Friday, 2 February 1979. Evening, Simonton, Texas.
At a quarter to nine, by the account of a Chinese state-television history, Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping and his wife arrive at the Roundup Rodeo, an arena about an hour’s drive west of Houston. Interstate 10 has been shut down, and Secret Service agents stand on every bridge along the back road. The State Department booked this show about six months ago, a rodeo and a barbecue. More than seven hundred reporters have come, more than the Chinese delegation and its American hosts together.
Two teenage sisters lead the grand entry. Kitty Van Dries carries the American flag and Kelly the Chinese one. Kitty, not long out of knee surgery, goes down with her horse when it slips, and is carried out on a stretcher. Kelly keeps the Chinese flag off the ground. Then she rides to the rail with the reins in one hand and a white ten-gallon Stetson in the other. Deng takes the hat and puts it on. The stands erupt in applause and flashbulbs.
He climbs into a stagecoach and rides round the arena, now wearing the hat, now waving it, then goes back to the stands to watch the riding. He sends his own physician to see Kitty, and has her seated beside him, his wife and the interpreter.
He is seventy-four. This morning he landed in Houston on Air Force One. The mayor met him with a box of silver spurs; Texas’s two senators chose not to be seen with him, and the governor, though at the airport, did not greet him in person. He toured the Hughes Tool Company, which makes oil-drilling equipment, and sat in a replica lunar rover at the Johnson Space Center. Yesterday, in Atlanta, he toured Coca-Cola’s headquarters.
Four days ago in Washington, between five and twenty to six in the evening, he met President Carter, the Vice President, the Secretary of State and the National Security Adviser. Speaking, as he put it, “in the small circle”, he told them that Vietnam was playing the role of Cuba, and that China planned to give it “an appropriate limited lesson”; its troops would quickly withdraw. Carter answered that an invasion would be a very serious, destabilising action.
The same television account says the hat went back to China with him. Fifteen days after the rodeo, early on Saturday 17 February, about 85,000 Chinese troops crossed into Vietnam in the first assault; some 200,000 took part in all. By the historian Xiaoming Zhang’s account, Deng had decided on the war after Vietnam invaded Cambodia at the end of December, and the attack, first planned for mid-January, was put back about a month. China took Lang Son in the first days of March, announced on 5 March that it was ending the operation, and had its last troops back across the border on 16 March. The dead were never agreed. Chinese military sources later put China’s dead at about 7,000, where earlier scholarship had estimated as many as 25,000; Zhang judges Vietnam’s casualties at least equal to China’s, and likely greater.
India’s foreign minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was in China when the attack began, on the first high-level Indian visit in almost two decades. His hosts did not tell him. He heard it from an Indian correspondent whom his office in New Delhi had reached, and he cut the visit short by a day.
Opening outward did not mean opening up. On 30 March 1979, at a Party forum on theoretical work, Deng named four principles that could not be questioned: the socialist road, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership of the Party, and Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. He singled out a “Democracy Forum” in Shanghai, a “Thaw Society” and a “China Human Rights Group”, and asked whether a freedom of speech that flagrantly contravened the Constitution could be tolerated.
The opening also had a destination, and Deng had not written it.
On 29 January 1963, at a conference on science and technology in Shanghai, Premier Zhou Enlai said that China must modernise its agriculture, its industry, its national defence and its science and technology, and that the key was science and technology. On 13 January 1975 he restated the goal to the Fourth National People’s Congress with a timetable: an independent and relatively comprehensive industrial system before 1980, and the comprehensive modernisation of all four fields before the end of the century. He said the two stages had first been proposed, on Chairman Mao’s instructions, in his report to the Third Congress ten years before. In the same speech he warned against servility to things foreign.
Zhou died on 8 January 1976. Around the Qingming festival that April, crowds filled Tiananmen Square to mourn him. The Party’s own magazine counted about 100,000 at the peak, on 5 April. Among the poems it condemned as counter-revolutionary was one that promised to return with offerings on the day modernisation in four fields was achieved. Two days later the Politburo dismissed Deng from all his posts. In July 1977 the Central Committee restored him. In August the Eleventh Party Congress wrote the end-of-century goal into the Party’s constitution for the first time.
So the goal Deng carried to Texas was sixteen years old, had been credited to Mao, and was already in the Party’s rules. It did not say how. The first answer came from Hua Guofeng, then the Party’s chairman, at the National People’s Congress of February 1978: a ten-year plan with 120 construction projects that needed massive imports of foreign technology.
India’s present ran on a different clock. A severe drought cut farm output by 12.5 percent in 1979–80, the price of oil jumped, and net national product fell by about 6 percent. On the World Bank’s measure the economy shrank by 5.2 percent. The Janata coalition that had governed since 1977 split. In July 1979, with a no-confidence motion debated but never put to a vote, Morarji Desai resigned. His successor, Charan Singh, resigned before facing the Lok Sabha when Congress (I) withdrew the support it had promised.
1980IndiaIn the election of 3 and 6 January 1980, Indira Gandhi’s Congress won 353 of the 529 seats that went to the polls. Voters had removed her party less than three years earlier. Now they turned out the parties that had replaced it.
Two economists later made this year a turning point. Dani Rodrik and Arvind Subramanian date India’s growth take-off to around 1980. They trace it not to any liberalising law but to a change of attitude in the national government, in favour of private business. The political scientist Atul Kohli describes the same turn as an alliance of state and business for growth. The dissent is as old as the claim. Kunal Sen credits formal changes made earlier: the bank nationalisation of 1969, rising public investment from the mid-1970s, and trade reforms from the late 1970s. Arvind Panagariya points out that the 7.5 percent growth of 1980–81 came on the heels of the 6 percent fall, so the level it reached was not much above that of 1978–79. The argument over when India’s climb began starts here, and returns in Part Two.
China’s turn that year reached further, and it began with a fraction. On 16 January 1980 Deng told a meeting of cadres that China’s income per head came to a little more than $200, and that the aim was $1,000 by the end of the century. A target per head has two halves, output and heads. In the same speech he worked through steel: one ton for every two Chinese by 2000 would take 600 million tons, he said, “assuming that our population reaches only 1.2 to 1.3 billion”, and that was neither possible nor necessary.
Susan Greenhalgh, who studied the policy in Shaanxi province, writes that months before the Third Plenum of December 1978 the leadership had decided that only a drastic limit on fertility would secure its economic goals for the year 2000. A national planned-parenthood conference announced the policy of one child per couple in January 1979. The ground had been laid the year before. In 1978 the new constitution made state regulation of population growth an obligation, and a Central Committee document, No. 69, urged “one is best, two at most”. The Party’s stated aim was a population of about 1.2 billion at the century’s end. In early 1980 the scientist Song Jian published projections in the People’s Daily that were credited with ending the debate. Critics inside and outside China questioned his conclusion that the optimal population would be under 700 million. On 26 June 1980 the Party’s Secretariat approved the policy.
The provinces wrote the rules. Shaanxi issued its first in June 1979, a month after Anhui, under the slogan “one is best, don’t exceed two”. Its regulations of that year promised a person sterilised a cash reward of 50 yuan if the couple had one child, or 30 if they had two. A town couple who signed a single-child certificate was promised, among other benefits, an extra ounce of edible oil a month. The rules of 1979 and 1981 promised a village family with one child priority when recruits were chosen for factory work, further study and the army. Couples who broke the rules paid fines.
1980BeijingOn 25 September 1980 the Central Committee published an Open Letter to every member of the Communist Party and the Communist Youth League. It announced a drastic programme of twenty to thirty years, and called on them to take the lead by having only one child. The People’s Daily printed it on its front page the next morning. Chen Jian, a researcher and adviser to the Beijing Municipal Population Research Institute, has since pointed out that the letter was addressed to Party and League members, not to the public, and reads it as an implicit criticism of the rigid one-child rule already being enforced in practice. For thirty-five years from that letter, the policy limited how many children Chinese couples could have, with exceptions that widened after 1984.
India had tried a version of that reach four years before. The record of how it ended is unusually full.
On 12 June 1975 the Allahabad High Court found Prime Minister Indira Gandhi guilty of misusing government machinery in her 1971 campaign. On 25 June the President proclaimed an Emergency on the ground of internal disturbance, and two days later the right to go to court to enforce fundamental rights was suspended. Under the Emergency, sterilisation ran on targets. The Union health ministry set 4.3 million operations for 1976–77, and several states set themselves higher figures. The count was between 2.6 and 2.7 million in 1975–76 and about 8.1 million in 1976–77.
The tools were the ones China would use. A health ministry note to the Cabinet on 5 March 1976 argued that, short of legal compulsion, the situation justified a judicious package of incentives and disincentives. The National Population Policy of 16 April left each state to choose its own. Uttar Pradesh raised its target for 1976–77 from 4 lakh operations to 15 lakh. Several states tied rations, housing, jobs, health care and loans to sterilisation. On 19 October 1976 the central schools run by the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan told their principals that children whose parents had two or more children, and neither of whom had been sterilised, should not be entitled to seek admission.
In Delhi the targets met a demolition drive. On 7 April 1976 the Delhi Development Authority told the police that it would begin clearing a transit camp west of Turkman Gate, in the walled city, on 11 April. The work was put off to 13 April. On 15 April Sanjay Gandhi, the Prime Minister’s son, came to the area around the Faiz-e-Ilahi mosque with officials of the development authority, the municipality and the police, on his way to Dujana House, which held a family-planning camp. Residents met him at the mosque and told him their problems. The commission that later investigated recorded that he left after a few minutes, displeased with his reception.
197613:30Turkman Gate, DelhiOn 19 April the bulldozers moved again. At about half past one a large group of women and children gathered on the main road. Police arrested women, fired tear gas and charged with lathis. The crowd grew to five or six thousand, stones were thrown, and armed police opened fire. Two reporters, John Dayal and Ajoy Bose, wrote that about three hundred men, women and children were inside the mosque when police broke its gate with a battering ram, fired two tear-gas shells into the hall, and broke the imam’s left arm.
Deaths at Turkman Gate, Delhi, 19 April 1976
Four figures from four authors, none of them averaged. The Shah Commission examined a seventh death and could not establish it (para 14.117).
Source: Delhi Police, named list of dead (Shah Commission, para 14.116) ; ASI Gobind Ram Bhatia, Turkman Gate police post, to the Shah Commission ; Rajesh Sharma, Executive Councillor, Delhi, to the Shah Commission (para 14.120) ; Unnamed independent researchers, as cited in Ashok Chakravarti, The Struggle Within (2021)
See the numbers
| Author | Estimate (deaths) | Source | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Delhi Police, named list of dead (Shah Commission, para 14.116) | 6 | Shah Commission of Inquiry, Interim Report II (26 Apr 1978), ch. on Turkman Gate | domestic |
| ASI Gobind Ram Bhatia, Turkman Gate police post, to the Shah Commission | 8 | Shah Commission of Inquiry, Interim Report II (26 Apr 1978), ch. on Turkman Gate | domestic |
| Rajesh Sharma, Executive Councillor, Delhi, to the Shah Commission (para 14.120) | 20 | Shah Commission of Inquiry, Interim Report II (26 Apr 1978), ch. on Turkman Gate | domestic |
| Unnamed independent researchers, as cited in Ashok Chakravarti, The Struggle Within (2021) | 400 | Ashok Chakravarti, 'The Struggle Within' (HarperCollins India, 2021), excerpt in Scroll.in, 14 Sep 2021 (a participant's memoir) | domestic |
Nobody agrees how many died. The Delhi Police counted 146 people injured, 58 of them policemen, and named six dead. The assistant sub-inspector in charge of the Turkman Gate police post told the Shah Commission he had come to know that eight had died; questioned, he withdrew the figure, saying it had slipped out. Rajesh Sharma, a member of Delhi’s executive council, told it that at least twenty had died, and that the bodies of old women and children were found under the rubble. The commission examined a police diary entry about a seventh death and could not establish it. It found that some of the bodies had been taken to police stations rather than to the Irwin Hospital a short distance away, which it called an unusual practice that set off rumours about the number killed, and that district officers on the spot made no enquiry into how many were dead. A memoir published in 2021 cites unnamed researchers who put the toll at four hundred. The estimates stand side by side and are not averaged.
The Shah Commission was appointed in May 1977 by the government that replaced Indira Gandhi’s, so its findings are best read as an official record rather than an impartial verdict. Its first report, in March 1978, found that the law minister first learned of the proclamation at a Cabinet meeting early on the morning of 26 June, and that neither he nor his ministry had been consulted. It found nothing alarming on the economic front when the Emergency was declared: wholesale prices had fallen 7.4 percent between December 1974 and March 1975, and governors’ reports showed law and order under complete control. Its final report recorded complaints of death in 1,774 cases linked to sterilisation, and 548 complaints of unmarried people sterilised. It reproduced a note sent by Uttar Pradesh’s home department on 18 November 1976. The note said that fixed sterilisation quotas for districts and departments had bred apprehension and opposition. One line reads:
The words family planning and sterilisation have almost become synonymous.1977
India voted between 16 and 20 March 1977. By later press accounts, Shyam Saran Negi of Kinnaur, the schoolteacher recorded as having cast independent India’s first vote in 1951, never missed an election. The Congress won 154 seats, and Indira Gandhi lost her own, Rae Bareli. It won none of Uttar Pradesh’s 85 seats, none of Bihar’s 54, and none in Haryana, Punjab or Delhi. In Andhra Pradesh it won 41 of 42. The Emergency was lifted on 21 March, and on 24 March the Janata Party formed a government under Morarji Desai.
No ballot records its reason, and the map does not settle it. The commission’s longest lists of complaints of deaths came from Rajasthan (217), where the Congress kept one seat of 25, and Uttar Pradesh (201), where it kept none. But the counts are raw, not per head, and several states returned nil. Maharashtra, third with 151, still gave the Congress 20 of its 48 seats, and Andhra Pradesh, with 135, returned it almost everywhere. What the record shows is narrower and firmer. The reach was made while fundamental rights could not be enforced in court, a commission documented it within two years, and the government that made it was removed at the next election.
Line up the 1980 decision with what came before and after: a goal for the year 2000, a ceiling on births to meet it, a campaign to enforce the ceiling, and, forty years on, a shrinking population. The numbers do not all fit.
- China · Later, longer, fewer · 1971/73–1979
- China · One child · 1980–2015
- China · Two children · from 2016
- China · Three children · from 2021
- India · The Emergency drive · 1975–77
India · 1976–77
8.1 million sterilisations
the Government of India's own count
China · 1983
20.7 million sterilisations
16.4 million tubal ligations and 4.3 million vasectomies
Two states reached into the family. One was voted out; one was not.
South Korea fell below the replacement level of 2.1 in 1983, Taiwan in 1984, China in 1991 and India in 2020. India's voters ended the government behind the Emergency drive in March 1977; China's limit on births stayed until 2015.
Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (SP.DYN.TFRT.IN); for Taiwan, UN, World Population Prospects 2024 to 2023 and the Ministry of the Interior for 2024. Counts: PIB, Government of India; China Health and Family Planning Statistical Yearbook 2013. Policy dates: Britannica. Fetched Oct 2026.
See the numbers
| Year | China | India | South Korea | Taiwan |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1965 | 6.61 | 5.94 | 4.89 | 4.99 |
| 1970 | 6.09 | 5.62 | 4.53 | 3.98 |
| 1975 | 3.57 | 5.20 | 3.43 | 2.97 |
| 1976 | 3.24 | 5.13 | 3.00 | 3.00 |
| 1980 | 2.74 | 4.78 | 2.82 | 2.53 |
| 1983 | 2.56 | 4.57 | 2.06 | 2.18 |
| 1985 | 2.63 | 4.43 | 1.66 | 1.88 |
| 1990 | 2.51 | 4.05 | 1.57 | 1.79 |
| 1995 | 1.59 | 3.65 | 1.63 | 1.78 |
| 2000 | 1.63 | 3.35 | 1.48 | 1.47 |
| 2005 | 1.62 | 2.96 | 1.09 | 1.13 |
| 2010 | 1.69 | 2.60 | 1.23 | 0.92 |
| 2015 | 1.67 | 2.29 | 1.24 | 1.19 |
| 2020 | 1.24 | 2.05 | 0.84 | 0.99 |
| 2024 | 1.01 | 1.96 | 0.75 | 0.89 |
The hardest year came three years after the letter. In 1983 a national campaign required couples with two or more children to be sterilised. By one count, about sixteen million women were sterilised that year, often by tubal ligation, and more than four million men had vasectomies. Greenhalgh counts 1979 to 1983 as the years in which the policy most resembled an order pursued by coercion, and judges that the political costs of the 1983 campaign, in peasant backlash and disillusioned cadres, were extremely high. In Yulin prefecture of Shaanxi, spending on birth planning more than doubled between 1982 and 1983, and the birth-planning department ran up debts of 940,000 yuan to the health department for the operations. Qian Xinzhong, the first minister in charge of the State Family Planning Commission, was removed that December; Greenhalgh records the removal without a reason.
1984In April 1984 the Central Committee’s Document 7 opened what its slogan called a small hole to close a large one. Local governments could make exceptions, and rural couples whose first child was a girl could have a second. The change was not directly reported to the public; Greenhalgh writes that the leaders feared news of any relaxation would set off a baby boom. Greenhalgh found a second force at work. When land contracts were extended to fifteen years that year, some of the most effective means of collecting birth-planning fines were lost. The family farm had reached the bedroom.
2015On 29 October 2015 the Party allowed every couple two children, citing the ageing of the population. On 31 May 2021, after a census that counted about 12 million births in 2020 against 18 million in 2016, it allowed three.
2025China recorded 7.92 million births in 2025, 17 percent fewer than the year before, and its population fell for the fourth year running. The demographer Yi Fuxian put the number at roughly the level of 1738, when China had about 150 million people. In July 2025 the state announced its first nationwide childcare subsidy, 3,600 yuan a year for each child under three. A state that had once fined births now paid for them.
Chain C071978 → 2025From a birth ceiling to a baby bonus; pays off in A Flood19472026Two states reached into the same room within four years of each other. India’s fertility, close to five births per woman in 1978, fell without any one-child rule to about 1.9 by 2025, below the level at which a population replaces itself.
The hat Deng waved at Simonton showed Americans a China opening its doors. The enforcement that followed the letter of September 1980 showed Chinese families how far the state would come inside them. In the fields, in the same months, the same state was letting go.