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China's one-child policy punishes families for having 'out-of-plan' children, resulting in sex-selective abortion and tens of millions of 'missing girls' as well as forced abortion and sterilization campaigns.

Over the years, so many exceptions and amendments were made to China's one-child policy that it was hard to pinpoint a moment to pronounce it dead.

There is also an epidemic of infertility in this country. There are more women who have put off child-bearing in favor of their professional lives. For them, the only way they are going to have a family is to adopt from China.

I first came to China as a child on a visit with my family in 1978.

When I was in China, Mao was Chairman, and parents were terrified to tell their children anything that differed from the party line in case the children repeated it and endangered the whole family.

If children were brought up to become non-conformists it would only ruin their lives. So parents all over China who loved their children told them to do as Chairman Mao said. It was not possible to tell them anything else.

People in China have a range of strong views about how children should be protected when they go online and whether the responsibility should be with the government, with parents, or somebody else.

Social services, not wealth per se, seem to be the key to lower birth rates. The Chinese, although among the poorest peoples of the world, have brought their fertility rate down to 2.4, partly by social coercion, but mostly by broadly available education, health care and family planning.

The Chinese model calls for giving your kids very little choice - and I've come to see that you can go too far with that. On the other hand, I also believe that Western parents sometimes give their young kids too much choice.

Some Western demographers have posited, due to the female shortage created by the one-child policy, that China will be forced to field a vast force - as in tens of millions strong - of wifeless men who'll gladly wage wars around the planet to burn off all those unrequited hormones.