This story was written By Rex Rhoades. He was actually there. It’s worth reading.

One-child policy has curbed China’s population, but it has also produced millions of orphans.

The blue-suited police officers were inside the orphanage when our team from L-A College arrived. They had just walked in with a cardboard box containing a week-old infant girl, perhaps abandoned in response to China’s strict population control policies.

It’s a scene that’s been repeated countless times across China over the past 25 years since adoption of the nation’s controversial “one-child” policy.

But it’s really an ancient story rooted in Chinese culture and economic realities.

For many centuries China had been plagued by periodic famines and starvation. Usually, this resulted from poor weather or floods, but in 1959 and 1960, millions of Chinese also starved to death when an attempt by Mao Tse-tung to collectivize farms went awry. Private farm ownership was eliminated, and farm families were forced into thousands of communes.

It was a tragic failure.

But the repeated shortages of food were also worsened by two simple facts: In China, about 22 percent of the world’s people live on 7 percent of the world’s arable land.

In the late 1970s, Chinese leaders realized that with such a high fertility rate (the average Chinese woman was bearing about six children in her lifetime), the country’s population could quickly - and catastrophically - outstrip its ability to produce food.

So, in 1979, Chinese leadership embarked on an ambitious program of economic growth and birth control.

And, they have succeeded on both fronts. China’s fertility rate is now about 1.7 children per woman, and its economy has been the fastest growing in the world.

The Chinese government estimates that its policies have prevented 250 to 300 million births.

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