Yes, China abandoned the one child policy after almost two decades after its launch. It was met with huge resistance initially–male babies were the goal, and if the one you had was female you were out of luck. And yes, many female babies were simply discarded, or out sourced to trafickers. This policy was an essential idea for China, a critical idea at the time, and the measures were quite strong–including, as you remind us, forced sterilization for “selfish” non compliance. This use of parentheses is an example of what I was thinking about earlier: if we fail to begin the long and inevitably slow implementation of worldwide, voluntary, incentivized family limitation, the consequences will later come at us with a vengeance. What we now consider a human right (such as having any number of children we desire) will blow away in the wind. Definitions of personal freedoms will be re-written across the board, as they slowly are being “altered” now, as we speak. China abandoned the policy for the worst of all possible reasons: because they wanted to become more competitive, not because it didn’t work, not because people didn’t finally grudgingly accept it. It was a capitalist and corporatist motive, and I find that both surprising and dismaying. My brother and sister–both married long ago and now voluntarily well past child bearing years having chosen to forego it…have no regrets. As for the canard of “racism” that neo-puritanical virtue signalers spew when they hear someone talk about this topic, I say let geese gabble and hiss.
Shades of Eisenhower’s comments on the military industrial complex taking food from the mouths of children. How true.
If someone asked me how to fulfill that need for children, I would suggest trying foster parenting or adopting first. At least for me, there was nothing wonderful about being pregnant.
It is nice, sort of, that the US is using immigration instead of encouraging babies for their economy. Sort of. And sort of not! The countries they are coming from need to find a way to deal with reducing their population to a level and in a way that they can support. The whole idea that growth in business or population or economy is good needs to be ditched! I have seen the media spreading this idea of the need for growth.
I fear that as long as immigration is allowed in large numbers, the anchor babies may continue being born and sent here.
Our chance for a sane, peaceful and planned approach to this problem has passed.
If we factor in the soil and water that has been polluted beyond safety limits the total global human population have already overshot the planets existing production capabilities.
With the biosphere now collapsing all around us there will simply not be enough food to support the existing human population, never mind any projected increase.
If i know this so does our rulers and it does not take a genius to figure out what their “solution” will be.
Well said. It seems to me that the statement by these 250+ groups is largely an appeal against the US to stop its sanctions and efforts to create political instability or outright coups with CIA and military backing of insurgents and terrorists, more so than any other country. I would love to see the USA strive to be a country that lives up to the ideals expressed in many of our founding documents and rhetoric, or even just a country that focuses on solving our own homegrown problems and works in partnership with other countries to find win-win economic goals; something I haven’t seen in my lifetime. But world domination seems to be the only thing on the minds of TPTB.
There has to be a punishment for warmongering.
War, which kills millions of disproportionately poor people. Yes, peoples choices at the ballot box do often have major consequences for them.
The dominated are getting sick of it. I cant blame them.
Well, they generously offered to give them the jobs of our overpaid working people;. Maybe that will make them feel better.
I don’t think that can have been true, Helen, because China’s population has never stopped growing.
If its politburo had been enforcing the policy by sterilization, then there should have been a visible downturn as the entire urban segment of the breeding-age population was limited to one child.
But there were enough couples having more than 2 kids the whole time to cause the population to increase every year by about 11M.
Ways it happened:
- People avoided hospital delivery. The sterilization occurred at hospitals.
- People passed off their second and third child with people who did not have children or with grandparents.
- Minorities were not given any limits on childbirth. One of my students said there were seven girls in her family! I asked if they were minority. She said they were. This was done to avoid conflict with minorities or because minorities were in sparsely populated areas where growth was desirable.
- People could pay a huge fine to have another child.
- If a family could claim that their first child was defective in some way, they were allowed a second child.
Niemand, while I was visiting India, 1990-1991, my hosts told me that poor people who delivered in a hospital but could not pay the bill were sterilized. This was in Chennai.
Its my understanding that China needs more children because of all the women they sterilized and babies that they aborted. Now they say they are going to have to raise the retirement age to 60 or maybe even higher. Even though work is not available to their old people, businesses mostly hire the young.
Also, the wealthy in the US are very worried about the needs ofthe Baby Boom and have been talking for many deecades about the costs of old age for the Baby Boom, wanting to eliminate entitlements like Social Security because wages have not kept up with the costs and many don’t have enough money to manage. So they want to dump the costs onto them, or push poor people out of government programs, anything to avoid the moral hazard of trying to get people care for a fraction of the cost they need, a burden they feel will fall on them through taxation. Yet at the same time they did not worry about this enough, (because they used the promise of good US jobs traded away via GATS) to increase their yields in all sorts of businesses (drugs is a conspicuously distressing one. People never think of how we got foreign coountries to accept the idea of patents and “intellectual propery” which is what makes drugs profitable when the ingredients typically cost literally almost nothing. ) What happened is trading jobs and market access. to foreign firms to set up here, sell services of all kinds, and use their cheap labor to do it, labor that may cost 1/20 of the wages here. This is coming soon. The Clinton Administration, in 194 agreed to traded away potentially millions of your jobs in exchange for adoption of the TRIPS and TRIMS patent regime, and other key changes, in the WTO. Thank all of you for being so generous, even though your lives will probably change a lot.
the high patent terms and high drug prices were and are being paid for by jobs in dozens of service sectors… they are determined to get that price benefit as they may end up paying a price for it in anger from the people of the USA. Basically, think about a sort of NAFTA for the rest of the jobs, the desk jobs, the ones that didnt go to China. Wherever cheap labor can be leveraed, they plan to. There is a lot of profit ion that and a surplus of degreed highly trained “self entitled” young people in a belt of authoritarian bargain countries stretching more than halfway around the middle of the world. These are the countries where the cheap raw materials come from and this is deemed an essential by industry. They dont want democracy or public healthcare, or public education to break out (they frame it like its a contagion or cancer there. )
At the Chinese university where I worked, the male professors were retired at 55 and the female professors at 50, if I remember correctly. All foreign workers were retired at 60 unless they had higher credentials.
Where I lived, elder Chinese find work as family storekeepers and in lots of volunteer work. Community services like political work, COVID monitoring, street sweeping are sometimes organized for elderly in a slower paced way suitable for their age.
Its so sad, COVID-19. I bet a lot of the old people who died early were expecting to live a long happy life with their loving families and spouses while retired.
But then this virus swept through families and killed so many of them. The stories I’ve read have been heartbreaking.
In North Korea, I’ve heard and seen in many photos, the old people and housewives, often while taking care of grandchildren, cut all the grass in the glittering showplace capital (which the non-elite residents of the country are only rarely even allowed to visit) with scissors.
There must be lawn mowers somewhere in the country, but you wouldn’t know it.
When did you leave China? Was it before the COVID-19 epidemic and various travel bans against both of us?
One more reason for the population increase observed in China:
Average lifespan increase.
Excellent and affordable health care.
Check out the increase in lifespan there over the last several decades. Compare with other countries.
I was in China until last summer, all through their COVID crisis, but in Sichuan, not near Wuhan. On a tourist visa, I am generally required to travel in and out of China every two months, but they gave me several extensions during COVID.
When I was able to travel to the border as required, I knew I would be out for good because foreigners would not be allowed back in except for those with high priority visas. That was summer 2020. Since then even more foreigners have been required to leave because we all have to go in and out for whatever visa, and outside the borders, COVID still lurks.
zmuch more of the wealth generated seems to have managed to get passed along there than here, creating a real middle class, although there is still a huge amount of inequality, especially among the non-HAN minorities in China. And The people of Xinjiang have suffered immensely.
However, were China like India there would have been practically no growth in the middle.
That is a really horrible situation. Were it not for the WTO we could boycott them for their huge inequality.
Read “Blame it on the WTO” by Sarah Joseph, which discusses this.problem where the WTO blocks countries from mrecogning huge human rights atrocities in any meaningful ways. . I guess the gol is so countries cant prevent the theft of their natural resources from corporations no matter what.
Even if their people are starving or dying of thirst, or freezing to death, if they cant pay, they dont get the resource. Even if peoples jobs are being outsourced, if they cant find work they have to starve, since thats the natural way things go.
Government measures cant distort trade. Similarly the WTO overrules all out anti discrimination laws, because its the repayment of a debt, we cant claim that we have a debt to our African Americans and channel jobs to black owned companies if a cheaper bid from Africa is lower. That wopuld be discriminating to the owners of African companies. We may even have to stop some forms of public education (adult now but primarty education is being groomed for privatization in the future because we’re subsidizing some private schools, which may be required by WTO rules)because its viewed as trade distorting and unfair competition to foreign owned private schools.
The same thing with healthcare. Government intervention is taking the food off the corporations plates. If the US stands for anything,in the world today, that must be it. No corporations left behind.
By the way, Delaware is the largest secrecy jurisdiction in the US.
Delaware, from forty years back, the place for credit card companies and chemical companies.
Most countries have minority issues. I think the problem occurs mainly because the country tries to adopt a country identity and assign value and morality to it. This national identity does not include their minorities, but also leaves out a lot of very independent-minded and non-conformist type people. All of those outside the banner model are then overlooked by fashion and history and law.
Yeah, I think China may be wealthier than the US on average now. A big change between when I left the US in 2006 and when I returned in 2020, just about the reverse of what was happening in China in terms of well-being.
However the poor pollute less in some ways. May be better for climate issues to be poor. I have stopped driving, just walk everywhere
I do think our national identity includes everybody. We are a country made up of all nationalities that has a strong love of freedom and inclusive society. But the way the trade deals frame inclusion is twisted and perverse. I do not think human rights should e rejected in favor of corporate rights that nobody even knows about let alone believes in. But that is what they are using to nullify democracy and shove their amoral system of values in to nullify what we want. Its kind of a perverse parody of the US civil rights movement. But its being used to nullify ll the gains of the civil rights movement, ironically framing all our gains as discrimination.
Its based in competition law… But look at the promotional material for World Competition Day.
This transition is geared towards a big shift that makes all deregulation irreversible because the change becomes a corporate entitlement.
It makes me ill just to think about what they are doing. People have been so trusting so they will be hit totally off guard.