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Comment by hillsboroughman | Hacker News Reader

I dont know if anyone read this:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/27/china-to-limit...

A lot of the big drives that Xi is on seem to be simply to reduce cost per child for a family so they will have more children. Thats why they want to go after the after-school tuition industry. They want to go after the housing industry and now this Texas style restriction on reproductive rights. Of course everything Xi does is not motivated by a single objective. But the Chinese are laser focused right now on creating conditions which would increase their population.

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I really do not appreciate this article. It exaggerated a Reuters article that itself exaggerated the document without saying anything outright false.

In the exact line where they talk about reducing abortions, they say that access to contraception and evidence based sex ed should be strengthened.

That seems to me to be the exact opposite of trying to have more children - and it's a lot closer to Bill Clinton's "safe accessible and rare" strategy than anything else.

The CCP and Xi are obsessed with planning everything, and that includes growing the population. Unplanned and especially unwanted pregnancies disrupt lives and social order. I don’t think there’s anything contradictory about encouraging having children, but also trying to make sure that happens within planned and orderly family situations.

I think they're obsessed with optimizing conditions for their country to flourish in the medium to long term. If only we had politicians in the West who thought like that. We could call it "socialism with western characteristics" ;) I'm a citizen of a European country and I regard our politicians as literal traitors. They serve the interests of an elite minority which has power in the USA.

In the area of demographics they're doing an appallingly crappy job of it. They should have reversed one child 20 years ago. It was based on a misconceived Malthusian view of the world that it became clear was bunk well before that. The trouble is it's tied up with their ideology so very hard to back pedal on.

> and now this Texas style restriction on reproductive rights

Now? Are we talking about the same country here? The one-child policy literally taking away one's _right to reproduce_, and it's been in effect for years (recently slightly modified).

This just shows the CCP is used to treating its people like cattle. Now you can breed, now you can't.

I hadn't seen that; thank you.

It's depressing that the CCP hasn't learned from the experience of Romania[1] and everywhere else governments have tried to increase fertility.

As I see it the only ways China's fertility can lift to or above replacement are: 1. reverting back to a pre-industrial, pre-germ theory society; 2. introducing pensions, introducing free health care, allowing free movement within the country (revoking the hukou system), increasing mandatory parental leave, providing permanent tax breaks and child support payments, replacing the gaokao by a lottery system for tertiary education, and controlling property prices.

On second thought, even doing all of 2 may not do it. Doing any less than all of it certainly won't.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_orphans

China already has a public pension system and free health care, albeit not very good. What's mainly keeping people from wanting to have children is the cost of housing as you mention and the cost of child care. And yeah, the short parental leave.

Education costs also, China has public education but it is funded very oddly, there are lots of fees that you have to opt into, even if Xi really outlaws cram programs. Things become much more pricey if you raise them in a city away from where there hukou is.

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