forward with the four modernizations of industry, agriculture, national defense, and science and technology. This new paradigm of modernity had a long process of development but was publicly promoted as a comprehensive program of national development in the last years of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. After Deng Xiaoping became the paramount leader of China in the late 1970s, the CCP Central Committee took the decisive step to implement a structural change of the existing system to speed up economic growth to achieve national prosperity. Internationally, China significantly increased economic and cultural interactions with Western nations after the Sino-U.S. relations took a dramatic turn for the better with American president Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. The opening-up of doors of the West to China offered Chinese leaders opportunities to observe personally the actual economic and technical advancements in developed nations. Moreover, active educational and cultural exchanges with Western nations contributed to the dissemination of scientific and technological knowhow in China. With first-hand observations abroad, Chinese leaders and scholars felt a deep sense of the huge gap between China and developed nations in terms of economy and technological advances. China was still a poor country, lagging far behind the West, with a large population of over one billion, despite the significant accomplishments of national reconstruction after 1949. How to speed up economic growth and raise people’s living standards became the urgent task for Chinese leaders. The desire to modernize China into a strong country on a par with the West had been the dream of the Chinese since the late nineteenth century, but the Cultural Revolution had cost China 10 precious years of economic development to catch up with the West. For the leaders of China, there was no time to be lost in deciding on the new path of modernity and national prosperity. The fast population growth appeared to outpace economic growth, however, and it became a serious concern for state economic planners. To coordinate the plan of national economic growth and technical advancement, new policies of family planning were formulated to encourage late 274marriage and fewer children to slow down the population growth. The government issued the one-child policy in 1978 and vigorously enforced it as an important component of the overall state planning of economy and national development. 1
