In Chairman Mao Zedong's time, the Chinese government had an ambiguous and changing attitude toward family planning, especially during the Great Leap Forward.

[3][4][5] Family planning was first introduced in the 1950s as a "recommendation," yet had never been strictly implemented until 1970, when the Military Control Commission of China's Ministry of Health announced that contraceptives would be provided free of charge, and Premier Zhou Enlai enacted population growth targets for urban and rural areas, respectively.

[9]: 78  This linguistic shift was also intended to help influence a change in the primary mode of fertility control from abortion (which had been the most frequent method in the Republican period) to other forms like condoms and cervical caps.

[9]: 78 In 1957, Mao started to change his attitude and Ma, who supported family planning, was widely criticized in the "Anti-rightist Campaign and was forced to resign as the President of Peking University in 1960.

[17] In the period prior to the Cultural Revolution, China sought to promote birth planning through art, entertainment, and posters.

[9]: 102–111  Trade unions, factories, the All-China Women's Federation, and local organizations hosted birth planning exhibitions.

[9]: 108–109  The Tianjin Foreign Trade Committee, for example, held an exhibition of 124 billboards explaining the benefits of delaying marriage, using birth control, use of IUDs, abortion procedures, and sterilization surgeries.

[9]: 108  Organized group conversations and cultural activities were also used to challenge the traditional Chinese preference for sons over daughters and for early marriage and achieved some success in this regard.

[9]: 124 By the mid-1960s, urban fertility rates were declining, primarily as a result of developmental factors including increases in education and state welfare benefits.

[17] In that year, Mao's attitude changed again, and the government began to promote family planning more sufficiently, causing the annual increase rate to drop below 2% after 1974.

[9]: 158 In 1974, the central government required that contraception, including oral birth control, condoms, and cervical caps, be distributed free of charge in rural China, especially among sent-down youth.

Starting in 1979, given the overpopulation crisis at the time, China's new paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, together with other senior leaders, including elder Chen Yun, Premier Zhao Ziyang, and President Li Xiannian, began to promote the so-called one-child policy in mainland China.

On 15 October 1979, Deng met with a British delegation led by Felix Greene in Beijing,[29][30] saying that "we encourage one child per couple.

[1][2][5] Given the crowded conditions of cities and a shortage of housing, urban people generally accepted the One-child policy.

[22]: 63 The one-child policy had various exemptions, including twins, rural families who could have more children due to the necessities of farm work, and ethnic minorities.

[10]: 72 Leaders after Deng, mostly the administrations of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, continued promoting and imposing the one-child policy in most areas of mainland China.

[32]: 77 Also in the early 1990s, experts from leading population-research institutes began appealing to policymakers to relax or end the one-child policy.

However, over the years, the one-child policy had created much controversy, even within mainland China, especially over the human rights abuses due to its strict measures.

[37] However, the alternate model of 16 comparator countries proposed by these observers to refute the official estimate implies instead that China's population today is some 600 million fewer due to the program since 1970.

[22]: 63 As of 2015, after nearly four decades of harsh enforcement, the one-child policy brought profound social and economic consequences that included a national gender imbalance due to the preference of male children for females, an aging population, and a shrinking workforce.

[41][42][43] On 29 October 2015, it was reported that the existing law would be changed to a two-child policy, citing a statement from the Chinese Communist Party.

When the Chinese Communist Party decided to relax this policy and allow two children per a household, it made their carbon neutrality goal significantly harder to reach by 2060.

[53] So in terms of the Two-Child Policy, as the economy is declining due to low amount of workers avlaible and less factory/importations available, it allows for the environment to reheblitate.

[56][57] At the end of the month, the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party further relaxed its family planning measures to the "three-child policy.

"[1][58] Guidance was issued on June 21, 2021, proposing implementation including promoting the "three-child policy" and cleaning up old regulations involving fines for exceeding the birth limit.

[62] On December 31, 2022, the People's Government of Zezhou County, Jincheng City, Shanxi Province, promulgated a preliminary nine measures.

The Admissions Office of the Zezhou County Education Bureau staff responded that this was just an unimplemented policy because the extra points would not be taken until more than a decade later.

Starting in 2017, regional governments in China introduced preferential policies to increase the birth rate, such as reducing taxes, providing subsidies for childcare, and extending paid maternity and paternity leave for both parents.