If you think pent-up demand for commodities in China is high today, imagine if there were 30% more people, or almost double today's Chinese under 30!  Whatever you think about China's policy, if there's going to be population control their strategy is probably superior to how it was possibly done in ancient Greece.

From the first in a series of programs about China's One Child Policy, by the BBC:

China's family planning policy has prevented 400 million births, officials say.

... And it looks likely that, nearly 30 years after the policy was first introduced, it will not be relaxed to allow couples to have more children.

... "Because China has worked hard over the last 30 years, we have 400 million fewer people," said Zhang Weiqing, minister in charge of the National Population and Family Planning Commission.

... Chinese officials say the current fertility rate is between 1.7 and 1.8 births per woman, well below the 2.1 births needed to keep the population at a stable level.

Overseas experts dispute this figure; they say the fertility rate is even lower and stands at 1.5.

This will result in an increasing proportion of older people, a smaller workforce to look after them and a disproportionate number of boys to girls.

China's decision to implement its One Child (Or Planned Birth) Policy of 1979 was driven by several considerations.  There was the memory of the Great Chinese Famines of 1958-1961, in which perhaps 15 million people starved to death and after which Mao's first birth control program was initiated (though the causes of that famine were likely caused more by the disastrous Stalinist/Maoist argricultural-collectivist policy than by an "out of control population growth rate").

When economically-minded Deng Xiaoping took power in 1978, his observations of and experiences with the government's problems in "keeping-up" and serving an ever-growing population led him to believe that large numbers of new children endangered the government's ability to achieve economic progress and development.

But "keeping-up" with a growing population in order to achieve increased living standards does indeed have a basis in modern Economic theory, best demonstrated by exogenous growth models such as the famous Solow Growth Model.  If you'd like to learn a little more about the theory, and why the one child policy is probably a significant contributor to China's rise, (and likewise a significant burden on other, more prolific, societies) keep on reading.

The basic idea is simple - living standards depend on an average's workers real productivity. The real productivity of a worker depends on technology and having the capital to equip each worker with the optimal amount of that technology to maximize production.  The investment capital to equip workers with technology to maximize production comes from savings.  The whole system tends to reach some kind of equilibrium, with a change in any of the main factors tending to alter that equilibrium.

The main factors are savings rate, depreciation, technology, and population growth.  The great hope is that savings and technological improvements, are enough to overcome depreciation and population in order to give the next generation of workers a higher initial endowment of capital, whereby they will be more productive and enjoy better standards of living.  This is often given as a compelling explanation for how economic growth is achieved and, at any rate, makes a certain amount of intuitive sense.

Most of the implications are obvious, but one gives people trouble.  Everyone knows that improvements in technology makes workers more productive so long as they don't use their internet connection to watch You-Tube all day.  Everybody accepts that the rate at which the roads and bridges fall apart determines how much money is tied up in replacing them (and, essentially, spending money just keeping things as they are) vs. being available for alternative consumption.  Or, as another kind of "depreciation", if war or natural disasters destroy infrastructure that a large amount of money would have to be diverted to the cost of replacement.  And everybody knows that the more you save today, the more that will be available for your kids tomorrow.

But while everyone seems to understand the problems of the poor family with lots of children having "too many mouths to feed", or the impropriety of the farmer who could barely feed his family on a small plot, then splitting up the farm into even smaller plots as inheritance to his many kids, few people are willing to draw the same conclusion with economies at large. Yet the situation is identical. 

The more children couples have in any economy, the harder it is to endow all those new workers with the human (education) and technological capital they need to be more productive than their predecesors.  All else being equal, more kids means a lower standard of living than less kids.  The political implications of this idea disturb many people who vehemently regard the decision of how many children to have as a fundamental human right of which no government should have authority to regulate.  Perhaps this is why some resist the population-growth-rate conclusions of the Solow model.

Unfortunately, national policies and economic positions are so different that it is difficult to assess the influence of the one-child policy on China's economic growth vs other emerging economies.  Still, the dominance of their performance vs. other similarly situated but more quickly populating states, and the remarkable correlation between population growth and poverty argues lightly for the predictions of the theory. 

I say "similarly situated" because there are a few exceptional categories to that list.  Oil-exporting Arab nations are both wealthy and large-family-prefering and include the UEA, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain.  The only non-oil "rich" countries on the list above the world average include Israel, Ireland, and Luxembourg which both have somewhat unique tax and immigration circumstances.  At the very bottom of the list one finds the shrinking but poor nations of the ex-Soviet Union.

China, the fastest growing of the world's major economies, finds its population growth rate in the region shared by Spain, Norway, France, and UK. If the policy continues, and there's enough commodities to go around, China just may achieve their goal of a quadrupling of living standards in 20 years.