I always wondered how the Chinese managed to enforce their insane one-child policy. I thought it was all done through levying fines, which can’t be that effective. If people want a second child, a lot more than some stupid fine is necessary to stop them.
And now I discovered how the policy actually was enforced. You might have known all this for a while but for me it was a revelation. It turns out that these poor second children were simply denied citizenship rights. Often they have no passport or ID card at all, can’t go to school, get any but the most low-paid menial job, get a marriage license, receive adequate medical care. It’s like the state refuses to recognize the existence of people who were born without state sanction. Obviously, parents don’t want to condemn a child to this kind of horror and choose not to give birth at all.
This is cruel, inhuman, and disgusting. Of course, there is a very easy way of bringing birth rates down dramatically without resorting to these vicious measures. This tried and proven method is called “a feminist revolution.” It’s been tried in many different countries with identical results. And nobody had to be tortured or turned into a second-class being. But then the people of China wouldn’t be adequately degraded and dehumanized, so a different method was chosen.
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The policy was a bit for nuanced than that. Families were able to pay for services for the second child, instead of having the state fund the services. However, the family would have to be able to afford that. When they didn’t have or couldn’t raise the money, then the problems start. Of course, the parents would know about the policy before making the decision on having a second child. That puts the onus on the parents — if you are poor and cannot afford services for the child, why would you get pregnant?
The policy restricted population growth, but created some new problems. In rural areas, families would have additional children who were intended to work the family farm while the parents went to cities to seek higher paying work. Thus a 10 year old might be the head of the household on a farm with the parents both absent. And no, these kids were not being educated.
The second issue is the problem plaguing Japan and now the US, a top heavy age profile. There are in Japan too many elderly relative to the working population. This condition is developing in China and the US.
The Pew Foundation has a very good report on the changing demographics of the US called “The Next America.” It was published to relatively little fanfare in 2014 and remains quite worth reading (its available online from their website).
Within 20 years, we will be in a position in which most of the people on public assistance (including Social Security) will be white and the workers paying taxes to support these people will be mostly minority (Hispanic and Asian). Unless it changes, the GOP will be history by then. Keep in mind the slogan, “payback’s a bitch.”
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Great comment, thank you.
Yes, you are absolutely right, we are witnessing the agony of the GOP in its current form. And that’s why the spectacle is so loud and off-putting. They know it’s their very last chance to make a splash and they are using it with abandon.
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You’re presenting China’s “one child” policy in a extremely benign light. In reality it was a barbaric policy enforced by a totalitarian government with horrific results.
Some of the barbarism was openly done by the Chinese government, including forced abortions and sterilization of women who got pregnant once too often, and the denial of citizenship rights to native-born Chinese children who had the misfortune to be born a younger sibling.
Some of the tragic results were considered illegal but nonetheless practiced. Since boys are valued over girls in Chinese culture, first-born baby girls were sometimes murdered by their parents.
The gender demographic consequences will take decades to correct. It’s been estimated that by 2020, there will be 24 million more Chinese men than women of marriageable age. The Chinese government itself has expressed concern about the millions of young men who won’t be able to find brides and may turn to criminal activities like kidnapping women, sex trafficking, and other forms of social unrest.
Japan and America will have to deal with their coming demographics problems in a manner consistent with the accepted norms of civilized democracies, and not like the savagery of Communists.
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No, the one-child policy is absolutely horrifying. There is no excuse for doing this to people, none. It’s a tragic, inexcusable method of social control. It’s wrong on every level.
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The “You’re” in my comment was directed at Vic Crain.
Frequent commenter Stringer Bell seems to be technically knowledgeable about WordPress (if nothing else), so why don’t you ask him how to program WordPress to disable treed comments, and post everything in strict chronological order?
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I could do that easily but people say they like treed comments.
Not that it would change anything for me because I do see all comments chronologically in my app. So I always interpret every comment as addressing me. It’s an app for narcissists. 🙂
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The problem is that the trees in WordPress’s garden have so many broken branches. 🙂
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not exactly a democrat or liberal here but laughable to call social security public assistance. Its a social insurance / deferred pension system. much different than what would be welfare such as food stamps, housing assistance, tanf etc.
but both of those aren’t a major issue. The big issue is healthcare. If our healthcare was 12% of GDP instead of 18% a good majority (not all) of both public and private financial considerations would moderate. Healthcare will moderate. Will take 10-20 years due to everyone in healthcare doing there best to be shielded from economic realities, but it will occur.
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Sigh. People are demonstrating that the drivel from the Red Scare days in the US is still with us. If you have the choice of people dying of starvation of restricting births, which is more barbaric? We haven’t faced that choice in the US or Europe, but there could be a day in the future for it. Is Chinese policy any worse than what India is doing?
Right-to-Lifers in the US don’t care about what happens to the kids they insist be born. That’s someone else’s problem. Nor do they want to pay increased taxes to care for them — so they get shitty care. Is that better than what China has done?
China has taken a position: this is the level of population we can support. Economists have been urging westerners to think this way for decades, with little success.
If you ask Chinese citizens if they suffer from a barbaric government, the vast majority won’t understand what you are saying. (I’ve been to Shanghai, have you?) They can’t relate to that. It’s a different culture with different views of life and different values. To try to impose an American way of thinking on them is silly and won’t work any better there than it has in Afghanistan.
Right now, the US solution to population control seems to be to give everyone guns and let them reduce the population that way. The murder rate has been running about 35,000 per year, and it should be up sharply when the numbers are in for this year. (As I right, two teens on bikes were shot in Philadelphia this evening, one killed. There were 17 shots fired at the boys.)
And we’re going to stand on top of a soapbox and tell everyone else what to do?
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@Vic Crain:
Double sigh. If you have the choice of people dying of starvation or slaughtering children at birth, what’s a respectable progress to do?
Sure, toss little sister down the family well, and pray to your local gods that she drowns quickly, and that the local authorities don’t find out. Mama’s pregnant again, but unwanted Junior isn’t out yet? Fine, strap Mama to an operating room table and rip Junior out of her body, along with all of Mama’s reproductive organs.
Baby Soo Lyn is a third child, but she wasn’t discovered until she was too old to butcher? No problem, just deny her citizenship rights and send her away to the nearest whore house to grow up.
Is it yielding to to the Red Scare (or perhaps the Yellow Peril) to recall the Biblical King Herod, neither a pinko nor a Mongol, when he ordered the deaths of all male infants in his kingdom over 2,000 years ago, aiming at a specific birth control for a different reason?
Your chosen villains, the Republican “right-to-life” absolutists are definitely stupid, but none of them are advocating infanticide. ( It’s Planned Parenthood who’s accused of playing slice-and-dice with the surviving toddlers.) It’s true that some Pro-Lifer” fanatics are trying to deny reasonable VOLUNTARY abortion choices, but nobody is claiming that they want to kill the babies that skip through.
You take swipes at the American GOP for its confused family planning policies, and THEN you somehow try to tie reducing birth rate to the TOTALLY unrelated issue if gun control????
I know it’s late , Vic, so why don’t we end this conversation now, and you can come back and try again at at reasonable time tomorrow night? Don’t worry, I’ll be around then.
Goodnight.
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As I said, there was a simple and easy answer : promote women’s rights. The birth rates would have dropped within a single generation.
And people who don’t go in the direction of women rights are not a culture and have no values. They are barbarians whom I despise.
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“promote women’s rights”
You don’t even have to call it that (for the squeamish). Incentivize higher education Nothing tracks birth rates like education.
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Exactly. There are very easy solutions that have been proven to work. Instead, this barbarity was chosen with consequences that we can’t even imagine just yet. And now I’m supposed to believe that murdered baby girls thrown into ditches are “culture.”
I’m starting to dread the word “culture” at this point.
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The whole one child policy was enforced by many different kinds of savagery (no other word fits).
A very large problem is that no one really knows what’s going on at ground level in China because the only statistics that would give us an idea are collected by the government and nothing it says can be trusted (there will be elements of truth, outright lies and outright invented numbers all mixed together).
The scary thing of course is that there is a likely scenario in which there are tens of millions of young men who have no chance of ever starting a family and the traditional way that societies deal with that is to start a limited war to kill a bunch of them off. India also has the same problem for the same basic reason (preference for sons over daughters).
Gender imbalances work out after time but the process can get pretty bumpy….
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You see country after country with drastically reduced birthrates is because of two factors: 1)drastically decreased infant mortality and 2)children switched from being an asset to a drain on resources. If this is just due to feminism, how low of a level of feminism has to kick in before people decide not to have lots of children? Surely you can’t say Japan and Scandinavia have the same level of feminism.
Also even to have a subsistence level worker for a dirt farm requires more parental investment than it did 50 or even 30 years ago. Even in India (check out the charts on the side), as the population level rises, the birth rate falls (part of this is due to selective sex abortion which is not the result of feminism) and the infant mortality rate is going down.
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“If this is just due to feminism, how low of a level of feminism has to kick in before people decide not to have lots of children?”
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And in the USSR, the changes kicked in long before anything was done about infant mortality or anything else.
This is about women and only about women.
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Apparently China’s new 2 child policy won’t end forced abortions: https://t.e2ma.net/webview/q95a7n/a4cc9870a917228e735469416723322e
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