Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com