雅思阅读材料：the population of China_雅思英语阅读

雅思阅读材料：the population of China

　　Other countries achieved similar declines in fertility during the same period. The crucial influences, Mr Wang reckons, are the benefits of development, including better health care and sharp drops in high infant-mortality rates which led people to have many children in order to ensure that at least some would survive. By implication, coercive controls had little to do with lowering fertility, which would have happened anyway. Countries that simply improved access to contraceptivesThailand and Indonesia, for instancedid as much to reduce fertility as China, with its draconian policies. Taiwan, which the government in Beijing regards as an integral part of China, cut its fertility rate as much as China without population controls.

　　The government denies the one-child policy was irrelevant. It insists that, thanks to the policy, 400m births were averted which would otherwise have taken place, and which the country could not have afforded. Ma Jiantang, head of Chinas National Bureau of Statistics, insisted the momentum of fast growth in our population has been controlled effectively thanks to the family-planning policy.

　　There are many reasons for the governments hard-line defence of its one-child policy. One is a perhaps understandable view that China is unique, and that other countries experience is irrelevant. A second is that, though the policy may not have done much to push fertility down at first, it might be keeping it low now. A third is that, if controls were lifted, population growth might rise. In fact, there is little justification for such fears: in practice, the one-child policy varies from place to place; it hardly applies to Chinas minorities and is more lightly applied in rural areasand there is no population boom in those parts.