>[citation needed]
I'm surprised this isn't covered on wiki, or at least PRC family planning article.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinwhyte/files/challeng...
Pg 149.
>Was China's Birth Control Program Voluntary in the 1970s?
>With these ambitious goals a national campaign of mandatory birth planning was put into full motion. The slogan that summarized the three demographic components of the campaign was “later, longer, and fewer” (wan, xi, shao 晚、稀、少). “Later” referred to the effort to enforce late marriage—at least after age 25 for brides and 27 or 28 for grooms in the city, and after 23 for brides and 25 for grooms in the countryside. “Longer” referred to requiring greater intervals between permitted births—at least four years. “Fewer” meant limits on the number of births allowed—no more than two children for urban families and three for rural families, with penalties for those who did not comply
>falling in the 1960s
With respect to graph, plot some 101 PRC history. Early 60s... residual of Great Leap Forward famines. Mid 60s onwards... Cultural Revolution. Until mid 70s.. when Two Child Policy went into effect, then One Child. These were not periods of general development. This was a period when PRC was still incredibly impoverished, and the default strategy for poverty generally is to have many children because you can not ensure all their survival and to maximize chance of being taken care of.
>would have achieved the same result
There are several averted birth studies for PRC family planning ranging from 100s of million to 1 billion by mid century accounting for descendants. The consensus is family planning is responsible for maintaining low births. I suppose we'll have to see how India manages, they started with 70% of PRC population in 1950s and is set to surpass PRC by a 300M @ 1.7B by 2050s. If argument is development, PRC didn't pass India in per capita GDP until early 90s. That said PRC under communism was more egalitarian for women, but education didn't pick up / restart until after the famine and revolutions either.
E: But most information shows PRC without family planning would have pushed ~1.7B-2B people, maybe they would have hit carrying capacity before, but 500 extra million mouths to feed and alleviate poverty is no joke. IMO, it's a sufficiently massively structural demographic problem that would have caused the country to implode.