In the 1950s and 1960s, the CCP encouraged Chinese women to bear many children as a way of boosting the working-age population, which had been decimated by years of warfare and famine. Chinese families dutifully obliged, and the population exploded 80 percent in thirty years.15 In the late 1970s, the Chinese government, now worried about runaway population growth, instituted its policy limiting each family to one child. As a result, by the 1990s, China had a huge baby-boom generation entering the prime of their working lives with relatively few elderly parents or young children to care for. No
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