I don’t know India’s population-planning history, but China had some kind of whiplash moves done.

India might have more slack because there isn’t need to correct for prior moves.

My understanding is that early-on, Mao felt that the way to industrialize a country was via population density, so he encouraged larger families (and this was much larger than replacement rate).

Later on, the government slammed the lever hard in the other direction with One Child.

Now, China’s trying to pull up again.

googles

Yeah. Actually, WP says that the “large family” era ran longer than I thought, until the 1960s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy

Until the 1960s, the government mostly encouraged families to have as many children as possible, especially during the Great Leap Forward, because of Mao’s belief that population growth empowered the country, preventing the emergence of family planning programs earlier in China’s development. The state tried to incentivize more childbirths during that time with a variety of policies, such as the “Mother Heroine” (Chinese: 英雄母亲) award, a programme inspired by a similar policy in the Soviet Union. As a result, the population grew from around 540 million in 1949 to 940 million in 1976. Beginning in 1970, citizens were encouraged to marry at later ages and many were limited to have only two children.

Although China’s fertility rate plummeted faster than anywhere else in the world during the 1970s under these restrictions, the Chinese government thought it was still too high, influenced by the global debate over a possible overpopulation crisis suggested by organizations such as the Club of Rome and the Sierra Club. The fertility rate dropped from 5.9 in the 1950s and to 4.0 in the 1970s. Yet, the population still grew at a significant rate. There were approximately 541,670,000 people in China in the year 1949. The number then went up to 806,710,000 in 1969.

In the early 1970s, the state introduced a set of birth planning policies. It mainly called for later childbearing (Chinese: 晚; pinyin: wǎn), longer time spans between having new children (Chinese: 稀; pinyin: xī), and giving birth to fewer children (Chinese: 少; pinyin: shǎo).: 57  Men were encouraged to marry at age 25 or later, and women were encouraged to marry at age 23 or later.: 57 The authorities began encouraging one-child families in 1978, and in 1979 announced that they intended to advocate for one-child families. Ma Yinchu, a founder of China’s population planning theory, was also an intellectual architect of the policy. In the late spring of 1979, Chen Yun became the first senior leader to propose the one-child policy. On 1 June 1979, Chen said that:

Comrade Xiannian proposed to me planning “better one, at most two”. I’d say be stricter, stipulating that “only one is allowed”. Prepare to be criticized by others for cutting off the offspring. But if we don’t do it, the future looks grim.

Abolition

In October 2015, the Chinese news agency Xinhua announced the government’s plans to abolish the one-child policy, now allowing all families to have two children, citing a communiqué issued by the CCP “to improve the balanced development of population” – an apparent reference to the country’s female-to-male sex ratio – and to deal with an aging population. The new law took effect on 1 January 2016 after it was passed in the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on 27 December 2015.

The rationale for the abolition was summarized by former Wall Street Journal reporter Mei Fong: “The reason China is doing this right now is because they have too many men, too many old people, and too few young people. They have this huge crushing demographic crisis as a result of the one-child policy. And if people don’t start having more children, they’re going to have a vastly diminished workforce to support a huge aging population.” China’s ratio is about five working adults to one retiree; the huge retiree community must be supported, and that will dampen future growth, according to Fong. Since the citizens of China are living longer and having fewer children, the growth of the population imbalance is expected to continue. A United Nations projection forecast that “China will lose 67 million working-age people by 2030, while simultaneously doubling the number of elderly. That could put immense pressure on the economy and government resources.” The longer-term outlook is also pessimistic, based on an estimate by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, revealed by Cai Fang, deputy director. “By 2050, one-third of the country will be aged 60 years or older, and there will be fewer workers supporting each retired person.”