China After the One-Child Policy

December 12, 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Mānoa Campus, East-West Center, Burns Hall, Room 3012

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China After the One-Child Policy

Wang Feng

Professor of Sociology
SociologyUniversity of California at Irvine and Fudan University in Shanghai, China

Monday, December 19, 2013 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m.
John A. Burns Hall, Room 3121/3125 (3rd floor)

The Chinese government recently announced that it will begin relaxing its three-decades-long one-child policy. This historic change came two decades after the fertility level in China dropped to below the replacement level (2.1 births per woman) and one decade after collective calls from scholars and the Chinese public to end the policy. Why the change now? And what does it mean for China's economy and society? This talk will give the background for the recent policy change, assess the policy's legacy, and outline the challenges that China faces in its quest for economic growth.

Wang Feng is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. He is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Between 2010 and 2013, he served as a Senior Fellow and Director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing. Professor Wang is a widely-recognized expert on social and demographic change in China and on comparative demography and social history. He is a co-author of One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700-2000 (/i)(Harvard University Press 1999) and Prudence and Pressure: Reproduction and Human Agency in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900 (MIT Press 2010), and he is author of Boundaries and Categories: Rising Inequality in Post-Socialist Urban China (Stanford University Press 2008). In November 2013, he published an op-ed (available at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/opinion/chinas-one-child-rule-should-be-scrapped.html) about China’s one-child policy in the New York Times .

Wang Feng received his PhD in sociology from the University of Michigan. Between 1989 and 1996, he was a Research Fellow at the East-West Center.

Event Sponsor
East-West Center Research Program, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Ann Takayesu, 808-955-7566, TakayesA@eastwestcenter.org

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