From Birth Control to Reproductive Health: The Long Journey of Ending China’s One Child Policy

To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), held in Cairo, Egypt, in September 1994, and as part of WEAI 75th Anniversary celebration’s Global Policy Series, this panel discussion will feature several scholars and policymakers deeply involved in the evolvement and end of China’s one-child policy, with discussions on historical changes as well as updated analyses of China’s social and demographic trends and projections for the future. The event will be co-sponsored by the Columbia China Center for Social Policy, Columbia Population Research Center, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

Specifically, the event will involve four 15-minute presentations, followed by a half hour Q&A. Among the speakers, Judith Bruce will speak on the global shift to women’s rights and health, background and significance of ICPD; Joan Kaufman will zoom in on China, with a focus on quality-of-care programs and related changes; Baochang Gu will discuss ICPD and policy reforms leading to the end of China’s one-child policy; Yong Cai and Wang Feng will present on post one-child policy demographics and what we can learn from the lessons of the one-child policy. Qin Gao will moderate the panel as well as the Q&A.

Speaker Bios:

Judith Bruce is a Senior Advisor to the Population Council where she worked for 47 years as a Senior Associate and Policy Analyst. Through policy analysis, evidence-based intervention design, advocacy, and capacity-building, Bruce has changed the way the world thinks about quality of care from the client’s perspective and about the power and potential of the poorest, most excluded girls. She was among the first to illuminate the scope and negative impact of child marriage—including violence and discrimination. A graduate of Harvard University, Bruce received the Association for Women in Development’s bi-annual award for outstanding contributions to the field in 1993.

Joan Kaufman is the NY-based Senior Director for Academic Programs for Schwarzman Scholars, Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She was a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellow at Harvard in 2001. She has lived and worked in China for fifteen years as Ford Foundation’s Program Officer for Gender and Reproductive Health, Director of Columbia University’s Global Center for East Asia (Beijing), and for four years as the first International Program Officer for the newly opened UN Population Fund Office in 1980.

Baochang Gu is Senior Research Associate at the Center for Population and Development Policy Studies, Fudan University. As an advisor to the China delegation, Gu attended the ICPD Prepcom in New York in April as well as the Conference and NGO Forum in Cairo in September in 1994, and attend the 4^th World Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995. Gu was involved in the quality-of-care initiative in family planning programs in the mid-1990s, and worked with a team on three petitions for lifting the one-child policy in 2004, 2009 and 2015. Gu co-edited Efforts in Memory – Quality of Care Initiative in China’s Family Planning Program (2020) and co-authored An Ongoing Journey – Review of ICPD-25 in China (2025).

Yong Cai is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He specializes in Chinese demography, especially China’s low fertility in a global context. His research challenges the conventional wisdom that the one-child policy was the main driving force behind China’s fertility decline. His work demonstrates that major part of fertility decline in China happened before the one-child policy, and current low fertility in China has more to do with structural changes brought by socioeconomic development as well as cultural features deeply embedded in Chinese society. His publications have appeared in Demography, American Sociological Review, Population and Development Review, and others.

WANG Feng is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. He is a scholar with expertise in global demographic change, social inequality, public policy, and comparative population and social history. Wang Feng is the author of several award-winning books in these areas and has contributed to many other publications. His work and views have appeared in major global media outlets. His latest book, China’s Age of Abundance: Origins, Ascendance, and Aftermath, examines the underlying forces driving China’s four-decade-long historical transformations.

Qin Gao is Professor and Founding Director of the China Center for Social Policy at Columbia University School of Social Work. Dr. Gao studies poverty, inequality, social policy, and population well-being in China and among Asian Americans. She is also on the faculty of the Committee on Global Thought and Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University and a Public Intellectual Fellow of the National Committee on United States-China Relations. Dr. Gao is the author of Welfare, Work, and Poverty: Social Assistance in China (Oxford University Press, 2017) and co-editor (with Weiping Wu) of China Urbanizing: Impacts and Transitions (Penn Press, 2022).

This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and cosponsored by the Columbia Population Research Center and the China Center for Social Policy.

Registration: To attend this event in-person, please register HERE.