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diggChina’s one-child policy in the balance
Will western values finish in the Asian giant what the one-child policy began?
The twentieth century fetish for population control has been particularly hard on China. Mao Zedong thought there was strength in numbers and talked the birth rate up to 5.8 births per woman in 1970. With the imposition of family planning ideology in the 1970s it came crashing down to 2.2. At the end of the 1970s Deng Xiaoping, chief architect of China's economic reform and opening to the outside world, pushed the downward trend further with the infamous one-child policy -- enforced by fines, sterilisations and abortions up to the present.
If there were any doubts as to how seriously the policy has been pursued they are countered by new research showing that 63 per cent of Chinese couples are strictly limited to one child, and the actual fertility rate is 1.5 children per couple -- very close to the target rate of 1.47.
But there are signs that the people are sick of being bullied in this way. Newly rich urbanites who can afford to pay the fines are adding illicit children to their families, apparently undeterred by a naming and shaming campaign. Rural families, who are generally poor, have also broken the one (or two) child rule over the years but are less able to pay the fines and also seem to have suffered more from periodic enforcement campaigns.
The one-child policy is a gross violation of human rights. It is a violent intrusion of the state into the marital relationship which robs the couple of their dignity and their child of siblings. It reduces the family to the status of a cog in the great national machine just as much as Mao's collectivism did.
One such blitz occurred in the Guangxi region of south-west China from February to the end of April. According to mainly unofficial reports, local government workers were drafted into family planning work squads and sent out to round up women for pregnancy tests or, in the case of historic violations, demand fines as high as 10,000 yuan (US$1300) -- in an area where most annual incomes are about 1000 yuan. If people did not pay up in three days their belongings were seized and, if they resisted, their homes were destroyed.
Two weekends ago the fury of farmers at this brutal campaign boiled over in rioting at several towns. Protestors gathered at municipal headquarters where they verbally and physically attacked officials, overturned vehicles and smashed and burned at least one building and other property.
At one level this riot was just another expression of resentment at the growing rich-poor gap between the booming urban economy and the struggling countryside -- there are tens of thousands of "mass incidents" a year in the provinces. Yet it is not surprising that the one-child policy has become a symbol of other grievances.
The one-child policy is a gross violation of human rights. It is a violent intrusion of the state into the marital relationship which robs the couple of their dignity and their child of siblings. It reduces the family to the status of a cog in the great national machine just as much as Mao's collectivism did. It has negative social effects -- including those arising from the "gendercide" of unborn girls and a badly-skewed sex ratio -- that are yet to be fully felt.
That it continues to have the approval of the world's rich white club is predictable but shameful. Human rights and the dignity of ordinary people do not count when there are bucks to be made. That, at least, was the attitude implied by one western expert at a gathering of Australian businessmen in Shanghai earlier this month. Clint Laurent¸ a New Zealander who is managing director of Hong Kong-based Global Demographics, was full of enthusiasm for the achievements of China's draconian population policy.
The figures, he revealed, are even better than generally thought. Analysis of China's year 2000 census, combined with other more recent data, including school enrolments, shows that the Asian giant's population has been overestimated. Instead of 95 million children younger than five there are 64 million -- one third less, indicating an average of 12.8 million births a year. If that figure stills sounds like a population explosion to some, they can take comfort from Laurent's forecast that it will decline to a mere six million by 2026. Indeed, even over the next 10 years China will account for a modest 5 per cent of all births in the world as against North America's 6 per cent and India's 33 per cent.
This means that China's population is changing rapidly. Over the next twenty years the number of people under 24 will fall by half and the number of people over 50 will increase by 71 per cent. The workforce will stop growing as soon as 2009. The main shift of workers from the countryside to the towns has already occurred, meaning that there is no new source of labour to be tapped. Total production (GDP) will slow much sooner than expected.
Doesn't that sound like a host of economic and social problems on the near horizon, as others have warned? Doesn't it mean that it is time to abandon the offensive and inhuman population policy?
No, says Laurent, an ageing China is "a dream scenario". It means that productivity, per capita income and living standards will rise. The education budget can go into better education for children and into vocational training to provide skilled, more productive workers. Better-paid urban workers will spend more on eating out and other luxuries. As they get older and their one child leaves home they will travel more. (In strategic economic talks this week, Washington and Beijing agreed to facilitate group tourism from China to the US.) All in all, market prospects are better than ever if foreign businesses start thinking of quality rather than quantity, of "market share, not market size".
So, no problems at all? What about social support of the elderly with only one or two children, often located in distant cities? Laurent suggests that Japan is the model here: as more of the population (women) works and people retire later, he predicts that each worker will need to support less than one dependent person. Rural decay? Big agricultural corporations will take over. Forty million surplus males aged 15-39 by 2026? "Form an army to keep them busy?" suggests Laurent in a throwaway line which, aside from being likely to annoy the Pentagon, refuses to engage with the human suffering and social threat which this particular outcome of population control represents.
What would happen to his "dream" scenario, however, if the Chinese government were to ditch its increasingly unpopular one-child policy? You would think, from the way the government is behaving, that the Chinese would immediately obey their natural instincts and produce a massive baby boom. Laurent, however, thinks little would change. Wang Feng, a sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine, suspects the same.
They believe that a western style economy and the values associated with it will continue to keep birth rates low. In other words, the Chinese will behave just like us, allowing family aspirations to be dominated by the attractions and pressures of a consumer society. No other country, they note, has reversed the trend of "below replacement" fertility.
If these predictions turn out to be correct, China would take its place in the world as a sort of colony of western-style materialism. After all that its people have suffered in the name of ideological uniqueness, what a terrible irony that would be.
If the experts are wrong, however, and if the Chinese are finally fed up with being pushed around, China will have some vital lessons to teach the rest of the world.
Carolyn Moynihan is the Deputy Editor of MercatorNet.
I totally agree that the one-child-policy is working and has helped improve immensely standard of living in China. I am for the policy. I am also for birth control and voluntary abortion. But a bureaucrat with a long needle injecting a fetus in the 8th or 9th month of gestation stretches my tolerance. Ditto for the sheer fact that population control has had an adverse effect on the lives of girls and their chances of surviving in the first week and year of their lives. It is this gendercide that must be addressed.
Just so everyone knows, about 75% of Chinese people are in favor of the policy. Though there does exist many disadvantages of the policy, the improvements made by it are remarkable. The original intent of the policy was on account of economic reasons. Because of the policy, China has reduced the demand of natural resources due to an overpopulated country (thus reducing the strain on resources), maintained a more steady labor rate by reducing unemployment, and also brought more women into the workforce due to them having more time to invest in careers by having less children. Since the policy was implemented in 1979, the would-be population of China today is several hundred million people less than would have been otherwise, thereby lessening the ecological footprint of the people. I’m not saying that it is the best method of improving the quality of life in China, but everything has its pros and cons. Don’t knock it until you know the facts.
i agree with nic and charlie. this is immoral and inhumane and should be stopped!!!
does all the U.S hold the same view as Krishna?
i await the USA’s response.
Ryan
Dear Human Rights activist;
With China blocking access to information about the mysteriously high mortality rate of its infants--especially females--while major organizations such as Human rights Watch, Amnesty International, World Health Organization and the U.S. State Department merely acknowledging infanticide in China with a nod, I set out to learn the facts.
The process has proven almost simple. I used Unicef’s 2005 birth rates and superimposed China’s population authority’s published boy-girl ratio to extrapolate that 1.7 girls are “missing” in China each year.
Where are these girls?
As I investigated gendercide (with the help of Chinese-language researchers,) I managed to put together a gruesome picture in which many of the white spaces pose questions as critical as the findings.
My Power Point presentation, “Talia Carner: Gendercide in China. Indifference or Just Silence?” was delivered March 5, 2007 at the U.N. Committee on the Status of Women that took place at the U.N. in New York City. You may now view my presentation at http://www.taliacarner.com/gendercide.pdf
I am certain that adding a link to it on your website will be beneficial to your visitors.
As a background, I’d like to mention that this study was made after my suspense novel, CHINA DOLL, had been published and I found myself facing audiences skeptical that infanticide was still happening in China today. After all, there had been very little media coverage about what is the first human rights’ violation--of the right to live.
Also please check my op-ed article in the NY Sun, “Baby Supermarket” at http://www.nysun.com/article/48829 and TV interviews at http://www.taliacarner.com/cd_press.html
Read more at http://www.taliacarner.com/cd_background.html
With the upcoming Olympics 2008 in Beijing, we have an opportunity to marshal a collective outcry about the tragedy of gendercide in China.
Best,
Talia Carner
Author, CHINA DOLL
Dear Charlie,
You do agree with me indirectly, let me explain how? You have agreed that your country men emigrate simply becouse they do not get job within the country. You say that your country men would prefer to stay at home in case of availability of job opportunity there. This fact indicates that job opportunity in your country falls short for entire working population living there. It means that the population of your country is not optimum one. In order to optimise the population your country will have to take first step to increase job opportunity for full employment. If this first step fails to bring fruit due to paucity of resources then you must bring down your population in long run by adopting preventive measure and inducement plans preferably. Unless your country achieves the optimum level of population in this way,it will be considered to be an overpopulated country causing migratioin of some people for a foreingn job.
Now. come to Chinese problem. In terms of GDP it is the second richest country (only next to USA) of the world, but its first position in terms of population has made it poor. I believe there is a link betwee over poplatin and pverty. Over population causes unemployment-- unemployment causes dependency-- dependency causes poor quality of life that is poverty.
Dear Mr. Khant Jha,
I disagree with your notion that labor force from developing countries are forced to migrate to developed ones because their country is overpopulated. I come from a developing country and the main reason my countrymen migrate is they can’t find a job here. They couldn’t care less about our population going up. If jobs were available here of course they would prefer to stay. Fortunately we have enough to replace them so we actually encourage them to go out and work abroad because they contribute 10% to the country’s GDP.
And a note on China: this country will become old before it gets rich. Its remarkable economic progress is temporary and fleeting. Sooner or later they’ll pay the price of bankrolling their aging population.
Your statement is true in the interest of individual country facing the problem of underpopulation. Such a country or individual family of the country shuld maintain domestically optimum level of working force instead of depeding on foreigners for the same. But the emigrating persons joining labor force of western rich country are forced to do so due to over population in their own country. So such a over populated country should be induced to bring down population up to optimum level by adopting preventive measures. Some international organisations should also prepare and work on some projects in this direction in the interest of global prosperity.
I wish everybody would read what you have so well stated about the foolishnes of those who create human life and then proceed to destroy it. If a farmer were to spread the seeds, and then proceeded to pull out the growing wheat, arguing at the same time that he actually enjoyed spreading the seeds but was not interested in the harvest, we would agree that said individual has lost his mind.
If said farmer would at harvest time turn around and buy wheat from his neighbor to feed his family, we would have no doubt that the man needed some psychological treatment in order to bring the individual back to sanity. This represents what we in the West are doing. We destroy our own children, and then allow both legal and illegal immigrants to fill the demographic void, despite the fact that many of these foreigners come determined to impose their own values on our society. This doen’t make sense to me!
Abortion is bad any where in the world. It is a foolish act on our part to create a thing which we don’t need and to destroy the same there after. A wise peson plan first according to need and then create. Some western counties are advanced and educated enough to adopt preventive measure first to induce and show way to countries like China.
When so much preventive measure to control the population is available today, there is no need of abortion anywhere in the world. It is very bad planning to create a thing which is not needed and to destroy there after. Wise persons plan the future actin first and then act accordingly. Some of the western countries are advanced and educated, so these counries should act accodingly to sow way to others.
Well said! I haven’t heard a more magnificent statement about population control than yours in a long time. My question to you is:
Given the fact that the practice of abortion is so prevalent in the West, do you think that the Chinese will have any incentive to do away with abortion as their main tool for population control?
Population control does not mean killing any one. Question of killing arises only after a child is conceived. But population planning requires preventive measure. We know prevention is always better than cure.It is immoral to differentiate human being on the ground of sex, caste,race,region etc. We should believe in global family now. And, for the global prosperity population planning in coutries like India and China is essential.
Killing the most innocent and the most vulnerable members of the human race is despicable; but the Chinese are doing this because there are too many of them. What is much worse and more difficult to understand is what is happening in the West. In Russia, Italy, Japan, and the United States the birth rate is way below what is needed for a stable demographic situation. We are killing our own, and filling the deficit with legal and illegal immigrants from countries like Mexico, San Salvador and even Moslem countries. Is this policy beneficial for our countries future?
I fear the principal reason we in the West do not object violently to China’s coercive family planning policies is that after all they are only Chinese. They are yellow, not white, and thus of lesser value. Much the same attitude informs our approach to family planning policies in India and Africa. Moreover, we fear the rising tide of the economic power that their purportedly soaring numbers will bring. Racism comes in many guises – altruistic concern for the woes of the toiling masses of the Third World would be its most pernicious form.
I am not opposed to population control, but controlling population by killing the unborn is a morally debased system.We are not animals, but rather human being with morals to go by. Taking the lives of a group of innocent human beings in order to enrich others is not acceptable in my book. There are many alternatives of controlling the population without shedding the blood of the innocents.
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