#One Child Policy

[tomorrowusa]

This video from Australia's public broadcaster ABC News does a better job at explaining China's current economic meltdown than anything else I've read or seen about it.

The root of the problem is China's previous one child policy which lasted for about three decades. Though other factors certainly contributed to it.

Indirectly the demographic situation in China raises some issues which deserve more attention.

The conventional wisdom is that population growth is necessary for a healthy economy. But when a country achieves a certain level of prosperity, the birthrate tends to level off.

So one question which economists should address with more urgency is: Can a country, or even the world, maintain prosperity with a largely constant population?

Obviously human population cannot grow endlessly, that certainly isn't great for the environment or the climate.

The old and endless arguments over capitalism and socialism are ultimately linked to the concept of unending population growth. Such talk needs to be supplanted by discussion and research on how to maintain prosperity in an environmentally friendly way for a consistent population level while respecting democratic norms.

That latter bit about democracy is vital – and not just for touchy-feely reasons. It was the autocratic Communist Party of China which implemented the heavy-handed one child policy and encouraged a culture of mendacity which led to the current crisis. Any system which does not respect democratic rights is doomed to failure in the long run.

——————

PROPS TO ABC AUSTRALIA: Just want to repeat my previous praise for ABC News Australia – the source of that excellent vid. The country punches above its weight with news and public affairs programming from its public broadcaster. It deserves a place on everybody's news menu. They have an app as well as a major presence on YouTube.

ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

[coochiequeens]

Chinese men: “Why aren’t women having kids?” Chinese women: “Aren’t we getting poorer with each child we have?”

28-year-old Joy Yu’s parents each had three siblings. As they were growing up in the 1970s, the Chinese government started to limit the number of babies born.

Government statistics show on average a woman in China went from having about three babies in the late 1970s to just one.

Four decades on, China’s leaders are asking women to have three children again, which doesn’t sit well for Yu, an only child.

“For me to give birth to three children, my future husband must be rich enough to make sure I can live well without a job. This is a big challenge,” Yu said.

Last year, China’s population dropped for the first time in six decades by 850,000. That still leaves the country with 1.41 billion people but if the decline continues, there will be multiple impacts on the economy.

One-child policy

China began enforcing birth limits in the late 1970s when the country was poor and there were too many mouths to feed.

In a Chinese propaganda film called the Disturbance of Gan Quan Village, the birth restrictions were justified on economic grounds.

“We should put our energy into getting rich rather than keep having children,” says one woman in the film.

She’s sitting among a group of women picking corn kernels off the cob. “Aren’t we getting poorer with each child we have,” she says. The rest of the group nods in agreement.

Chinese leaders enforced, sometimes brutally, the so-called one-child policy in 1979, just as the country was coming out of the tumultuous Cultural Revolution.

“The post-[Chairman] Mao leadership thought that economic development would be the new basis for the party’s political legitimacy and based on pseudo-scientific and demographic projections, limiting birth to one child per married heterosexual couple,” said Yun Zhou, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan.

There were exceptions. Some ethnic minority groups could have up to three children. People from rural areas could try for a second child if their first-born was not a boy. Later, if both parents had no siblings they could have two children. Starting in 2016, China raised the birth limit for everyone to two children, but there was no sustained baby bump.

Obstacles

Yu said she had opportunities her parents never had because she grew up without siblings. She attended one of China’s top colleges and her parents are able to help her with a down payment on a pricey property in Shanghai if she so desires.

Still, Yu said over an Italian meal in Shanghai, she is not even sure she wants to get married or have children.

Raising children in China is expensive. Also, the work of raising children, like in many countries, falls disproportionately on women. Those demands would be hard to juggle with China’s long work hours. A six-day work week is standard in many sectors.

Other people have complained of being penalized in the workplace for being mothers.

“Women are being forced back to the home to increase births. It is like my body isn’t mine.”

Only-child, Joy Yu

Global impact

Fewer people might mean slower growth in China, which will be felt by the U.S. and beyond.

“They’ve now become, you know, the center of the global manufacturing superhighway and are typically the largest contributor to growth every year,” said Scott Kennedy with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C.

Chinese officials often credit the so-called one-child policy for preventing over 400 million births, but some analysts say China’s population would have declined regardless.

“It’s just simply a rule across all countries, that as you urbanize, and as you get a more educated female population that enters the workforce, fertility numbers fall,” Kennedy said.

China’s birth restrictions merely sped up that trend and made the fertility rate drop dramatically and unevenly. The traditional preference for boys in Chinese families combined with the birth limits and ease of access to abortion has led to a massive gender imbalance.

Chinese government statistics show in 2020 for every 100 women there are 105 men, whereas the global ratio is one-to-one. 

Attempted incentives

To encourage more births, the Chinese government has dangled a mix of carrots and sticks — cash incentives, tax breaks, pledging to lower the cost of children’s education, and making it harder for couples to divorce.

“Now, the government organizes matchmaking events, and it’s a mission just like when it enforced the one-child policy. This is so terrifying,” Yu said. “Women are being forced back to the home to increase births. It is like my body isn’t mine.”

A backdrop of gendered violence

Sometimes, the government is asked to step in, but officials are instead accused of a cover up.

For example, when a woman was found chained up in a far-flung village after having given birth to eight children, it triggered a discussion on human trafficking. But efforts by local journalists and concerned citizens to verify the details of this woman’s life independently have been repeatedly blocked by local officials. That includes an attempt by pioneering lawyer Li Zhuang earlier this year. He wrote a post about the difficulties he encountered, which was later deleted.

In northern China’s Tangshan city, a group of men savagely beat some women at a restaurant. The incident provoked a public outcry and while officials have punished the men and dismissed some police officers, the women have not been seen in public since. Officials were accused of suppressing the discussion about violence against women.

Even women in wealthy cities like Shanghai said they could identify with the victims in the reports.

“Those reports encapsulate a sense of gendered precarity that speaks to women in [a] deeply patriarchal and gender unequal society,” social demographer Zhou said.

Economic costs

The number of Chinese workers is already declining; according to the World Bank, in 2001, China had 10 workers to support one retiree.

“In 2020, that was down to five working folks for each retiree and by 2050 it’ll be down to two,” Kennedy said.

He believes China still has time to offset the effects of population decline, including by boosting productivity, increasing the retirement age and lifting restrictions on people from rural areas to freely settle in cities with their families.

“I don’t think the problem has become so severe that demography is destiny, and China is destined to radically slow down and its chances of becoming an economic superpower breaking out of the middle income trap have been dashed,” Kennedy said.

“[But] these are pretty significant challenges.”

[thingstol00kat]

One Child Policy by Nanfu Wang

[whats-in-a-sentence]

To reduce the pressure on resources, he promoted the notorious One Child Policy, which (in theory) required women who had two babies to be sterilized,* and to increase the resources available he embraced the global economy.

*It is not clear how much impact this actually had. In 1974, the average birth rate had been 4.2 children per woman. By 1980, when the policy got properly established, this had fallen to 2.2. The decline then slowed, taking another fifteen years to fall to 1.0 per woman. China's population will probably peak around 2015.

"Why the West Rules – For Now: The patterns of history and what they reveal about the future" - Ian Morris

[antigonenikk]

modern day liebgott is an uber driver who exclusively plays chief keef on his busted out speakers. his car is a 2004 toyota corrolla that smells like cigarette smoke and axe body spray. the rubber is peeling off of two of the doors. the left blinker does not work. a door handle has been mysteriously ripped off and the windows wont roll down. he has ten parking tickets he refuses to pay off and does not care about right of way. if hes delivering your food for uber eats you can count on the fact that he has eaten some of your fries. in spite of all of this he pulls more bitches than all of his friends combined.

[caitlynmeow]

Bela: Cassandra, keep an eye on Daniela today. She's going to say something to the wrong person and get punched. Cassandra: Sure, I’d love to see Daniela get punched. Bela: Try again. Cassandra, sighing: I will stop Daniela from getting punched.

[theophagie]

> opens bnha tag

> "Even when Nana was wrong for having a family and a son when she knew AFO would target them..."

> closes bnha tag

[6ebe]

Pedri actually needs to sue the rfef I’m so serious

[rowanthestrange]

i voted

took me forty minutes to put the x in the box of the party i am literally a member of

successfully rationalised that we’re a new and probably swing constituency so we’ve got to

feel a truly unmatched sense of depoliticised disenfranchised hopelessness

[coochiequeens]

China did this to themselves

Ming Ming, a boisterous six-year-old, longs to have a playmate, but his mother is adamant that she will not have another child.

“No way! One is quite enough,” Li Hong gasps. “Childcare, after-school activities, tutoring … you want them to have a good education but it costs money. We’re just ordinary working folks, not the super rich. The cost of bringing up two kids would kill us!” says the 43-year-old supermarket cashier from the southern province of Guangdong.

Li herself was born just before the one-child policy began in 1980. As an only child, she says the cost of bringing up her son on top of caring for her elderly parents and those of her husband were her main concerns.

The Covid pandemic has not helped. It began when her son was starting kindergarten, but the regular class suspensions meant she could not work full-time. Looking after a toddler all day in a small flat left her constantly exhausted. “I simply don’t have the energy for two,” she said.

Women are ‘invisible’

For three-and-a-half decades, the one-child policy that was meant to control the population exacted a huge social and human cost on Chinese society. Forced abortions, sterilisations, the use of intrauterine contraceptive devices as well as hefty financial penalties left physical and emotional scars on millions of women and traumatised families.

Thirty-five years after the one-child policy’s implementation, China is left with one of the lowest birthrates in the world.

Fearing the adverse social effects of an ageing population and a looming shortage of working-age people, the Chinese government has tried to boost the birthrate by partially lifting the one-child policy in 2013 and allowing couples to have two children if one of the spouses was an only child. In late 2015, the authorities announced all married couples could legally have two children.

But these measures failed to trigger a baby boom: In 2016, China reported 18.46 million births – just 1.4 million higher than the average number of births in the previous five years. The figure was well below the increase in births that the government had projected, which was between 2.3 and 4.3 million a year. Annual births continued to drop thereafter: from 17.23 million in 2017 to 15.23 million in 2018, 14.65 million in 2019, 12 million in 2020, then to 10.62 million in 2021. The authorities further eased the birth limit in 2021, raising it to three children per couple.

“The declining birthrates seem to be irreversible, but the government does not have a gameplan,” Dr Ye Liu, a senior lecturer in international development at King’s College London says. “It’s all about the power of men over women and utilisation of women’s bodies as economic means. In short, men make policies for women. In the recent party congress, there were many promises made but none for women. Women are ‘invisible’.”

Chinese scholars campaigned to scrap the one-child policy for more than a decade, on the grounds that the country’s total fertility rate was worryingly behind the replacement rate. In the 1970s, the total fertility rate (births per woman) fell from 5.8 in 1970 to 2.75 in 1979. In the 1980s, the rate hovered above the replacement level of 2.1 that would allow the population to replace itself, but since the 1990s, it has declined to below the replacement level. The 2010 and 2020 censuses yielded total fertility rates of 1.18 and 1.30 respectively. This further fell to an alarming 1.15 in 2021, according to figures from the National Bureau of Statistics.

More sticks than carrots

Key factors behind the low fertility rate include the rising costs of bringing up children amid rapid economic development in the past three decades, as well as the lack of social welfare provisions for families such as free or low-cost childcare, academic studies have found.

Fewer young Chinese people are getting married, and those who do are having children at a much older age, or not at all. When asked why, they routinely cite the rising cost of living, stagnating professional mobility, and the pressure of traditional gender roles on women.

see rest of article

[beeseverywhen]

"All political parties face a trade-off under a first-past-the-post electoral system. Governing depends on attracting a broad coalition of voters, inevitably involving compromises that leave a party’s base disgruntled.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that as we move closer to a general election, the discontent from the anti-Labour left who claim there is little to distinguish Keir Starmer from Rishi Sunak in the battle for the premiership is only getting noisier."

"The argument is threefold: there’s no meaningful difference between the Conservatives and Labour; Starmer supposedly can’t be trusted because he has dropped pledges he made in the 2020 leadership election to shift his party towards the centre; finally, the “Tories are toast” and Labour can’t lose, so disgruntled left voters can safely vote for other parties, such as the Greens.

With Labour so far ahead in the polls, the urge to debunk these sentiments may seem like an expression of paranoia. But all three aspects of this narrative are comprehensively wrong, including the reassurance that it is safe for anyone who would prefer a Labour government to vote for another party in Labour-Tory contests."

"But what this underplays is the number of Labour-Tory marginals where a relatively small vote for other left candidates could cost Labour a win. James Kanagasooriam, of the polling company Focaldata, has written about the “sandcastle” nature of Labour’s likely majority; his forecast is that there will be many more marginal seats in the 2024 parliament compared with 2019. If more than predicted numbers of those who voted Green in the locals decide they can afford to do so in the general election because Labour is so far ahead in national polls, that will boost the Conservatives.

Next up is the idea that Starmer’s dropping of some of his leadership pledges makes him dangerously untrustworthy. But this is the product of a system in which the tiny unrepresentative slice of the electorate that is a party membership pick their leader before voters choose their prime minister. Anyone hoping to be PM would have to shift position between a leadership selection and a general election: a Labour leader’s most important job is to connect with potential voters, not to coddle members with the comfort blanket of a policy platform such as the “free broadband for all” 2019 pledge that was roundly rejected.

Liz Truss provides a cautionary tale of what happens when a party leader seeks to impose a membership-endorsed platform on the country without a general election. For Starmer to have stuck to his 2020 leadership election pledges, instead of spending the past four years understanding voters, would have been fundamentally anti-democratic.

The most egregious aspect of the anti-Labour left argument is there isn’t much to choose between Starmer and Sunak. Yes, Labour’s “Ming vase” election strategy has seen it take a much more cautious fiscal approach than many of us would like: it has effectively adopted the Tory macroeconomic worldview and with it a set of spending constraints that no one sensible thinks either party could stick to in the wake of the election.

That is frustrating for anyone hoping this election campaign may illuminate some of the tough trade-offs facing Britain; but it would have been incredibly risky for one side to go it alone on this. The alternative is Labour walking into the trap and handing the Conservatives a “Labour tax bombshell” election campaign.

From a commitment to scrap the Rwanda plan to making clear that in an ideal world Labour would discard the two-child benefit cap, there are plenty of reasons that it is preposterous to think that a Starmer government would make the same trade-offs as successive Conservative governments that have financed billions of pounds worth of tax cuts for more affluent families by cutting tax credits and benefits for low-income parents. The six pledges Starmer launched two weeks ago may be incremental, but Labour needs voters to believe they are deliverable, and they are indicative of a very different set of priorities than those that animate Sunak."

"Starmer is not without weaknesses, as shown by the days he took to clarify an interview last October in which he gave the impression he thought Israel had the right to withhold power and food from Gaza. But there is no doubt whatsoever he would make a vastly more compassionate and competent prime minister than Sunak. To encourage people to put that outcome at risk by casting a protest vote against a Labour government that does not yet exist is perhaps the ultimate form of luxury belief campaigning."

[moki-dokie]

how to make 19 year old boy who came of age during the pandemic and never had a real real job before now realize he needs to Chill The Fuck Out and be Less eagar about working for free holy shit he is impossible to wrangle

[the-busy-ghost]

Warning- this is a very petty post, but I think I'm entitled to at least one petty, pissed-off reaction every time I finish a classic novel that hit harder than I expected so take this as my quota for the year.

Also spoiler warning for a book that came out over a century ago but still, I didn't know the plot going in so don't want to ruin it for anyone else, if you haven't read it shut your eyes. (Also Local Tumblr User Going Wild Over Book Published a Hundred Years Ago That Everybody Else Already Read should probably be categorised as akey part of indigenous tumblr culture at this point).

Anyway I just finished the War of the Worlds and in between studying I've thinking about Themes and Motifs as you do, and idly looking for further analysis. I then accidentally ran into an article called 'A Quiet Place II Succeeds Where the War of the Worlds Failed' and:

Now I haven't seen any of the Quiet Place films, this is not a rant against them and of course everyone is entitled to their own opinions. But re: the ending of The War of the Worlds, I have to ask, did this guy somehow miss, uh, the entire point of the book or am I just utterly insane?

[tittyinfinity]

I don't think that kids should be exclusively homeschooled, but I also don't think that kids should be going to a building with hundreds of people 5 days a week during a pandemic. It's one of the main reasons why it keeps spreading so rapidly and won't go away. They don't take any preventative measures at schools anymore (at least not around here). You got kids? You're getting sick. Your coworker has kids? You're getting sick.

Schools are back to counting attendance. You can't even keep your kid home long enough to recover from covid before sending them back. They literally send a "truancy" (police) officer to your house if you keep them home too often.

I feel like we could be doing something better. I'm not entirely sure what the solution is. But this isn't it.

[welcometoteyvat]

tbh sometimes i feel like lore theorists are just making things up

[lovedeluxe92]

what no weed does to a mf