After the advent of the nineteenth century and populations having doubled, China moved toward a so-called high-level equilibrium trap, meaning that: The land has reached its maximum potential for feeding a population, and the surplus population egins to starve Radical improvements in crops or technology is inevitable, given the large number of potential inventors. A "one-child" policy leads to a demographic imbalance, in which baby girls outnumber baby boys by a factor of 2:1. A country's neighbors are trapped into accelerating the level of reproduction in order to keep up with a rival's burgeoning numbers