Ecoscience: China's Population Crisis

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Paul Ehrlich (Bing Professor of Population Studies and Professor of Biological Sciences, Stanford University) and Anne Ehrlich (Sen ior Research Associate, Department of Biolog ical Sciences, Stanford) are familiar names to ecologists and environmentalists everywhere. But while most folks are aware of the Ehr lichs' popular writing in the areas of ecology and overpopulation (most of us—for I instance —have read Paul's book The Population Bomb) ... few people have any idea of how deeply the Ehrlichs are involved in ecological research (the type that tends to be published only in technical journals and college texts). That's why we're pleased to present this reg ular semitechnical column by these well-known authors/ecologists/educators. 

China faces a very serious problem, the crux of which can be seen by examining a few sample statistics. That country, which is about the size of the United States, has more than four times as many people and approximately one-half the arable land' In addition, its weather is less stable and its environment has suffered far more abuse than ours ... plus—with nearly a quarter of Earth's people—it possesses only a twentieth of our planet's fresh water!

And, as its own government recognizes, many of the problems faced by the People's Republic of China can be traced directly to the nation's overpopulation. In the 1960's, Premier Zhou Enlai stated, "If we control population development, we will obtain benefits. Not only will it reduce the burden of the state, increase (capital) accumulations, and enable our country to become wealthy and powerful more quickly ... it will also raise the scientific level of our country so that it will catch up with and surpass that of the [advanced countries] more quickly, and accelerate the speed of our industrialization."

This has not always been the state's position, though. In 1949, Mao Zedong was parroting the tired Marxist line contending, in essence, that properly organized socialist states had nothing to fear from population growth.

However, by 1953 China's first census showed that its population was approaching 600 million souls, and was growing at a rate of 2% per year ... which would have produced a population of about 1.2 billion by 1990. These projections galvanized the nation's leadership, and in 1957 Mao proclaimed "population growth must be controlled".