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The White Paper on Chinese population policy, entitled "Family Planning in China," was issued by the Chinese Information Office of the State Council on August 23, 1995. The population problem is an important question that touches upon the survival and development of the Chinese nation, the success or failure of China's modernization drive as well as the coordinated and sustained development between the population on one hand and the economy, society, resources and environment on the other. It is a natural choice that the Chinese government has made to implement family planning, control population growth and improve the life quality of the population a basic state policy on the basis of a wish to make the state strong and powerful, the nation prosperous and the people happy. In the 1960s, the country's population entered its second peak birth period. From 1962 to 1972, the annual number of births in China averaged 26.69 million, totaling 300 million. In the practice of carrying out family planning programme, whilst persistently proceeding from its reality and taking into full account and observing principles and regulations concerning population and family planning formulated by international institutions and organizations, the Chinese government has gradually set up guiding principles, policies, measures and methods that reflect the basic interests and various rights and interests of the people and has continuously improved these as the actual situations change, so as to better safeguard the right to subsistence and development of the Chinese region.

The author responds to comments by Monica Das Gupta on a research paper previously circulated by the author. In the paper the author attempted to link gender imbalance in Asia to the prevalence of the hepatitis B virus. The author argues that women who are carriers of the virus give birth to more male children than those who do are not. She also argues that 45 percent of the gender imbalance can be attributed to hepatitis B. Das Gupta argues that the hepatitis B explanation is unlikely to be significant, since sex ratios in China differ over time, and among families in ways that evidence the couple's preferences.

The article presents abstracts of certain research studies on public health. The research paper "Did the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic Originate in China?" seeks to establish whether China, like most other countries, experienced an influenza outbreak in 1918-19 and to gauge its extent and severity. It evaluates the suggestion that the 1918-19 influenza virus originated in China and was carried to France by Chinese migrant workers during World War I. The investigation covers statistical and other materials for Hong Kong and Shanghai, non-statistical materials for elsewhere in China, and British archival records relating to the recruitment and transportation to France of Chinese workers. The research paper "Changes in the Quantum of Russian Fertility During the 1980s and Early 1990s," investigate whether Russia's dramatic fertility changes pre- and post-Soviet times were due primarily to tempo effects, as has been argued recently, or to quantum effects, this study standardizes for factors that distort conventional fertility indexes.