February 26, 2023
"Efforts by the ruling Communist Party to raise fertility rates — by permitting all couples to have two children in 2016, then three in 2021..."
"... have struggled to gain traction. The new policy in Sichuan drew widespread attention because it essentially disregards birth limits altogether.... In most parts of China, single mothers are denied the government benefits offered to married couples. Until recently, some provinces had even imposed fines on unmarried women who gave birth. But the baby shortage has prompted provinces like Sichuan to start legally recognizing children born to single mothers, part of a Communist Party push toward more 'inclusive' population policies.... But the obstacles for women... go far beyond compensation.... 'What many women, especially single mothers, lack is not money, but the protection of their rights and the respect of society'...."
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It's been an insight in the debate about China for a couple of decades: "China's in a race to get rich before it gets old - and it's not doing that well". We'll see. Global investors have discussed the pluses and minus of China for a long time. I sure don't know the answer, but I can tell that China has invested very well in getting their story marketed a positively as possible.
All the dead baby girls are not available for comment.
This is a good lesson in the failures of command economies, as we move inexorably toward one in the name of "climate change." The head honcho of Toyota just got fired by even higher authorities for not being on board with the switch to EVs due to what he described as fatal engineering obstacles to rolling out EVs universally.
The powers that be are way ahead of him, and just plan to limit our access to cars.
Sex in politics. State's Choice, NOW her Choice in planned parenthood. Excess boys by Choice. The "burden" of granny on a forward-looking basis.
"What many women, especially single mothers, lack is not money, but the protection of their rights and the respect of society'...."
The NYT seems to be totally unconcerned that the ChiComs have for decades denied women the basic right to have children. They are now concerned that the denial of that basic right is being relaxed somewhat. They seem to think that the "right" to be "respected" is more important than the right to have children.
Here's a hint: If the government has the power to deprive you of the right to have children, you don't have any rights at all, let alone "respect." It doesn't mean that the government is using its power incorrectly. The government is a tyranny.
Peter Zeihan was for many years employed by the Stratfor Group, an Austin based futurist consultancy. His books, especially "The End of the World is Just the Beginning", detail the forthcoming demographic collapse in China. He thinks they will go from 1.3 billion to 650 million by 2100. The UN predicts the decline more conservatively, to 800 million by 2100. China is run by people who are not stupid. I worry that the impending collapse creates enormous urgency for China to act aggressively, sooner rather than later.
China may have gone from premodern developing country, to postindustrial collapse, in less than 60 years. Dangerous times.
Unintended consequences.....
One of the most irritating ideas about China is that the Chinese have some kind of racial or cultural tendency to think in much longer terms than the non-Chinese.
"What do you think of the French Revolution?" Some Western solon is supposed to have asked Mao. "Too soon to tell." replied the wise Chinaman.
What bollocks. The Chinese can do math. They knew where the One Child policy was going to do to them. China's One Child policy was the result of a mid 20th century intellectual idea, coming from the West, that only nations that were able to control there own population numbers would be successful. The Chinese don't take a longer view than anyone else. There are many examples of the Chinese under Mao & later, making terrible policy mistakes based on taking the short view.
eff em.
This was predicted by anyone paying attention, and it is not easily fixed.
Paul Ehrlich was completely wrong in The Population Bomb, but he persuaded a large portion of the boomers, many of whom are still in government and certainly in universities.
"the obstacles for women... go far beyond compensation.... 'What many women, especially single mothers, lack is not money, but the protection of their rights and the respect of society'"
So the old line applies to communism as well: women and minorities hardest hit?
But seriously, what "rights" and "respect" does anyone have under CCP rule?
Am I the only one who thinks it's hilarious that a country with a population of 1.4 billion plus is moaning about not having enough people...?
isn't The Real Problem, that IF you let women decide how many kids, MOST will say LESS THAN 2?
Our worldwide experiment with treating women as people.. Has To End
Barefoot, Pregnant.. the way Allah intended
The Chi Coms have an advantage over other aging societies.
They can just make the old people disappear.
Then the remaining working-age people only have to worry about supporting themselves.
JSM
It takes a while for a culture to turn around and do the opposite. I was talking to a man coming from India, I picked up at the airport here in Atlanta on Amazon business. We talked about how long it’s taking that country to come out of the culture of having to have permission to do just about everything - the legacy of the British empire. It doesn’t happen overnight.
Why have children? By 2100 the world will burn up.
No hope.
RMc said...
Am I the only one who thinks it's hilarious that a country with an upcoming population loss of 650 million plus is moaning about not having enough people...?
(fify),
sadly no: you're NOT the only person who thinks a population loss of MORE THAN HALF is "hilarious"
One of America’s strengths is that it is a magnet for immigrants, and immigrants have lots of children.
China doesn’t seem to welcome immigrants, and even if it did, who’d want to go there?
So, what makes China a more prosperous country with, say, a billion people vs. half a billion people? Demograpics, right? Declining birth rates = fewer working-age people to sustain a growing number of old people.
Having more babies is not a solution. More babies will make the problem worse. The whole concept of leaving the workforce at a certain age is quite ridiculous. If a person can work, they should work. Aside from demanding physical tasks, a healthy 75-year-old can often be more productive than a 35-year-old.
Another solution (likely not only in China but is a country near and dear to you) will be limits on various medical interventions depending on age.
So much for reproductive choice. Regardless of whether the CCP has transitioned from restrictions to incentives, either way it's a means of control.
"What do you think of the French Revolution?" Some Western solon is supposed to have asked Mao. "Too soon to tell." replied the wise Chinaman.
Yeah, that's the stereotype-and-Telephone-Game retelling.
The actual person asked the question was Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, in 1972, and he was talking about the May 1968 crisis in France, which was still a live issue in French politics for quite a while to come.
Dictating social policy on a (literally) life-and-death issue like controlling the birth rate of your nation is, IMHO, a fool’s errand. Not because people will evade and subvert the policy, but because you cannot possibly manage the future with the imagined (and needed) degree of precision. Stuff happens. Murphy’s Law. Etc.
Maybe it’s like flying a jet or driving on ice: what you need are gentle tiny inputs made waaay early, the lightest possible touch, informed by humility, foresight and much (often bitter) experience.
The trouble with the CCP regime is the trouble with all tyrannies: they cannot afford to appear indecisive, which is what patience and humility can seem to be. And they become ever more sure of their omniscience even as their sycophantic underlings filter out any real-world feedback that doesn’t match their vision.
Hubris; then nemesis.
The Chinese don't take a longer view than anyone else.
There are many examples of the Chinese under Mao & later,
==========
so was communist Mao a true Chinese? [a la Scotsman]
you're NOT the only person who thinks a population loss of MORE THAN HALF is "hilarious"
China is asshole. I want their population to drop to zero.
FWIW Zeihan and others say that any change of policy now is too late by decades, and I tend to agree.
I don't shed any tears for the never-conceived, and if the Chinese die off from bad ideas and short-sighted policy, so be it.
As for Chinese aggression against Taiwan, it's a distinct possibility--insecure regimes often lash out; OTOH, how many Chinese parents are willing to send their Little Emperor into a meat grinder?
Not sure if the Time' s article on this rolls into another component of the China population management story or not. However it is pretty broadly accepted (with low quality data) that through all of this China has been having many more boy babies than it has girl babies.
. . . . . . . . . . . turns out - that is good for . . . . . . . . . . . . . ummmm . . . . . . . . . . . . well . . . . . . . . . nobody.
Lewis Wetzel said...One of the most irritating ideas about China is that the Chinese have some kind of racial or cultural tendency to think in much longer terms than the non-Chinese.
I've heard this many times and it always makes me wonder, "if they are so patient, thoughtful, cool and rational about the future,
how come they've never gotten it to work out for them"?
People who read history have seen this coming for years.
Get ready for war.
That is the only hope for the Chinese regime.
The Biden Regime is in a similar position. Putin needs war.
The global rulership is openly trying to start WWIII because all of these countries are ruled by illegitimate regimes that their populace hates.
Matt
Not many, but the issue will be decided before a genuine anti war movement gets going.
One way or another.
it would be interesting to see what some of China's biggest influential fans such as Ray Dalio (very smart guy), and Thomas Friedman (my old St. Louis Park neighbor) think about all this.
The dogs that didn't bark. Perhaps somewhere at some time there were some feminists who objected to the way that China and India ruthlessly killed off their females in the womb, but, if so, such an issue was muted. I guess raising such an issue would cause people to look askance at the holy sacrament of abortion. The bigger and far more important issue was trying to restrict late term abortions. Banning late term abortions would inevitably lead to coat hangers and innumerable women dying of septic shock. That's the issue that feminists mobilized behind.....Feminists were pretty sanguine about our withdrawal from Afghanistan also. You would think that they would have made a case for our continued presence there.
For the record, for many hundreds of years China had a superior civilization and a higher standard of living than western countries. Most of the Renaissance innovations were western applications of Chinese inventions: The compass, paper money, the printing press, clocks, porcelain, et. al. These originated in China....The autocratic nature of Chinese society kept them from fully utilizing these things, but they were Chinese in origin. When the clock was invented it was put in the Emperor's garden. All the Mandarins and courtiers marveled at it, and that's as far as the clock was developed. When the mechanical clock was introduced into a town square in Germany, the neighboring town felt it incumbent to make a bigger and better clock. Sometimes this competition lead to wars and sometimes to better clocks.
@RMC: Am I the only one who thinks it's hilarious that a country with a population of 1.4 billion plus is moaning about not having enough people...?
Here is a different way of looking at it. China has a lot of people, yes. It is also a huge country. China has 385 people per square mile. Germany, 605; UK, 719 — I wouldn't consider either to be particularly overcrowded. (The US, at 91, is decidedly under overcrowded.)
Maybe governments should rule with the consent of the governed.
Let's not make fun of the Chinese since the TFR here, in the USA, is only 1.6 and dropping. Yes, we attract a lot of immigrants but that's a zero sum game. Since fertility is collapsing worldwide our gain is just some other country's loss.
The problem with China having more children is Biden’s anti-balloon policy.
Biden is droning birthdays and weddings as soon as a balloon is spotted.
IIRC, almost 90% of the Chinese live in much less than 30% (?) of the land area--overcrowding in China is a tradition.
William of course is correct about China's early and wide lead over the rest of the world, as far as technology, productivity, and innovation . . . followed by a series of own-goals and foot-shootings in the face of challenges from very barbaric barbarians.
Since 1800 or so, the biggest mistakes the Chinese have made, and the grossest crimes, were due to the misunderstanding and misuse of imported Western ideas, whether Christianity or the even more Western Communism.
They were only two decades behind noticing they had too many people to feed, and two decades behind noticing that they now didn't have enough workers. It's why libertarians say we shouldn't screw with stuff that fixes itself, however painfully. It's because external solutions are worse.
Titanics are hard to turn on a dime.
Deny women and men's dignity and agency, and normalize human life as a negotiable commodity. An ethical religion, a wicked solution, whether State or her Choice, normalized with forward-looking collateral damage.
Communists, like Democrats, treat people like chattel. When their Three Rivers Dam was to be built, the Communists didn't ask or try to persuade. They simply told villagers in the areas where the dam was to be built, "YOU'RE BEING MOVED. PACK UP."
"Why have children? By 2100 the world will burn up.
No hope"
If China reduces its population by half they may save the world from "climate change". What a quandary...keep having kids and destroy the planet, or stop having kids and destroy their country.
Does this take into account the "Car Seat Dilemma?" After a couple has two children, there is no room for another (government mandated) car seat for the third child, in the average sedan. This is in effect until the oldest child is no longer required to be in one, by law. This effect is postulated to be a driver in lower US birth rates.
Narr said...
William of course is correct about China's early and wide lead over the rest of the world, as far as technology, productivity, and innovation
***************
Oh yeah? Name one thing used in homes all over the modern** world invented, manufactured and distribututed to the world by the Chinese.
**covid-19, gunpowder and printing presses don't count.
Innovation? Don't make me laugh. They steal every secret they can get their hands on.
gspencer, look at the history of TVA for overbearing government forcing people to move for the sake of hydropower.
eff, I'm talking about history--stuff that happened before your grandparents were born, and even their grandparents.
You are adding criteria to the statement that I didn't put in, which you so often do.
But anyway--porcelain. Invented, manufactured, and exported as a major part of the global trade in luxuries for centuries. (Guess why the stuff is called "China.")
Try Joseph Needham's works for an introduction.
Or you can stick with your unfounded and uninformed opinions.
Yes, it's too late for China.
The more interesting question is, is it too late for Americans to understand how truly evil Communism was and is?
Maybe.
Central planning, be it focused on the economy or demographics or anything else, has proven repeatedly to be a bad idea. Unfortunately, it's an idea that the smart people intent on doing all that planning have a hard time internalizing.
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