When it comes to "family planning", people generally understand it as "fewer children" and "eugenics", and some people even paranoidly think that "only one good child" is family planning. In fact, this understanding is biased. Family planning refers to planned childbearing, and is a relevant policy formulated by the national government to encourage more or fewer births according to the country's population situation and economic development. Stabilize the population within an acceptable range for social development. Therefore, the so-called family planning may encourage fewer births, or it may encourage more births.
Ancient China encouraged more births most of the time?
The population of ancient China was extremely small compared to today. During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the combined population of the princely states was also 10 million. The population of peacetime, whether it was the powerful Han Dynasty or the Tang Dynasty, was limited to between 50 and 60 million. The Song Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty, according to scholars' estimates, only exceeded 100 million. The Qing Dynasty once reached 200 million. But compared with the 1.4 billion people of modern China, this figure is obviously a small witch.
Why was the population so small in ancient times? This matched the economic development situation at that time. China is a large agricultural mouth, and the output of one mu of land in ancient times was only a few tens of catties, and more than a few hundred catties. Compared with the current grain output of more than a thousand catties or even a few thousand catties, it is obviously not in a heavyweight class. Moreover, the grain crops in ancient times were not as colorful as they are now, and there were no greenhouses. If there are more people, eating is the first problem. It is that the population is so small, and there are many records of famine in history, and people live a life without enough food and clothing.
In addition to the reasons for the level of economic development, cruel wars, plagues, natural and man-made disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and droughts often occurred in ancient times, which caused the population to be urgently reduced. Every time the dynasty is changed, it is a time when the population is greatly reduced. During the Three Kingdoms period, the population of China fell to 10 million people, which was comparable to that of the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. During the Wuhu Chaohua period, the Han chinese were slaughtered to the brink of extinction. The destruction of the Song Dynasty by the Yuan Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty by the Qing Dynasty were both the troughs of the Chinese. In this case, the state can only adopt a policy of encouraging fertility and allowing people to have more children in order to ensure rapid population growth. According to statistics, the average life expectancy of the Xia Dynasty people was 18 years old, the Qin Dynasty was 20 years old, the Eastern Han Dynasty was 22 years old, the Tang Dynasty was 27 years old, the Song Dynasty was 30 years old, and the Qing Dynasty was 33 years old. Of course, this life expectancy is affected by factors such as wars, plagues, natural disasters, and high infant mortality, but it can also be seen in the living conditions of ancient times. Having more children is also the need for survival of the fittest.??
Therefore, we can see that from the pre-Qin dynasty to the Qing Dynasty, the country encouraged fertility for almost most of the time, relying on the rapid increase in population to restore the country's vitality. Before the Qing Dynasty, the population of China during the boom period was maintained at about 50 million. This was the world at that time, but also the most populous country, the slogan of "the land is vast and the population is large", which has been called for thousands of years.
In order to encourage fertility, various dynasties and generations have introduced corresponding policies. The sage Confucius believed that a man could marry and have children at the age of 16 and a woman at the age of 14, "Men are sixteen proficient, and women are fourteen and incarnated, and they can be born (Confucius's language), which sets the tone for early marriage." During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, Yue Guo implemented a policy of compulsory early marriage, strictly prohibiting twilight love, old and young love, "so that the strong do not take the old woman, so that the old man does not marry a strong wife, the woman does not marry seventeen, her parents are guilty, the husband does not marry thirty, and his parents are guilty", giving birth to a boy, the state awards two pots of good wine, a dog; giving birth to a girl, the state rewards two pots of good wine, a piglet; giving birth to twins, the government arranges free nannies; giving birth to triplets, the government arranges free nursing mothers. And the state is responsible for delivering babies, everything is free. During the reign of Emperor Hui of the Han Dynasty, the state adopted the method of economic punishment to encourage early marriage and multiple births, "a woman who is over fifteen to thirty years old does not marry, and the five counts." During the reign of Emperor Zhang of the Han Dynasty, the state promulgated the "Fetal Care Order", "Now all pregnant women, give the fetus to raise the valley people three times", and exempt the husband from the conscription and poll tax, so as to facilitate the care of pregnant and nursing women. In order to solve the problem that the poor could not afford to marry, the Tang Dynasty issued the "Decree on The Order of Yousi to Exhort the Marriage and Appointment of the Shu People in a Timely Manner", encouraging the rich to sponsor the poor to marry. At that time, people's ideological realm was quite high, and many rich people responded to the call of the state and funded the poor to marry their wives; during the Song Dynasty, "the poor were forbidden not to raise children, and those who could not bear children were given money to support them." The Yuan Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty implemented the national policy of subsidizing families with multiple births, and the Qing Dynasty Kangxi went further, "breeding people and never adding endowments", and the Yongzheng Emperor "spread the land into acres" and abolished the poll tax for thousands of years, which greatly stimulated people's desire to have children. The qing dynasty estimated that the population of the whole country reached 200 million at the peak.
Concerns about overpopulation have been around for a long time?
On the one hand, it encourages more children, on the other hand, some people of insight are worried that the excessive population will cause an imbalance between the level of population and economic development, causing the disaster of many people, and many ancient figures who pioneered "family planning" have appeared.
If you look for the theoretical basis of family planning, the earliest can be traced back to Lao Tzu, the originator of Taoism, who advocated "small countries and widows" and opposed the large population, believing that "the disaster is greater than the dissatisfaction, and the blame is greater than the desire." During the Tang Dynasty, another pioneer figure of "family planning" appeared in China, he was the poet Wang Fanzhi, who wrote in the poem, "Rich children and young men and women, poor men and women give birth to a group", "There is no need to have more children, but one thing is enough." The poem became the earliest source of "a couple only has one good".??
The third pioneer figure of "family planning" was the historian Ma Duanlin of the Song Dynasty, and Ma Duanlin's father was Ma Tingluan, the right minister of the Southern Song Dynasty, but the era elsewhere was not very good, it was the last year of the Southern Song Dynasty. After the fall of the Song Dynasty, Ma Duanlin lived in seclusion and concentrated on writing, the most famous work is the "Literature Examination", which is divided into twenty-four disciplines such as field endowment, coinage, hukou, service, requisition, municipality, tugong, state use, election, school, official, suburban society, zongmiao, wang li, music, soldier, punishment, scripture, imperial lineage, feudalism, elephant wei, material difference, public opinion, four ethnic groups, etc. In this book, Ma Duanlin believes that "the number of people is not enough for the prosperity and decline of the country", and puts forward "fewer births", "eugenics", and "family planning" that attaches importance to the quality of the population and the overall quality. theory.??
The fourth pioneer of "family planning" was the Ming Dynasty novelist Feng Menglong, who took the lead in proposing that a couple only had two good theories, "If two men and two women double each life, and do not decrease every day, why eat it?" "If you are not born as a man and a woman, there will never be an increase or decrease, it can last a long time." Feng Menglong's proposal that "a couple gives birth to a boy and a girl" is highly coincidental with people's current ideological concepts. However, he was hundreds of years ahead of us.??
The fifth pioneer of "family planning" was the Qing Dynasty scribe, writer, and geographer Hong Liangji, who calculated the law of population growth by adding five times the hukou every 30 years, believing that the population of the Qing Dynasty would grow by 5 times to 20 times in a hundred years, forming an overpopulation. Hong Liangji became the pioneer of modern population theory with the theory of the harm of over-rapid population growth.
The sixth pioneer of "family planning" was the late Qing Dynasty scholar Wang Shiduo, whose entire family was affected by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and his two daughters died. He took the lead in proposing the concept of "late marriage" in the "Diary of Wang Xieweng Yibing", believing that "a woman marries twenty-five, and a man marries at thirty". In that era of early marriage and early childbearing, this concept was groundbreaking. In addition, Wang Shiduo also proposed that for women of childbearing age, the government should widely apply "no procreation medicine" to control population growth. This theory is highly consistent with modern family planning, making people wonder whether it crossed. However, Wang Shiduo also put forward many extreme views on "family planning", hoping that the government would "ban the drowning of women, popularize the law of drowning women, administer cold medicine for breaking the fetus, and double their endowments if they have two women in the family...", and he even suggested that "non-rich people should not marry wives, must not have children, and those who are born are drowned, that is, those who have children are not in good shape, do not look good, and have poor eyebrows." Some people call Wang Shiduo China's "Malthusian", he was the first person to think deeply about the problem of Chinese mouth, but the solution reflected the limitations of his time.
The seventh pioneer of "family planning" was the Qianlong Emperor, who, although he continued many of the policies of Kangxi and Yongzheng to encourage population growth, raised deep doubts about the excessive growth of the population: "In the future, the number of household registrations will increase day by day, how can it be a profession?" "The number of people reported by the provinces in the previous year has increased by more than ten times compared with the Kangxi years, and those who are born are few, and those who eat are many, and they are very worried." Qianlong asked the provinces to report the reasons for the increase in the number of people. But he did not introduce a further policy on population growth.
In addition to the above figures, Gong Zizhen, Wei Yuan, and others are also worried about China's "increasingly complex teeth and increasingly receptive weather", but the method of reducing the population proposed by the two of them is "relocation", the migration of the idle population that is "not a soldier, not a farmer, no worker, no businessman", if they do not "voluntarily" leave, the state can forcibly relocate.
The underdevelopment of contraceptive methods is the main reason why there can be no fewer births in ancient times?
For the ancients, in fact, it was not that they did not want contraception. Do you think that women in ancient times were happy to have a dozen or more children, half or more of whom died? No. The underdeveloped contraceptive method and the backwardness of science are the main reasons why women in ancient times could not have fewer children.
We all know that in ancient times there was birth control. But this kind of birth control is a punishment for both men and women. Men are called "palace punishment", and the great historian Sima Qian suffered this punishment, and many men who volunteered to become eunuchs also underwent this so-called "surgery"; women are called "claustrophobic", and many palace women or concubines who have committed crimes will accept this kind of sterilization punishment. Whether it is palace punishment or claustrophobia, it is a passive punishment and has nothing to do with "family planning".
There is also a kind of birth control measures for taking medicine, in ancient times, there were also "contraceptives", this "contraceptive pill" is called "green powder", which is a sterilization drug that can kill people, which seriously affects people's physical and mental health, and the prostitutes in the general green building use this method of contraception. However, this method of contraception is generally forced by old bustards to take by prostitutes in order to avoid their pregnancy. Many prostitutes are infertile for life and even lose their lives because they take this unsafe "contraceptive pill".
Of course, in ancient times, there were also "no harm to the body" birth control methods, such as the Han Dynasty harem had a "belly button" home remedy, it is said that the concubine's navel is pasted with this plaster will not get pregnant; the Qing Dynasty palace also has a "point point" contraceptive method, the emperor and the concubine after sexual relations will not be pregnant with a certain acupuncture point of the concubine. However, these methods are too magical, and they are now in a state of "lost". Whether it is true or not is unknown.??
It is worth mentioning that the Qing Dynasty invented a "safe and harmless" method of reducing the population, the Qing Dynasty in order to reduce the number of Mongols, in the Mongolian region vigorously develop Tibetan Buddhism - Yellow Religion, many of the Mongols became lamas, and lamas are not married, do not marry there is no such thing as fertility, so the Mongolian population in the early Qing Dynasty developed to the end of the Qing Dynasty, more than two hundred years did not grow. This is similar to the modern theory of reducing the number of unmarried people by increasing the number of unmarried people. (Lu Abandoned)