So it seems China isn't so much ending its one-child policy, as augmenting it by one to a two-child policy. This means the brutal and cruel enforcement will continue, only it will kick in at the third child instead of at the second.
Some tried giving Arab countries democracy and it turned out they never really wanted it and most of the dictators were much better alternative (still bad, just better - to clarify).
Same with China - imagine them exploding with an extra 1 Billion people over next 20 years. Who will feed them? What would be social implications of such a move?
Our freedoms are not always applicable in other parts of the world.
Just before WWI lot's of European intelligentsia favored communism. Same happened before WWII with fascism. It is still completely possible that spread of democracy is just multinational fashion trend. And something else will come after it.
For any given moment, it's even probable that majority of some country does not want democracy. There are ~200 countries and several somewhat convincing ideologies.
Just to get a real feel for it, I recommend reading through this[0] book review, it may scare one shitless. Also, that belief went for longer than just I WW, it went through the II WW and finally dwindled down when the Cold War started. But imagine this - western newspapers were literally refusing to print bad news about Soviet Union, because it would offend their readers.
[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-...
As has barefaced lying to the populace about their own dislike for democracy.
It seems particularly common in Egypt where the idea that "the people just aren't ready for Democracy yet like they are in the west" is commonplace among the country's elite.
>It is still completely possible that spread of democracy is just multinational fashion trend.
Nobody's ever voted democracy away and it's not fashion that causes it to end, it's violence.
Now, it's debatable if a "representative democracy" would seem to offer that, but I wonder that myself from time to time...
The thing is that true patriot and authoritarian government for a decade can fix many problems that democracy cant handle. Once again - not everywhere though.
In Libia for example most people loved Kadaffi. Yet, he was removed by revolution that would surely fail if not for major help from west. Kadaffi while violent man, managed to make Libia in to blooming example of African country that can distribute prosperity to majority of people.
Let us check Singapore - did it work? Sure. Was it bad for people? Not really. Obviously there will be some affected by strong power, but devastating majority seen their lives skyrocketing comparing to Malasia.
The issue is that majority of strong Leaders are either military man, or democratically chosen governments that refuse to give power away - and they are often bad news.
Exactly this. And isn't it the reason so many people here are into startups? Technology is inherently undemocratic, and so are tech startups that succeed - but we don't call it that because this is "private land", not "politics land". And even ignoring the profit motive, that's why technology is appealing - a few smart people (backed by enough money) with one good design can force a change on the entire world that would never fly if you've asked people themselves.
And frankly, this might be something that we desperately need for the coming decades. Democratic countries have proven themselves unable to tackle the serious issuses of energy and climate change. They don't even bother making token gestures. On the other hand, if a decade ago they'd just said "fuck it, we're building those nuclear power plants whether you like them or not", we'd all be running on green energy now.
The point though, is that nobody can choose to not have the freedom to choose. And as such, we all wish to choose the best government for us - whatever form that may appear. But when it stops serving us...
If anything we have a conflict between people who want the country to be more Catholic and the ones who want it to be less Catholic, and a secondary push against any government because people seem to believe that entrepreneurs are force of good that is being murdered by the Evil Government through means like taxation.
Democracy is strong here - people are being indoctrinated in it since early childhood, and it's especially effective since we have the boogeyman of comunist USSR to scare them with.
That is highly contentious statement.
We could go in to the detail but I assumed my point was clear on this one.
Not saying the law is just, but the parents did it to themselves.
No, it couldn't. The person responsible for killing the child is the person that enforces the law and the person that created the law.
It follows then the person that kills a death row inmate is responsible for their death, not the inmate for committing a crime in the first place.
Anyway, it's not interesting, the only thing the parents are responsible for is having a second child and breaking the law. What people do to enforce the law is their responsibility not the responsibility of the parents that broke it, the same applies for the murderer on death row.
Just because something is legal doesn't absolve you of responsibility. The same way soldiers "just following orders" are responsible for the actions they commit at the behest of their superiors. Both the superiors and the soldiers are responsible
The criminal is only responsible for breaking the law, the only thing he had control over before he was caught (assuming he was caught for the sake of argument). We as society are responsible for dealing out the punishment.
How could the criminal be responsible for the punishment when he is not the one inflicting it on him/herself.
edit: To make my argument slightly easier to understand I'm going to give an extreme example
Let's say it's illegal to be a certain religion. Is it the insert religion here person's responsibility that he is punished and sent to a death camp?
As it turns out, responsibility for statutory laws is only transitive when applied to a party to the statute (e.g. a lawmaker or the enforcer).
A thief is responsible for restitution because depriving someone of their property is violation of natural law. A party who breaks a contract is responsible for fulfilling the terms they agreed to, because they made that agreement.
A thief, or a party who breaks a contract, is not responsible for a _statutory law_ enforced against them (unless they are a law maker or the law enforcer).
The creators and enforcers of the statue are responsible for creating it and enforcing it. They are responsible for its outcome, whether that is a dead murderer or a dead baby.
Your "need" to kill them because they crossed some line is your need, and you're the killer. (For better or worse...)
It's really similar to jumping out of the 10th floor window. It's the dv/dt that actually kills you, but it's you who is responsible for your own death.
Why won't you stop hitting yourself?
http://www.pri.org/stories/2013-04-15/china-past-due-one-chi...
tl;dr Couple had the legal right and license to have a second child, but the local family planning officials were over quota so they made up some bullshit about her license being expired and forced her to abort her 8-month old fetus.
If you can accept these as being OK because they are occurring in a different culture, then my only response is "God help you".
Well for one thing, you'd have a billion more potential farmers...
Population growth is a pretty old problem, and if recent developed nations' demographic reports show, it solves itself once you reach a certain level of development.
China's success is not necessarily because of the policies in place by the government. It could very well be in spite of them.
We have more than enough land and water to feed everyone, but the (simplified) problem is that when one person does all the farming for the whole world, nobody else can afford to trade for any of it from them.
Please enlight us then; Knowing that in china government is present in EVERY aspect of a life (religion, state, education, internet) I cannot see how their success is not because of the policies of the government. Any place that has an exploding growth is in deep shit just look at the whole africa. better off countries with exploding growth, turkey or maghreb countries are also in deep shit with big parts of the population immigrating to europe to survive this.
China already has an average of ~1.7 children per family [0] if you factor into account that the policy is enforced at a provincial level, and depending on that province, it may be the case that (0) people of certain backgrounds (e.g. farmers, minorities, parents with disabilities or medical conditions) can be exempt in some areas, (1) affluent people sometimes just pay the fine and have a second child, (2) in the most recent version of the law, if one parent is an only child, they were permitted have 2 children, (3) Chinese citizens who have resided overseas for some period of time may be permitted to have 2 children.
A lot of people may go from 1 to 2 children. Not that many people will go from 2 to 3 children. Children are very expensive for most families.
Population growth at China's scale is not a "pretty old problem". It's literally the largest population in the history of the world. No one, not even the U.S. government has an idea of what to do there. Then, add in the fact that when these policies were made, China had not even been through an industrial revolution and just had a MASSIVE famine (20-40 million deaths), I think the decision to have a one-child policy made a lot of sense.
A mistake was made. It was not understood that people in war-torn countries want peace and stability above all else, and are willing to hand in their liberties for it. It was also not understood that among people who don't trust news or words of any kind (justified in this case) it is rational to support the candidate that's closest to yourself genetically.
The link between democracy and wealth, stability and trust flow both ways, and it's easier to start with wealth, stability and trust than with democracy.
As I understand it (probably needs some correction):
This is a cold war being fought over who will supply Europe with natural gas. Russia, the current supplier, makes a ton of money off the current arrangement and it gives Russia influence over Europe. Europe has largely stayed out of the fracas publicly, to avoid antagonizing Russia, but supports the US's efforts to get the pipeline built to have an alternate source for the energy they need. I'm unclear as the role of the US in all this, but we're tightly allied with Western Europe, so I imagine we're representing Europe's interests by proxy. But what is clear is that it's no coincidence that the countries where all this craziness is happening are the countries along the planned route for the pipeline. Seen through this lens, everything starts to make sense, including Russia's endeavors to support Assad, an opponent of the pipeline.
Expecting stability in a region where one superpower wants a pipeline built and another doesn't isn't reasonable, no matter how ready the population is for democracy. Add in that the region has a ton of people who believe in a medieval religion that advocates violence against non-adherents, and what little hope there was vanishes.
To be clear, do you think that killing children or forced abortions were major contributors to that? Or does it just so happen that the two happened at the same time?
It seems like a bit of a logical stretch to me to say, "America installing democracy didn't work in Iraq, so we shouldn't be worried if China kills or forcefully aborts children."
Your assumption is a stretch. You are putting words in my mouth and that's just below level of conversation one should expect from HN community.
I still disagree with your overall point, but I was responded to what you wrote, not what you had in mind.
As I wrote elsewhere, it's hard enough in a vacuum to overthrow a dictatorship and start a free and functional democracy. It's even harder when there are a multitude of foreign powers interfering in your country preventing this from happening. Democracy is failing in the middle east because there are a lot of powerful people and nations who don't want it to succeed, want the region to remain unstable, and want the region to remain within their respective spheres of influence.
And finally, how does anybody know "what they really want" unless you ask the entire country in a free and fair manner? This is the big fallacy behind "the people prefer the lesser evil of dictatorship." You can't say that. You don't have a clue what the people prefer. This is the whole point: if the people want a dictatorship, give them a free, fair, democratic vote and let them choose dictatorship.
It's not even that easy. Ask the entire country in a free and fair manner and you'll quickly discover that people's opinions are not independent and do not exist in a vacuum. They may say to you they prefer living in a dictatorship because of a combination of not knowing anything else and pro-dictatorship propaganda. Or they may say "democracy!" because they drank the kool-aid.
I'm starting to believe that the only way to reach democracy as a stable state is for a society to naturally evolve towards it. Just leave it alone, let them figure things out; after a few generations they will probably sort out their culture and then they'll have a democracy that's sustainable because it'll be backed by decades of cultural growth. Trying to speed this transformation up is a dangerous game. Trying to speed it up with tanks and guns is just crazy.
No, that's dictating.
Does the presence of terrorists in developed countries prove "we" don't want democracy either?
Because I didn't see the people (of the middle east) choosing, I saw the same thugs and warlords of the past continuing to make the decision for them.
As for Africa, isn't most of the mess the result of Europe coming there, destroying their local governance, abusing them for a while and then withdrawing, leaving a huge power vacuum behind?
_The Prince of the Marshes_ is a good book to read on this subject.
But more seriously, thanks for the recommendation :).
And theocracies and kingdoms are slave states by definition, so most of what was around them is the same or worse.
You have a lot of exciting history reading ahead of you if you have the will to learn.
Is that what they teach in American schools? Let's see how you cope with this:
Also, I think it could benefit the earth if more countries would limit children.
Some, myself included, do deny that it could benefit the earth if more governments would enforce limits on children. I think humans are important to the future of the earth, and treating them in a cruel and brutal fashion will cause more problems than it solves.
I'm starting to think it's in our best interest to start building nuclear reactors pro bono all over Africa - you don't want them all to rise their standards of living by burning coal.
Larger creatures, and those higher on the food chain, having greater access to resources and higher survival rates, invest more in fewer children. Smaller creatures, with lesser access to resources and higher mortality rates, invest less in more children.
A rabbit doe can theoretically have 480 offspring, at 12 per litter, 10 times per year, over 4 years. That's the kind of thing you might do if 98% of your kids get eaten, because you will still have 10 left. Rabbits can also abort their litters when stressed.
An elephant might have one calf every four years, over 55 years, or a maximum of 14 children. That's what you might do if only one other species can reliably kill any of you, and you expect all of your babies to survive to adulthood.
With humans, the observed historical behavior is that poor or uneducated humans are relatively fecund, producing 8-30 children per pair, occasionally with multiple births. As wealth and education increase, and particularly when child mortality drops and elder care becomes socialized, birth rate drops down to the population replacement rate (or below). Middle-class first-worlders usually have 0-4 kids.
I am also pro child limit laws. I would suggest nothing too strict, just impose a tax on the third child and up. We know from psychology that little restrictions and the mere fact of a 'cost' would reduce the intrinsic desire of people to even take an action, in this case child bearing. Furthermore, I think a tax is a not an extreme measure, considering the fact that you would still be allowed to have children if you want. But do keep in mind that the poorest, less educated are often the ones to have plenty of children, which ends up harming the family, this might be good for them.
Example:
> In a 1994 study titled Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy, David Pimentel and Mario Giampietro estimated the maximum U.S. population for a sustainable economy at 200 million
The dangers of over-population myth assumes a naive view of a static society. For instance, we can reasonably have X land for food production, from that we can grow Y food and that can feed Z people so anything above Z would be harmful. The problem is that Y is dependent on human innovation and technology. Same can be said for most resources. We never did reach peak oil.
These predictions of inevitable decline have been wrong for a long time. I don't know why you put so much faith into the modern day equivalents.
What will need to change is the efficiency of how we as a species make use of the earth. We can feed many times the current world population easily. We can house many times the current world population easily. What we can't accomplish is doing those things the same way we do things now.
Advances in agriculture, energy and housing are needed. Advances which are happening as we furiously type at each other.
Either we all die horribly or we'll all be fine.
Inequality seems to be deeply encoded in the system. Capacity, in my opinion, only makes sense if you extrapolate from an average human, but there is no such thing as an average human being. However, I don't think it is an exaggeration that our western way of life is not sustainable on a global scale. I wish the fruits of human ingenuity could be enjoyed by every single one of us, but unfortunately it seems utopian.
Even the poorest in our society have incredible access to goods.
Just to list a few:
Wikipedia
Ability to talk to relatives from across the world to little or no cost (Skype and alternatives)
Ability to send money and store wealth cheaply (low cost ETFs, bitcoin, free checking)
Social acceptance of previously marginalized lifestyles
Access to wide variety of foods and entertainment
There has never been a better time to be alive, and I expect that to continue, despite greater inequality.
Some believe we should limit growth now, thus potentially preventing the problem before it becomes, well, a problem.
Nobody is suggesting nobody has children. People will still be born, discoveries made etc.
I've noticed here in the USA young girls getting pregnant and not being able to pursue higher education. I've also met some of my family in the Philippines who had many children by age 14. The husband's salary would pretty much all go to the children, and the wife would spend all day taking care of them. They are just trying to survive day to day-- little thought was given to trying to reach for anything higher.
Most people with access to birth control have children-- just when they're more ready for it. Not only does this make them more financially steady, but they are happier, and the same goes for their children.
"I find suggestive evidence that individuals’ access to contraceptives increased their children’s college completion, labor force participation, wages, and family incomes decades later." - Martha J. Bailey, an economics professor at the University of Michigan. Here's the article and link to her work. http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/09/the-long-term-effects-of-...
Brutal and cruel acts include:
* Killing of child immediately after birth
* Killing of child whilst being born, e.g. in birth canal during birth
* Termination of pregnancy as late as 8.5 months
* Forced abortions (incorporating kidnapping and assault)
All of these things have happened routinely as part of enforcement of the "one child" policy in China and have been widely reported on by human rights organisations. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#Human_rights_...
The policy has also encouraged infanticide/gendercide, corruption, child abandonment, neglect, and abuse.
you have to understand that laws here usually range from completely unenforced to strong discouragement with possible financial implications.
it wouldn't surprise me if there were incidents of the stuff you mention, but doesn't seem like any of it was ever common place.
friends actually said the opposite: people in rural areas would tend to have a lot of kids trying for a boy (something about boys getting to go to school and being able to work the farm), though i guess that's getting better with the education and gender equality stuff.
did you grow up in one of those areas or something? or know people that did? which areas are you talking about?
The main contention is that people who work in the public sector (which is giant in China) does not have the option because it is still, technically, illegal and will ruin your chances of promotion within the party or any state-owned enterprises. The law change merely levels the playing field for public sector workers so they have one less incentive to leave.
Some of the examples you listed have only one report. And it's policy that lasted almost 40 years in a country with a billion people.
Back up your statement with a citation please. Considering that they explicitly made forced abortions of these kinds illegal (although this is hardly enforced) implies that it was a big enough problem the government needed to step in.
The officials are not dumb, they probably saw the incentives structure and decided to ban this proactively.
GP has a good point. Singular events in few decades in a population of over a billion? That's either bullshit or random fluke, depending on how charitable you want to be towards the report, but it's definitely not something a reasonable person should care about.
I spent a summer in Beijing in 1998 and knew a young lady whose unborn baby was forcibly killed. So I don't buy "in some rural area".
Most of the brutal and cruel acts you listed are a result of carrying a child to birth. Surely they would have noticed that they were pregnant and had the opportunity to abort at an earlier time. Better yet, why couldn't they just... not have children? Do they not have access to contraception?
It's a terrible thing to let economic concerns so dominant the public arena and politics that people let the gov't decide how many kids they have.
You elect district leaders, who elect state leaders and the congress, and they elect the president and prime minister.
Technically, that's roughly the same system we have here with the electoral congress and faithless electors. The difference is that in the US, faithless electors are much less common than in China.
But you can look here and see that there is a history of faithless electors in the US too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector#List_of_fait...
China's system is actually not so different from ours was 150 years ago, so they're not that far off all-told. Or, actually, in a sense even more recently when the congress decided between Bush and Gore.
...from a list of candidates approved by the Communist Party.
In the US you generally get one Democrat and one Republican.
When you have only one party, it's as though you have no parties, you get to elect from many different candidates.
By the same token, in the States we get say in the president. The same is not true for places under the control of The Office of Insular Affairs & Puerto Rico.
At least the citizens of Hong Kong get to vote.
I'm not saying Chinese government is perfect, it absolutely has massive hurdles before it could be described as modern, but it's not nearly as bad as most Westerners make it out to be. A lot has changed in the last 30 years.
I agree, somewhat, about using vernacular, but that misses the point.
The USSR was no-more a communism because they said so than they'd have been a capitalism by saying so... You are as you do, not as you wish to be seen doing.
The communist party is just another dynasty in the long succession of dynasties. That they have a specific brand of ideology should not fool you - the current china is more of a pragmatic autocracy than an ideological communist state.
Has there ever been a nominally communist state that wasn't a pragmatic autocracy? That seems to be the main criticism of communism... that it's impossible without immoral coercion of some sort.
The problem of illegal and brutal "enforcement" only exists in some rural areas and nowadays with the popularity of Internet, it a lot more rare than before.
And thus it's not part of the incentive to end the one-child policy.
People talk about the dangers of overpopulation as if they're theoretical. They're not, numbers don't lie. At some point people have to stop having babies, whether humanely by a government mandate, or by the inhumanity of war and poverty.
If you want more, then there's only one solution - push harder for science and technology, so that we may use our resources in a more efficient way (Earth has a lot of carrying capacity on the surface, and we haven't even begin to colonize oceans). And then we may move to other planets.
But people need to grow up and realize they're not free to do anything they like, not yet. Freedom to breed is just another one we need to collectively decide to restrict for now. And then, like with every other coordination problem, you have to punish the defectors, because coordination is not a statically stable state.