Population policy in China Abstract This thesis concerns the topic of population policy in China, focusing on the one-child policy. It describes the development of these policies and then deals with the research questions themselves. First of all the thesis describes the process of the fertility decrease in China in connection with the population policy since the 50s of the 20th century. This part of the thesis results in the findings that the largest fertility decrease occurred in the 70s of the 20th century as a consequence of the population policy measures. It was even before the implementation of the one-child policy in 1979, even though this also had a significant impact on the fertility. The one-child policy, amongst low fertility, has also brought some negative effects including accelerated demographic aging, increased sex ratio at birth, the phenomenon of "little emperors", more difficult situation for parents who lost their only child, etc. The thesis also compares the population policy of China and other Asian countries with similar trends in fertility. This part of the thesis results in the finding that similar fertility limitation can be handled by a milder way than it was in the case of China. Keywords: China, population policy, fertility, one-child policy

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