China allows couples to have three children
bbc.com
bbc.com
1) There is an entire family planning bureaucracy within the CCP setup to manage this; would do you do with all those people if they are not needed anymore?
2) China is more strict on population planning for certain minorities - not officially, but in the background; think Muslims in western China or Tibet or Mongolians, or ethnic Koreans in northeastern China... If you had no population planning for all the Han chinese, you might have a brighter light cast on this small in number but impactful population control actions.
3) Once someone has power, why let go of it? The CCP survives by creating a fairly good life for the majority in China - and it has done that extremely well - in exchange for control. It is easier to go from 3 back to 2, than it is to go from unlimited back to 2, for example.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-uses-coercive-poli...
56.5% decline in birth rates in one year when the right sample is taken. Beyond shocking. Doing such a thing with your left hand while allowing more births for Han Chinese with your right hand must be seen for what it is: genocide.
There are others in the thread who seem to be suggesting that because Han Chinese have also been subject to population control measures, that my point is somehow invalid.
No one has yet explained why we see such steep birth rate declines, specifically in Uyghur regions, relative to the rest of China, only in the last half decade or so.
You know, right around the time they started rounding up millions of people in that same ethnic group and putting them in camps. The Chinese government has many euphemisms and rationalizations for these camps, but they don't dispute their existence. In any case we have satellite imagery.
What can one conclude about these coinciding actions by the Chinese state if not genocide? If it's not that, what is it?
You can find the 36 page report here:
https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2021-05/Fami...
Edit: via this summary from ASPI (in case the AWS link above breaks in the future)
https://www.aspi.org.au/report/family-deplanning-birthrates-...
so if the birth rate in that region simply fall to national average, it will went down 80%. I think it's an perfect example of how numbers lie, but most people don't have any vested interest to find out.
The report is named: "Family De-planning: The Coercive Campaign to Drive Down Indigenous Birth-rates in Xinjiang". This is not a case of media misrepresentation no matter how badly you want it to be.
The conclusion is typically found at the end of a report. Why don’t you go back and try again.
After rereading as you suggested, it also said 'Urumqi is also a Han-majority city .... In 2018, the city’s birth-rate grew by about 25 percent compared to the pre-2017 baseline, from 8.5 births per thousand people to 12 per thousand.' So at the same time Han in Urumqi were having 8.5 per 1000 birth, Minorities in Kashgar were having 68 per 1000 birthrate. If that's anything, I'd say the CCP is genociding Han Chinese for selectively enforcing the policy.
I think the act to list only percentages without listing exact number is dubious, and I am confident the pattern would be similar.
You're comparing birth rates of a major city full of unmarried Han who have been lured to the area by government incentives and other work arrangements, to a predominantly rural area. Those birth rates will always be divergent; anywhere in China, and most of the rest of the world. The part about Han being purposely incentivized to move to Xinjiang is explained in section 5 of the report.
The report does not dispute that Uyghur birth rates were higher relative to Han Chinese in the past. It makes a convincing case that Uyghurs are being targeted now, at the same time birth control policies are being loosened in Han Chinese parts of the country. That policy discrepancy is intentional, and we should expect it to continue unless we speak out against it.
Finally, we can agree that the Chinese government is also evil for controlling the births of Han Chinese and ruining life for generations of their own people who had to contend with the CCP's signature and unique natal authoritarianism.
It's linked in the Methodology appendix on page 28 of the report. I copied it here for you since it seems you haven't made it that far yet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dH-GMlRZ8Kc1Lp5or5vS...
Understandable considering you were confused about the report only being "20ish pages".
As for the fruit: Yes, what a wonderful bounty you've brought for us on this fine Memorial Day.
So the conclusion was from Xinjiang's 2017 and 2018 birthrate, which respectively as included was 15.88 and 10.69, so that's where the 50% drop came from. However, the same index for China overall was 12.43 and 10.94, where we see around 20% drop. I don't think it can be categorically concluded it's some racially-motivated policy. (whether it's a good policy or bad is a whole different matter.)
Me: Here’s an article about this report.
You: The press is misrepresenting the abstract.
Me: Nope. Here’s the full report.
You: The report draws the wrong conclusions. Besides, they don’t even share the dataset.
Me: Nope. Here’s the dataset linked in the report.
You: The data show that Xinjiang birth rates declined 30% more than they did in the rest of China. As you can see I was right all along.
I’m curious how you managed to make this journey. It doesn’t seem like you’ve been participating in this discussion in good faith, frankly. I could be wrong though. In that case, I would recommend you actually read what people are trying to show you before attempting to criticize it. You are clearly working backwards from your priors.
It's quite easy to see that birth rate in Xinjiang falls around the national average in 2018. Stil, I'm glad you found the actual dataset in the appendix.
In addition, ASPI is notorious for being sponsored by the US, UK and Australian weapons industry who have a vested interest in drumming up this kind of thing. I would take anything they have to say with a massive grain of salt [2].
[1] https://twitter.com/drStuartGilmour/status/13938342716939632...
1. Did population control allow Han Chinese/CCP to maintain their dominance in size over the growing minorities who were largely still living the agrarian lifestyle? 2. Minorities' would have their growth exponentially reduced over a hundred year. 3. And by increasing it now, Han Chinese can now exponentially grow again with momentum over minorities.
So in the background, it seems there's more than meet the eye to maintain Han Chinese power over other minorities in the country.Similar to Japanese (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people) and other "race"; same strategy and intent, different tactic.
> When the policy was implemented, 26 [out of 31] Chinese provinces allowed ethnic minorities to have an additional child.
There were other exemptions too - for example, rural farmers could often also be exempted, particularly if their first child was a daughter.
ethnic Korean from north east China here, many of my relatives had 2 children while our Han neighbors only had 1
LAMO
My mother was almost forced to sterilze, which would make me disappear in 1984, she is Han Chinese. That was because local beauracrats' stupid idea of birth planning.
Can you stop making CCP looking better by saying it's discrinating against minorities...
Edit: I was the 2nd child.
That is a new concept to me, unless maybe it was wealth / income / genetic disease related?
Of course, forced sterilization is not going to work in the cities. Because people with some form of certain degree of intellect understand the use of contraception and can just forgo their job or certain possession to pay the fine.
Forced sterilization was never an explicit policy. Everyone with decent intellect knows that's ridiculous.
It was practiced, of course, out of middle and low level bureaucracy's sense of "meeting the goal".
Of course CCP has not enough resources to enforce a ridiculous policy anyway.
* https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/october/china...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Birth_rate_in_China.svg
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
Industrialization, urbanization, reduction in child mortality, and the education of women accomplished a reduction in the rate in China just like it did/does just about everywhere else.
The ghastly human rights violations that led from the policy were completely unnecessary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/F...
Which shows a massive male surplus particularly in the young demographics, way larger than you would biologically expect. How can we claim this policy has no effect if clearly people are still killing female infants?
No effect ≠ no need.
The intended purpose was to reduce birth rates for population control. This was being accomplished before the the policy even came into effect.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/11/30...
It's also China, where they put toxic stuff in watered down milk to make it look as foamy as protein-rich good milk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal , i.e. a place with a lot of corruption and where gaps are possible.
I sort of hate buerocracy in all its shapes, but given the choice between a western style buerocrat and a marxist buerocrat, I choose the former.
Now I am more amused at the notion that modern China is Marxist.
https://gazette.com/news/born-in-the-usa-without-a-shred-of-...
Buddy of mine had two, one was illegal. When they make a law that you can have two, he made a third. I guess he will make a 4th now to send a clear message to the government :-)
There just was bribery or fine, but they still are registeredin the system? Or are they fake papers they have?
Can you think of a law ("stopping rule") that could even get the expected number of boys higher than the expected number of girls?
.50(B) + .25(G+B) + .25(G+G) = .75(B) + .75(G)
Unfortunately, you'll be quickly rate limited by birth capacity, even if you somehow manage to double the amount of children per birth.
Also, asymptotically, you'll still be around a 50% split.
But I think there were selective-abortion shenanigans, and that the policy was effectively in response to them. If we assume each family wants, as its first objective, to maximize the number of sons, and, as its second objective, to maximize the number of daughters, then each selective-aborting family would have exactly one daughter followed by one son under such a policy.
So, if you have 1 B, you stop.
If you have 1G, you may have another child, which is somewhat more likely to be a girl than a boy. So you'd expect this policy (in isolation) to produce a surplus of girls.
Yes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-Child_Policy
“Peasants” (their term, not mine) and minorities* could have more than one. It was very, very common. Apparently half of the country was effectively under a two-child policy.
* There are 55 recognized minority groups in China (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_minorities_in_China).
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:China_single_age_populati...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USA2020dec1.png
The proportional male surplus in China is just over double that of the US. Of course there is something different happening in China, but asserting that this is mostly due to people "killing female infants" is ludicrous. By your logic, there "only" about 2/5 (portionally) of female infants getting killed in the United States as well.
Why is it easier to imagine that Chinese people murder infants than it is to imagine literally any other scenario?
Why is it easier to assume that a massive sex imbalance is the result members of a particular group of people being psychopaths rather than the result of some systemic cause? Hmm.
Also, I assumed the reason there was no evidence posted for the Chinese infanticide claim is that it’s extremely common and has been known for a long time. I just assumed everyone was aware.
It doesn’t mean people killing literal babies, but does mean stuff like more abortions of female embryos. [0]
Wikipedia [1] has a more general article with more links to sources.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2016/02/01/465124337/how-chinas-one-chil... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_infanticide_in_China
Ancient cultures practiced it much more frequently and I think shows how different cultures have different values for life.
If a girl were adopted in China she would still show up in this dataset. I haven't heard about foreign adoption being popular in China (like it would be in eg. Africa), so the unbalance is likely to be the result of aborting/killing baby girls.
Strong statement. Evidence please.
https://www.npr.org/2016/02/01/465124337/how-chinas-one-chil...
Not because they're inhuman, of course; that sort of behavior has happened all throughout human history. It's just that, with China in the 20th century, the scale was huge.
Note that there was a big shift in the gender ratio before sex determination by ultrasound was widely available in rural China.
Both are well documented and account for the 30M extra males than females (Can’t hide this cultural bias).
"It hasn't happened in the last 2 centuries" isn't an argument against Malthusian collapses either. China has a long memory.
I have a lot of sympathy for the argument that the One-child Policy was a mistake. In my view, it was. But I also have a lot of sympathy for the people who implemented it. As ideas go it isn't an obvious mis-step in the class as, say, Communist economic policies.
> As ideas go it isn't an obvious mis-step in the class as, say, Communist economic policies.
No, it's an exemplary case of completely bonker policies in rank with "4 pests" campaign.
Sadly, stuff like that is very much intentional, and are signature of Maoesque political thought:
You intentionally make populace outraged over something very obvious, and then keep obsessing over it for no reason making people think it's a big thing, when it isn't.
When people people have something more close, personal, and painful to be outraged about, it shifts people's attention from an even more obvious fact of complete governance failure, and communist occupation of the country.
This is a questionable ascertain. The birth rate had already dropped, and had been dropping for over a decade, before the policy kicked in.
That was due to the original 2-child policy from the 70s. To rephrase accurately: "family planning" prevented ~300M births, adjusted downward from 400M since 100M+ previously unregistered birth was logged since reversion to two child policy again. There's no credible analysis that suggest PRC family planning policies did not directly and dramatically reduce population. 300M IUDs and 100M sterilizations aren't placebos.
[citation needed]
Where is there more information on this? I do not see it mentioned for China:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-child_policy
The birth rate also started falling in the 1960s:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Birth_rate_in_China.svg
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINCHN
> There's no credible analysis that suggest PRC family planning policies did not directly and dramatically reduce population. 300M IUDs and 100M sterilizations aren't placebos.
Of course the policies reduced fertility rates and population growth. The question is whether they were needed in the first place, or whether general development would have achieved the same result anyway.
I'm surprised this isn't covered on wiki, or at least PRC family planning article.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinwhyte/files/challeng...
Pg 149.
>Was China's Birth Control Program Voluntary in the 1970s?
>With these ambitious goals a national campaign of mandatory birth planning was put into full motion. The slogan that summarized the three demographic components of the campaign was “later, longer, and fewer” (wan, xi, shao 晚、稀、少). “Later” referred to the effort to enforce late marriage—at least after age 25 for brides and 27 or 28 for grooms in the city, and after 23 for brides and 25 for grooms in the countryside. “Longer” referred to requiring greater intervals between permitted births—at least four years. “Fewer” meant limits on the number of births allowed—no more than two children for urban families and three for rural families, with penalties for those who did not comply
>falling in the 1960s
With respect to graph, plot some 101 PRC history. Early 60s... residual of Great Leap Forward famines. Mid 60s onwards... Cultural Revolution. Until mid 70s.. when Two Child Policy went into effect, then One Child. These were not periods of general development. This was a period when PRC was still incredibly impoverished, and the default strategy for poverty generally is to have many children because you can not ensure all their survival and to maximize chance of being taken care of.
>would have achieved the same result
There are several averted birth studies for PRC family planning ranging from 100s of million to 1 billion by mid century accounting for descendants. The consensus is family planning is responsible for maintaining low births. I suppose we'll have to see how India manages, they started with 70% of PRC population in 1950s and is set to surpass PRC by a 300M @ 1.7B by 2050s. If argument is development, PRC didn't pass India in per capita GDP until early 90s. That said PRC under communism was more egalitarian for women, but education didn't pick up / restart until after the famine and revolutions either.
E: But most information shows PRC without family planning would have pushed ~1.7B-2B people, maybe they would have hit carrying capacity before, but 500 extra million mouths to feed and alleviate poverty is no joke. IMO, it's a sufficiently massively structural demographic problem that would have caused the country to implode.
It's a very controversial policy, but you're free to prove me wrong.
People could be employed longer without an abundance of young people taking their jobs.
Industrial espionage isn't even wrong. There is this absurd idea that a country should isolate itself from its neighbours and do everything on its own. How are you supposed to catch up or even overtake developed nations if all you do is reinvent things that have been available for decades? You can't.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?country=CHN~OW...
> The ghastly human rights violations that led from the policy were completely unnecessary.
No, this was entirely intentional. That was the whole point.
This is "the big lie theory" taken to its extreme. It was done to keep people, and party cadres preoccupied. If you were to speak to an adult Chinese at around late eighties, the 1 child policy would've been the number 1 thing on people's tongues, as if there were no other problems.
It was an entirely artificial crisis made to distract people from the total economic ruin, and destitution as a result of cultural revolution.
I'm reading the progression of this thread, and can't believe my eyes. You HNers, supposedly intellectual elites, got completely hooked by the same cheap diversion.
The point is not whether it was a legit, or not policy. The point is the entire conversation being completely pointless.
The real rationale was to not to let people talk about something having a point — the real problems in a starving, falling apart nation in a deepest crisis, which China was at the time.
And you known who proposed and architected the "one-child policy": Yinchu Ma.
His theory is influenced by Malthus [2]. And you know what, Mr. Ma's theory were not recognized until Mr. Deng come into power. And Mr. Deng realized there are so many people but no way the economy machine is going to find jobs for so many people.
Although in the end Mr. Ma and Malthus were all wrong. They never experienced the prosperity's effect on people's behavior in making baby. Like any mass production.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_Yinchu#:~:text=Ma's%20theor....
In Africa, Burundi, my country of 28km2, we have more than 90% of the litigations in the courts about land and properties. Siblings kill each other for land! We have 5.4 children/woman. One of the biggest natality rate in Africa. Only surpassed by Niger! We have American evangelical coming in scaring peoples to do abortions and contraception! We can't even talk about sterilization! With population density of more than 450 peoples by the km2.
Primary School is free and children get free healthcare till 5 years of age. It means that those 5.4 children per woman are likely to live and multiply!
What do you think we need to do?
I can only imagine how Chinese peoples did projections and saw that by the end of the century they would be half the world population without half the ressources and took drastic measures!
Work.
What is the difference in between 10 people making less than 1 ton on an acre and starving, and 10000 people making less than 1000 tons on 1000 acres, and starving?
The difference is just the number of starving people.
And add to that that all land was, and still is nationalised in China.
> I can only imagine how Chinese peoples did projections and saw that by the end of the century they would be half the world population
And communists knew it being 100% bullshit for masses. Just like Mao very well know how "4 pests," and other mass actions been complete bonkers.
They were not stupid to the point of drinking their own coolaid.
Generally speaking: reduce child mortality (better health care), urbanize/industrialize, educate women.
Every country that has done with over the last ~200 years has seen a drop in fertility rates.
Life is still not so expensive for the families (essentially men) are still having more babies than they can afford to nurture!
It's a pity to watch.
And it was more than enough to feed China even back then.
It's a poor insinuation claiming that top statesmen didn't know that. They knew it very well, and they also knew how catastrophically they mismanaged the agriculture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
>Robert Hinrichs Bates argues that the state itself has no violent power; rather, the people hold all the power of coercion to ensure that order and other equilibriums hold up.
Should we be discussing this?
Personally, a one-child limit a few decades ago would have been much more tolerable than face being told in the near future that we can no longer eat meat, drive a car, or travel internationally, amongst other things.
*https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/tps00199/defa...
This (allocation per child) is a policy very frequently encountered in a large number of countries.
It is also frequent in those countries to raise the level of the allocation per child immediately before elections, which leads to quite an inflated level after many election cycles.
Unlike with China's population control policy, I have not seen any questioning of these allocation per child policies from other countries, even if in that case the state also intrudes in the individual rights by extracting money from them.
That policy also results in some kind of reverse eugenics, because the more responsible people delay having more children until having the financial means to raise them, but because they are forced to pay higher taxes they must delay even more, while some of the least responsible people choose to have as many children as possible, with the hope of sustaining the family only or mainly from the state aid.
In my opinion all kinds of potential abuse from a government must be questioned, not only those for which there exists a tradition to be criticized.
The planet has a problem with human overpopulation. We must self-regulate as a species. Governments are good at making and enforcing regulations. China's government oversees one of the largest sectors of the human population.
We have to give some praise to China for being forward-thinking. They have recognized their role and responsibility in stopping the rampant breeding that plagues our planet. All governments need to take the same steps that China has, or the planet won't be inhabitable for much longer.
For more info, see http://www.vhemt.org/.
If we accept that any biome will eventually have a finite carrying capacity while the possibility of human reproduction is exponential it seems inevitable that there must be some limits to reproduction. Regulation is crude but might be less bad than "direct environmental feedback" such as die-offs or drastically decreasing quality of life.
Of course it's a co-ordination problem, which is very difficult.
I can imagine many cultural and technological approaches to population control, some of which already exist, and might not be terrible.
It seems to me that in particular any engineered habitats with well-defined carrying capacities, e.g. mars, would have to deal with this quite early on.
I'm just not sure it's a sign of cultural maturity; it feels like we've quietly skirted a difficult conversation through low wage growth and expensive housing, health care and education (more humans are discouraged because of bottlenecks in key supports).
In theory if there were "smooth" environmental feedback the population would nicely sigmoid without too much overshoot, maybe that's what is actually happening. I wish I knew.
I am not saying that I agree with China's policies or their implementation, but it seems that they worked.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(real...
For that reason, we are exempt from the normal laws of Malthusian ecology and carrying capacity. More people translates into higher, not lower, living standards. That's why over the past 200 years the population has increased seven fold, while the percent living in poverty has fallen to unprecedented lows. The greatest risk by far is not having enough people. Population control robs us of future Einsteins, Borlaugs, and Turings.
This is a wild claim. Not everyone is a net positive contributor to the species. The world’s resource are already consumed beyond their replenishment rates, and hundreds of millions of people suffer from abject poverty and constant food insecurity. Total fertility rate decline curves are objectively positive for humans as a species and resource contention.
I do agree with the finite carrying capacity aspect you mentioned but if you think China's child policies weren't awful then you should read up on what it really means to live your life as heihaizi.
I'd agree it's not the worst thing they've done so far, but given that they're actively committing genocide that's a pretty high bar.
2. You can means-adjust the fines to dissuade the rich. You can even redistribute revenue from these fines to the poor if your concern is inequality. I’m particularly curious about paying the poor not to have children since fining the poor seems likely to be unproductive.
China’s one child policy was mainly about population control but also had a eugenics component to it as well.
One person could devote one lifetime to solving a problem. Or, they could have 4 kids, everyone devotes half of one life time (the other half to raising kids), and now there are 2.5+ lifetimes of effort spent on the problem.
The single greatest thing we could do to improve our species' odds of survival today is reduce ourselves in number. Because we are currently causing a mass extinction event.
That seems like a ludicrous leap to jump to.
Surely some far more obvious reasons are: better educated people are better able to judge whether they can afford to look after a child; people in skilled professions earn more money, and are more likely to afford to look after a child.
IMO, traditional societies have had a fascination with eugenics for practically centuries. 19th and early 20th century thinkers were deeply fascinated by it, and the idea didn't really get tabooed until Nazi Germany adopted as part of its agenda and that horrified the whole world for centuries to come.
For that reason, many posters with western values might find the accusation of eugenics to be quite harsh. But IMO, the social stigma against eugenics isn't nearly as prominent in non-European societies and it's even softly encouraged and openly talked about in some cases.(Singapore's SDU est.1984 being a good example)
To be clear, I do not endorse eugenics in any way. Also, I mean eugenics in purely: "Adding incentives for reproduction among certain people in society to promote what are perceived to be desirable traits within said society" and not "Genocide everyone who isn't of high blood".
Consider if something unlikely happens that completely changes the dynamic of families, e.g. a cultural shift where women stay more at home and have more babies. If the average family started having more than 3 children, they would consider bringing back this system, which could cause big social problems, as it costs more social capital to bring back an unpopular system than to simply maintain it.
https://qz.com/africa/1963566/how-many-chinese-workers-are-t...
Any policy defined in terms of "X children per couple" or "X children per woman" is, by definition, exponential growth.
When X is 3, it's very rapid exponential growth.
Per this argument, I would think that an exponential function is different to something experiencing exponential growth. One of them is a definition, the other is a description. They aren’t really interchangeable when it comes to communicating a point.
> not growth, forget about exponential.
This is really weird phrasing, since you're on much stronger ground saying "not growth" [arguable] than you are "not exponential" [flat wrong]. I just pointed out that defining results in terms of "X children per woman" will always necessarily produce an exponential curve. That's the definition of an exponential curve. If you want to distinguish between "growth" and "decay", you can say so, but you're still stuck with labeling them "exponential growth" and "exponential decay".
This is technically correct, but also purely academic. If I called the function f(X) = 5 in an analysis exam "exponential", then I would be laughed out of this exam, and for a good reason.
> This is really weird phrasing, since you're on much stronger ground saying "not growth" [arguable] than you are "not exponential" [flat wrong].
"not A" implies "not (A and B)". That's all I meant.
That's not true at all; you'd have to look at the context. If you called it an exponential function as part of a discussion of exponential functions, you'd raise no eyebrows.
Even if you were doing it in a weird way, it's unlikely you'd get laughed out of the room; math exams are not known for penalizing you for being correct.
The 3 children per woman limit is still the smallest number that accommodates for the 2.1 average required for replacement level. To achieve equilibrium and avoid rapid growth the limit must be set to 3 and then hope that the average will be drawn down enough by the women who can't/won't have children for various reasons.
Not advocating for this policy, and I am not considering how well it works in practice and the morality. This is just a reductionist model.
I don't want anyone tell me, how much children I can or should have.
We got to make sure the work life balance is in order for people to have the time and money to afford a family and give adequate support like daycare etc.
But apart from that, I really don't like some buerocrats in some buerau somewhere calculating the "correct" number of births. That regulates itself. There is immigration and emigration. There is automatisation (elderly care), better medicine, so older people can tend to themself longer and less need of a "dumb" workforce etc. etc.
Trying to calculate it and declare meassures based that, can only fail in my opinion.
Stuff like this can and does result from bureaucrats / policy-makers deciding what an ideal number of children (for the well-being of the society) is. You say "that regulates itself", but clearly the things you listed (work-life balance, economic prosperity, daycare, etc.) are not self-regulating. You also mention specifically that this matter doesn't need centralized solving, but that's different from what you went on to say, that the factors that go into determining how many children are had are self-regulating. A decentralized approach does nothing to guarantee that.
Whether you like it or not, the government has a large influence over all of these matters. Choosing to not regulate them is a choice that will affect how they turn out. Likewise, the very structure of the economy and social systems will affect these things. A government can not avoid determining what those are like, whether by the government's active influence over them, or its more laissez-faire approach. When you have a monopoly on violence, you cannot truely recuse yourself from what happens in the society around you, and if you lack a monopoly on violence then you aren't really a government.
Because you know, what worked best for us? All the things that are not regulated, like grandparents watching over the childs or teenage babysitter. The very well regulated state kindergarten?
It was a nightmare so far, even though we have a quite good kindergarden compared to the various stories I heard so far of what is possible, as well. And sure, Corona was not helping with that either, but I know quite some people in social jobs and I listen to their stories since way before corona.
Attacking both sides of a problem is sometimes necessary for effectively dealing with it.
And yes, it didn’t apply to rural areas as well.
I had a friend in China who lived in Shenzhen and has 3 children, he essentially just payed two fines (not even sure how much it was).
„I paid a 50000 yuan fine for you just so you could live! Now do your homework!“
Every parent spends lots of money on their children. It should be a gift, not a dept.
Cell division is globally and locally restricted in the body in ways single cellular organisms aren't. We have "growth hormone" which encourages or suppresses division at certain periods of life and even certain periods of day and night.
And uncontrolled growth we call "tumors" and "cancer" and it leads to the rapid decline and death of the multicellular organism, and with that, the death of all those cancer cells as well.
So who knows what the future holds. Maybe that's not a China thing. Maybe it's a society thing, that we've not wised up to yet.
As a very broad generalisation, it's usually less educated couples that go for the far higher numbers.
Sooner than later we will have to adapt to at best constant population, which will mean a large proportion of elderly.
Trying to boost births (as everyone is doing) is just kicking the ball down the road at the expense of the environment.
Now, in China specifically I think lifting restrictions won't have much impact. A child is very expensive and virtually all women work. They would need to look at a welfare system to help families for people to consider having more children. There is also the issue of migrant workers: many people from poorer areas work in richer cities and leave children with grand parents for years on hand. They are not going to have more children just because it is allowed.
I don't know if it's true in China, but if looked at carefully, it might not be the time to sound the alarms. The same happened in the West, just by 20-50 years prior.
With a shrunken generation of family to help due to 30+ years of one-child policy, and almost no social support (China does not really have socialized healthcare in practice) there's no one to help take care of larger families. But there is a HUGE number of rapidly aging parents and grandparents to take care of.
Add a culture that puts accumulating wealth as the #1 virtue, and it becomes nearly impossible to reverse a low birth rate.
In Canada Quebec has been paying French families to have more kids for a very long time. Today Quebec has the lowest provincial birthrate in Canada.
Source: Something we learn in Canadian History classes.
Not remotely true. As of 2016 Quebec has a fertility rate of 1.59 children per women which is higher than the Canadian average (1.54), Ontario (the largest province by far, 1.46) as well as BC (1.40) and the Atlantic provinces (1.42-1.58).
See https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/91-209-x/2018001/article...
I found it interesting that the authors looking at the history of efforts to financially simulate birthrate found that it has never worked to reverse the decline. @21:15
Because of their one child policy, you have a family generation consisting of 4 people (grandparents), followed by 2 people (parents), followed by 1 person.
So now they are way on their way to an demographic crisis, where most people will be old.
Partly because costs have been high, but also people find their interests elsewhere other than the traditional path.
Let countries be free to do birth control of their own violation - you do not want more births whose lives they cannot support properly which in turn threatens the social fabric of their societies. To push this as a human rights violation in support of the west's rhetoric is pretty hypocritical since they don't have to support the excess births.
For instance, it seems that a large reason that China is hesitant to lift any limits whatsoever is a belief that rural women will have large families and urban women will not and that this would be 'unfair'. This cant help but feel like a eugenics argument about not wanting to swamp the gene pool with 'low IQ rural undesirables'.
What would be the foreign response if some of the more distasteful ideas behind mandated birth rates were brought to the fore-front:
* 'all able-bodied women must have at least one child.'
* 'citizens in these jurisdictions can have as many children as they want.'
I believe we would see a lot of outrage in other countries over these policy, but I worry the CCP sees no difference ethically in mandating one or the other. Instead opting for whatever is deemed necessary.
The reluctance to lift limits is perhaps better owing to the fact that means yielding a bit of control, and not wanting to appear to have been wrong (why today and not yesterday?).
That said, you don't see much outrage in other countries (despite stories of infants being thrown out, forced abortions, forced sterilizations) because we have short attention spans and no real hope of forcing the government's hand.
Look at all of the accusations, allegations and witness over the treatment of uighurs. Or, look at the middle eastern countries where women couldnt vote, drive, or even travel out of the county without their husband's permission. Even of we had pushed harder for faster reforms, we would have faced internal criticism for a "colonial" attitude.
With the one child policy all of the housing was built for 1 child families (i.e. 2 bedroom apartments). Even with the two child policy it was really difficult to find apartments built for larger families.
[1] I know someone who lived in China, who said this was an issue, but I don't have any actual sources so this may be wrong.
It's just about maintaining family planning as a public prerogative, atthis point.
The draconian policy of China enabled it to spend more resources on economic development. It is not so long ago that China was also a typical third-world country.
https://zeihan.com/video-dispatch-chinas-demographic-decline...
China now has 2 generations that've never known uncles, aunts, siblings or the conception of family beyond the nuclear unit. New norms have developed around the amount of investment that parents are expected to put in a child, with work being the only other thing that is supposed to matter.
The soft incentives have realigned to strongly discourage children. Multiple children makes it difficult for parents to be invested in a single child or work in a way that society expects them to. The thousand year long values of sibling relationships have to be built back up from zero, and is not trivial in the least.
For a country where maternity leave is punishing to a woman's career, a career that women are also taught to care deeply for, convincing women to have multiple children will be a tall ask. We are already seeing a plummeting marriage rate and an average marriage age that's steadily rising.
With all of these things in mind, the only way CCP reverses the current trend, is if they pull a Mao and practically force people to marry more and earlier/have multiple children by introducing incentives as draconian as Mao's China.
Surely that will solve their demographic problems.
Only ectogenesis could reverse this trend. China and the world better start investing more in ectogenesis research.
It's huge if you live in Hong Kong.
So long as the children of immigrants are adapting fine to the rest of American culture, who cares if our population growth depends on them?
And many (most?) Western countries do provide various incentives to have kids, as well as Asian countries, but the incentives don't ever seem to work to get above that 2.1 replacement level, so Western governments are 'worried'/concerned about birth rates, but boosting them significantly not an easy thing to do. Especially when part of the reason might be that people simply don't want more than 1 or 2 kids these days regardless of finances.
Its not just about the number of children per women/couple: the missing element is to have children really young.
Like 16 - 24
Make childcare, schooling, etc tax deductible for starters.
Not just because of costs, but the harder to modify cultural reasons like people valuing independence, "casual dating"/FWB more common instead of dating with intent to marry, less social pressure/shaming from parents ("why don't you have a husband/wife/kids yet?!"), freedom to "find yourself/travel" or "get sexually experienced/have a ho phase before settling" for years after college, etc.
Most people don't want to go from college to marriage and kids right away these days, and a few years of this type of casual dating/exploration after college eats up a lot of prime reproductive years like you said. But these cultural factors are very hard to change especially with the absence of religion/strong communities these days.
At this point it affects most countries outside of Africa.
immigration
I believe in diversity. Immigration will forever change the countries it affects, typically making them more like the source countries.
boosting hard
One might be able to push it just above 2.1, but fundamentally the causes are significant, unprecedented technological and social changes since the industrial revolution. Nowhere is it guaranteed that these changes produce a stable, lasting order.
It was difficult to read this and not laugh because it conveniently leaves out First Nations, as well as the fact that the USA in particular used immense amounts of slave labor while the "natives" you refer to (the whites) reaped the rewards in relative comfort.