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.
* https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/october/china...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Birth_rate_in_China.svg
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
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.