China continues to try to centrally control its birthrate
In 1979, China instituted its one-child policy for population control, and enforced it with draconian measures. It’s an example of the impulse to centralized control by leftist states, and also the cruelty, unforeseen consequences, and ultimate failure of such control.
There were many effects of the policy, some of them still debated today because it was in place during a time when birthrates were falling anyway in many Western countries. But one of the fairly clear results of the policy has been a large male-to-female ratio. Another is this:
As the first generation of law-enforced only-children came of age for becoming parents themselves, one adult child was left with having to provide support for his or her two parents and four grandparents. Called the “4-2-1 Problem”, this leaves the older generations with increased chances of dependency on retirement funds or charity in order to receive support. If not for personal savings, pensions, or state welfare, most senior citizens would be left entirely dependent upon their very small family or neighbors for assistance. If for any reason, the single child is unable to care for their older adult relatives, the oldest generations would face a lack of resources and necessities
In 2016, China changed the policy and allowed two children. But the change failed to increase the birthrate sufficiently, and now the country’s leaders have announced that they will be allowing three.
But if two didn’t do the trick, why would three?:
The cost of raising children in cities has deterred many Chinese couples.
The latest move was approved by President Xi Jinping at a meeting of top Communist Party officials.
But human rights organisation Amnesty International said the policy, like its predecessors, was still a violation of sexual and reproductive rights…
“If relaxing the birth policy was effective, the current two-child policy should have proven to be effective too,” Hao Zhou, a senior economist at Commerzbank, told Reuters news agency.
“But who wants to have three kids? Young people could have two kids at most. The fundamental issue is living costs are too high and life pressures are too huge.”
If there are economic disincentives to having more children, it’s not going to work. There are also social changes in the perception of what the ideal family might be:
Generations of Chinese people have lived without siblings and are used to small families – affluence has meant less need for multiple children to become family-supporting workers, and young professionals say they’d rather give one child more advantages than spread their income among several kids…
More than 180,000 users have commented on Xinhua’s upbeat post, and the ones with the most likes do not look upon the policy kindly.
“There are too many big pressures in life at the moment,” one user says, “Young people are not willing to have kids.”
Many talk about modern day “workplace dilemmas” for people leaving on maternity/paternity leave and there not being even “the most basic reproductive benefits”.
And with a shrinking labour market, young Chinese people today accept that they have to work longer hours. Overtime and overwork are endemic.
More women meanwhile are choosing to pursue further education and employment, rather than settle down early to start a family.
All of these things are rather obvious, and all work against having large families. They are not particular to China, either; Western countries are experiencing a decline, too. However, the falling birthrates are happening just about everywhere.
That’s a huge and important topic, but it’s one I’m not going to explore further in this post. I’ll probably give it more of an in-depth look in a future one.
They show such a lack of imagination in trying to up their birthrate! Why not offer massive government benefits — such as forgiveness of all taxes or positive government subsidies — for every fourth, fifth, etc., child. This of course forces parents to have three children right up front in order to qualify.
Government workers previously making sure that there were no more than two and now three children per couple can be switched over to keeping track of who deserves benefits for raising large families. (It could get complicated with divorce and remarriage.) Fertility drugs which encourage twins, triplets, etc. mean that women would only need to become pregnant a few times to qualify.
It only takes a few octomoms to make up for a lot of low performers.
Could this have been foreseen? Allowing only one child leads to females being aborted leading to an overabundance of men. Which leads to not enough children!
They reap what they sow.
A recent financial news program recently claimed that the U.S. birthrate fell off a cliff during “our year of living Covidly,” which was opposite to the host’s prediction. I think he figured that couples locked down in their homes would get closer more often.
I believe that the baby boom started at the end of WWII, not during the war. While Covid wasn’t a war, there were fears and some privations involved. It’ll be interesting to see where the birthrate goes in the next year or two.
I read somewhere today that the number of homeschoolers has increased a lot during the pandemic because online learning didn’t work. Maybe this will lead to more parents staying home more with their kids and then having more kids. You just can’t plan for behaviour.
When I was growing up, most moms stayed home. Then as the kids grew older, they opened stores and moved into the workforce. Who knows what will happen next?
About half of China’s females are beyond their childbearing years.
2.1 is the replacement rate to avoid a declining pop.
China’s birth rate is 1.6
Hemned in by their own societal precepts.
Here is the piece on homeschooling:
https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/01/homeschooling-skyrocketed-in-2020-as-much-as-700-percent-in-some-states/
Leaving aside the fact that the US would be well-served to institute some state and federal policies that encourage and incentivize the family structure as a way of population replacement and growth – what is remarkable in all these China stories covering the new 3-Child allowance is the implicit, indulgent joy being expressed. Oh! China! They’re moving toward enlightenment!
I haven’t seen a single article pointing out how ruthlessly totalitarian it is, to specify an allowance on reproductive rights with penalties for overages. Not one. To all appearances, nobody from the West is outraged in the slightest that the Central Party controls the birth scheduling of over a billion people by decree.
I wonder what their reaction will be when China’s CCP, dissatisfied with the progress, starts to command reproduction from its citizens. I wonder how that will be parsed in order to now be unacceptable.
TommyJay,
One of the Little Fireflies was born almost precisely nine months after New Year’s Eve, 1999 – New Year’s Day, 2000. The nurses in the maternity ward were all abuzz that it was a record setting period for the ward. There were a lot of jokes by the staff that couples had obviously been “busy” that New Year’s Eve. It was not a part of my or the Mrs. thinking, but apparently the Y2K New Year was a motivator for a lot of couples.
I believe NYC also saw a bumper crop of babies nine months to a year after the 9/11 terrorist bombings.
About 8 years ago my family was in China and we were surprised by some seemingly very open, personal conversations some of the young (20 – 30) year old Chinese had with us. A common theme among the young men was it was hard to impress their female peers. They claimed young women were very demanding and expected a great deal. The women were also frank about having that attitude. Both genders told us that growing up as only children their parents and grandparents gave them a great deal of attention and material possessions, and they felt their generation was much softer because of this. Also, they knew they would inherit their grandparents and parents’ wealth and were reluctant to share with a spouse.
These were urban professionals, likely the top 5% of the country. We also saw many, many, many, many urban and rural poor whose lives and attitudes were likely much different. But, even if urban professionals only make up 5% of the population; 5% of 1,400,000,000 is still a lot of people!
Aggie,
I think most of the nordic European countries; Germany, Denmark, Norway… have been giving money to couples to reproduce more for several decades now.
Japan is beyond toast. Italy, Greece, Germany… As Mark Steyn writes, “the future belongs to those who show up.”
Ought to get interesting…
The interesting thing in the US might be to not focus on the overall average birth rates, but look at cultural characteristics across the spread among white Americans. You can almost be certain that the more conservative the white couple is, the more kids on average they will have. There was a reason white leftist wanted the borders swung wide open. They were not reproducing at near the rates white conservatives were. Of course they have the schools, so that would be mute. The only real offset is homeschooling and private, conservative schools.
Le wena fela ga re bua nnete, o ka ipotsa gore, cheese, cake, jang tota?
(Inviting Zaphod to weigh in on this question.)
The underlying driver of declining birthrates everywhere is not quite precisely ‘Female Education’ and Equal Rights at Law, or availability of Birth Control. These are factors along with a myriad other inputs to the equation.
But what is unmentionable Wrongspeak and therefore largely unthinkable by our Managerialist Bugpeople Overlords is that the Ur-problem is simply Female Freedom. There is a spectrum running from abject slavery/subjection to the present Whoredom Triumphant. The arrow always runs from Left to Right along this line as civilizations progress, flourish, decline, collapse. There’s an optimum somewhere along that line where you get the great high points of Classical Civilizations: beyond that the Jezebels rot the thing, abort their children and generally put on the Kali Act.
The rest is just details… flourishes, curlicues, arabesques, insignificant knobs on the black box. Tinkering with them doesn’t interfere with the forcing function. Putting Women back in their Box is Difficult. Once she’s out of it, she’s just going to go around opening other boxes until we’ve all gone down to perdition. Pandora, anyone?
Sorry Ladies… But true.
🙂
PS: This may not be so unthinkable in China. I wonder. Will take more years. The technocratic hyper Elite governing class in Singapore certainly grasp the issue, but I don’t think even the utterly ruthless and ferocious and genius level IQ Lee Kuan Yew dared to cross his battle axe of a wife.
Hi, Yawrate. I think it wasn’t the one-child policy as such that led to the sex-selective abortion of a proportion of females, but the collision of that policy with the lingering long-standing cultural pressure in China in favor of having sons as eldest children – primogeniture and so on – which Mao & Co. were apparently unable to expunge entirely.
TommyJay, it’s an interesting thing: you point out that COVID wasn’t a war, which is true in the traditional meaning of ‘war,’ and yet it strikes me more and more that in some senses, we as a society have actually been experiencing the equivalent of war, and I don’t mean the “moral” one. In saying that, I think of, first of all, the deaths and demographic disfigurements, among which one must include the downward blip that will show up in the birth numbers for 2020 on the future published charts.
But also I have in mind such developments as the concentration of economic and financial power more and more tightly in the hands of our oligarchs. I will allow myself to say that regarding, e.g., Jeff Bezos as functionally a war profiteer may be at least open to argument. There is the loss of a year or more of schooling for our youth, alluded to in another thread of today – so much wasted life. There is the disruption to our economic supply chains, still ongoing (and the cyberattacks on the pipeline and now this meatpacker having issues are, in my view, a kind of related echo of those). And, last but not at all least, there is the usurpation – yes, I would use that term – of the White House, which would probably not have been brought about were it not for Everybody’s Favorite Pathogen and the reaction thereto.
I know I’m hijacking here – sorry, Neo – but TommyJay’s comment brings all this out of me, I guess, because I feel I’m coming to the conclusion that wars are fundamentally revolutionary situations. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this seems to be one of the most basic characteristics of modern war, and by it one can recognize such a war: it ends up being not so much about the mass slaughter and destruction of cities, etc. as about the socially revolutionary situations that it brings about. The World Wars are obviously the gold standard for this in my current thinking, but there are elements of it in other conflicts as well, only not as strong. Looking out from my little abode, I’ve felt for the past year or so that this all really has a suggestion of what WW I must have felt like at the time. I suppose the major difference is that the physical casualties have been mostly among the elderly rather than military-age cohorts.
there are more to say with China 1979 instituted its one-child policy, it’s the working hand in the farms which make the framers suffer from not having boys to work with them.
On the other point, I knew at least one guy who did it, many Chinese seek asylum in the western world on claimes the one-child policy and they wish to have more babies.
In the mid-nineties, we saw different sort of immigrant to the western world which covers most US, Canada, the UK, France and Europe also Australia, New Zealand. these chines first immigrated on basis of business/ Money Investments, this caused them to settle starting buying business in western world also introduce new companies which they start to bring workers to those businesses, so the numbers of chines start rises in many western worlds, so they start control real estate sectors and small business(Cafes, Bakary, Vegimarkets),
So China policy was to export here people all around the world some say that was controlled by the chains government/ communist party elite state and most of them got loans at low interest around 2% when Western Banks where interest were 6%-10%.
That caused the decline in population inside Chania also decline and the falling with the birthrates, the in western countries in western countries we seeing the opposite, less in the cost in western countries, clearly caused the raising in the number of newborn and the Chinese children, in fact, it’s encouraged many Chinese young couples to make more babies in early age and seized the benefits of healthcare and social benefits attached to newborns babies in western countries..
@AppleBetty:
Apparently this is Sesotho? Google translate is a bit weird here. As a child I did know a few smatterings of Zulu from the housekeeper and gardener. No help at all here though. Can you tell me what it means please?
I think it’s German we need more for this thread:
“Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiß die Peitsche nicht!” — Nietzsche, who else?
And Schopenhauer’s Essay on Women:
https://www.theabsolute.net/misogyny/onwomen.html
I slept in this morning. Must redouble my efforts to catch up! 🙂
@dh:
“On the other point, I knew at least one guy who did it, many Chinese seek asylum in the western world on claimes the one-child policy and they wish to have more babies.”
You were doing well until you took at face value a statement made by a random asylum seeker.
These people know exactly which things to say when applying for asylum in the West. There are lists of these things on websites. All races do this, just Chinese are the highest IQ folks doing it these days. A few years ago, asked to advise someone how to pull a visa conversion stunt in another country I admitted my ignorance and simply told her to go find the local immigrant Chinese and ask them. It worked. They knew all the loopholes. They always do. We stupid whiteys are a Swiss Cheese and they’re the Weevils.
Incentives for more children? Perish the thought! This is a Communist country we’re talking about. They will turn Ceaucescus-like to restricting access to birth control and closing their abortion facilities. Won’t it be fun seeing the left trying to spin that?
@Philip Sells:
“I know I’m hijacking here – sorry, Neo – but TommyJay’s comment brings all this out of me, I guess, because I feel I’m coming to the conclusion that wars are fundamentally revolutionary situations. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this seems to be one of the most basic characteristics of modern war, and by it one can recognize such a war: it ends up being not so much about the mass slaughter and destruction of cities, etc. as about the socially revolutionary situations that it brings about. The World Wars are obviously the gold standard for this in my current thinking, but there are elements of it in other conflicts as well, only not as strong. Looking out from my little abode, I’ve felt for the past year or so that this all really has a suggestion of what WW I must have felt like at the time. I suppose the major difference is that the physical casualties have been mostly among the elderly rather than military-age cohorts.”
Nailed it.
I think worse in modern managerialist lib-dem states because there is a large element of governing class always triangulating on how to move things in their desired directions whether state of peace of war exists. In wartime they merely redouble their efforts and the state of total war on the home front removes a lot of the restraints and friction which would normally act against their desires.
Simple illustrative example is Prohibition being foisted upon fighting men by their stay at home womenfolk and progressive (of the day) busybody demagogues.
You don’t want to read the old Missionary reports on female infanticide in China of Yore. Pretty gruesome.
Portable and relatively cheap ultrasound machines have caused a holocaust of female fetus abortions in China and India. India I suspect worse because a daughter incurs massive dowry expenses *as well as* not supporting you in your retirement as a son should.
This all so laughable. First, because the Central committe is always right, they institute a one child policy. Now after all the damage done by the previous wise leaders the new wise leaders have over ruled the previous wise leaders and re-instituted what the previous wise leaders ruled was bad.
One of the many reasons why Malthus — and Paul Ehrlich — were idiots.
Humans are not animals. We don’t reproduce to match the food supply, then crash because we overdid it.
Humanity is currently expected to peak at about 9-9.5 billion, and then taper off.
}}} You don’t want to read the old Missionary reports on female infanticide in China of Yore. Pretty gruesome.
Portable and relatively cheap ultrasound machines have caused a holocaust of female fetus abortions in China and India. India I suspect worse because a daughter incurs massive dowry expenses *as well as* not supporting you in your retirement as a son should.
YEah, thinking those “dowry expenses” are gonna be a bit light, when there’s 110 guys for every 100 women.
The women are going to get to pick and choose their mates, not the other way around.
The SMART Chinese parents had the female… She’ll be moving UP in the social queue.
}} There is the loss of a year or more of schooling for our youth, alluded to in another thread of today – so much wasted life.
Actually, if it got them out of @#$$%#$% public schools and into homeschooling… mayyyybe not such a bad tradeoff.
Now if we could only get the parents to stop helicoptering outside of the homeschool, kids might actually wind up with a decent childhood for the first time in like 3 decades.
Zaphod, thank’s for commenting.
(I borrowed some seTswana from Chellz Kitchen)
@AppleBetty:
I’ll have to put Botswana on my Cheese Cake Bucket List.
Not much of an expert on African Cooking — the Zulus seemed to do most of their conquering and slaughtering on a diet of maize porridge and beer. Apparently gets more interesting further north.
Portuguese African colonial cuisine is very good. And you don’t need to go to Africa or Portugal:
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g664891-d1216162-Reviews-Henri_s_Galley-Macau.html
First went there on a word of mouth recommendation in a rattly old Toyota Crown black and white taxi in late 1991. The old Praia Grande which it sits on is still a lovely walk in cooler months if you don’t look too closely at the modern stuff surrounding it that shouldn’t be there.
I know many of Neo’s readers also check in at Powerline daily, but this bears repeating.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/06/china-to-allow-third-child.php
Instapundit shared this again yesterday, appropriately enough for this discussion. I personally know several young families with 3+ kids under 8yo and it’s been interesting to learn how they’re dealing with this prime example of the law of unintended consequences. (Most often: graduating their oldest out of the booster seat earlier than legally allowed, but keeping them in the backseat. Other than buying a minivan, what choice do they have?)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046
“Since 1977, U.S. states have passed laws steadily raising the age for which a child must ride in a car safety seat. These laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back.
… We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000.”
Zaphod @ 9:45pm,
I have a friend who owns quite a few tax preparation franchises. Many are in lower income neighborhoods. He tells me the clientele are expert in all tax laws involving government subsidies. They know time frames, forms, how to obtain whatever paperwork is required to qualify, what words and terms to use to qualify and get maximum aid…
Odd that our Legislative leaders never figure this out.
My youngest daughter, who was born in 1985, informes me that she and her husband have no intention of having children.
Zaphod,
What was point is Chains citizen they are only people claiming because there state impose one-child policy.
It’s not about IQ or loophole
@FB:
OK.
In richer countries, it appears that having children is more of a burden than otherwise. It used to be children could be put to work around the house and farm. Nowadays, they spend their days at school, and with current norms, when they’re not at school or other activities, parents are expected to hover over them and protect them from harm. Children used to represent security in old age; now people have savings, retirement accounts, Social Security, and other means of support in their “golden years”.
As China becomes more prosperous, I would expect this to happen there as well.
In addition, everyone of childbearing age will have absorbed one-child propaganda during their formative years. I think it was Machiavelli who said, “Give me a child until he is eight, and you may have him thereafter.” (Or was it Roman Polanski?)
These adults will have that propaganda buried in the backs of their minds no matter what the law says now.
One big question is, will a population crash trigger a war?
On another topic, yes, conservative populations tend to have more children. This especially true with conservative and religious populations. In the US, it may wind up meaning red states will out breed blue ones. In countries where the official religion is atheism, where will religious conservative populations come from?