Women, education and the One Child Policy
Social Policy After Mao
Deng Xiaoping’s reform era brought significant social changes alongside economic transformation. Three areas stand out for the exam: education (the restoration of merit-based university entrance), the family (the One Child Policy), and the role of women under the new Marriage Law of 1980. In each case, the reforms represented both genuine change from the Maoist period and the continuation of strong state intervention in personal life. The language of liberation was again deployed by the Party, and again historians find a complex and contested reality beneath it.
The One Child Policy was introduced in 1979, largely designed by Song Jian, a demographer who applied systems modelling to project that China’s population growth would undermine economic modernisation. Enforcement varied widely: urban families faced financial penalties for second children, loss of employment benefits, and social pressure. Coerced sterilisation and forced abortion were documented in some localities, particularly in rural areas where enforcement was left to local cadres.
The One Child Policy: Multiple Perspectives
The One Child Policy is one of the most contentious social policies of the twentieth century. Three broad perspectives should be understood for the exam. The PRC government’s rationale was demographic and economic: unchecked population growth would consume the gains of economic modernisation and prevent the rise of living standards. This was a genuine concern, not mere ideology: China’s population had grown from approximately 550 million in 1949 to around 970 million by 1979.
Human rights organisations and international critics raised a different set of concerns: the policy involved state coercion of reproduction — decisions the state was treating as collective economic problems were being forced on individual bodies. Coercive local implementation, including documented cases of forced sterilisation, gave weight to these criticisms. A third set of concerns was demographic: the preference for sons in rural areas, combined with sex-selective abortion and female infanticide, created a significantly imbalanced sex ratio in the generation born under the policy. The ageing population that resulted from decades of low birth rates would create economic challenges in the twenty-first century.
One of the most symbolically powerful acts of Deng’s early reform period was the restoration of the gaokao — the university entrance examination — in 1977. During the Cultural Revolution, university entry had been based on political credentials and recommendations from work units and communes, not academic ability. Restoring the gaokao meant that academic merit could once again determine access to higher education. The first restored examination, held in December 1977, attracted nearly six million candidates — a generation that had been denied educational opportunity during the Cultural Revolution years and was desperate to study. The gaokao’s restoration was both an educational reform and a political statement: it signalled that expertise and knowledge mattered again. In December 1980 the Party and State Council resolved to universalise primary education; compulsory schooling was written into the 1982 constitution and became law in 1986.
Women Under Deng: The 1980 Marriage Law
A new Marriage Law of 1980 replaced the 1950 original. It raised the legal age of marriage to 22 for men and 20 for women. It made family planning a duty of both husband and wife, which tied the law directly to the One Child Policy. It also made divorce easier by allowing it where affection between a couple had broken down. Women could work in state enterprises on the same formal terms as men, and the All-China Women’s Federation continued to operate as a vehicle for women’s political participation within Party-defined limits.
However, the reform period’s economic changes created new forms of disadvantage for women. As state enterprises reorganised and shed labour, women workers were often targeted first for redundancy. In rural areas, the Household Responsibility System returned economic decision-making to the household — in practice often to male household heads. The preference for male children, intensified by the One Child Policy, placed daughters at risk of abandonment or infanticide in some rural communities. Analysts therefore find continuity in women’s subordinate position alongside genuine legal gains, pointing to a persistent gap between formal equality and lived experience.
The gaokao was restored in 1977 after being abolished during the Cultural Revolution. Nearly six million candidates sat the first examination in December 1977. The restoration signalled that academic merit — not political loyalty — would again determine access to higher education, marking a fundamental cultural break with the Maoist period.
Deng’s social reforms widened the existing urban-rural divide in several ways. The One Child Policy was applied more strictly in urban areas; from 1984 rural families in many provinces were permitted a second child if the first was a girl. The gaokao opened university access in theory to all, but rural students faced structural disadvantages: fewer teachers, worse facilities, and the economic pressure to contribute to farm labour rather than study. Urban workers retained state enterprise benefits into the early 1980s while rural populations were simultaneously losing commune-organised welfare. The hukou system continued to prevent rural populations from freely accessing city services. These structural inequalities would become the defining social tensions of China’s reform decades.