My One and Only

I've talked about this before bu there is some interesting new information out there so I wanted to briefly revisit the subject. China's one child policy, which limits most families to only having one child is something I changed my mind on a great deal since coming to China. The origin of the policy goes back to Mao, but Mao didn't want to limit the size of families he told people to go out and have as many children as possible. This resulted in something of a population explosion, expect for the times when Mao's other policies meant people were starving to death in droves. But after Mao the leaders looked around and realized that there were far too many people so in came the one child policy. Most families can only have one child, but there are some exceptions. In very rural areas, where kids are more needed to help on the farm, having two children is sometimes allowed. Also under newer rules if both of the people in a marriage are themselves only children, they are sometimes allowed a second child.

Minorities, like the Uyghurs are totally exempt from this rule, one of my students told me she was the youngest of 10 children. Also people who are really determined to have two kids can sometimes pay a fine to be allowed the second child, they are talking about expanding this section of the rules. But the enforcement of the one child policy can also be brutal. There have been countless cases of forced abortion or sterilization. In one book I read the author describes the police in some little town holding a man down while a doctor sterilized him. Also the penalties can go well beyond fines, in another book the author sees someones house being demolished for having too many kids. This policy along with a strong cultural preference for boys has also lead to a huge imbalance in the number of men and women, in the coming decades there will be 10's of millions of men who will never be able to marry. But for all that the population of China has stabilized, the newest growth numbers put the population growth at only around half a percent, well below the world average, and the number will likely keep falling. By 2050 China will probably only have around as many people as it has today.

Before I came to China I thought the one child policy was barbaric. The idea of the government going so far into peoples lives as to dictate how many children they could have is abhorrent, and it's carried out in a brutal way. But after seeing just how many people there really are here and how crowded it is, I've come to believe more and more that something had to be done. India's population continues to grow faster and faster and not only will it soon overtake China but there's no telling how high it could go. This has devastating consequences for the outlook of India, almost no matter how fast there economy grows they'll always been poor if the growth is spread out over that many more people. This doesn't mean that China's population controls are necessarily good for the economy through. There population is aging rapidly and the workforce, especially those who make the low cost goods which China is so famous for, is set to shrink. But after seeing the impact of have 1,340,000,000 people in an area only about the size of the United States, it seems impossible to allow that number to continue to grow. Even 1% growth means the population will double in about 70 years. China can barely handle 1.34 billion people how could it hold 3 billion?