A lot of people are asking why a policy is even still needed - why not go for no limit at all?
1) There is an entire family planning bureaucracy within the CCP setup to manage this; would do you do with all those people if they are not needed anymore?
2) China is more strict on population planning for certain minorities - not officially, but in the background; think Muslims in western China or Tibet or Mongolians, or ethnic Koreans in northeastern China... If you had no population planning for all the Han chinese, you might have a brighter light cast on this small in number but impactful population control actions.
3) Once someone has power, why let go of it? The CCP survives by creating a fairly good life for the majority in China - and it has done that extremely well - in exchange for control. It is easier to go from 3 back to 2, than it is to go from unlimited back to 2, for example.
I've always wondered about the timing when population control was first implemented, and their intent.
1. Did population control allow Han Chinese/CCP to maintain their dominance in size over the growing minorities who were largely still living the agrarian lifestyle?
2. Minorities' would have their growth exponentially reduced over a hundred year.
3. And by increasing it now, Han Chinese can now exponentially grow again with momentum over minorities.
So in the background, it seems there's more than meet the eye to maintain Han Chinese power over other minorities in the country.Similar to Japanese (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people) and other "race"; same strategy and intent, different tactic.
I believe the decision was made mainly over the concern of food supply. If you haven't already known, 195* many people died from hunger. Minorities have enjoyed more relaxing restrictions and often these policies are not enforced unless they have proper jobs (governments, CCP members and so on, breaking this could mean the end of your career). Many minorities are in small number to begin with, then the large minorities such as Tibetans and Uygurs are in tens of millions anyway. It is very different from Japan or other countries.
"The ASPI report said birth rates in counties with a 90 percent or greater indigenous population declined by an average of 56.5 percent from 2017 to 2018, far more than other regions in Xinjiang and China during the same period."
56.5% decline in birth rates in one year when the right sample is taken. Beyond shocking. Doing such a thing with your left hand while allowing more births for Han Chinese with your right hand must be seen for what it is: genocide.
the problem with that report is that I can't find anywhere the exact number, it only states decline by 56.5% without showing any specific numbers. I'm mildly suspicious that they originally had a much higher birth rate than Han Chinese since the same policy allowed one kid for Han Chinese allowed two to four kids for minorities
In addition, ASPI is notorious for being sponsored by the US, UK and Australian weapons industry who have a vested interest in drumming up this kind of thing. I would take anything they have to say with a massive grain of salt [2].
update, in a related voa newspiece, it reads 'For example, in Hotan prefecture, where the Uyghurs make up about 97% of the population, the birthrate was 8.58 per 1,000 people in 2018. Before 2017, it was more than 20 births per 1,000 people' at the same time the national average was around 11
Thank you so much. The full report is much more genuine than the abstract from the press. For example, it writes 'in Kashgar prefecture in 2014, the
birth-rate soared to nearly 68 children per thousand people' at the same time the national average was around 12, perhaps because people in those regions are allowed more kids and the policy are rarely enforced compare to other region.
so if the birth rate in that region simply fall to national average, it will went down 80%. I think it's an perfect example of how numbers lie, but most people don't have any vested interest to find out.
I’m glad you had time to digest that report thoroughly in the 11 minutes between my comment and yours. Of course, everyone here should be aware that you are cherry picking. The conclusion of the report is that on average, there was a steep drop in birth rate in minority counties.
The report is named: "Family De-planning: The Coercive Campaign to Drive Down Indigenous Birth-rates in Xinjiang". This is not a case of media misrepresentation no matter how badly you want it to be.
The conclusion is typically found at the end of a report. Why don’t you go back and try again.
I don't mind to examine the full dataset if they are available. And the report is kind of only 20ish pages, excluding the references and covers.
After rereading as you suggested, it also said 'Urumqi is also a Han-majority city .... In 2018, the city’s birth-rate grew by
about 25 percent compared to the pre-2017 baseline, from 8.5 births per thousand people to 12 per
thousand.' So at the same time Han in Urumqi were having 8.5 per 1000 birth, Minorities in Kashgar were having 68 per 1000 birthrate. If that's anything, I'd say the CCP is genociding Han Chinese for selectively enforcing the policy.
I think the act to list only percentages without listing exact number is dubious, and I am confident the pattern would be similar.
Now you're comparing apples to oranges, in addition to cherry picking.
You're comparing birth rates of a major city full of unmarried Han who have been lured to the area by government incentives and other work arrangements, to a predominantly rural area. Those birth rates will always be divergent; anywhere in China, and most of the rest of the world. The part about Han being purposely incentivized to move to Xinjiang is explained in section 5 of the report.
The report does not dispute that Uyghur birth rates were higher relative to Han Chinese in the past. It makes a convincing case that Uyghurs are being targeted now, at the same time birth control policies are being loosened in Han Chinese parts of the country. That policy discrepancy is intentional, and we should expect it to continue unless we speak out against it.
Finally, we can agree that the Chinese government is also evil for controlling the births of Han Chinese and ruining life for generations of their own people who had to contend with the CCP's signature and unique natal authoritarianism.
You have a love for fruit, don't you? But that's not apples and oranges, nor are they cherries. That's the most specific data you can find in that report on the actual birth rate. You're more than welcome to share more data and maybe we can examine.
It's really wonderful for you to link the dataset here. I think neither of us would have the time to compile the dataset manually. Admittedly and regrettably I didn't check the appendix.
So the conclusion was from Xinjiang's 2017 and 2018 birthrate, which respectively as included was 15.88 and 10.69, so that's where the 50% drop came from. However, the same index for China overall was 12.43 and 10.94, where we see around 20% drop. I don't think it can be categorically concluded it's some racially-motivated policy. (whether it's a good policy or bad is a whole different matter.)
You: The report draws the wrong conclusions. Besides, they don’t even share the dataset.
Me: Nope. Here’s the dataset linked in the report.
You: The data show that Xinjiang birth rates declined 30% more than they did in the rest of China. As you can see I was right all along.
I’m curious how you managed to make this journey. It doesn’t seem like you’ve been participating in this discussion in good faith, frankly. I could be wrong though. In that case, I would recommend you actually read what people are trying to show you before attempting to criticize it. You are clearly working backwards from your priors.
Well, I guess you know how to spin a story. My point the whole time has been that percentages can be misleading without the actual number presented, still you seemed to be only cares about the percentages.
It's quite easy to see that birth rate in Xinjiang falls around the national average in 2018. Stil, I'm glad you found the actual dataset in the appendix.
Indeed, this seems to have touched a nerve. Interesting that no one has tried to refute my point directly.
There are others in the thread who seem to be suggesting that because Han Chinese have also been subject to population control measures, that my point is somehow invalid.
No one has yet explained why we see such steep birth rate declines, specifically in Uyghur regions, relative to the rest of China, only in the last half decade or so.
You know, right around the time they started rounding up millions of people in that same ethnic group and putting them in camps. The Chinese government has many euphemisms and rationalizations for these camps, but they don't dispute their existence. In any case we have satellite imagery.
What can one conclude about these coinciding actions by the Chinese state if not genocide? If it's not that, what is it?
In case any potential down voters are not educated on the matter, the U.N. convention on genocide specifically prohibits targeting ethnic or religious minorities for forced sterilization/birth control:
Most of Chinese want to have a girl and a boy, some may go on to have another child if they are missing a girl or a boy. I do echo other comments that the limit of 3 is not necessary. I also don't see a declining population as a problem as economists see it. They weren't right to begin with. The main drive for productivity and economy output is going to be technology, not human labors anyway, with unlimited supply of money, you can increase consumption just by printing money. Even better, when you don't need to slave human for taxes, you don't need to increase their consumption anyway.
I wouldn't call at least 1 million uighurs interned and reportedly forcibly sterilized or put on other types of birth control a small number. Though given the huge size of China out of 1.3bb it's a rounding error.
> China is more strict on population planning for certain minorities - not officially, but in the background; think Muslims in western China or Tibet or Mongolians, or ethnic Koreans in northeastern China... If you had no population planning for all the Han chinese, you might have a brighter light cast on this small in number but impactful population control actions.
LAMO
My mother was almost forced to sterilze, which would make me disappear in 1984, she is Han Chinese. That was because local beauracrats' stupid idea of birth planning.
Can you stop making CCP looking better by saying it's discrinating against minorities...
Of course, forced sterilization is not going to work in the cities. Because people with some form of certain degree of intellect understand the use of contraception and can just forgo their job or certain possession to pay the fine.
Forced sterilization was never an explicit policy. Everyone with decent intellect knows that's ridiculous.
It was practiced, of course, out of middle and low level bureaucracy's sense of "meeting the goal".
Of course CCP has not enough resources to enforce a ridiculous policy anyway.
Well I am glad that she was able to avoid it for your sake. Unfortunately, I am sure many women were not able to do so. It is very much a terrible thing.
There is some question on whether the one-child policy was even needed. If you look at a graph of "children per mother" chart before and after the original policy went into effect, it's quite evident that rates were dropping for more than a decade beforehand:
Industrialization, urbanization, reduction in child mortality, and the education of women accomplished a reduction in the rate in China just like it did/does just about everywhere else.
The ghastly human rights violations that led from the policy were completely unnecessary.
> There is some question on whether the one-child policy was even needed.
> The ghastly human rights violations that led from the policy were completely unnecessary.
No, this was entirely intentional. That was the whole point.
This is "the big lie theory" taken to its extreme. It was done to keep people, and party cadres preoccupied. If you were to speak to an adult Chinese at around late eighties, the 1 child policy would've been the number 1 thing on people's tongues, as if there were no other problems.
It was an entirely artificial crisis made to distract people from the total economic ruin, and destitution as a result of cultural revolution.
I'm reading the progression of this thread, and can't believe my eyes. You HNers, supposedly intellectual elites, got completely hooked by the same cheap diversion.
The point is not whether it was a legit, or not policy. The point is the entire conversation being completely pointless.
The real rationale was to not to let people talk about something having a point — the real problems in a starving, falling apart nation in a deepest crisis, which China was at the time.
How is the crisis artificial? The amount of agricultural land China needed to sustain its population is totally calculable. the Chinese population grow threefold from 1912 to when the policy was introduced, had it been growing like that, today China would have HALF of the world's population. it's understandable to think it might an ecologically unsustainable growth.
I totally understand you. Peoples come in here and just go on criticize policies because they don't know the reality of living in an overpopulated country with limited ressources.
In Africa, Burundi, my country of 28km2, we have more than 90% of the litigations in the courts about land and properties. Siblings kill each other for land! We have 5.4 children/woman. One of the biggest natality rate in Africa. Only surpassed by Niger! We have American evangelical coming in scaring peoples to do abortions and contraception! We can't even talk about sterilization! With population density of more than 450 peoples by the km2.
Primary School is free and children get free healthcare till 5 years of age. It means that those 5.4 children per woman are likely to live and multiply!
What do you think we need to do?
I can only imagine how Chinese peoples did projections and saw that by the end of the century they would be half the world population without half the ressources and took drastic measures!
Absolutely! We have been doing so for the last 20 years. Reducing child mortality at the fastest rate in East Africa. Women education is one of our top achievement from those years. Urbanization and industrialization is the only thing that's coming slow.
Life is still not so expensive for the families (essentially men) are still having more babies than they can afford to nurture!
What is the difference in between 10 people making less than 1 ton on an acre and starving, and 10000 people making less than 1000 tons on 1000 acres, and starving?
The difference is just the number of starving people.
And add to that that all land was, and still is nationalised in China.
> I can only imagine how Chinese peoples did projections and saw that by the end of the century they would be half the world population
And communists knew it being 100% bullshit for masses. Just like Mao very well know how "4 pests," and other mass actions been complete bonkers.
They were not stupid to the point of drinking their own coolaid.
> The amount of agricultural land China needed to sustain its population is totally calculable.
And it was more than enough to feed China even back then.
It's a poor insinuation claiming that top statesmen didn't know that. They knew it very well, and they also knew how catastrophically they mismanaged the agriculture.
And you known who proposed and architected the "one-child policy": Yinchu Ma.
His theory is influenced by Malthus [2]. And you know what, Mr. Ma's theory were not recognized until Mr. Deng come into power. And Mr. Deng realized there are so many people but no way the economy machine is going to find jobs for so many people.
Although in the end Mr. Ma and Malthus were all wrong. They never experienced the prosperity's effect on people's behavior in making baby. Like any mass production.
I did not consider this could be the case for China since I am frankly pretty ignorant of Chinese politics, but I have suspected for a while that the US government heavily invests in such distractions from the real issues.
Which shows a massive male surplus particularly in the young demographics, way larger than you would biologically expect. How can we claim this policy has no effect if clearly people are still killing female infants?
Wasn’t their some policy saying that rural mothers could have a second child if their first was a girl? If they each had the maximum number of children, it would lead to an average of about 1 boy and 0.75 girls per rural mother.
“Peasants” (their term, not mine) and minorities* could have more than one. It was very, very common. Apparently half of the country was effectively under a two-child policy.
It's actually even worse for the assertion than this, because the genders of babies from the same parents are not independent statistical events.
So, if you have 1 B, you stop.
If you have 1G, you may have another child, which is somewhat more likely to be a girl than a boy. So you'd expect this policy (in isolation) to produce a surplus of girls.
You’re totally right. I guess what I wrote above doesn’t hold water. And an intuitive way to think about it is that each child does not know the sex of the child before it—if you had a line of children and each mother simply took the next child in the line, you would expect a 50-50 sex distribution even if mothers followed the rules given above.
Assuming no selective-abortion shenanigans, every child you have is expected 50% male, 50% female (barring e.g. unusual men who only produce sperm of one gender—I think that exists but is extremely rare), so there's no possible strategy that leads to an uneven gender split, probability-wise.
But I think there were selective-abortion shenanigans, and that the policy was effectively in response to them. If we assume each family wants, as its first objective, to maximize the number of sons, and, as its second objective, to maximize the number of daughters, then each selective-aborting family would have exactly one daughter followed by one son under such a policy.
Those were local family planning board decisions and never really applied in the cities. In fact, family planning was applied so unevenly across China that some people got in trouble for having one kid at all (because of corruption), or on their second kid had to give up their government jobs even though they technically had rural hukou.
Yes, the article saying the one child policy remained untill2016 is an oversimplification. There were already exceptions introduced including when both parents had never had any siblings.
If everyone in the planet gets to toss a coin, and if it comes up heads you get to toss it again, that doesn't mean that there are any more tails than heads, each coin toss is just a coin toss, independent from any other.
Can you raise a unreported child in china? How would that work? With no papers at all and the communist buerocrats also really likes paper about everything. ?
Buddy of mine had two, one was illegal. When they make a law that you can have two, he made a third. I guess he will make a 4th now to send a clear message to the government :-)
It's also China, where they put toxic stuff in watered down milk to make it look as foamy as protein-rich good milk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal , i.e. a place with a lot of corruption and where gaps are possible.
Up until Covid stopped business travel, my Chinese colleagues brought home as much infant formula or follow up milk powder for toddlers as they thought they could get away with when visiting HQ in Germany, and always asked us to bring some with us when we went there. Lots of stores here had limits on how much you could buy at once because of that.
Are you suggesting that China is somehow unusual in poisoning the populace? Are you aware of Superfund? Nestle, who convinced mother's to starve and poison their babies with formula and dirty water that replaced and then blocked lactation?
I am amused at the phrase "communist buerocrats [sic]". I live in the United States, where a particular bastard hybrid of socialism and crony capitalism requires that every birth be well documented by bureaucrats.
It has less to do with socialism and cronyism and everything to do with your rights. Your birth certificate is your primary evidence of citizenship. Literally every right you enjoy springs from that one document.
It was both killing newborn infant girls, especially where there was no ultrasound, and intentional miscarriages of girls when the ultrasound was used (which is why ultrasound is illegal in some parts of China).
Both are well documented and account for the 30M extra males than females (Can’t hide this cultural bias).
For some people killing a foetus is the same as killing an infant. Please respect different opinion on a subject that has no definitive answer. Calling people racist as soon as you disagree is indeed very telling.
The anti-Chinese racism on this site is fairly evident on anything having to do with China. dang even had to tell people to tone down the rhetoric recently. This is just another case in point. Just because you’re not aware of it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
They indisputably did, though. No fact can be racist.
Not because they're inhuman, of course; that sort of behavior has happened all throughout human history. It's just that, with China in the 20th century, the scale was huge.
There is still a male surplus and culturally people still prefer to have boys because they carry their family name. Girls are married out of the family and if your one child is a girl there will be nobody to look after you in your old age.
What a sick little comment. The world is a lot larger than the rich West and historically children were what we have - in some wealthy places - a social security system for. But in many places where the state is barely functional and family ties are strong children tend to take care of their elders, because that's how it's been traditionally. The best way to reduce that factor in how many children people have is to up the standard of living, which more or less automatically reduces the number of children people will have because they no longer need to worry that much about their old age.
On another note: those societies have - of necessity - much stronger family ties than that same rich West, so something valuable is lost along with the social needs.
It looks like in China it's even a law[1] that old people use to take advantage of their children.
Just because it's a "tradition" doesn't make it good. It's been a "tradition" to beat your wife and children as well in many parts of the world or even worse.
If you are miserable why would you like to make your children's life miserable as well?
In the USA we have a similar law that allows older people to use the resources of younger people to survive. We call it social security.
My point is just that sometimes things seem very different in other cultures but are not so different when you drill down. In both cultures we recognize that the elderly deserve to be taken care of. We just get to that goal in different ways. Neither one is prima facie better than the other and each had advantages and disadvantages.
When you're in a hole: stop digging. Really, this has absolutely no bearing on the discussion. Bringing spousal and child abuse into this is ridiculous.
And even in the affluent West it isn't all that rare to find children caring for their elders: it's perfectly ok, even if there is a tendency to stick old people in old folks homes and to try to forget about them even though they are still alive that definitely isn't something everybody subscribes to. Those that came before us deserve some respect and care in their old age, they are still family.
The COVID-19 epidemic has brought out one thing quite clearly: that there are people who wouldn't care one bit whether older people die off en masse. I wonder what the overlap is between those egoists and the ones that want to live forever.
"Tradition" is often used to justify all kind of behaviours(many times abusive behaviours) so I don't think my remark is that misplaced. I'm not a fan of gerontocracy "traditions"/laws regardless if they originate in China, Italy or the U.S either.
I would not ask someone to take care of myself if I'm unable to do so. I think it's fairer to make sure the world you leave behind is prosperous and equitable enough instead to rely on close relatives or invisible powers to take care of you when you innevitable become old.
Make sure you get paid well enough during your youth so that you can live off your own savings/pension when you become a zombie.
Why is it easier to imagine that Chinese people murder infants than it is to imagine literally any other scenario?
Why is it easier to assume that a massive sex imbalance is the result members of a particular group of people being psychopaths rather than the result of some systemic cause? Hmm.
Infanticide doesn’t mean psychopaths. It’s been practiced, and I think super bad, by many cultures. I don’t think that means the culture is full of psychopaths.
Also, I assumed the reason there was no evidence posted for the Chinese infanticide claim is that it’s extremely common and has been known for a long time. I just assumed everyone was aware.
It doesn’t mean people killing literal babies, but does mean stuff like more abortions of female embryos. [0]
Wikipedia [1] has a more general article with more links to sources.
True story: when we got pregnant in Beijing, our first ultrasound that could tell the sex of the baby, the technician was hinting at it (look there!), but she wasn’t allowed to say it out loud.
That’s an important distinction. And why I called out that much of the ratio imbalance is due to abortion and not literally people killing their baby after birth, although this does occur nonzero and is really horrifying to me.
Ancient cultures practiced it much more frequently and I think shows how different cultures have different values for life.
Yes, abortion is murder and a new human being is formed at conception. It's just convenient to call it something else not to appear monsters.
If a girl were adopted in China she would still show up in this dataset. I haven't heard about foreign adoption being popular in China (like it would be in eg. Africa), so the unbalance is likely to be the result of aborting/killing baby girls.
Foreign adoptions from China were popular a decade or two ago, now they pretty much don’t exist. Still, those flows should have had some effect on today’s numbers.
The proportional male surplus in China is just over double that of the US. Of course there is something different happening in China, but asserting that this is mostly due to people "killing female infants" is ludicrous. By your logic, there "only" about 2/5 (portionally) of female infants getting killed in the United States as well.
The natural ratio between male and female births averages around 51:49, the US is almost bang on this number. China is currently closer to 55:45... clearly there is some unnatural pressure going on.
It is absolutely necessary. I have no doubt about it.
There is a very strong Chinese pro Chinese belief to have many Children. Most of my grandfather generation. Chinese first generation immigrants have more than 5 children. 9 children is very common.
China (and India) are dealing with population numbers never before seen, at a scale that is inconceivable without special training or focus (whats the difference between a million and a billion? about a billion). It is a mathematical possibility that growth rates overshoot and settle into patterns of boom and bust - and a bust in human populations can get really ugly.
"It hasn't happened in the last 2 centuries" isn't an argument against Malthusian collapses either. China has a long memory.
I have a lot of sympathy for the argument that the One-child Policy was a mistake. In my view, it was. But I also have a lot of sympathy for the people who implemented it. As ideas go it isn't an obvious mis-step in the class as, say, Communist economic policies.
They deserve no sympathy, it was sheer madness, and it is.
> As ideas go it isn't an obvious mis-step in the class as, say, Communist economic policies.
No, it's an exemplary case of completely bonker policies in rank with "4 pests" campaign.
Sadly, stuff like that is very much intentional, and are signature of Maoesque political thought:
You intentionally make populace outraged over something very obvious, and then keep obsessing over it for no reason making people think it's a big thing, when it isn't.
When people people have something more close, personal, and painful to be outraged about, it shifts people's attention from an even more obvious fact of complete governance failure, and communist occupation of the country.
Was what we know now available information for the CCP to make rational decisions. This policy occurred in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution which crippled this nation. I doubt the leadership made rational decisions even if the data was available.
does this look like a sustainable world population growth curve? our resources are not increasing exponentially. and china's contribution towards this exponential growth has been decreased significantly as result of their policies.
It started with a British colony that made it easy to do business, then China stole the good parts of the British colony and created special economic zones.
Industrial espionage isn't even wrong. There is this absurd idea that a country should isolate itself from its neighbours and do everything on its own. How are you supposed to catch up or even overtake developed nations if all you do is reinvent things that have been available for decades? You can't.
One Child Policy prevented ~300M births. Currently PRC with 1.4B has 150-200M surplus / idle workers, 600M trapped in low(er)-middle income. PRC has too many people to elevate to upper-middle or high income status within reasonable time and simply not enough resources. Any policy to reduce population was "beneficial". 1.4B is already too much. PRC with population of 1.7B people would fall apart. Crassly, a more severe Great Leap Forward that suppressed current population to "only" 1B would alleviate a lot of strategic stressors. Family planning was completely necessary but came too late and arguably enforced too softly.
>The birth rate had already dropped, and had been dropping for over a decade, before the policy kicked in.
That was due to the original 2-child policy from the 70s. To rephrase accurately: "family planning" prevented ~300M births, adjusted downward from 400M since 100M+ previously unregistered birth was logged since reversion to two child policy again. There's no credible analysis that suggest PRC family planning policies did not directly and dramatically reduce population. 300M IUDs and 100M sterilizations aren't placebos.
> There's no credible analysis that suggest PRC family planning policies did not directly and dramatically reduce population. 300M IUDs and 100M sterilizations aren't placebos.
Of course the policies reduced fertility rates and population growth. The question is whether they were needed in the first place, or whether general development would have achieved the same result anyway.
>Was China's Birth Control Program Voluntary in the 1970s?
>With these ambitious goals a national campaign of mandatory birth planning was put into full motion. The slogan that summarized the three demographic components of the campaign was “later, longer, and fewer” (wan, xi, shao 晚、稀、少). “Later” referred to the effort to enforce late marriage—at least after age 25 for brides and 27 or 28 for grooms in the city, and after 23 for brides and 25 for grooms in the countryside. “Longer” referred to requiring greater intervals between permitted births—at least four years. “Fewer” meant limits on the number of births allowed—no more than two children for urban families and three for rural families, with penalties for those who did not comply
>falling in the 1960s
With respect to graph, plot some 101 PRC history. Early 60s... residual of Great Leap Forward famines. Mid 60s onwards... Cultural Revolution. Until mid 70s.. when Two Child Policy went into effect, then One Child. These were not periods of general development. This was a period when PRC was still incredibly impoverished, and the default strategy for poverty generally is to have many children because you can not ensure all their survival and to maximize chance of being taken care of.
>would have achieved the same result
There are several averted birth studies for PRC family planning ranging from 100s of million to 1 billion by mid century accounting for descendants. The consensus is family planning is responsible for maintaining low births. I suppose we'll have to see how India manages, they started with 70% of PRC population in 1950s and is set to surpass PRC by a 300M @ 1.7B by 2050s. If argument is development, PRC didn't pass India in per capita GDP until early 90s. That said PRC under communism was more egalitarian for women, but education didn't pick up / restart until after the famine and revolutions either.
E: But most information shows PRC without family planning would have pushed ~1.7B-2B people, maybe they would have hit carrying capacity before, but 500 extra million mouths to feed and alleviate poverty is no joke. IMO, it's a sufficiently massively structural demographic problem that would have caused the country to implode.
Gotta love HN comment section on a story such as this. People here solving math problems more than questioning the power of a government to tell people how many children they are ALLOWED to have.
I wonder if you also question the power of a government to forcibly take money from the people with no or few children and give the money to those with many children.
This (allocation per child) is a policy very frequently encountered in a large number of countries.
It is also frequent in those countries to raise the level of the allocation per child immediately before elections, which leads to quite an inflated level after many election cycles.
Unlike with China's population control policy, I have not seen any questioning of these allocation per child policies from other countries, even if in that case the state also intrudes in the individual rights by extracting money from them.
That policy also results in some kind of reverse eugenics, because the more responsible people delay having more children until having the financial means to raise them, but because they are forced to pay higher taxes they must delay even more, while some of the least responsible people choose to have as many children as possible, with the hope of sustaining the family only or mainly from the state aid.
In my opinion all kinds of potential abuse from a government must be questioned, not only those for which there exists a tradition to be criticized.
Human rights are irrelevant when they are having a drastic impact on the environment. Human reproduction is one of the most detrimental things there is for the environment.
The planet has a problem with human overpopulation. We must self-regulate as a species. Governments are good at making and enforcing regulations. China's government oversees one of the largest sectors of the human population.
We have to give some praise to China for being forward-thinking. They have recognized their role and responsibility in stopping the rampant breeding that plagues our planet. All governments need to take the same steps that China has, or the planet won't be inhabitable for much longer.
>Robert Hinrichs Bates argues that the state itself has no violent power; rather, the people hold all the power of coercion to ensure that order and other equilibriums hold up.
Ok, seems like you'd like no birth controls. Would you be willing to support the excess births in China with your own money then? As a US citizen? Because the excess births are going to put a burden on China's infrastructure and you're pushing for no birth controls.
The state (just about anywhere) can use its powers to take your property, lock you in a cage, or send you or your children off to fight and die thousands of miles from home. What's the difference?
But perhaps it would have been the right thing to do for governments to limit population growth and not let us breed our way to destruction so fast, unsustainably stripping the earth of its resources and accelerating climate change.
Personally, a one-child limit a few decades ago would have been much more tolerable than face being told in the near future that we can no longer eat meat, drive a car, or travel internationally, amongst other things.
Or maybe, perhaps there are other ways to decrease birth rates to a more sustainable level besides forced abortions and infanticide? There is not a single in country in the EU with a fertility rate above 2 (the average in 2019 was 1.54) it's higher in the US but this is mostly a result of external immigration (either directly or immigrants having more children). At least in Europe this is going to cause huge issues in the upcoming decades due to huge increases in social and healthcare expenditures coupled with a shrinking workforce.
Every story about China should include a note that the government decides how many children its citizens are allowed to have. We've grown numb to how terrible this is.
This doesn't seem intrinsically terrible to me, particularly if it's done through incentives and doesn't involve say, murder or sterilisation.
If we accept that any biome will eventually have a finite carrying capacity while the possibility of human reproduction is exponential it seems inevitable that there must be some limits to reproduction. Regulation is crude but might be less bad than "direct environmental feedback" such as die-offs or drastically decreasing quality of life.
Of course it's a co-ordination problem, which is very difficult.
I can imagine many cultural and technological approaches to population control, some of which already exist, and might not be terrible.
It seems to me that in particular any engineered habitats with well-defined carrying capacities, e.g. mars, would have to deal with this quite early on.
It turns out that as countries develop their birth rates naturally decline and eventually turn negative without requiring the government to set the number of children you can have. Indeed Japan and others are doing almost everything possible to encourage people to have more children and cannot get their populations to return to growth.
I agree that market forces and cultural trends seem to be curbing population growth in wealthy countries.
I'm just not sure it's a sign of cultural maturity; it feels like we've quietly skirted a difficult conversation through low wage growth and expensive housing, health care and education (more humans are discouraged because of bottlenecks in key supports).
In theory if there were "smooth" environmental feedback the population would nicely sigmoid without too much overshoot, maybe that's what is actually happening. I wish I knew.
When there are too many deer and not enough predators in an ecosystem, the deer consume all the available food and many die from starvation, self regulating the population to a sustainable level. I see parallels to this in human economic systems.
But a country with a rapidly growing population will struggle to grow economically, e.g. due to the increasing strain on natural resources. The GDP per capita growth of China between 1960 and 2018 is almost 4000%, while some other third world countries even had negative growth[0].
I am not saying that I agree with China's policies or their implementation, but it seems that they worked.
> This doesn't seem intrinsically terrible to me, particularly if it's done through incentives and doesn't involve say, murder or sterilisation.
I do agree with the finite carrying capacity aspect you mentioned but if you think China's child policies weren't awful then you should read up on what it really means to live your life as heihaizi.
What about the rights or consent of the human that's life matters most here, the child? When did anyone thought if the child wanted to be born with those parents who might be poor, unhealthy, genetic diseases that come to child, who is forced in all these without any way out? Should we only care about the parents?
The most precious resource by far is human ingenuity. Home Sapients are not like other organisms. Every additional person increases the rate of innovation across the entire species. Because of cultural transmission there are increasing returns to scale that don't exist in other species.
For that reason, we are exempt from the normal laws of Malthusian ecology and carrying capacity. More people translates into higher, not lower, living standards. That's why over the past 200 years the population has increased seven fold, while the percent living in poverty has fallen to unprecedented lows. The greatest risk by far is not having enough people. Population control robs us of future Einsteins, Borlaugs, and Turings.
“Every additional person increases the rate of innovation across the entire species.”
This is a wild claim. Not everyone is a net positive contributor to the species. The world’s resource are already consumed beyond their replenishment rates, and hundreds of millions of people suffer from abject poverty and constant food insecurity. Total fertility rate decline curves are objectively positive for humans as a species and resource contention.
I’m a pretty staunch critic of China, but population control seems like a pretty good thing. I suppose ideally it would be promoted but ultimately voluntary, but I don’t think their single child policy was the worst thing they’ve done by far.
How about forced sterilization, forced abortions, and the interplay between the one child policy and culture that led to massive numbers of sex-targeted abortions and infanticide? Calling it "population control" euphemizes away the horrible human cost of the enforcement methods and the collateral damage.
I'd agree it's not the worst thing they've done so far, but given that they're actively committing genocide that's a pretty high bar.
Agreed. The comment I was responding to took issue with China dictating a number of children—I don’t have a problem with that. The specific enforcement (sterilization, abortions, etc) are grotesque. Conceivably you can enforce population control without resorting to those measures.
That only encourages those who have both the need and the abilityto prioritize budgeting/saving to think ttwice about having kids. In other words, that really only targets the middle class.
1. That’s still a net reduction in births, even if the reduction isn’t spread evenly among socioeconomic classes
2. You can means-adjust the fines to dissuade the rich. You can even redistribute revenue from these fines to the poor if your concern is inequality. I’m particularly curious about paying the poor not to have children since fining the poor seems likely to be unproductive.
China also isn’t the first country to screw themselves with misguided family planning policies. Singapore and South Korea have gone through the same thing also.
Would you be willing to pay for their excess population then? As a US citizen? Because the excess population puts more pressure on China's infrastructure and you're pushing for no birth control.
Interesting side note on china during the one-child policy era. This policy was enforced on the masses but highly educated people were given waivers. If you were a engineer, professor or any highly skilled professional you were encouraged to have lots of children.
China’s one child policy was mainly about population control but also had a eugenics component to it as well.
> China’s one child policy was mainly about population control but also had a eugenics component to it as well.
IMO, traditional societies have had a fascination with eugenics for practically centuries. 19th and early 20th century thinkers were deeply fascinated by it, and the idea didn't really get tabooed until Nazi Germany adopted as part of its agenda and that horrified the whole world for centuries to come.
For that reason, many posters with western values might find the accusation of eugenics to be quite harsh. But IMO, the social stigma against eugenics isn't nearly as prominent in non-European societies and it's even softly encouraged and openly talked about in some cases.(Singapore's SDU est.1984 being a good example)
To be clear, I do not endorse eugenics in any way. Also, I mean eugenics in purely: "Adding incentives for reproduction among certain people in society to promote what are perceived to be desirable traits within said society" and not "Genocide everyone who isn't of high blood".
> China’s one child policy was mainly about population control but also had a eugenics component to it as well
That seems like a ludicrous leap to jump to.
Surely some far more obvious reasons are: better educated people are better able to judge whether they can afford to look after a child; people in skilled professions earn more money, and are more likely to afford to look after a child.
Maybe I am dumb, but what's wrong with so called "Positive Eugenics"? I.e encouraging people with good genetic qualities and here, good resources for children's upbringing, to have more children?
It seems the problem is in the use of force. Apart from that, if there's a group of people that would make better than average parents, and whose kids would be more likely to contribute more to society than they consume, then shouldn't that group be encouraged to have and adopt as many kids as they can afford to support?
No problem was ever solved by deliberately reducing the potential number of people available to solve it. If humanity faces resource constraints, the way to solve them is to get as many net-positive-resource people as possible working on solutions.
One person could devote one lifetime to solving a problem. Or, they could have 4 kids, everyone devotes half of one life time (the other half to raising kids), and now there are 2.5+ lifetimes of effort spent on the problem.
We aren't facing resource constraints, we're facing overuse of resources. The problem of overpopulation is not one of an inability to feed, house and water people - the problem is the impact we have upon our own environment.
The single greatest thing we could do to improve our species' odds of survival today is reduce ourselves in number. Because we are currently causing a mass extinction event.
Just because one was barred from university or wealth doesn’t mean that the political entrenchment was eliminated. If I was a wealthy family that rubbed elbows with other wealthy families, such that all my family friends were from wealthy families, any success I gather would also have me nepotize my family friends into whatever companies I make and whatever government success I achieve.
It feels strange to me why they're not just getting rid of the limit at this point. Especially since they already seem to have trouble getting couples to have two children.
I imagine there’s entire departments of people dedicated to managing this program. Probably dedicated party members. I don’t think they could take their titles away and reorganize them without starting a lot of infighting.
It could also be that they see no scenario ahead where they want the average number of children per woman to be above 3. I don't think China wants back to exponential growth ever. They probably want to find their equilibrium.
Consider if something unlikely happens that completely changes the dynamic of families, e.g. a cultural shift where women stay more at home and have more babies. If the average family started having more than 3 children, they would consider bringing back this system, which could cause big social problems, as it costs more social capital to bring back an unpopular system than to simply maintain it.
I think the idea is to bring the average up to 2.1, which is the accepted "replacement" fertility rate, to stem a population decline. One way to achieve that level is when a majority of women have 2 children but a few have 3 children. For a population the size of China, a "few" might mean a few million. I don't see that happening without a few carrots.
I am not sure, that this is a problem that needs centralized "solving".
I don't want anyone tell me, how much children I can or should have.
We got to make sure the work life balance is in order for people to have the time and money to afford a family and give adequate support like daycare etc.
But apart from that, I really don't like some buerocrats in some buerau somewhere calculating the "correct" number of births. That regulates itself. There is immigration and emigration. There is automatisation (elderly care), better medicine, so older people can tend to themself longer and less need of a "dumb" workforce etc. etc.
Trying to calculate it and declare meassures based that, can only fail in my opinion.
> We got to make sure the work life balance is in order for people to have the time and money to afford a family and give adequate support like daycare etc.
Stuff like this can and does result from bureaucrats / policy-makers deciding what an ideal number of children (for the well-being of the society) is. You say "that regulates itself", but clearly the things you listed (work-life balance, economic prosperity, daycare, etc.) are not self-regulating. You also mention specifically that this matter doesn't need centralized solving, but that's different from what you went on to say, that the factors that go into determining how many children are had are self-regulating. A decentralized approach does nothing to guarantee that.
Whether you like it or not, the government has a large influence over all of these matters. Choosing to not regulate them is a choice that will affect how they turn out. Likewise, the very structure of the economy and social systems will affect these things. A government can not avoid determining what those are like, whether by the government's active influence over them, or its more laissez-faire approach. When you have a monopoly on violence, you cannot truely recuse yourself from what happens in the society around you, and if you lack a monopoly on violence then you aren't really a government.
I have a young family, so I can tell you that I do know a bit how things go and how many things don't work so well - to which I do in fact blame the various regulations.
Because you know, what worked best for us? All the things that are not regulated, like grandparents watching over the childs or teenage babysitter.
The very well regulated state kindergarten?
It was a nightmare so far, even though we have a quite good kindergarden compared to the various stories I heard so far of what is possible, as well. And sure, Corona was not helping with that either, but I know quite some people in social jobs and I listen to their stories since way before corona.
Wow... I can't believe you're advocating for something completely normal, like choosing to decide how many children you have, and how creepy it is that some governments literally dictate to you this most private aspect of you and your spouse's life, and you are being downvoted. The shills must be out in full force today.
Considering countries who have tried to increase their birth rate have failed to even budge the number by 10%, I’m pretty sure the risk of too many births is pretty much non-existent.
This has to be looked at country by country. Unlike Europe, China still has a large rural, poor population. Without regulation, their population will explode, something the chinese government probably wants to avoid.
Instead of regulating their lives like they do with the child policy and making migration illegal maybe they should try improving their lives a little so they don’t need to have a ton of kids or work illegally and without services in order to get by? Who would have thunk a communist country would treat their poor workers so badly?
that is not really "exporting". If you export bananas, the bananas do not come back to you, while these workers are only temporarily abroad, they're not (for the most part) emigrants who moved there to stay.
The 3 children per woman limit is still the smallest number that accommodates for the 2.1 average required for replacement level.
To achieve equilibrium and avoid rapid growth the limit must be set to 3 and then hope that the average will be drawn down enough by the women who can't/won't have children for various reasons.
Not advocating for this policy, and I am not considering how well it works in practice and the morality. This is just a reductionist model.
When X is 2, then 2 people replace 2 in theory, so there is no growth. In practice, some of those children will die early, so 2 is actually a minor reduction, not growth, forget about exponential.
When X is 2, you have one of the most important functions in the family of functions that display exponential growth. It is the one in which the exponent is 0.
> not growth, forget about exponential.
This is really weird phrasing, since you're on much stronger ground saying "not growth" [arguable] than you are "not exponential" [flat wrong]. I just pointed out that defining results in terms of "X children per woman" will always necessarily produce an exponential curve. That's the definition of an exponential curve. If you want to distinguish between "growth" and "decay", you can say so, but you're still stuck with labeling them "exponential growth" and "exponential decay".
> When X is 2, you have one of the most important functions in the family of functions that display exponential growth. It is the one in which the exponent is 0.
This is technically correct, but also purely academic. If I called the function f(X) = 5 in an analysis exam "exponential", then I would be laughed out of this exam, and for a good reason.
> This is really weird phrasing, since you're on much stronger ground saying "not growth" [arguable] than you are "not exponential" [flat wrong].
"not A" implies "not (A and B)". That's all I meant.
> If I called the function f(X) = 5 in an analysis exam "exponential", then I would be laughed out of this exam
That's not true at all; you'd have to look at the context. If you called it an exponential function as part of a discussion of exponential functions, you'd raise no eyebrows.
Even if you were doing it in a weird way, it's unlikely you'd get laughed out of the room; math exams are not known for penalizing you for being correct.
Yes, it is. Since the population is shrinking over time, it is more often called "exponential decay", but mathematically there's no difference. It just means the value of the exponent is negative.
Per this argument, I would think that an exponential function is different to something experiencing exponential growth. One of them is a definition, the other is a description. They aren’t really interchangeable when it comes to communicating a point.
I was under the impression the one child policy never applied in poor rural areas. If it was universally enforced I’d like to see an explanation for China’s population growth over a period where it would have experienced a decline.
When I see how our governments evolve I always compare global restrictions to similar processes in multicellular organisms.
Cell division is globally and locally restricted in the body in ways single cellular organisms aren't. We have "growth hormone" which encourages or suppresses division at certain periods of life and even certain periods of day and night.
And uncontrolled growth we call "tumors" and "cancer" and it leads to the rapid decline and death of the multicellular organism, and with that, the death of all those cancer cells as well.
So who knows what the future holds. Maybe that's not a China thing. Maybe it's a society thing, that we've not wised up to yet.
I agree. From what I understand from Chinese friends, this is sort of an irrelevant move. Chinese culture demands fully supporting your children financially throughout their adult lives, including fully financing education, purchasing homes for them, and purchasing vehicles for them. As you might expect, this is extremely expensive and difficult to scale up to 3 kids.
Seems like you some rich chinese friends. It's a bit of a stretch though to say the culture is to purchase homes and vehicles for each child though. It's more likely they'll be sharing sharing 1 ancestral house and 1 family vehicle.
Probably because exactly the wrong people will have five or more children while the highly educated that they want to reproduce continue to have only one.
Probably don't want fringe groups to procreate without limit. Not just with respect to Uyghurs, where family planning sterilizations are being applied to those who had 3+ kids, but any potential (non-secular) groups.
Globally, population growth is the single biggest problem, IMHO, and it won't be possible to meet both environmental and development targets with current and medium term population numbers.
Sooner than later we will have to adapt to at best constant population, which will mean a large proportion of elderly.
Trying to boost births (as everyone is doing) is just kicking the ball down the road at the expense of the environment.
Now, in China specifically I think lifting restrictions won't have much impact. A child is very expensive and virtually all women work. They would need to look at a welfare system to help families for people to consider having more children. There is also the issue of migrant workers: many people from poorer areas work in richer cities and leave children with grand parents for years on hand. They are not going to have more children just because it is allowed.
One of the most common things I see these demographic analysis miss is the changing average age of mothers: as they focus on careers, they might postpone giving birth to later in life (30-40yo), compared to the traditional (20-30yo). With this move happening over a couple of decades, it is only natural to have a diminished birth rate as motherhood catches up with the 10 year shift (since it's a cultural thing, it would be happening over a time span of, say, 20 years).
I don't know if it's true in China, but if looked at carefully, it might not be the time to sound the alarms. The same happened in the West, just by 20-50 years prior.
With a shrunken generation of family to help due to 30+ years of one-child policy, and almost no social support (China does not really have socialized healthcare in practice) there's no one to help take care of larger families. But there is a HUGE number of rapidly aging parents and grandparents to take care of.
Add a culture that puts accumulating wealth as the #1 virtue, and it becomes nearly impossible to reverse a low birth rate.
In Canada Quebec has been paying French families to have more kids for a very long time. Today Quebec has the lowest provincial birthrate in Canada.
> Today Quebec has the lowest provincial birthrate in Canada.
Not remotely true. As of 2016 Quebec has a fertility rate of 1.59 children per women which is higher than the Canadian average (1.54), Ontario (the largest province by far, 1.46) as well as BC (1.40) and the Atlantic provinces (1.42-1.58).
I found it interesting that the authors looking at the history of efforts to financially simulate birthrate found that it has never worked to reverse the decline. @21:15
Your comment is a bit bigoted, the government has been paying families, not "french families", to have more kids. This isn't segregated by language at all. Everyone gets their child allowance payments, whatever their origin.
It had its basis in the anglification of Montreal and other cities. After 1763, Quebec was a French province ran by the Brits, and due to immigration policies and family sizes, cities like Montreal became more English than French. When the French came into power after Dominion, they and the catholic church incentivized French people to have more children. After a few generations of very high birth rates (think 4 or 5 children per women), Montreal was once again more French than English. Nowadays, that policy is extended to all families, regardless of language.
Source: Something we learn in Canadian History classes.
It's not meant to be bigoted (that's you mind reading) - it's meant to give context to non Canadians. But I probably should have said "Quebec Families".
US has one of the best demographics in the Western world. Millennials are larger than Boomers. Plus the US can use immigration to decide what population they want. Countries not built on immigration cannot really do this in practice. see Japan.
The problem with China right now is the 4-2-1 problem.
Because of their one child policy, you have a family generation consisting of 4 people (grandparents), followed by 2 people (parents), followed by 1 person.
So now they are way on their way to an demographic crisis, where most people will be old.
Another result of this, is that males outnumber females, so there’s a lot of single males unable to find a partner. This is because parents generally preferred boys as their only child.
Yeah, however, the young generation is putting off their marriage year by year as in developed world. I can see the trend where people choose not to marry someone and/or not to have kids is
picking up though may not be the mainstream any time soon.
Partly because costs have been high, but also people find their interests elsewhere other than the traditional path.
True, many of my Chinese friends complain that their parents are urging them to get married before 30. And while plenty of young people still do this, more and more people are putting of getting married, and wait until they're really ready. Not just because society tells them to.
Just curious are such policies considered a human right violation. For example could US or let's say France implement such law as well? Let's say the government just want's to prevent families having more than 5+ children for whatever reason.
Western countries attempt to manage this through taxation and benefits. There are plenty of countries that encourage having children with tax benefits. The UK controversially introduced a limit to how much you’ll get in state support if you have more than 3 children- https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claiming-benefits-for-2-or-more-...
Years ago there was a US president who questioned the birth control = violation of human rights thing to Deng Xiaoping, to which Deng answered: "Are you going to support the excess population then?" or something like shipping them off to the US. That shut his US counterpart up pretty quickly.
Let countries be free to do birth control of their own violation - you do not want more births whose lives they cannot support properly which in turn threatens the social fabric of their societies. To push this as a human rights violation in support of the west's rhetoric is pretty hypocritical since they don't have to support the excess births.
The short answer is yes, it's a human rights violation, and it doesn't matter what others 'consider' it. But no one will say anything because it's the Chinese Communist Party.
I find it a bit odd how accepted a child mandate has become when it comes from the CCP with the global community.
For instance, it seems that a large reason that China is hesitant to lift any limits whatsoever is a belief that rural women will have large families and urban women will not and that this would be 'unfair'. This cant help but feel like a eugenics argument about not wanting to swamp the gene pool with 'low IQ rural undesirables'.
What would be the foreign response if some of the more distasteful ideas behind mandated birth rates were brought to the fore-front:
* 'all able-bodied women must have at least one child.'
* 'citizens in these jurisdictions can have as many children as they want.'
I believe we would see a lot of outrage in other countries over these policy, but I worry the CCP sees no difference ethically in mandating one or the other. Instead opting for whatever is deemed necessary.
Rural families- especially farmers and ethnic minorities- have had exceptions to the one child policy for quite a while now.
The reluctance to lift limits is perhaps better owing to the fact that means yielding a bit of control, and not wanting to appear to have been wrong (why today and not yesterday?).
That said, you don't see much outrage in other countries (despite stories of infants being thrown out, forced abortions, forced sterilizations) because we have short attention spans and no real hope of forcing the government's hand.
Look at all of the accusations, allegations and witness over the treatment of uighurs. Or, look at the middle eastern countries where women couldnt vote, drive, or even travel out of the county without their husband's permission. Even of we had pushed harder for faster reforms, we would have faced internal criticism for a "colonial" attitude.
the world summary of the policy is not the whole truth. you could always have more than one child, but there's a tax. so you get one child for "free" and the others you have to pay a tax. there are countless families with multiple siblings of all generations, even in cities.
What’s missing in this article is a proper discussion of the level of government for each child. This ends up being the limiting factor for most who are not wealthy.
As far as I am aware [1] one of the big issues here is housing.
With the one child policy all of the housing was built for 1 child families (i.e. 2 bedroom apartments). Even with the two child policy it was really difficult to find apartments built for larger families.
[1] I know someone who lived in China, who said this was an issue, but I don't have any actual sources so this may be wrong.
At this point, it seems that China's family planning policies aren't really directly related to population growth anymore. No policy/restrictions at all would probably not meaningfully impact gross population growth.
It's just about maintaining family planning as a public prerogative, atthis point.
Many third world countries are trapped in a vicious circle. Because there is no functioning social security system, it is important to have many children because they will provide income for your family in the future. So on a micro level this makes sense. But on a macro level it is disastrous because the population growth will put even more pressure on your social security system.
The draconian policy of China enabled it to spend more resources on economic development. It is not so long ago that China was also a typical third-world country.
The CCP (and often communist revolutions in general) underestimate the massive intergenerational effects of societal rehaul that can only be restored with policies more draconian than the ones that destroyed those norms in the first place.
China now has 2 generations that've never known uncles, aunts, siblings or the conception of family beyond the nuclear unit. New norms have developed around the amount of investment that parents are expected to put in a child, with work being the only other thing that is supposed to matter.
The soft incentives have realigned to strongly discourage children. Multiple children makes it difficult for parents to be invested in a single child or work in a way that society expects them to. The thousand year long values of sibling relationships have to be built back up from zero, and is not trivial in the least.
For a country where maternity leave is punishing to a woman's career, a career that women are also taught to care deeply for, convincing women to have multiple children will be a tall ask. We are already seeing a plummeting marriage rate and an average marriage age that's steadily rising.
With all of these things in mind, the only way CCP reverses the current trend, is if they pull a Mao and practically force people to marry more and earlier/have multiple children by introducing incentives as draconian as Mao's China.
This will not change the fertility rate, there was a bump for one or two years after China allowed 2 children, and the fertility rate went down again, and the tfr is at its lowest since it has been calculated.
Only ectogenesis could reverse this trend. China and the world better start investing more in ectogenesis research.
I feel like a ton of government policy would be a disaster if carried out indefinitely. Look at this last year with covid, somethings are intended to be temporary
I think you were joking, but totalitarian regimes have done this before (Romania's orphan crisis was the result of similar policies, iirc).
The poverty/immigration dance - if you reduce poverty, women have less children. Eventually you reach the point where you need to allow immigration to provide enough workers to keep your aging population from starving. Immigration is an existential threat if your country is based on a single ethnic identity (e.g. Han). Immigrants are poorer and therefore have more babies, and at some point will become the ethnic majority, or at least a sizable minority, large enough to cause problems (and economically vital so you can't just round them up and deport them).
Getting middle-class people to have more babies is difficult.
Edit: of course, this isn't a problem if you don't base your country's identity on an ethnic identity.
You seem to have a bit of sour grapes that a non-Western country dares to talk positively about their own policies.
You should understand that translations often lose some cultural context, so when you have a prejudice against the English word "harmonious", understand that the Chinese equivalent is used much more freely in everyday speech. "Solidarity" might have been a better translation.
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Reply to the comment below:
> I recall that, in the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony, China celebrated its ethnic minorities by having Han children dress up as them [..]
In a big place like China or the US, there are always going to incidents like this. Furthermore, most news stories will exaggerate the headlines or twist the details, so I am not even sure if this particular incident is as you described. What matters is what the policies are doing for the larger scale of individuals. You can't judge anything about this larger scale by looking at a few incidents, especially when Western media have a vested interest in showing you these news items and ignoring the vast majority of what is going on. (To be fair, the vast majority is quite boring.)
"Ask the people themselves" is used typically in these discussions as a weasel phrase, as if Western liberal democracies are truly "asking the people themselves". You have mass media bombarding the general population all the time with pre-ordained narratives. Nobody votes in elections with an independent analysis. So sure, it depends on what you mean by "ask the people themselves". There's lots of content on social media including from ethnic minorities, people are generally happy with their lives and the amount of freedom they have. Are you going to pick holes in that? Why not pick holes in what's happening with mass media de-jure "independent" de-facto manipulative elections in the West?
You seem to have some sour grapes about criticism of China and some kind of twisted, paranoid presumption about Western attitudes toward non-Western policymaking.
The point was not to make fun of the word choice “harmonious”, but rather to point out that CCP-led China is functionally an ethnostate that bluntly prefers and privileges one identity over the others.
There was no indication whether that poster was Western or not. Only you read that aspect into the comment. The poster was ripping on China specifically. And then you magnified it into higher stakes: that the presumably Western poster must be skeptical of or hostile to all non-Western policymaking. That says more about your presumptions about Westerners than it does about the comment.
And yes, the poster ribbed on the word harmonious, but again, that wasn’t the point. The meat of the post was about being ruled by big brother Han. Interestingly, you didn’t object to that bit at all!
I recall that, in the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony, China celebrated its ethnic minorities by having Han children dress up as them instead of letting any ethnic minorities represent themselves.
I don't think "harmonious" or "solidarity" or whatever other positive word you come up with would be an accurate representation of the relations of ethnic minorities. Especially if you were to ask the ethnic minorities themselves to come up with a word.
Ya but is that any different than Beijing? The Chinese government has to keep the propaganda and slogans up everywhere, it’s really the only tool they know of to communicate broadly their apparent successes to the people.
It actually was, both in sheer intensity and in style. For example, in Beijing (at least when I last visited) it was kind of hard to find posters of Xi Jinping, while in Lhasa you had a lot of this kind of thing: https://imgur.com/a/GRN9VZz
Which to me seemed remarkably tone deaf (nothing like reminding Tibetans to celebrate their "liberation" and its mastermind Mao), but presumably worrying about how the message would land was not among the KPIs of the cadre responsible.
China is not a totalitarian regime - you shouldn't believe all the propaganda out there, you should actually go there yourself and you'll find that you can live your life quite normally and happily.
China's identity isn't based on a single ethnic identity - the various restrictions (such as the now-3-child-policy, and permanent immigration between cities) apply to everyone. In fact ethnic minorities generally get preferential treatment - e.g. looser restrictions, affirmative action in various places such as state examinations - because it's recognised that a majority ethnic groups have disproportionate power.
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Reply to the comment below:
> As long as you don't stick out, or criticize the government positively quite frequently.
The ways in which this statement is both true and false in its details, is not particularly different from the West.
In China, there are local protests quite regularly, and local governments respond.
In Hong Kong the protests were incredibly violent and disruptive. You cite the crackdowns by the government, but you don't cite the actions by the protestors and opposition legislators, that also attack innocents and filibuster the legislature for years, much more disruptively and disrespectfully than anything that's happened in the West, including shouting "Fuck China" during legislative oath-taking.
In China, mass organised protest against the national government is not tolerated, but nobody cares if you write some stuff on social media. In the West, in the rare case that actual mass protests ever get too rowdy they are shutdown quite brutally by the police. In China the government stops the situation before it gets to that point. In the West, anyone that sticks out enough to really be a bother, like Julian Assange, gets shut down very brutally too.
In both cases, these types of mass protests don't generally change anything in the political system. And in both cases, most ordinary people actually really just don't care to do these things, because the situation is fine in both China and the West - certainly not like the levels of the revolutions in the 1800s or the wars in the early 1900s. So when you criticise China for not allowing these things, this comes from a position of privilege, you have forgotten what it's like to be hungry. Not being hungry matters more, and China has found an efficient way to do that, so I am happy for them (and "us" as far as I can claim that). Maybe later things will become more relaxed, but it's not a particularly big priority.
> brutal suppression they do in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, or Inner Mongolia A-OK?
Most of the "evidence" regarding Xinjiang is fabricated, the Hong Kong stories are exaggerated and one-sided. I'd be against any actual specific cases of brutal suppression that's going on. But that still wouldn't make me "anti-China" in the same way you're not "anti-US" or "anti-West" presumably (I am not either). But that's what Western media portrayals seem to be trying to do - saying that, oh China is doing some bad things, they are evil, they need to be stopped. China is not evil, the world is a complex place.
> we all know it was would be like Putin and Medvedev, with Xi still controlling,
Nobody really knows the details of these things high up, it's all conjecture. It's sure convenient that Democrat and Republican policies, compared to the rest of the world, are very similar. How do you know they're not essentially in cahoots and just putting up a show of being "opposites" for the rest of the world?
> In China, mass organised protest against the national government is not tolerated, but nobody cares if you write some stuff on social media.
Is there a typo somewhere or are you really saying there is no consequence for posting on social media in China? Because that's certainly not the case[1,2,3], unless all of Western media is misleading about this.
I lived in China, in Shanghai, near the French Concession, speak Mandarin, read 汉字，(not fluently, but HSK5-6), and have been to pretty much every province in China. About as privileged as you can be as an ex-pat, and I can still say, IMHO, it's pretty totalitarian.
Totalitarian: "relating to a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state."
Is China centralized? Yes, it has a top down system, top-down industrial policy, top-down internet policy, state owned enterprises (30% of economy), state-owned media, etc.
Is China dictatorial? You can talk all you want about the Politburo Standing Committee sharing power, but Xi Jinping essentially holds total power (now for life with no term expiration), and even if Li Keqiang took power, we all know it was would be like Putin and Medvedev, with Xi still controlling, otherwise there would have been no reason for removing term limits for Xi. Xi controls the PLA loyalty, and he could arrest Li Keqiang or people from his faction if he wanted.
"you can live your life quite normally and happily."
As long as you don't stick out, or criticize the government. Ask the Hong Kongnese. Or if you prefer, ask Feng Ti Mo, who was invited for a cup of Tea with the gestapo because she sang the Chinese National Anthem in a way that displeased the government, and is now forced to carry Communist Youth League content on her streaming channels. Or ask Jack Ma, who offered a milquetoast criticism of out-of-date financial regulatory framework in China and found himself with a Tea date with the gestapo. (The analogy here would be Colin Kalpernick being held by the CIA, and then forced to make pro-Trump speeches at football openings, or Elon Musk criticizing the SEC, and being told the SpaceX IPO is cancelled)
In other words, sit down, shut up, keep your head down, and you'll be ok.
Oh, and woe unto you if you want to access internet outside of China, and waste time everyday trying to find which VPN server you can connect to that isn't blocked. The sum total knowledge of mankind is now available to most people on the planet, but foolishly blocked in the Mainland.
"In fact ethnic minorities generally get preferential treatment - e.g. looser restrictions, affirmative action in various places such as state examinations". Yes, and I hear and see Han complaining all the time about Uighurs, Tibetans, and Miao, etc getting preferential treatment on the Gaokao, which is very much like whites and asians in the US complaining about affirmative action.
But does that make up for the abuse? Does the US government setting up Affirmative Action programs make up for a terrible criminal justice system biased against African Americans, or police brutality against African Americans? So the Chinese government has affirmative action for ethnic minorities, that makes any other brutal suppression they do in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, or Inner Mongolia A-OK?
Is repression over anyone criticizing the central government publicly (and being loud enough to be noticed) made up for by marvelous infrastructure projects? Is this the price of high speed rail? Is it not possible to have freedom to compare Xi Jinping with Winnie the Pooh, and also have High Speed Rail and Shiny new airports?
Look, I don't hate China, otherwise I wouldn't have traveled all over it, learned Mandarin, and lived there. But I criticize US government policy HARSHLY, especially foreign policy, and I believe people have a right to criticize their government, and that China would be a much better agent for positive change in the world if it could shed the legacy of Mao, and move on to become a more open society, even going back to Deng-era policies would be better than the neo-fascist/nationalism that Xi is promoting these days.
The last 4 years saw rising nationalism in the US, and it has also been rising in Europe and in China. This is not good. We're trying to tame out nationalist Trump-wing here, and IMHO, Xi's pursuit of stroking nationalist sentiment is creating additional danger.
Rare to see such high quality content here. I share your analysis. But I believe Xi came at a time the mainland needed to be strengthened, to avoid being trumped over again (opium war like)
He is still needed? Maybe, because you said:
> The last 4 years saw rising nationalism in the US, and it has also been rising in Europe and in China. This is not good.
It is not good. Eventually the future for the mainland is bright, with good material condition and freedom. The situation is not ready yet. You can not "impose" democracy, the population must be ready.
But I believe all is done right and set for the generation being born now ("3 children per family") to be the happiest in the world.
Look, I understand the sentiment and context. China saw what happened in the USSR, and what's happening in India, and they are rightly fearful that a mob of 1 billion people who have not risen to the level of the 300-400 million middle class Chinese, pose an existential threat to the stability of the country if a power vacuum were left. They need to bring up the rest of the country to, ironically, prevent a communist revolution to the current "state capitalist" system they have.
The US came frighteningly close to instability during the Great Depression until FDR launched massive infrastructure projects, created social security, built 40,000 schools, created the GI Bill, etc.
But there is a such thing as overdoing it. I don't believe the current censorship is actually creating stability. Most educated Chinese know what's going on, can use VPNs, and the creativity of using anti-censorship terms on Weibo, shows people still want to criticize the government. (for example, mentioning Chloe Zhao was banned, so Chinese netizens started using her pinyin initials or English initials like CZ to refer to her, and the algorithms didn't pick it up)
Scarily enough, Xi has created such an atmosphere of nationalism, that "cancel culture" on behalf of "patriots" these days is enough to ruin someone, you don't even need the government to censor. If you criticize the government or China online these days, netizens will crush you.
Thank you for writing this epos. Your points are valid and even thou many chinese would disagree (I think), the parallels you draw between western and chinese phenomena are striking.
From afar (I have never been to china), I have to admit with a cold shiver, that the chinese control over the media might be working as intended. Usually, wealth and security encourage laicistic world views but like you said, nationalistic tendencies are on the rise everywhere and very useful for totalitarian regimes.
Maybe, the CCP even manages, with stronger measures, to rule away the demographic crisis, they are heading for and western governments will be even more jelly. It’s very concerning.
I spent years travelling around SE Asia, and met plenty of Chinese, enough to decide I did not want to go there. All of them were openly racist (mind you, all of SE Asia is openly racist, so this is nothing unusual). I accept that there are minority ethnic identities within China, but I have been told over and again (by Chinese people) that China is Han.
I have Chinese friends here in Berlin who still won't talk about Chinese politics within hearing range of their phones. If this isn't a totalitarian regime, what is?
My direct experience contradicts your statements. What are you basing them on?
My direct experience contradicts your direct experience. I'm Chinese, grew up in China until I was 5, and visit it every now and again.
> I have been told over and again (by Chinese people) that China is Han.
You are either selectively reporting, or selectively misremembering things based on your own existing prejudices. I have certainly talked to more Chinese people than you, and nobody has ever said this.
I lived in Berlin for 3.5 years, I found plenty of racism there as well; also in the UK and US where it's more subtle.
I'd assume your Chinese friends are a non-representative sample of Chinese people - likely, you are friends with them because they ran into issues with the government, and hence had similar interests and were attracted to the same events and locations. China has 1.4 billion people, this is bound to happen.
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> little point in discussing anything China-related in Western internet forums.
Thanks for the advice, I am indeed trying to take it in moderation. I think it's important to try to maintain some level of healthy discourse though, the anti-China propaganda is taking the world down a dark path.
> Curious on what you think of what China is doing to the Uyghur people. Do you believe that this is fabricated by all these media outlets?
Yes, they are all citing the same fake reports written by a few people working non-independently, driven ultimately by geopolitical strategy and taking advantage of liberal media's existing prejudices to portray China as "evil". See https://www.qiaocollective.com/en/education/xinjiang - a collection of a large number of sources from many different people, working independently.
I'm sorry you experienced racism. As an Australian and Brit, I apologise for our countries not living up to our ideals on these things. I can't speak for Germany - I'm a guest here too - but I know that most Germans are working towards eliminating racism from their culture.
That's not my experience of the Chinese, however. China is not working to eliminate racism. It doesn't have these ideals. As a white person I will never be accepted as a Chinese person by the Chinese, because in Chinese people's eyes, Chinese == Han (from my experience). This isn't unusual in Asia - Cambodians only recognise Khmer people, Japan only recognises ethnic Japanese people, and so on. I have white friends who have lived in Cambodia for decades, speak the language perfectly, have Cambodian families, but who can never become citizens and will never be accepted as "Cambodian" because of their race.
This isn't true of Australians (for example). Australia doesn't equate Australian = caucasian [0]. You can emigrate to Australia, and become a citizen, and the vast majority of Australians will accept you as an Australian because of that. Being Australian is not about race, but more about culture and commitment. Australia's sense of identity is not linked to its ethnic identity in the same way that SE Asian countries are.
[0] There are always some racist dickheads who will disagree with this. Sorry for that.
These days, I find that there is little point in discussing anything China-related in Western internet forums. There's an overwhelming amount of ignorance, misinformation, prejudice and propaganda about China from tons of different parties. People largely post to get their standpoints confirmed, and nothing you post will change anything.
As a fellow Chinese raised in the West, I know it's hard to resist getting drawn into such thread. I try to avoid posting/reacting as much as I can, and sincerely advise the same to you. You're probably not going to change anybody's mind and just wasting your own time.
As a Brit (though I have travelled and worked a bit in China), I'm constantly dismayed by the thinly-veiled (and sometimes overt) racism, biases, prejudice and ignorance that are on display in just about any HN thread about China - the comments for this article are particularly shocking.
Yes, the Chinese government has done some bad things in it's time, but plainly not everything they do has bad intentions. And bejesus, people in glass houses and all that.
It seems very much like the USA's anti-China propaganda machine is working well - particularly telling since I would have assumed that the average US HN reader was educated.
A culture of ostracizing what's perceived as 'the dumb and uninformed' is what got the US Trump. Putting up a wall against them didn't get the US to a better place. Like it or not, there's a substantial amount of misinformed and misguided people and if you do not at least interact/counter-argue there's a real chance that more people get misinformed to the point something goes horribly wrong, they're in support of it and you can't do anything against them.
As chinese there's a sense that we should keep our head down in favor of the harmony. But I've come to realize this isn't enough we should let the truth speak louder. Keep fighting the good fight.
I think this is equivalent to someone not arguing back because theres no real evidence to support their bias. Saying that all these media outlets are spreading misinformation for some reason is really not supported by fact. Is there fake news, sure. But that's different from saying that everything critical of a country is propaganda.
What are people ignorant about here? There's been several countries/states that deny China and confirms what everyone believes (Taiwan, Hong Kong).
Curious on what you think of what China is doing to the Uyghur people.
Do you believe that this is fabricated by all these media outlets? I would think that genocide of a particular ethnicity would count as totalitarian and racist.
I don’t really see this as a controversial statement. All countries are likely to face the issue of shrinking population this century, and they’re going to have to try all sorts of schemes to keep the wagon on the road.
When China faced a population explosion, it didn’t create a complex mix of incentives and marketing to nudge people into having smaller families: it outlawed larger families. It seems reasonable to suggest that is a policy lever they will reach for again in the face of another demographic crisis. What am I missing?
After the communist "land reform", the Chinese communist party / Chinese Government owns all the land in China. Now, local governments use land control and land sales as their major source of revenue. The end result is that vast majority of Chinese people live in small apartments, which are designed for 1 couple + 1 kid families. In big cities, average apartment size is around 60-80 sqm. In small cities, it could be 100-120 sqm. For a family of three kids to live in those small apartments, life is gonna be really tough.
Pardon me, but how is 100-120 sqm small? 60 sqm is small for 4 people yes, but everything else subject to how rooms are organized. We had 105 sqm growing up with 5 people and we had a very large living room + 4 bed rooms, no second bath room though.
I wonder about stories like this, how much western propaganda they are composed. I've been to China, and observed this number of children policy to be completely ignored outside their major cities. It is not uncommon to see large families with 5-8 kids in their farming and areas of less population.
Westerners so enthusiastic about “China’s demographic problem” would be well advised to worry about their own, local sub-replacement birth rates, in particular for natives (you know, the ones who built the countries everybody else seems so hell-bent immigrating to), as well as for the educated, the middle classes.
I'm guessing you don't mean "natives" in the modern sense. But I am still one of those people who's ancestors have been in this country since the 17th century, and I don't get what worries you. I was always taught that being American is not about being a particular race or ethnicity. Heck, my family couldn't even tell you our ethnicity other than "white". And I may be educated middle class, but my grandparents who grew up in the Appalachian mountains sure weren't.
So long as the children of immigrants are adapting fine to the rest of American culture, who cares if our population growth depends on them?
Historically much of the US was built by immigrants, and it’s still the case that recent immigrants do a lot of work. They could do more if allowed. So, if you think that the demographic problem is not enough workers it could fairly easily be solved.
>> in particular for natives (you know, the ones who built the countries everybody else seems so hell-bent immigrating to)
It was difficult to read this and not laugh because it conveniently leaves out First Nations, as well as the fact that the USA in particular used immense amounts of slave labor while the "natives" you refer to (the whites) reaped the rewards in relative comfort.
What you are implying is that the wealth of western nations in the present is in a significant way the product of slavery (by whites, of blacks; ignoring the universality in time and space of slavery) which is not the case. In the counterfactual, western nations without slavery, colonialism today would look roughly the same—except, of course, whiter.
I assume by 'native' you mean 'white'? Looking at the students/faculty of elite schools/research labs and staff of top companies, I see plenty of highly intelligent and educated non-white immigrants producing great work (sometimes they even make up the majority of these elite groups).
And many (most?) Western countries do provide various incentives to have kids, as well as Asian countries, but the incentives don't ever seem to work to get above that 2.1 replacement level, so Western governments are 'worried'/concerned about birth rates, but boosting them significantly not an easy thing to do. Especially when part of the reason might be that people simply don't want more than 1 or 2 kids these days regardless of finances.
At this point it affects most countries outside of Africa.
immigration
I believe in diversity. Immigration will forever change the countries it affects, typically making them more like the source countries.
boosting hard
One might be able to push it just above 2.1, but fundamentally the causes are significant, unprecedented technological and social changes since the industrial revolution. Nowhere is it guaranteed that these changes produce a stable, lasting order.
IMO even with all those incentives I just don't see the typical age at first child getting to 16-24 in any Western country even with strong incentives.
Not just because of costs, but the harder to modify cultural reasons like people valuing independence, "casual dating"/FWB more common instead of dating with intent to marry, less social pressure/shaming from parents ("why don't you have a husband/wife/kids yet?!"), freedom to "find yourself/travel" or "get sexually experienced/have a ho phase before settling" for years after college, etc.
Most people don't want to go from college to marriage and kids right away these days, and a few years of this type of casual dating/exploration after college eats up a lot of prime reproductive years like you said. But these cultural factors are very hard to change especially with the absence of religion/strong communities these days.
1) There is an entire family planning bureaucracy within the CCP setup to manage this; would do you do with all those people if they are not needed anymore?
2) China is more strict on population planning for certain minorities - not officially, but in the background; think Muslims in western China or Tibet or Mongolians, or ethnic Koreans in northeastern China... If you had no population planning for all the Han chinese, you might have a brighter light cast on this small in number but impactful population control actions.
3) Once someone has power, why let go of it? The CCP survives by creating a fairly good life for the majority in China - and it has done that extremely well - in exchange for control. It is easier to go from 3 back to 2, than it is to go from unlimited back to 2, for example.