Posted on 09/19/2024 8:49:59 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
In 1980, the Chinese government instituted what became known as the "one child" policy, forbidding families from having two or more children without special permission from the government. The government in Beijing feared what they described as an impending "demographic disaster" if the nation's population continued to grow at the current rate seen during that time. It was a brutal approach to what was being seen as an intractable problem. The rules were enforced vigorously, with many women being forced to have abortions or be sterilized. At first, the policy appeared to be having the intended effect and the country's population growth slowed down measurably. But human nature has a way of thwarting the will of the most authoritarian government and by the time the country finally repealed the policy 36 years later, the damage had been done. Now they are facing an entirely different set of daunting challenges, all of which were wholly preventable in retrospect. The Wall Street Journal has an excellent review of how things reached their current state and the new challenge of China not having enough single women of childbearing age. (Subscription required)
Ricki Mudd was born in 1993 in China during the one-child policy era. She remembers her early childhood only in fragments, but has been told she had spent some of it hidden in a bag.
At age 5, she was adopted from a Chinese orphanage, one of the more than 150,000 children China sent overseas. Most were girls. In the West, they were one of the most visible consequences of the one-child policy, which ended in 2016. This month, Beijing put an end to foreign adoptions.
China is grappling with a demographic crisis, with dropping birthrates and a rapidly aging population.
The policies to control the population have given way to new ones in the opposite direction. But a legacy of the one-child policy is a dearth of women of childbearing age.
Social engineering on this scale is incredibly challenging if it's even possible over the long run. Human nature has a way of rearing its head even in the most restrictive societies and playing havoc with the grandiose plans of the government.
For one thing, sons were traditionally valued more than daughters in Chinese society. That meant that if you were only allowed to have one child and it was determined to be a girl, you might go seek out an abortion or do something even worse, allowing you to keep trying until you managed to deliver a boy.
That may be a sterile, but brutal description of the situation, but that's how it worked out. People didn't begin to notice the downstream effects in a serious way for the first decade or more, but they certainly did when those boys matured to the age where they would typically start seeking wives of their own.
At that point, it became obvious that there were nowhere near enough females of their own age for everyone to find a spouse without looking outside of the country. By 2004, census data indicated that there were 117 boys born for every 100 girls. While that may not sound like all that huge of a disparity the figure in 1980 had been 104 boys for every 100 girls. The difference added up quickly.
The policy impacted international adoption figures as well. In the two decades prior to the pandemic, American families adopted more than 80,000 Chinese children. Of those, more than 80% were girls. Conversely, comparatively few male Chinese babies were adopted by overseas families. The deck was stacked against the possibility of maintaining a stable population and it was all because of the government's policies.
Most of the world is facing a decline in population growth today, with the exceptions being found primarily in Africa and South America. This is true of countries including the United States where there are no legal restrictions on the number of children a family can have nor the gender of those children. We are similarly experiencing declines in both male and female fertility. All of these factors are combined to create an environment where fewer children are being born and the average age of many nations' populations continues to increase.
So what should we be doing about this? If today's story teaches us anything, it's that this is not a problem to hand over to the government to be settled via regulations. The one thing that might help is fostering an atmosphere where younger people marrying and having children earlier comes back into fashion. You can't always keep putting off the decision to have children "until you are older." Fate is fickle, and that may no longer be an option for you at that point.
Chinese women’s menstrual cycles were charted by their work groups.
Imagine going to work and you have to report if you had your period.
And of course if you missed a period, and you already have a child — abortion for you.
If she doesn’t want one, it was forced. And if she hid out they’d bulldoze her family’s house.
This is the regime that Nixon/Kissinger propped up and then Bush, Clinton, Bush built up, sending our manufacturing and know-how there, making them not rich (it’s a fallacy China is rich now, they’re at Mexico level) but not abjectly impoverished across the board. And it also created the mega rich Communist oligarchs and their ability to buy military and ability to reverse engineer from the Russians.
Constructive engagement. It was and is idiocy.
Dumb chinks. Mao had his Red Guard fanatics kill birds during The Great Leap Forward.
The end result was an explosion of locusts and other pests and most of China’s crops were consumed, adding to the starvation that Communist idiots polices caused.
More than idocy. I say it’s criminal. I hope any rational women would honesty weigh China’s and my position.
“..where younger people marrying and having children comes back into fashion.”
Easier said than done.
It may help if public schools stop preaching that we human beings are nothing more than a form of pollution to the planet.
It may help if our government would stop pushing consumers to accept ‘green’ alternatives to every problem, that we are supposed to deny reality, ignoring the rich, plentiful, attainable now fuels within and upon the earth, in favor of less efficient, though far more socially gracious EVs and bird shredding windmills.
It may help if people had more faith in God, than exclusively in what is called “Science” at any given time.
Also, many young Chinese don’t want to get married or have kids. They see no point in it. They also don’t feel like working but only doing just enough to get enough money to get by for living.
Yeah, another billion Chinese would be wonderful right now!
For four thousand years of recorded history it has always gone wrong.
Please stop.
Without religion, and its commandment to procreate, there is no motivation.
I plead ignorance but I am curious, isn’t there any Gods that love and want more babies in any of their religions?
Story of Tian Mingjian.
Army marksman whose wife was pregnant with a second child b
Army found out and forced abortion at seven months.
His wife died.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tian_Mingjian_incident
In Western literature that would be recorded as a tragedy. The pain in your words makes it sound so callous and complacent. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Not yours. Oh please don’t misconstrue. I mean on the part of the governemnt.
We can ship China a million illegals / month if they want them.
My opinion about “having children earlier”.
Right now, if you have children early, you are going to remain poorer than you would be if you had children later.
What could change that is going away from nuclear families to more systems where the grandparents (and great grandparents) live in close proximity and help out the young couple while the children are growing.
The movement to not get married and have children is “let it rot” and “lie flat.”
The Chi-Coms have done everything they can to stop any form of protest against the government. Now people are protesting by simply doing nothing. How can they stop people from doing nothing? It’s like trying to prove a negative.
This may end up collapsing the Chinese Communist Party.
The Chinese need to borrow/copy ideas from the American left.
The left in America believes that men can get pregnant too. So, the Chinese need to get those lefties over to China to teach them how to do it. Buttigieg and husband know how to procreate and already have children.
So, men on men sex can be productive too, and the Chinese men will appreciate a new way of life, in many different ‘ways’.
What could change that is going away from nuclear families to more systems where the grandparents >>> Or get rid of the so called income tax which is actually a wage tax and should be apportioned (head tax) which was intended to force unaffordable families.
Too many bulls in the China shop.
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