Gov’t Studies One Child Policy Reform – Western Critics Still Clueless
China needs to adjust its one-child family planning policy to fight a worsening gender imbalance and an aging population with too few children, experts said.
China launched its nationwide, one-child family planning policy in the 1970s. Though it prevented 400 million births, it has been criticized for leading to gender imbalance, a large elderly population and a scarcity of working-age people.
“The country has successfully achieved the goal to prevent its population from growing too fast, which was set in its first population policy advocating ‘one child for one couple’,” Hu Angang, one of China’s leading policy advisers, said in an article he published on the Economic Information Daily on Thursday. (China Daily)
This is not so exciting in and of itself. Obviously a policy shift is necessary at some point because of demographic problems. This was inevitable.
What is entertaining (to me) is Western reaction to any story concerning the One Child Policy. Religious nutjobs have been fierce critics of the policy since the ’80s. None of them understood anything about economic growth and development policy, but that never stopped them. The Bible says to procreate like bunnies, they say, so anything that would undermine that is simply evil. Contraception, family planning, the One Child Policy, etc.
Sure, there were certainly problems with implementation of the policy. A lot of that had to do with the lack of control Beijing had over local officials. There were undoubtedly some excesses as well with respect to enforcement. That doesn’t mean, though, that the underlying policy was somehow a bad idea.
Yes, the policy has had some negative side effects, such as gender imbalance problems. That being said, I don’t consider having a rapidly aging problem an unintended negative consequence of the one child policy. If the policy was successful as designed, wouldn’t it inevitably result in an aging population? Wasn’t that the whole point?
Anyway, if you take away the religious arguments, I think a lot of people would probably say that the policy has been a rousing success. Too bad you can’t take the religious crap out of the policy discussion in some countries.
In the U.S., every time the religious freaks in Congress wanted to score some cheap points, they would call for a hearing and have some “academic” (i.e. some goofus from a think tank funded by a fundamentalist Christian billionaire) testify about forced abortions in China. Made for some good fundraising, I suspect.
So now that the policy has done what it was designed to do, it needs to be adjusted to current realities. The gender gap is one problem, but more importantly, China has moved on and simply doesn’t have the same population pressures it did 30 years ago.
Critics will undoubtedly pronounce any policy reform as proof that it was a failure, ignoring pesky facts like breakneck GDP growth rates for decades, millions of people raised out of poverty, better living conditions, better educational institutions — you know, stuff Jesus would have been quite keen on.
Never mind. Family planning = evil.
Werd to your mother!
That said, amongst Western critics, I think there’s as much secular/feminist “anti-sexism” as there is religious “right to reproduction” underlying their reprehension. For example, selective abortion often mirrors the forced abortion angle. It’s either the Chinese are evil in limiting a person’s right to have kids or the Chinese are evil in choosing sons over daughters if they can only have one.
I wholly agree that some idiots are going to point to reform (or adjustment) as validating their criticism of the idea. I also agree with you that the idea is rational social policy for a very real social problem, but yeah, the implementation could’ve been better. But then again, implementation could ALWAYS be better.
Yes, there always has been criticism from the Left as well. I always felt, however, that it had more to do with unintended consequences (i.e. gender issues) and implementation than some general moral-based attack against the underlying policy itself.
The One Child policy is not only misunderstood outside of China but also in the country as well. The policy eventually was eventually adjusted to vary by location with many actually under what has been really a ‘1.5 child policy.’ It’s debatable how effective the policy was as well, since population growth rates were apparently falling in China before the different policies were instituted.
Anyway, Professor Wang Feng, has a write up on the issue that’s worth a read: http://www.eastwestcenter.org/fileadmin/stored/pdfs/api077.pdf
Some of the discussion about the magnitude of demographic change that can be directly attributed to the One Child Policy has been quite interesting. Another point is that the policy was really never strictly enforced in many rural areas (i.e. where most of the people live).
In my opinion, none of this debate says anything about whether the policy was a good idea or not (at the time it was passed).
I’d say that there are fairly strong arguments that it may have not been necessary, but at this point it’s important to focus on reform from what has been learned about the policy so far.
The larger concern is the effect the policy has had on notions of the value of a female life as opposed to a male’s and the economic costs of supporting an aging population on par with more developed countries.
Family planning isn’t necessarily evil, just not convinced that fertility regulated by the State is a good idea.
Completely agree with this post. I have been so many times in heated discussions about the 1child pollicy that I dont care to speak about it anymore. Even non-religious people in the West get all excited about it, I guess for the reasons Kai mentioned above.
The thing is, if China had not implemented the policy it would be probably not far from 2 Billion by now, and all those idiots would probably be shitting their pants and complaining about the lack of control of the population in China. I only wish some other countries would do the same, starting with India, because the World just cant take indefinitely high numbers of people (this is not “malthusianism” as some like to say, it is pure logic, open your eyes people!)