Burying ‘One Child’ Limits, China Pushes Women to Have More Babies | Hacker News Reader

Burying ‘One Child’ Limits, China Pushes Women to Have More Babies

nytimes.com

64 pointsahmedalsudani95 comments

China's one-child policy was a huge success. They avoided a big population run-up in the gap the introduction of reasonably good medicine and a high enough standard of living that birth rates went down. India didn't do that.

Now that China is developed enough that birth rates have gone down as a result, they've backed off on the one-child policy. It did its job.

The country has a long history of famines. China's last famine was in 1985. Remember, China has limited arable land and many mouths.

By the same measure, the great leap forward was a huge success.

Perfectly balanced.

As all things should be.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And what is the strongest possible interpretation? How are we supposed to follow that rule when it's subjective on what is strong and what is invalid reasoning?

I think the point is to not criticize in bad faith.

You are meant to use common sense and be the judge of what is and is not a bad faith criticism or arguement.

Maybe we don't know what the strongest is, but a lower bound is that Animats wasn't justifying every conceivably related atrocity.

The real irony is dang assuming that anonuser wasn't responding to the "strongest plausible interpretation" is not the "strongest plausible interpretation" of anonuser's comment.

Good point.

It's unclear to me what the strongest plausible interpretation is.

Either a) One child was a massive success because it lead to massive infanticide (to the tune of 30 million girls).

b) One child was massively successful because it lead to 30 million girls that are officially non-persons in China.

OP heaps praise on a Maoist policy... and I'm arguing in bad faith?

You're correct, China had a long history of famines prior to the communist party coming to power in 1949. Shortly after they took power, and achieved stability in Korea, they began to set the stage to end this from happening again.

I never heard of a famine in 1985 though.

I'm not sure why you're getting down-voted, China has had quite a long history of famines (usually lack of rain in the northwest).

The last one was '59-'61.

Lots of weather patterns are said to have changed since then. Is the northwest more consistently rainy now?

The one-child policy also resulted in the worst gender imbalance in the world, which "could lead to instability as more men remain unmarried, raising the risks of anti-social and violent behavior."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-says-its-ge...

All it will take is a couple of wars to restore the balance. That's how it has always been historically.

A neat gender balance would be better for the people involved than an insanely skewed gender balance that favours men.

That being said, one could substitute China -> America and, gender -> wealth, unmarried -> jobless, and I think the accusation would be similar. I've had Americans seriously tell me that the country is on the brink of civil war, which seems about as bad as anything that could come from China's gender imbalance. I'd link that to economic problems, it is the explanation that makes the most sense to me.

Basically, there is a real concern; but I'm not sure it is an /unacceptable/ outcome of the One Child Policy. It might just be an outcome. The OCP can easily be cast as a policy of courage and prudence; overpopulation carries a real threat of starvation and collapse if it overshoots what the local resources can support.

I don't know what America has to do with anything, but China's income inequality is also worse than America's, so there's that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

Ah, sorry, should have linked my source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_distribut...

Wealth, not income. Although I do now see the data is 2000 era, so the situation might be different now. China was a very equal country by wealth back then, though.

For China, the difference between 2000 and 2018 is huge. In everything.

> I've had Americans seriously tell me that the country is on the brink of civil war

It's probably not a good idea to make value judgments based on the predictions of people obsessed with hysterical political news sources by companies who have make a living selling the public a worldview divided on stark black/white us vs them tribal lines. Where every minor bit of inane news coming out of Washington is blown up into big stories to fuel some grand political drama that never ends.

Meanwhile the world IRL for the vast majority has hardly changed at all in any significant way.

China's gender imbalance is only marginally worse than India's. The one-child policy may have been a contributory factor, but the fundamental problem is a deep-seated cultural preference for boys. You can't change that unless you're willing to talk honestly about the dangers of gender imbalance. In that sense, China's dire prognostications are a sign of progress.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

> the fundamental problem is a deep-seated cultural preference for boys

Not simply a cultural preference but a rational economic one as the odds a man will earn more than women has quite the better odds, and given their circumstances (and motivation to improve them) people are willing to compromise on the matter. Which is not simply the result of some conspiratorial patriarchal cultural phenomenon (although I'm sure that plays a role as it has elsewhere) but rather something amplified in developing countries where low tech labour and farm jobs are more common than knowledge/service work, favouring the physical attributes of men.

Also no dowry needed for male children.

in countries with so many men and so few women, I imagine that will switch

Actually in China the tradition is that the groom gives money to the family of the bride

Might not be true, check out the book factory girls. Men stay on the farm and do not earn, woman to the city and make way more.

That doesn't change this equation. China no longer needs the one child policy likewise the benefits of male offspring have diminished because the developing country has moved away from largely labour/farm jobs to mechanized factories and various supporting industries in urban environments where brute strength is no longer the deciding favour.

The changing economic incentives will address the gender inbalances faster than some government child policy or cultural/ideological shift...

Funny story: when my wife and I went in for our first ultra sound in Beijing, the technician wasn’t allowed to tell us the sex of the baby but covertly pointed out the obvious boy marker so that we didn’t really have a doubt.

India has a gender imbalance, and no one-child policy.

The problem is a social preference for sons over daughters.

What should happen is that the families of women are given money and houses by their daughter's husbands. Then girls will be seen as more of an investment than boys, and more families - particularly poor ones - will selectively abort males instead of females. Already this is playing out in China.

Unfortunately this also becomes a problem in the West, because migrants from countries like India are predominantly male, and Indian mothers are still selectively aborting females even when they move to countries like the UK.

This was all part of the horror started by Mao, resulting in 45 to 100 million deaths.

They forcibly sterilized women against their will. They encouraged mass abortions and infanticide. They turned neighbors against each other. They separated couples against their will.

Some success.

Didn’t most of the deaths come from famine, not the one child policy?

They were both caused by the same inhuman ideology enforced by a madman.

China's one child policy is from the 1980's. Mao was out of power and dead by that point.

My mistake. The guys following Mao were completely different - not following the same ideology at all.

Uh, you're being sarcastic but that is true. Deng Xiaoping is about as close to Mao ideologically as Trump is to Obama.

The revisionists and/or reformers survived the cultural revolution and won the power struggle after Mao's death.

Trump is actually quite close to Obama in ideology. They employ different methods in service to basically the same masters.

Trump is closer to Mao than he is Obama - in Trump's corruption, attacks on the media, attacks on the educated and intellectuals, attacks on minorities, boosting of racial nationalism, and attempts to steal tax dollars and profit off his leadership role.

The parties in the US are wildly different - one party is the party of billionaires, and you can tell because they pursue tax cuts for the very rich and cutting the social safety net for everyone else.

Pretty low bar. "Hey, Deng is better than this guy who killed millions!"

Let's check in on how these "reformers" are doing, shall we?

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/china-s-xinjiang-p...

Sounds like paradise.

I think the reason people down-voted you was because you attributed many perceived policy faults of the Chinese Communist Party over many decades to Mao himself. Rather, a careful analysis of history would show that there's profound difference in how each generation of CCP leader ruled the country, apart from the generalizations one could make about communist ideology as a whole.

And yet, they still put the image of a mass murderer on their currency. Can you imagine the EU putting Hitler on currency?

That says a lot.

You've been doing ideological flamewar in this thread. That's not what this site is for, regardless of how right you are, so could you please not?

Ditto, and especially, for nationalistic flamewar.

Yes, and the famine was due to Mao's farming policies, Deep plowing, etc. It was also in the 1950's and 60's (not 1985), and the generally accepted death count is 15-30 million, not 100 million.

Lot's of misinformation in the parent comments

Not even close.

Here's one for 77 million. Estimates start at 45 million and go up from there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_by_communist_reg...

Yes, and that number just keeps getting adjusted downward doesn't it.

By the Chinese government, yes. Not by everyone else. In truth, we will never really know how bad it was because China was closed off back then. First hand accounts only tell of absolute death and misery.

Have you ever seen a travel-log through rural china, there's a broadcast channel (MHz TV) here in MD that plays a lot of them and the shear physical evidence of famine written on the bodies of people is awful.

All of it is, of course, surrounded by narration about the current plenty that exists, which makes it worse somehow.

Which famine are you referring to? The last major famine in China, as far as I know, was in the 1950s/60s during their Great Leap Forward.

Many people are not aware of this but large parts of India are already below the replacement birth rate.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_union_ter...

And this happened without heavy-handed state policies.

Just adding some color commentary: population growth trails fertility rates, so the population in India should keep on growing for a while before the below-replacement fertility rates cause the population size to shrink.

Declining demographics is not only a problem in China, but many countries in the world. Japan's government policies, for example, have had limited success.

https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/tackling-de...

China's backtrack is also reminiscent of Singapore's campaigns, which also had problems raising its fertility rate after its "Stop-at-Two" campaign in the 60s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_planning_in_Singapo...

A side effect of encouraging more births in a patriarchal society such as China will be fewer selective female abortions.

Also, South Korea just went through the same backtracking.

>To put it bluntly, the birth of a baby is not only a matter of the family itself, but also a state affair,” the official newspaper People’s Daily said

Lest anyone think otherwise, thd regime remains deeply authoritarian and has echoes of early 20th cent. Progressive thinking from Europe and elsewhere.

Indeed, the brilliant people that came up with the One Child Policy were influenced by the environmentalists in the 70s.

"Although the fertility rate began to decline, the Chinese government observed the global debate over a possible overpopulation catastrophe suggested by organizations such as Club of Rome and Sierra Club. While visiting Europe in 1979, one of the top Chinese officials, Song Jian, read two influential books of the movement, The Limits to Growth and A Blueprint for Survival. With a group of mathematicians, Song determined the correct population of China to be 700 million. A plan was prepared to reduce China's population to the desired level by 2080, with the one-child policy as one of the main instruments of social engineering."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy

The idea that baby production is a community concern (it is literally perpetuation of the community) is nearly universal. Modern western society is the outlier in treating it as a personal affair. (And even in the U.S., people who "choose" not to have kids are viewed skeptically.)

Yeah but progressivism and accompanying eugenics of early 20th cent were seen favorably by both intrawar Germany and the SU and importantly to be controlled by the central gov.

You went from a comment by an official about the state's interest in babies to progressivism, eugenics, soviets and Nazis. It's word salad trollery and you should, as they the thing says, 'eschew' it.

They all think they know best and want to tell people what to do.

That really misrepresents it - eugenics was popular across much of the globe in the early 20th C, particularly in the USA. It was mainly the actions of Germany through the war that killed the idea off in the democratic nations in the postwar years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

I genuinely don't understand the constant push for population growth. Why does population need to keep growing? GDP? Paying taxes for some social benefits for the old?

How is this sustainable? When does the ever increasing growth end?

Some see it as a cultural arms race. A "the other cultures aren't stopping having children, so we need to out-populate them!" sort of deal.

What the fuck is with the idiotic voting going on here lately? Every single comment I make, many simply pointing out facts or objectively mentioning something uncontroversial, is getting downvoted lately. What I said in this comment is absolutely the mindset of a lot of people. I am not one of those people.

For an example of this see the quiverfull movement in the US. Those "N Kids and Counting" shows were about members of the quiverfull movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiverfull

The linked article shows the number of "quiverfull" people is less than a rounding error: 0.0025%.

So, not so much a "movement" as a reality TV show.

They're the explicit part of a larger idea.

I grew up Baptist, and remember the preacher explicitly making the same argument. There just were not a lot of people who defined their identity around it; they still internalized the idea though.

The nature of exponential growth is that it doesn’t really matter that much how small the starting number is. You quickly end up with a big number no mattwr what.

> What the fuck is with the idiotic voting going on here lately?

Maybe because it was a short low effort statement on a rather complex topic? I mean I'm not innocent of doing this but I never complained about down votes...

On topic, in the case of China I highly doubt being the country with the highest population puts too Much pressure on you, especially if your "arch enemy" america is at a quarter of what you have. It has more to do that they realize supporting the older generation isn't possible with the system they are currently running (it's based on the German system and they see what kind of problems we have over here even without a one child policy). But apart from that in general an aging population hurts society on a purely psychological level. So it doesn't seem that unreasonable to stop a very restrictive policy that arbitrarily crippled population growth and then in turn try to reverse the changes in society and mind set it created (little emperor syndrome to name the most popular instance).

People living longer, governments with generous social spending end up with that spending swallowing up the budget as working age population shrinks, so without a working age population increase less and less workers supporting more dependents.

I mean, we all know non-negative increase eventually exceeds carrying capacity of planet, though that capacity has been bumped up a few times due to technology (cheap fossil fuels, green revolution, etc).

The “easy” solution is to keep growth juiced and hope we’ll figure something out (technological or societal structural innovation) before we hit one of the hard limits.

I’m a bit more interested to see what happens when the megacities exhaust their water supplies, which they are burning through at an amazing rate.

China's total fertility rate is already well below replacement level, their population will start shrinking around 2027. They're just attempting to boost the birth rate so the dependency ratio (number of people who work to support the retired) isn't so dire.

China's total fertility rate is already well below replacement level

I hadn't heard about this, but a quick DDG shows it's true.

"Census data for 2000 produced an estimated TFR of 1.22 children per woman (for the year November 1999 through October 2000"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2849170/

Unfortunately the article is from 2009, and a lot has happened in China in the last decade. I'd like to see some updated studies, if anyone has a linky.

A "one child policy" is pretty obviously below replacement level.

The one child policy was never a strict limitation to one child, policies are almost never perfectly successful at surfing their goals, and it was weakened in a series of steps already, so it's not at all inconsistent with it having existed to be surprised that the actual birthrate on China is below replacement.

Agree that we need to lower the population but this is best done gradually. A sharp demographic shift cause a lot of instability and problems.

With too dramatic shift you can’t take care of old people anymore. People will reject essentially murdering old people to save the environment.

I think birt rates around 1.8 - 1.9 is probably a sensible rate. That will cause a gradual decline. 1.2-1.3 is way too low and will cause a lot of problems.

> People will reject essentially murdering old people

Troublingly, the crisis in U.S. healthcare suggests otherwise. We're currently murdering old people not for the survival of the species and/or civilization, but to increase healthcare and insurance industry profits.

Recent U.S. politics has shown that exterminating the elderly/sick/poor/dissenting is essentially a marketing problem. Don't call them "old people," call them "welfare queens." Convince people that it will only ever happen to someone else (immigrants, people with different skin color and/or ideology than you, "poor people" who deserve what's coming to them -- quite unlike temporarily embarrassed millionaires like yourself, etc).

Yessir, market your mass-murder correctly and people will think it's "business as usual."

As a counterpoint, we need to come to grips with the fact that we, as a society, cannot afford to pay several hundred thousand to multiple millions of dollars in healthcare costs at the end of most people’s lives.

You know, the USA is at the extreme end in this respect, in most other countries it doesn’t cost that much to provide healthcare.

Declare health insurance a mandatory nonprofit industry. Truly nonprofit. I view education the same way, and suggest stripping it down to just what's necessary to learn. Room, professor, chairs, chalk board, light bulb, books. Student brings pencils and paper. Adminstration should be streamlined by combining university systems. Costs should be low for the state and the only thing a student needs to provide are good test scores on entrance exams.

Basically austerity for health insurance middlemen and schools but no charge for education or healthcare. For example, I see a big push to air condition schools and I'm left unsure how my generation (Xennial) even survived. Not only my schools but my home never had air conditioning either.

These things are not necessities. Neither are health insurance profits.

> we, as a society, cannot afford to pay

...because the giga-rich stole from us. Let's not couch their actions in the passive voice, or pretend this situation just happened somehow. The "neoliberal" (ie not new or liberal) takeover of America was orchestrated by the rich for their own benefit, and almost 40 years later we're still suffering the effects: stagnant wages, rising profits, and ever-increasing wealth inequality.

There is indisputably enough of wealth for everyone on Earth to die with dignity. The problem is distribution, not quantity.

> several hundred thousand to multiple millions of dollars in healthcare costs

Healthcare price, not cost. The underlying cost is quite affordable.

The price is not because the insurancestudent debt/pharmaceutical/healthcare industries extort obscene profits (and taxpayer subsidies!) by leaching off a life critical, non-negotiable service. See above.

Need to maintain the debt.

Countries like the US would face serious questions if they re-projected population growth into declines as that would mean there will be less workers around in the future to pay taxes to service the debt.

Once mass urbanization takes hold, it is especially difficult to counteract declining birth rates. This is especially true in highly patriarchal societies like China, Japan, and Italy, where motherhood and career is much more of an "either/or" proposition and where men are much less likely to help out with housework.

Classing China in with Japan and Italy on this is weird and probably incorrect. Chinese women generally work after having kids, and take advantages of lots of child care resources missing from the other two countries (grand parents, lots of daycare/kindergartens). Chinese (especially Shanghainese) men are more likely to be henpecked, and they will do house work.

I wonder if China will be forced to encourage immigration. Illegal immigration is apparently already growing rapidly.

Companies can’t find workers anymore so they start smuggling in people to do the job

At some point this illegal stream will become so large that one has to consider legalization.

Automation will always be a superior option to immigration. You own the tech you develop, and you don’t have to be comfortable with your nation’s culture changing due to mass immigration.

Japan is starting to crack a bit on this front (allowing immigrants in), but China has the resources to see such a policy succeed. It also behooves them to develop these technologies as part of their China 2025 campaign.

What's cheaper - a Burger-Flip'O-Tron for a million dollars + an expensive maintenance contract, or a $500/month migrant worker who you can replace for any reason whatsoever and find another one happy to take their job?

Remember that in those countries labour is incredibly cheap and no, automation is not a superior option to immigration.

It's cheaper for your made-up model. I can make up one where it is more expensive.

Migrants who don’t want to assimilate into your culture are far more expensive than the labor costs you’re saving.

Very true, especially now when successful integration rates seems to be plummeting as we see 3rd generation immigrants reverting back to the anti-social behaviours that exist in the countries they come from.

Also when you consider migrants are much more likely to send money back home, you have to ask what about the costs of having workers who don't then spend that money in your own economy? How can you have these multiplication effects if the money being made isn't even re-injected?

> 3rd generation immigrants reverting back to the anti-social behaviours that exist in the countries they come from.

Can you expand on this?

It's something that is not easy to find information on due to the sensitive nature of the subject. But with just a bit of google, you can find things like this:

https://www.thelocal.fr/20160109/immigrants-struggling-to-in...

The article there seems to be saying even with 2nd generation immigrants from africa are reporting less integration as they feel more isolated from the identity than their parents and find themselves worse off economically.

So if this is the case, I don't see any reasons why the 3rd generation and onwards would suddenly bounce back from their isolated and relatively poor positions on their own without more intervention from the host nation.

Combine that with new waves of immigration, why wouldn't you see some of these 3rd generation ethnic africans find new identity in the africans that have just showed up?

> What's cheaper - a Burger-Flip'O-Tron for a million dollars + an expensive maintenance contract, or a $500/month migrant worker who you can replace for any reason whatsoever and find another one happy to take their job?

What is cheaper, hiring a plumber to fix your shower for $200 or getting your slave you pay with rations fix it?

Maybe we should just bring slavery back, so much cheaper.

China actually is in the process of establishing immigration agency and relevant laws/policies to encourage immigration.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/21...

That has always been true for the last 10 years at least, at least they’ve been talking about it. When it actually happens will be notable however.

As far as the history shows, China has never been an immigration country, unless the home of immigrates were conquered by China.

I am here to help

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

It is not because of one child policy that results in male babies birth rate higher than female’s. Actually，in China，this policy is not “powerful” to everyone，especially in poor area.however，birth rate in poor area is much severer（in many villages，it is possible that girls were killed when they were born）.In ancient times，birth rate was still not equal（sometimes even worse than today’ ）without one child policy.

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