China forces its citizens to have abortions if they have more than 2 children, and they censor the internet, so you can't access social media, like Facebook for instance. So, I would say they are ethically worse than the U.S.
It's an extreme example, but I want to underline that enforcing birth policy is not automatically immoral. China has a lot of people, of course they enforce birth policy.
Stepping into the murky quagmire of ethics, I could argue that the 2 to 4 million Vietnamese who died defending Vietnam from American invaders is much worse than censoring the Internet. That Internet is largely made by those same murderers and they have the largest spy agency in the world, the CIA, trying to break in and spy on seemingly everyone, so it must be filtered.
One could also argue that enforced family planning allows for centralized natural resource and pollution management. China per capita pollutes much less than the United States.
Again, I am not taking or defending these arguments, but it is easy to see that it is not clean and objectively true that one nation is always ethically superior to another.
If you (or anybody else) wants to count casualties, approximately 8 million Chinese dies in the Chinese Civil Wars. Surely the life of a Vietnamese person is not more valuable to America than a life of a Chinese person is to China.
And we also ought to include the lives of the between 15 and 45 million who starved to death in Mao's "Great Leap Forward."
It is also worth noting that China was largest foreign backer of North Vietnam, providing "both financial aid and the deployment of hundreds of thousands of military personnel in support roles" (quote from wikipedia), so it is untrue to say that the United States in uniquely culpable for the war's casualties.
For example different people will pick different ways to count. Some will distinguish between domestic and foreign, claiming that there some ethical difference. These people might claim that a government should kill its citizens that cause problems in the name of social order, and that the US is unjust and horrible because they don't kill enough dissenters.
Some will claim that lives lost in mistakes are different than lives lost in oppression and war. These people might claim that the great leap forward was good in intention, but lacked nuance in execution that could have saved many lives.
Some will claim that government and corporations should not be separated so will point the all the slave owning corporations and humans rights abusing industrialists in the USA and lump them in with the government.
All I am saying is that there are gray areas here, and that I cannot see a way to see different perspectives as objectively wrong or right. In some things there is objective right and wrong. Does Man-made CO2 change the climate, yes unambiguously no amount of perspective wiggling changes this. Is it ethical to make social that mildly harms one group to prevent a perceived larger harm to another, this seems fuzzier and innately requires something to be 'perceived' correctly.
If it's about the abortions, apparently there's two types of action taken[1]. If it's in an urban area, they apparently either charge a fee or don't assign a household register to the child (not sure what that means), but if it's rural they do apparently force abortions. If you're okay with the social policy, it seems like there are solutions that don't require forced abortions (such as implanted birth control). Whether that aspect is still ethically worse than the U.S. or not probably depends on your view on reproductive rights.
1: https://www.quora.com/What-happens-when-a-family-disobeys-th...
One possible argument might be that the social cost of that unborn child is so high that is it is morally reprehensible to have conceived it in the first place, and that such an action is a horrible crime.
Plenty of places suspend human right to imprison or even execute people who have committed crimes. It could be seen that such an action isn't even isn't even punitive, just corrective. Some might feel that the government simply removes the child before it is born, and then is lenient because the mother is not imprisoned for her indiscretion against society.
Other possible arguments could stem from the long term environmental harm that the child will have on the environment. If someone places higher value on nature than on human life this argument naturally follows.
- Paying taxes
- Child schooling
- Vaccination
- Health care
A population growth policy that targets birth is not so entirely different from those, as fundamentally different as it may feel, depending on your background. Giving people the option of either birth control or an abortion if they get pregnant would be one way to handle that. Have a fundamental disagreement with abortion? Use birth control. Have a problem with birth control too? Take it up with the state, just like in those items above.
I'm not advocating for this, I'm just pointing out it's not fundamentally different than other things we already do.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system#Effect_on_rural_w...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_in_China#Hukou_refor...
But things change. US is becoming more fascist which is potentially leading to an exodus of intelligent minds - who are perhaps going to be migrating to one of their main competitors, China.
The one good thing about China is that they are open to changes in their policies (but can't change the party).
It will be interesting to see how this plays out with all the immigration talk. I really hope Brexit and stuff like this don't actually happen. To me it feels like the reversal of the Fall of the Berlin wall.