An interesting effect of this
one-child policy is the change in the
kinship terms that people call each other in
Chinese. Some people I know call their cousins by what before, you would call your
brother or
sister.
An example would be a friend of mine, who originally told me that he was an only child. Later we were talking about someone who he referred to as his "older brother" ("gege") and I was like "hey wait, didn't you say that you were an only child?" To which he replied, "I am, I am talking about my older male cousin on my mother's side" ("biaoge")
Examples of this phenomenon are numerous to the point that if someone young (born after 1980, say)tells me about one of their siblings, I will take it that they are cousins unless they say otherwise.