It was made a constitutional duty for Chinese citizens to practice family planning under Article 49 of the country's Constitution approved by the Fifth National People's Congress on 4 December 1982 . Commenting on the results of the Chinese Census conduct on 27 October 1982 . Le Chengrui (1982), the Director, State Statistical Bureau, said:

Thus, of the more than 300 million increases in the 18 years, close to two-thirds occurred during the first nine years. This was mainly caused by the ‘leftist' tendency in the guiding ideology during the first nine years. Because effective measures were not adopted in family planning, there was a drastic increase in the size of the population. This was a major mistake in population policy.” The new Constitutional amendments in Chine enunciate the reciprocal duties of parents and children. In USSR , another socialist country, differences in population growth rates of Slavic, Baltic and Muslim groups have ultimately led to endorsement of a regionally differentiated demographic policy at the 26 th Party Congress in February 1981 (Wever and Goodman, 1981).

Although the role of administrative pressure on individual Chinese families by family planning cadre and other officials is well documented (Aird, 1982), Greenhalgh (2003) argues that the core ideas underlying the one-child policy in China came from Western discourse. They were shaped by the Club of Rome's work on the future crisis of the world.

A synthetic approach to population is found on the explicit aim of the World Population Plan of Action-Bucharest 1974: “to help coordinate population trends and trends in economic and social development”, prepared after an intense conflict between countries divided in two major camps: incrementalists, and redistributionists. The incrementalists group consisted of the Western European Nations, United States and Canada , which favoured increase in “Commitment of governments to family planning.” The redistributionist's consisted of the majority of developing countries and the countries of Soviet Bloc, which emphasized the need for developing better redistributive policies.