Introduction
The article by Feng Wang, Baochang Gu, and Yong Cai is called “The end of China’s one‐child policy”. The article was intended for the audience which does not live in China but is interested in its policies and affairs. The purpose of the article was to familiarize the audience with the recent changes in China’s one-child policy agenda as well as the history and effects that it had on Chinese society. The text meets its objectives and conveys its message to the readers in an engaging and accessible form.
Analysis
Besides providing facts and historical details behind the changes in the policy, the article adheres to the agenda of creating a negative perception of the policy. There are several supporting points that are used to explain how governmental birth control is a violation of basic human rights and how politics and bureaucratic factors limit such measures. For instance, the authors state that the changes in the one-child policy should have been issued at least a decade earlier. The studies on the effects of non-voluntary birth control were started in 2001. As a result, scholars appealed to the government to change the one-child policy three times – in 2004, 2009, and in 2015. It took more than a decade for the policymakers to consider the scientific evidence and take action.
The article is organized in a logical and chronological manner. The style adheres to the journalistic or popular history style as it provides a narrative with a number of factual evidence, such as statistics on the number of non-voluntary abortions or sterilized people. The sentence design in the article is simplistic and accessible. Yet, authors sometimes used strong adjectives that describe their attitude towards a policy.
From the standpoint of writers’ persuasive appeal, logos, ethos and pathos elements are present. Rational aspects of the text include the logical flow of the writing, where either a certain statement is then elaborated with evidence, or the number of sentences leads to the logical conclusion. The appeal of ethos is conveyed by the number of statistics and factual evidence that support the author’s text. Finally, to appeal to the reader’s emotional side, the authors use descriptive adjectives of phrases such as “three collective appeals to Chinese policymakers to relax and end the one-child policy”, which portrays the Chinese government as restless in its dehumanizing policies (Feng et al., 2016). In addition, the overwhelming numbers of non-voluntary abortions and sterilized women appeal to the emotions of readers.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the strategies that are used by the writers of the article were successful as the article meets all of its objectives. Through the logical flow of the writing and the information selected for the article, readers are familiarized with the history of the one-child policy in China and its history. The information presented in the article is not only sufficient but credible as well, which is a successful rhetoric strategy. Finally, the emotional appeal of the text is met by two factors – the overwhelming number of people who suffered due to the policy and the informal phrases and adjectives that characterize the policy and factors that surround it.
Reference
Feng, W., Gu, B., & Cai, Y. (2016). The end of China’s one‐child policy. Studies in family planning, 47(1), 83-86. Web.