Gendered Legacies of Control: How China’s Population Policies Reshaped Women’s Lives

China’s population control system—the hukou household registration system and the One‑Child Policy (OCP)—has produced divergent demographic patterns across rural and urban areas that contribute to declining fertility rates, slowed economic growth, and intensifying pressures from rising living costs, distorted marriage markets, and intergenerational care burdens. These policies have produced different experiences for women across rural and urban contexts, leading to embedded gendered and geographic inequities. China’s experience serves as a warning: population control mechanisms can entrench geographic and class divisions that persist long after the policies themselves end, fueling unrest and straining state capacity—all while rendering disproportionate impacts on women.

Women and the Hukou System

The hukou system, established in the 1950s, required Chinese citizens to be registered in a particular locality at birth and institutionalized a strict division between rural and urban residents. Urban hukou holders initially received ration certificates for essential goods such as food and clothing—benefits that, over time, expanded to include education, healthcare, welfare, employment, and housing. Rural hukou holders were excluded from these entitlements and left to rely largely on self-sufficiency and agricultural production. Since hukou registration was tied to birthplace and typically inherited, women’s social status at birth determined lifetime opportunity. Conversion between hukou types was rare and bureaucratically complex. Rural women’s exclusion from quality education and healthcare contributed to higher illiteracy rates relative to men and to urban women, limiting employment and mobility.

Reforms beginning in the 1990s allowed some mobility but largely favored people with education, property, and secure employment—categories that disadvantaged women working in informal sectors. When rural women migrated to cities as part of the “floating population,” they contributed essential labor yet remained outside urban welfare systems. Children of these migrants often lacked access to local schools; those left in villages with grandparents became “left‑behind children.” Both patterns intensified gendered burdens: women migrants balanced wage labor with care responsibilities across fragmented households, while rural grandmothers assumed unpaid caregiving roles with little state support.

While reforms in 2014 and 2024 reflect China’s efforts to expand population movement while limiting pressures on major cities, they also reinforce social grouping that renders rural migrant women at a disadvantage. By tying hukou conversion to employment and property ownership, the continuation of the hukou system links social mobility to formalized wealth indicators, establishing structural barriers to women’s socioeconomic advancement—particularly in rural settings.

Women and the One‑Child Policy

China instituted its OCP in 1979 as a national instrument to control population growth and drive gross domestic product per capita increases. The OCP promoted a smaller family size amid rising cost of living in urban cities, aiming to alleviate economic and resource pressures and ensure a manageable pace for urbanization. Scholars widely characterize OCP enforcement as coercive and heavily reliant on mass sterilizations and forced abortions. Dan Wang wrote that, “at its peak in the 1980s, the one-child policy morphed into a campaign of rural terror meted out against female bodies, namely the mother and the cruelly discarded daughter.” Beyond its overall brutality, implementation of the OCP was compounded in rural areas by deeply entrenched son preferences among the population, high demand for physical labor in rural communities, and patriarchal norms that gave disproportionate authority to male heads of household.

Eventually, authorities relaxed OCP enforcement in rural areas while maintaining a stricter, penalty-driven enforcement in urban areas. For urban women, the OCP transformed family structures in distinct ways from rural settings: parents channeled all educational and economic resources into one child, leading anthropologist Vanessa Fong to assess that daughters had “more power than ever before to defy disadvantageous gender norms while using equivocal ones to their own advantage.”

Outcomes for Women across the Urban–Rural Spectrum

The consequences of this decades-long policy profoundly affected the status of Chinese women in several dimensions:

Education: China has made impressive progress in expanding education and increasing the literacy of its population in recent decades, but progress has been uneven across urban and rural populations and between men and women. Census data from 2020 show rural women’s illiteracy rate is more than two times greater than the illiteracy rate of rural males, four times greater than the illiteracy rate of urban females, and eight times greater than the illiteracy rate of urban males.

Marriage and Family Formation: The OCP and hukou system together altered marriage patterns and women’s bargaining power. A national sex ratio imbalance of approximately 33 million more men than women has produced a “marriage squeeze,” especially severe in rural regions (108 men per 100 women). Urban women’s higher education and employment grant them greater leverage in choosing spouses, while rural men face shrinking prospects. The 2020 census data reveal that 18 percent of urban women remain unmarried compared with 25 percent of urban men; in rural areas the gap is 11 percent of women versus 20 percent of men. Women’s ability to “marry up” often intersects with hukou status, producing a large population of “leftover” rural men which can contribute to and exacerbate security concerns ranging from increased human trafficking and rising bride prices to violence and social instability.

Health and Aging: Aging patterns and migration have left rural areas disproportionately elderly, with negative impacts on well-being. Our analysis of the 2020 census data shows striking contrasts: whereas 62.5 percent of elderly Chinese men in urban areas are healthy, only 45.2 percent of Chinese women in rural areas are healthy. Compared to their urban counterparts, these rural elderly women often have fewer secure retirement resources, worsening cognitive functions, and increased risks of long-term care needs.

Conclusions and Policy Implications

The combined legacy of the hukou system and OCP have contributed to China’s severe decline in total fertility rate and birth rate. In efforts to reverse this demographic decline, China replaced the OCP with a two‑child policy in 2015 and a three‑child policy in 2021. Yet our recent RAND research indicates that these policies have proven ineffective: social media analysis reveals that, while Chinese people express optimism concerning pronatalist policies, they become pessimistic when witnessing government implementation challenges. RAND research shows that, combined with frustration over poor implementation of government pronatalist policies, Chinese people and government officials express frustration over the lack of affordable services—childcare and affordable housing—that are critical to having larger families, particularly in urban settings where the cost of living is high.

Overall, China’s hukou system and OCP have left a legacy of entrenched rural-urban disparities—from distorted marriage markets and uneven educational access to mounting elderly care burdens—all of which disproportionately impact women. These patterns illustrate how demographic engineering can institutionalize divisions that persist long after formal policies end, shaping national trajectories for generations. For U.S. policymakers, the key lesson is that demographic policy is not merely a social or economic issue, but a strategic one: its effects compound over decades, generating structural vulnerabilities that countries can neither easily conceal nor quickly reverse.

This post is based upon RAND research conducted by the authors along with Flora Sheng, Libby Weaver, Michael Pollard, and Kelly Piazza