China ends one-child policy
October 29, 2015 5:54 AM Subscribe

China will allow all couples to have two children, a Communist Party leadership meeting decided on Thursday, bringing an end to decades of restrictive policies that limited most urban families to one child. It is estimated that the one-child policy prevented the births of 400 million children since its adoption.
posted by Sir Rinse (128 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite

Two only is still a restrictive totalitarian policy, just slightly less restrictive.
posted by Drinky Die at 5:57 AM on October 29, 2015 [7 favorites]

Well, it's only slightly less restrictive if you compare it to the theoretical maximum of dozens of children. But if you compare it to what went before, it's twice as many children. And if China's middle-to-upper class are like those of other nations, most of then will only want two kids anyway. So the social and psychological impact is probably going to be a lot greater than "slightly less totalitarian and restrictive" might suggest.
posted by No-sword at 6:04 AM on October 29, 2015 [11 favorites]

Hopefully more than half of those children will be girls.
posted by Strange Interlude at 6:06 AM on October 29, 2015 [7 favorites]

Well, it's only slightly less restrictive if you compare it to the theoretical maximum of dozens of children.

Right, it's only less restrictive if you consider the rest of the world.
posted by timdiggerm at 6:14 AM on October 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

I read a book about sex selective abortion a while ago that suggested that the bias of nature is to produce slightly more girls than boys. The question, I suppose, is whether the possibility of 2 children rather than one is enough to persuade parents to risk a daughter in case the next child is a son.

I have to say I doubt it will make a difference to the gender imbalance. India hasn't, in recent years, been quite as aggressive as China in seeking to restrict the number of children born to the poor - the slogan has been "hum do, hamare do" (we are two, we have two) - but sex selective abortion has still been very popular in India. I know the two cultures are very different, but I'm still sceptical that one extra chance will be enough - parents affected by a strong cultural demand for sons will still be reluctant to "use up" one of their 2 chances at a child on a mere daughter.
posted by Aravis76 at 6:16 AM on October 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Sorry, I meant to cite the book but messed up the html: it's Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl.
posted by Aravis76 at 6:19 AM on October 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Great, just what we need, more humans.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:23 AM on October 29, 2015 [16 favorites]

Was actually hoping that the opposite would happen and that other countries followed suit.

You want other countries to increase governmental control of women's fertility?

To do what? higher incomes lead to family sizes stabilising at about two children anyway so you're advocating extremely invasive state interference in women's medical care and people's family lives to do something that would happen anyway.

Not to mention that "step change" sizes in family size rather than gradual reductions lead to strange demographic profiles.
posted by atrazine at 6:25 AM on October 29, 2015 [49 favorites]

Metafilter: more humans.
posted by JoeBlubaugh at 6:25 AM on October 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

Was actually hoping that the opposite would happen and that other countries followed suit.

Forced sterilisations, abortions and infanticide are not unique to China but I hope they're on their way out globally. You can reduce population growth by educating women and by increasing wealth - it takes longer but has more positive side-effects than using the apparatus of the state to force women to undergo invasive medical procedures without their consent.
posted by Aravis76 at 6:26 AM on October 29, 2015 [71 favorites]

Yeah, wishing other people were subjected to government-controlled reproduction is kind of a weird response to this. The solution to global population growth is not "Force poor people not to have babies." It's "Educate women and make birth control and abortion easy to access, cheap, and without stigma."
posted by ChuraChura at 6:31 AM on October 29, 2015 [77 favorites]

You want other countries to increase governmental control of women's fertility?

I want other countries to increase governmental control of men's fertility.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:45 AM on October 29, 2015 [22 favorites]

The solution to global population growth is not "Force poor people not to have babies." It's "Educate women and make birth control and abortion easy to access, cheap, and without stigma."

I certainly agree, but that's also a false dichotomy. There are other ways that states could encourage people not to reproduce. For example, only offering tax incentives or direct subsidies for the first 1-2 children. (Obviously such a system would only be fair if everyone, especially women, had free, easy access to comprehensive birth control options. It would also depend on a progressive tax code so that the burden of a third child was similar for both poor and wealthy parents.)
posted by jedicus at 6:47 AM on October 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

The human sex ratio at birth is about 1.05 boys for every girl, but boys are more likely than girls to die along the way, so the end result is more females than males.
posted by goatdog at 6:47 AM on October 29, 2015 [7 favorites]

Regulating fucking: always effective.
posted by delfin at 6:48 AM on October 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

I read a fairly disturbing story a few months ago which I think is related: Selecting Boys Over Girls Is A Trend In More And More Countries. China has the second highest (second to Azerbaijan) male-to-female ratio amongst children 0-4 years old (115.9). Though I think it's a good thing that the government has eased up on this, I also agree that the demographic damage has already been done and it's been going on for so long now I wonder if it's so deeply embedded into the culture that the new policy will even really matter.
posted by triggerfinger at 6:48 AM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

In 1960, women worldwide had an average of 5 children. The rate has since halved, and in 2012, women had an average of 2.5 children across all regions.
posted by straight at 6:51 AM on October 29, 2015 [10 favorites]

Many European countries and Japan birth rates are to low because it is just too expensive to have children. Without being near replacement rate (two kids for two adults or 2.1 to account for children's death)it effects things economically due to less taxes and more burden on the smaller generation to take care of the elderly.

This is one reason why neonatal policies (maternity leave, pay, childcare cost reductions) are more extensive in European countries because they need people to have babies.

China most likely wants to stay near replacement rate, a steady population helps keep the economy supported.

Just so you know the US is actually about ayyreplacement rate. The reason the US grows in population is due to immigration.
posted by AlexiaSky at 6:51 AM on October 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

The one-child policy already had its impact in the form of a significant imbalance of male births. Twenty years later, there aren't enough women for all those men to marry, so the market responded in the form of massive human trafficking of women into China from places like Vietnam and Laos. So they didn't really eliminate births so much as outsource them to other countries for a generation or so.
posted by Naberius at 6:52 AM on October 29, 2015 [25 favorites]

Oops, I must have misunderstood or misremembered the section of the book on the natural sex ratio. My mistake.

I'm surprised that there's debate over whether governments have the right to force adult citizens, male or female, to undergo medical procedures without their consent. Faint of Butt, do you mean that you want states to control fertility via mostly-voluntary incentives (eg paying men to undergo vasectomies or women to undergo sterilisation / abortion / hysterectomies)? I find it hard to believe anyone approves of the Chinese model of not bothering about consent.
posted by Aravis76 at 6:53 AM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

You want other countries to increase governmental control of women's fertility?

Why does it have to happen to only the women? (I know the answer is patriarchy but if the hypothetical is that other countries would replicate the policy, hypothetically, it could be done through men's fertility.)

You can reduce population growth by educating women and by increasing wealth - it takes longer but has more positive side-effects.

How much time do we have though?

The solution to global population growth is not "Force poor people not to have babies."

Why do you assume that the policy is only forced on poor people? Yes, the wealthy can do whatever they want, but they can also pretty much murder people without punishment. However, although most of the population is not wealthy, that does not mean everyone else is poor. This policy would effect the middle class too.

I don't 100% agree that the world should replicate China's policy exactly, but damn there were alot of assumptions made in arguing against what Slackermagee said.
posted by LizBoBiz at 6:53 AM on October 29, 2015 [8 favorites]

Jedicus, I think those work well in developed countries where the birth rate is already pretty low, but tax breaks and government subsidies just aren't feasible in a lot of the developing world where birth rates are so high and governments don't have access to the resources to do that (and people are living on less than a dollar a day without much of a tax burden but with a lot of kids and without access to reproductive care).
posted by ChuraChura at 6:54 AM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Close to half of the world's population now lives in countries with fertility rates below the replacement level, which, as a rough rule of thumb, is 2.1 births per woman.

...the U.S. Census Bureau puts China's total fertility rate at about 1.5 children per woman, or 30 percent below the level required for long-term population stability.

posted by straight at 7:00 AM on October 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Regulating fucking: always effective.

We have a branch of the social sciences that devotes something like 80% of its time to comparing how various societies regulate fucking. Let's not pretend this isn't a pervasive phenomenon.
posted by ocschwar at 7:01 AM on October 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Meatbomb- In China you do get a mix due to low incone rural families with many children going to work and moving to urban enviroments. The enforcement of the policy varies greatly depending on the region and parents occupation.
And remember that the culture ira different and fosters a sense of unity among people anyway.
So stidying the topic is more difficult that it seems abs relies on western ideas of patenting not Chinese ones.
posted by AlexiaSky at 7:02 AM on October 29, 2015

The Census Bureau predicts that China’s population will peak in 2026, just 14 years from now. Its labor force will shrink, and its over-65 population will more than double over the next 20 years, from 115 million to 240 million. It will age very rapidly. Only Japan has aged faster -- and Japan had the great advantage of growing rich before it grew old. By 2030, China will have a slightly higher proportion of the population that is elderly than western Europe does today -- and western Europe, recall, has a higher median age than Florida.

posted by straight at 7:06 AM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

I don't 100% agree that the world should replicate China's policy exactly, but damn there were alot of assumptions made in arguing against what Slackermage said.

But China's policy is distinctive precisely because it does involve aggressive human rights violations - if you say you want more countries to follow China's example, it sounds like you mean that the human rights violations are a price worth paying for the benefit to the environment.
posted by Aravis76 at 7:07 AM on October 29, 2015 [13 favorites]

The solution to global population growth is not "Force poor people not to have babies."

Well no, it's climate change. But if we could find one that's less brutal and destructive than the collapse of civilization back to pre-industrial levels and the deaths of billions through starvation and violence... I mean let's face it, that's a pretty high bar and pretty much anything else will limbo right under it.
posted by Naberius at 7:09 AM on October 29, 2015 [7 favorites]

But these will also be more developed kids, having had much more focused and exclusive attention from their parents. Any articles around on this topic?

Actually, the Economist just had an article about this.

"Over the past generation, about 270m Chinese labourers have left their villages to look for work in cities. It is the biggest voluntary migration ever. Many of those workers have children; most do not take them along. The Chinese call these youngsters liushou ertong, or “left-behind children”. According to the All-China Women’s Federation, an official body, and UNICEF, the UN organisation for children, there were 61m children below the age of 17 left behind in rural areas in 2010."

"Being left behind damages children in many ways. In Cangxi county, Sichuan province, in south-west China, the local education authority (as part of a study) gave eight- and nine-year-old left-behind children video cameras and taught them to film their lives. Sun Xiaobing, who is eight years old, is in the charge of her grandparents, but she is left alone for days on end. She shares her lunch with a stray dog to attract its companionship. Her two days of video consist almost entirely of her conversations with farm animals; she has no one else. Wang Kanjun’s film is about his little sister. The five-year-old girl spends most of her time at home playing with the phone; she is waiting for her mother to call."

There are more "left behind" children in China than there are children in total in the United States and as Chinese have more children, more of them will be left behind.
posted by three blind mice at 7:10 AM on October 29, 2015 [16 favorites]

There were many exemptions to the policy. Wikipedia says it was 35.9% of the people who were actually limited to only one child, as of 2007. So this is not quite as dramatic a change as it might appear from the headline. As horrific a policy as it was, it was successful in preventing their population getting too disastrously large for the time necessary to get to a demographic transition going. Nothing else I can think of would have had much chance of being effective in time, given the situation they'd got themselves into.

People who try to argue that it didn't do any good seem to have about the same amount of intellectual honesty as those who argue that China needed to make this latest change because they were going to run short of people. Or those who say that Japan for instance, with a below-replacement-rate of fertility, will be totally depopulated in 500 years if present trends continue. That's not how reality works, guys.

Meanwhile in Canada we just had an election campaign where the main political parties vied to out-do each other on how much they'd pay people to have more children.
posted by sfenders at 7:11 AM on October 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

It is super weird watching people debate whether the rest of the world should implement China's one-child policy when we're facing a worldwide demographic crash in the coming decades.
posted by straight at 7:12 AM on October 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

Green tech and habits are good, a lower population consuming fewer resources would seem to be better.

But the one-child policy was horrible - horrible! - for a lot of people at the sharp end. I used to think it was quite reasonable when I was in my teens and early twenties (and having kids wasn't real for me) until I went to China and met people who were dealing with it. I heard from people who had had forced abortions and sterilizations, people who had been punished at work for having a second kid by accident, people who had a second child who was unable to access medical care or schooling. People whose families excluded them because they had one kid and it was a girl. People who were struggling to care for all the parents because there were so few kids and so much was expected of each of them.

In theory, of course, the policy meant that each child was totally spoiled by the whole family because there was only one. In practice, it meant there was huge pressure on each child, and a huge pressure on each mother.

The one-child policy was not some kind of "no one minds because it's China and things are different there". I can't speak for every Chinese person ever, of course, but I met real people who had suffered a lot because of this policy. I mean, we might as well say that American worker exploitation is okay because hey, it's just our culture - forced overtime and wage theft are normal here, right?

What I'm wondering is, are they going to decriminalize the existing second/third children? Are they going to provide some kind of reparations to the women who suffered under the policy?
posted by Frowner at 7:12 AM on October 29, 2015 [56 favorites]

It seems like if you were a benevolent totalitarian ruler who wants to reduce population while maintaining political stability, the sensible thing would to have a "one son" policy. Skew the population female.
posted by elizilla at 7:16 AM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also, frankly, China is quite large, and 35% is a LOT of people as an absolute number.
posted by Frowner at 7:16 AM on October 29, 2015

Well, the majority of the fault for global climate change is on the global north, and China. So let's not go about enacting population control through autocratic measures on the rest of the world in the name of Global Climate Change. Look, limiting fertility rates over the long term is going to be important. Population growth is a problem (though it's slowing - as women in the developing world have greater access to reproductive care and education). But the solution is not enacting laws that punish people for having multiple children, particularly in places where having multiple children is a sensible response to high infant mortality and lots of farm labor is done by hand. It is not sterilizing men or women. It really is highly effective to give people - and women in particular - the power to make decisions about their fertility, opportunities to benefit from education, access to the material to make these choices with, and have large-scale campaigns about family planning and why having one or two kids is desirable. It might not change demographics quite as quickly as you would like, but it also won't perpetrate human rights abuses on an already globally marginalized group of people.

(And unfortunately, I think in the event that some large scale edicts about population growth and limiting children come down, it's naive to think that they won't be enacted primarily and more forcefully on the poor than on the middle class and wealthy).
posted by ChuraChura at 7:20 AM on October 29, 2015 [11 favorites]

it sounds like you mean that the human rights violations are a price worth paying for the benefit to the environment.

One issues too often overlooked is how much of a human rights violation is it to bequeath a complete shithole of a planet to future generations? There is a massive issue of intergenerational justice attached to current and on-going population growth.
posted by biffa at 7:21 AM on October 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

One issues too often overlooked is how much of a human rights violation is it to bequeath a complete shithole of a planet to future generations?

Does not the entire abortion debate hinge on the difference between actual humans who are alive now and will have their rights abridged in favor of other people who are not yet born?

The yet to be born have no skin in the game, so to speak.
posted by three blind mice at 7:28 AM on October 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

(And unfortunately, I think in the event that some large scale edicts about population growth and limiting children come down, it's naive to think that they won't be enacted primarily and more forcefully on the poor than on the middle class and wealthy).

If you think human governments are brutal and unjust in this kind of thing, just wait until such an edict comes down from mother nature.
posted by ocschwar at 7:31 AM on October 29, 2015 [11 favorites]

We need a declining world wide population for environmental reasons. I'm therefore fine with parents being taxed more for having more than one or two kids, or being taxed even more for having male children.

I could imagine a country with serious population growth problems being justified in requiring that parents do not have more children soon after their first male kid or after two kids or whatever. Just impose fnes or parents who have kids too soon, while providing a financial incentive for fathers to undergo RISUG, a reversible sterilization procedure that lasts 10 years, and offer that mothers an IDU. It's easy to reverse those form of birth control if the kids dies, laws change, they move abroad, etc.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:33 AM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Why does it have to happen to only the women? (I know the answer is patriarchy...)

Patriarchy is a thing, but patriarchy is not the only (or really, the primary) reason why "controlling fertility" usually means "controlling women's fertility."

Women are already infertile more than they're fertile in any given ovulation cycle. "Stopping women from becoming fertile" is much easier, biologically, than "causing men to become temporarily infertile." Hormonal birth control just interferes with the signals that would otherwise cause women to enter that fertile period, by imitating the "don't ovulate" hormonal signals which are produced by pregnancy.

Men don't get pregnant. Men don't ovulate either. This whole system of hormonal on and off signals? Doesn't exist in men. Their sperm production is just always on. There IS no off switch that we can try to pull with a drug. Even RISUG isn't a drug, it's just another physical barrier -- an internal condom, if you will, which cannot be reversed nearly as easily as "stop taking pills" and is way more invasive, which will limit its (voluntary) use rate even once it becomes available (assuming it does.)

And so anyway... This is likely always going to be a women's issue. Controlling fertility is probably always going to mean controlling women.

The solution to population growth is to drive down infant mortality, increase access to birth control and women's education, and allow people who want to move off of farms to do so, by developing less-polluting industrial farming practices. Not controlling women's bodies.
posted by OnceUponATime at 7:33 AM on October 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

Wikipedia says it was 35.9% of the people who were actually limited to only one child, as of 2007. So this is not quite as dramatic a change as it might appear from the headline.

That is nearly half a billion people, you realize. Which is to say, more people than are in any other country except India. More people than are in the #4 and #5 most populous countries combined. More people than live in South America. Damn near more people than live in North America. More people than there are Buddhists worldwide. More people than the British Empire had living under it at its height.

This is a dramatic change.
posted by Etrigan at 7:35 AM on October 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

One issues too often overlooked is how much of a human rights violation is it to bequeath a complete shithole of a planet to future generations? There is a massive issue of intergenerational justice attached to current and on-going population growth.

And yet, how often this is human rights violations for thee and not me, so to speak. Human rights violations enacted against faraway people who aren't quite real to us except as numbers sound quite reasonable; when it's your sister waking up to a surprise hysterectomy, it looks a bit different, I bet.

The insistence with which people talk about how it's okay to treat actual citizens terribly because nature is going to do worse strikes me as deeply problematic, especially when it's people in the US on a majority-white site talking about China. I suggest that we imagine how a one-child policy would go down here in the US, how it would need to be enforced and on whom the greatest violence of enforcement would be likely to fall.
posted by Frowner at 7:36 AM on October 29, 2015 [42 favorites]

So let's not go about enacting population control through autocratic measures on the rest of the world in the name of Global Climate Change.

Yeah, climate change has nothing to do with it. In China they had, and still have, more immediate and local environmental problems to worry about. Extreme rapid population growth that goes too far tends to bring on things like famine and war where it happens, regardless of any long-term relationship to global problems.
posted by sfenders at 7:39 AM on October 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Alrighty then, I guess the financial penalty thing I've always heard of wasn't the only punishment.
posted by Slackermagee at 7:40 AM on October 29, 2015

More people than the British Empire had living under it at its height.

TIL there are more people in China today than there were in the entire world 150 years ago.
posted by sfenders at 7:44 AM on October 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

I would prefer the idea of giving everyone the right to have one child, for transfer or sale if desired. Couples with only one child sell the remaining right to another, for example.
posted by Brian B. at 7:45 AM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

I suggest that we imagine how a one-child policy would go down here in the US, how it would need to be enforced and on whom the greatest violence of enforcement would be likely to fall.

We could do better than that if it were really an ecological concern. Just limit parents to an allowable total ecological impact for their offspring perhaps based on the world average impact per capita. North Americans would be able to have approximately zero children.
posted by srboisvert at 7:51 AM on October 29, 2015 [7 favorites]

I would prefer the idea of giving everyone the right to have one child, for transfer or sale if desired. Couples with only one child sell the remaining right to another, for example.

The problem there is enforcement. Suppose someone gets pregnant after using / selling their child license. Does the state force an abortion? Take the child away after birth? Fine or imprison the parents? If a fine, what if they can't pay it? It's a mess.
posted by jedicus at 7:54 AM on October 29, 2015 [12 favorites]

So the carbon credits model?

Also wondering what the resource consumption difference is between first and third world countries is.

On preview, what srboisvert is getting at.
posted by Slackermagee at 7:54 AM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

I would prefer the idea of giving everyone the right to have one child, for transfer or sale if desired.
Brian B.

I'm assuming you're joiing, but I've seen libertarians sincerely argue for such a system.
posted by Sangermaine at 7:56 AM on October 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

This speculation is disturbing to me - how much many people are discounting the suffering, on mostly women, these policies entail.
posted by agregoli at 7:58 AM on October 29, 2015 [29 favorites]

I kind of object to kicking this all around like it's a total abstraction, and I'd like to ask the cis dudes in the thread to think about how you might feel differently if you were literally the one who could get pregnant, and how it might feel to have people violating your body as inspection and punishment.

I add, though: the trouble with allowing people a salable "child credit" is just like the problem with letting people sell their organs: poor people are pressured by dire financial need, while rich people either never have to sell a cornea or else are able to buy as many as they like. Bill Gates could buy a thousand child credits; my friend who desperately wanted a baby and struggled terribly to afford to take care of her daughter might well have chosen to sell her credit when she was homeless.
posted by Frowner at 7:58 AM on October 29, 2015 [54 favorites]

Was actually hoping that the opposite would happen and that other countries followed suit.

Green tech and habits are good, a lower population consuming fewer resources would seem to be better.

Just for the record, this is one of the most ignorant-ass statements I've ever read on this site, and that's saying something. Hi Metafilter, residents of China are actually people, and maybe you ought to at least consider putting human rights before vague speculation on carbon footprints or whatever. Like, I realize this is mainly a site for bored privileged techies in rich countries checking the web at work, but try at least fucking thinking before you type.
posted by thetortoise at 7:59 AM on October 29, 2015 [62 favorites]

"We must sacrifice our humanity to save humanity."
posted by charred husk at 8:02 AM on October 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

Right, it's only less restrictive if you consider the rest of the world.

I don't even know what this means. Is it still authoritorian and restrictive? Yes! Welcome to China. Is it also a huge deal that will probably change Chinese demographics and eventually society in major ways? Also yes. Shrugging and saying "Still not a liberal democracy, who cares?" is kind of a threadshitty response, is my point.
posted by No-sword at 8:06 AM on October 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

I think it's also really important to understand that just because you don't want kids [right now] does not mean that wanting kids isn't deeply, viscerally important to other people in a way that you just can't get. I have never wanted kids, not one bit. I have nightmares about pregnancy. If someone said "for the environment, Frowner, we discourage you from having a baby and will give you a generous tax credit", it would not destroy any of my life plans.

But it's just a kind of killing emotional violence to force that on a lot of people. It's not wrong or weird or incomprehensible to really, really want kids. "Just work your shitty working class job and live in lousy housing and be precarious and die in a charity ward, and don't even think about bringing kids into this world", that's what all this kind of thing is saying to a lot of working class people. Taking away the hope of a family, or policing the creation of a family with considerable state violence - that's horrible, and it's been the dream of lots of parts of the ruling class for a century. Preventing working class people from having families has been the goal of a lot of formal and informal social policy.

I especially want to say that if you are a young cis guy in a well-paying field, you are able right now to live a kind of "babies, what a drag" life, and you will also be enabled to marry a younger women when you're fifty and have kids if you change your mind. It's easy and low-cost to you to discount the emotional push to have kids. Please consider your standpoint.
posted by Frowner at 8:07 AM on October 29, 2015 [64 favorites]

I would prefer the idea of giving everyone the right to have one child, for transfer or sale if desired. Couples with only one child sell the remaining right to another, for example.

Oh, to be poor in a country where the very basis of biological life is monetized. Oh, to be poor in a country where the opportunity for family and the opportunity to love can be sold--what is desperation, in a system when one's very own children can be given up for cash?

'Procreation control' is a bit of language that makes it very easy for us to ignore what we're actually talking about. We're talking about babies--loving, lovely, family-structuring babies. Babies who wear adorable little hats, and who laugh when the wind blows leaves around, and cry when they are scared, and reach out for the warmth of a parent's touch when they are lonely and in need. We're talking about the opportunity to create a life to hug and to hold and to care for and raise into adulthood. We're talking about family, we're talking about the opportunity to love unconditionally. And this doesn't even touch on the horror of having one's body policed by the state--others have highlighted that. Don't let the subject be hidden behind the emotionless language of 'procreation control.'
posted by meese at 8:11 AM on October 29, 2015 [21 favorites]

Population control is always something that's for other people.

Seriously. And it's worth repeating, as people already have upthread, that this is to a significant degree a solved problem anyway. We know that if you raise living standards, decrease child mortality, and give women a better lot in life with more control over their reproductive health, families stop having exponentially more children. We can do good things and cause an extra good thing as a result! Win-win!

But no, forget that - on with the draconian policies. Sigh.
posted by Catseye at 8:11 AM on October 29, 2015 [16 favorites]

Two only is still a restrictive totalitarian policy, just slightly less restrictive.

One might even say half as restrictive.
posted by fairmettle at 8:11 AM on October 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Apart from the forced sterilisations and abortions etc, a significant penalty is imposed on the children born without permit themselves - because they are often unable to get identity documents until their parents have paid the fine (often unaffordable), they can't access education and healthcare.

Yes, one of my classmates in my Chinese language class is married to a Chinese woman who didn't exist for many years. She had to hide in closets when Party officials stopped by and couldn't go to school for many years. Her family finally paid the fine when she wanted to go to high school and had no papers to do so. Thank God she had no health issues growing up - there would have been very little recourse if she had to have any sort of surgery, for example. I was completely slack-jawed when I heard this story; it sounds like something out of a dystopian novel.

These are indeed real people, folks.
posted by chainsofreedom at 8:12 AM on October 29, 2015 [34 favorites]

Let's me be clear: as people get more money and childcare becomes more expensive without intervention people stop having children. You see it all over the world.

Neonatalist policy (for or against) does not matter if childcare costs are prohibitively expensive. Economic policy plays a much bigger role. So China is in a wierd space, now people are naturally having less children due to economic forces because there is now a middle class.

Chiina is laxing its policy because economic pressures will do the job just fine. Eventually China and the USA will join with the pro neonatalist policy where governents need more kids because everybody stops having them. Then benefits are added to help assist people to have kids.
posted by AlexiaSky at 8:13 AM on October 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

What's always odd to me in these discussions is how uncritically the claims made about the One Child Policy by the Chinese government are uncritically accepted by people.

People, including those in this thread, just take as an article of faith that the policy was necessary to control the population, that the 400 million number given is accurate, and that the policy was the only way. The discussion is then framed as clear-eyed realists daring to suggest that the policy is harsh but necessary to save the world.

Which is bizarre because there is good reason to question the policy's necessity and effectiveness. That section discusses claims that Thailand has had a fertility trajectory identical to that of China since the mid 1980s. I don't have them handy now but I've seen studies making similar claims about other nations like Argentina.

It's just weird to me that so many people are blindly willing to accept the word of an authoritarian dictatorship that their repressive controls were necessary and super effective. Was the policy actually necessary to reduce China's population growth rate? Did it achieve that goal? Would the storm of change that was sweeping China in the 70s and 80s have led to declining birth rates anyway? If you look at the history, the birth rate in China had already been significantly dropping for decades under Mao before the various elements of the policy were erected in the late 70s/early 80s. Also interesting is that an impetus for the creation of the policy was the influence of Western organizations pushing the overpopulation hysteria popular at the time on China.

We probably should have good answers to these questions before advocating for population controls elsewhere.

There's a disturbing totalitarian streak in environmentalism that rears its ugly head in discussions like this. There's always a vocal minority oddly gung-ho about repressive measures, and sometimes even cheering on the idea of mass deaths. I fully support the aims of the environmental movement and the need for action on climate change, but sentiments like those make me see why some conservatives recoil from it.
posted by Sangermaine at 8:28 AM on October 29, 2015 [42 favorites]

Babies who wear adorable little hats,

The birth of one baby is adorable; the birth of a billion babies is demographics.
posted by sfenders at 8:30 AM on October 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

Several comments deleted. Let's reel back in the temptation to say the worst thing possible, and then to get into metacommentary over who's bad in this thread.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:30 AM on October 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

Man, I remember in the heady 90s how we were thinking of the possibility of China turning into a democracy.

Now we'll be glad if they very slightly and gradually loosen a single human rights violating issue.
posted by FJT at 8:32 AM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Thailand has had a fertility trajectory identical to that of China since the mid 1980s.

If only the Chinese had thought of starting with 10 times the GDP per capita in the 80's, and beginning their trajectory of rapid economic growth from that level a decade earlier.

Still, given that it was actually suggested that the rest of the world might want to emulate China's approach, I defer to those who think that analyzing it is pointless; it's indefensible anyway, whether or not it might conceivably have lessened the sum of human suffering by some arcane measure.
posted by sfenders at 8:46 AM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

To me, this change seems like Xi's only real trump card for keeping wealthy and middle-class Chinese folks on side after the stock market woes of the last year. Now freed of the need to pay thousands of dollars in fines - money that had been invested and is now gone - that money can be poured into the economy in other ways to prop up China's lagging growth.

In recent years, there has been an absolute exodus of affluent Chinese young people - people with great skills, excellent English, and top-notch education, especially in the sciences and engineering fields - pouring out of the country and heading to study, work, and live abroad - and not coming back. Economic pressures to leave have always been there among poor and rural Chinese people, especially from the South, but the flight of the elite/educated/advantaged has (perhaps) been freaking out Zhongnanhai for a while since these people can't be replaced that easily by the rural-to-urban migrants pouring into China's more prosperous regions and cities. Being able to have a "normal"-looking family - few Western families have more than two kids nowadays anyway - is a big reason to exhale and maybe put off your plans to move to Adelaide or Ottawa for now...
posted by mdonley at 8:49 AM on October 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

straight: "In 1960, women worldwide had an average of 5 children. The rate has since halved, and in 2012, women had an average of 2.5 children across all regions."

A lower rate assisted greatly I'd imagine by 1/3-1/2 a billion people being restricted to one child.
posted by Mitheral at 8:51 AM on October 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

sfenders
If only the Chinese had thought of starting with 10 times the GDP per capita in the 80's, and beginning their trajectory of rapid economic growth from that level a decade earlier.

Or if only they had already been experiencing significant birth rate decline, and had already implemented family planning and birth control access policies while enacting major structural economic reforms that would soon enable enormous numbers of people to improve their economic situation which is strongly linked to declining birth rates.

Still, given that it was actually suggested that the rest of the world might want to emulate China's approach, I defer to those who think that analyzing it is pointless

You've got it exactly backwards, which was my point: it's those who advocate for the policy that aren't analyzing it and are accepting the claims made about it without scrutiny.

The policy is worth analyzing to see if it was actually needed to bring down the birth rate and what effect it actually had.
posted by Sangermaine at 8:55 AM on October 29, 2015

Slackermagee: “Was actually hoping that the opposite would happen and that other countries followed suit. Green tech and habits are good, a lower population consuming fewer resources would seem to be better.”

This is one of those intuitive notions that turn out to be flat wrong, like the idea that eating just before going to sleep will make you fat. The truth is that the amount of resources we consume is only tangentially related to the size of our population – as can be seen in the wide variation in per capita consumption across all the countries in the world – and our planet has plenty of space and resources for everyone right now. It's a convenient and optimistic myth, in some ways, because it allows us to believe that a paucity of resources, rather than plain old boring social injustice, is responsible for poverty and starvation. But the fact is that when we had far fewer people, we were just as awful at feeding the hungry – probably even more awful at it, actually – and the planet we're living on could easily support all of us. "Overpopulation" is an unscientific myth, an urban legend, and something we tell ourselves to give ourselves an excuse when we give up on trying to make the world just.
posted by koeselitz at 8:56 AM on October 29, 2015 [22 favorites]

that money can be poured into the economy in other ways to prop up China's lagging growth.

China's growth is naturally slowing and hopefully the next five year plan will set realistic targets and not the crazy 7, 8, 9%+ numbers of the past decades. China's growth is only lagging relative to their last couple insane decades. Honestly it doesn't need any more propping up, probably the opposite.

But China is naturally transitioning from their crazy centrally-planned-infrastructure binge and cheap-labour export economy to an economy that looks more like other developed nations - internal consumer demand being the main driver. This is a good thing I think.

At any rate this seem to me like a lot of other Chinese decisions to move from central planning to a more market-based model. As others have noted, teach women to read, give them economic opportunities outside of the home, put a TV in every home to give people something else to do once it gets dark and the birth rate drops all by itself. India (although India remains far more poverty-stricken than China and thus has a higher birth rate), Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia...

At any rate whether the policy was needed or not is a pointless argument - when the policy was put into place everything in China was done by central diktat. There were no other possibilities. Now The Party has found The Market and things are marginally better.
posted by GuyZero at 8:57 AM on October 29, 2015

I work with a couple of women who have permanently left China over issues like this. If what they say is true (and I have absolutely no reason to question them), the system is incredibly intrusive, to the extent of forced exams, party officials wanting to know the exact details of your sex life, monitoring birth control (to the point of counting pills!) and so on. Penalties are similarly extreme: loss of job for both woman and man, loss of housing, being cut off from healthcare, punitive taxes. Basically, a party official/government worker can make your life hell, if they want to. Personal dignity is a foreign concept, literally. And these women are not low level workers, they're university professors.

But the bigger issue for these moms seems to be environmental pollution. The woman I work with most closely refused categorically to go back to China when she moved her kid over and his asthma cleared up. Gone entirely. She had to return for 18mos or so while we figured out a way to transition her from postdoc to permanent unfortunately, but the first thing she said to me when we were able to get her back on staff was how happy she was to get her boy away from the smog and pollution.
posted by bonehead at 8:58 AM on October 29, 2015 [14 favorites]

(In fact, five, as we have three husbands on staff too. Notably they all have multi-kid families, now that I think of it.)
posted by bonehead at 9:04 AM on October 29, 2015

srboisvert: “We could do better than that if it were really an ecological concern. Just limit parents to an allowable total ecological impact for their offspring perhaps based on the world average impact per capita. North Americans would be able to have approximately zero children.”

Slackermagee: “So the carbon credits model? Also wondering what the resource consumption difference is between first and third world countries is. On preview, what srboisvert is getting at.”

Once again, to underline this:

The problem with schemes to limit population isn't so much that they're unethical, or that there are unfortunately lines we aren't allowed to cross in fixing the ecology of the earth.

The problem with schemes to limit population is that they are totally pointless if what you want to do is fix ecology. We can see this illustrated, blindingly, by the United States: a relatively tiny proportion of the earth's population is creating an outsized amount of ecological damage. There is no evidence whatsoever that reducing the population of the United States would reduce the ecological damage – none. I know it might seem intuitive to you, but it's wrong, scientifically wrong, to make these kinds of assumptions.

This Malthusian nonsense really, really needs to be counteracted, for a lot of reasons. Here's a big one:

Sangermaine: “Also interesting is that an impetus for the creation of the policy was the influence of Western organizations pushing the overpopulation hysteria popular at the time on China.”

That's right – we helped cause the draconian policies in China by encouraging them to be concerned about overpopulation, encouraging them to buy the idea that they were going to run out of space and food if they kept having children at the same rate.

We really need to come to grips with how incorrect this idea is.
posted by koeselitz at 9:10 AM on October 29, 2015 [11 favorites]

There is no evidence whatsoever that reducing the population of the United States would reduce the ecological damage – none.

What would this evidence look like, in your opinion? Obviously there is no direct evidence, since the population of the United States is still growing. But it's equally obvious that if, somehow, the entire population of the United States vanished overnight that the ecological impact of the United States would be greatly reduced.

Presumably you are suggesting that if the population of the United States were marginally reduced that the remaining population would "pick up the slack" by consuming more resources. This seems reasonable, but surely there is a point of diminishing returns and, eventually, an inflection point where the remaining population consumes less (in aggregate) than the current population. The question, it seems to me, is where that point is and how can we get there in a way that does not cause undue suffering along the way.

This Malthusian nonsense really, really needs to be counteracted

Are you suggesting that the Earth can indefinitely sustain an arbitrarily large population of humans at an ever-increasing standard of living? Because otherwise we're just arguing over the details of how many, for how long, and at what standard of living. Malthus doesn't enter into it.
posted by jedicus at 9:29 AM on October 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

An ever increasing population, with ever more automated jobs, and a gradually worsening climate is totally doable, guys. You just build forever downwards and rely on a catsplosion (can't automate scrimshaw!) to keep everyone happy, fed, and comfortable with their neighbors/life path. It still usually ends with !FUN! anyway but that's badly embarked civ adventures in Dwarf Fortress for you.

For people in meatspace? Best of luck. No sarcasm in that, I'll be here (knock on wood) in fifty years+ too.
posted by Slackermagee at 9:37 AM on October 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

There is no evidence whatsoever that reducing the population of the United States would reduce the ecological damage – none.

There can be no proof of this absurdly counter-intuitive notion, because we've never done the experiment of having a large, wealthy, post-industrial nation reduce the size of its population by a meaningful amount, peacefully and gradually, over several generations. Maybe someone should try it and see what happens.
posted by sfenders at 9:41 AM on October 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Naberius: " Pretty much any southern red state will do the same"

The intrusion and suppression of rights isn't even remotely the same (as much as these sorts of things can be put on a scale).
posted by Mitheral at 9:44 AM on October 29, 2015 [8 favorites]

Are you suggesting that the Earth can indefinitely sustain an arbitrarily large population of humans at an ever-increasing standard of living?

Australia alone has enough agricultural output to feed the world, the first world is heading for a depopulation demographic crisis of not enough young people working to pay for their social safety nets, etc.

There can be no proof of this absurdly counter-intuitive notion, because we've never done the experiment of having a large, wealthy, post-industrial nation reduce the size of its population by a meaningful amount, peacefully and gradually, over several generations. Maybe someone should try it and see what happens.

Western Europe, Japan and the rest of wealthy East Asia, etc.
posted by Apocryphon at 9:46 AM on October 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

There is no evidence whatsoever that reducing the population of the United States would reduce the ecological damage – none.

But what if the population were reduced to zero? Surely we'd see a reduction in ecological damage then.
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:04 AM on October 29, 2015

Err, Apocryphon, where are you getting your numbers from? According to a quick google search, the population of the areas you listed is either flat-lined or slightly increasing. So they are not depopulating by a meaningful amount. And do you have a cite for your Australian claim? Again, a quick google search yields articles like this:
http://theconversation.com/australia-cant-feed-the-world-but-it-can-help-11269

which say that Australia does export food, but it is only a small part of the global food system, and its food production is particularly vulnerable to climate change.
posted by Balna Watya at 10:09 AM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

me: “There is no evidence whatsoever that reducing the population of the United States would reduce the ecological damage – none.”

jedicus: “What would this evidence look like, in your opinion? Obviously there is no direct evidence, since the population of the United States is still growing. But it's equally obvious that if, somehow, the entire population of the United States vanished overnight that the ecological impact of the United States would be greatly reduced.”

Good evidence would look like sound economical arguments indicating that ecological impact correlates directly with population. Yes, if we instantly reduced the population absolutely and removed every person in the United States – or even cut it down to, say, a tenth or a quarter of its current size – it's likely that the ecological impact of this country would reduce. But the assumption that therefore we can reduce our ecological impact by gradually reducing population to a slightly lower amount (or even a much lower amount, say by 20%) is utterly unsupported; it ignores important problems, like the fact that large amounts of the population are already headed for an old age wherein they're likely to use a lot more resources than the rest of us, and cause a great strain even if we do have fewer babies to take care of. It also ignores the problems involved in reducing a population and maintaining the production of food.

“Presumably you are suggesting that if the population of the United States were marginally reduced that the remaining population would 'pick up the slack' by consuming more resources. This seems reasonable, but surely there is a point of diminishing returns and, eventually, an inflection point where the remaining population consumes less (in aggregate) than the current population. The question, it seems to me, is where that point is and how can we get there in a way that does not cause undue suffering along the way.”

No, I'm saying that there's not even a continuum. If you got rid of all the people, then, yes, the people would use less resources. If you got rid of 90% of the people, yes, the people would use less resources, but what 90% did you get rid of? The remaining 10% might starve for lack of any meaningful way to utilize the remaining resources. If you got rid of only 10%, but the right 10%, you might even be able to precipitate collapse if it meant the population were unable to sustain itself. These things aren't simple curves; they're filled with complications and difficult calculations we'd have to make.

In sum, trying to solve ecological problems by reducing the population seems a bit like trying to fix a car by throwing away the manual and just deciding to take the entire car apart, piece by piece, so you can then find the problem and put it all back together. Yes, theoretically, you could take an entire car apart, find the problem with it, and put the entire car back together; but in practice, it's almost certainly not going to work, you're introducing hundreds of smaller problems into the process, and there's no way you're going to fix the issue as quickly as you could have by just reading the manual and fixing the one problem in the first place.

me: “This Malthusian nonsense really, really needs to be counteracted...”

jedicus: Are you suggesting that the Earth can indefinitely sustain an arbitrarily large population of humans at an ever-increasing standard of living? Because otherwise we're just arguing over the details of how many, for how long, and at what standard of living. Malthus doesn't enter into it.”

Malthus enters into it because he's the original expounder of the idea that population growth is exponential whilst food supply growth is arithmetic, and that therefore it's simply a natural result that population growth will always outstrip food supply. He turned out to be wrong. Suggesting that this means the Earth ought to be some sort of magical device which can support arbitrarily large populations of humans is a leap in logic; all that needs to be said is that the Earth, as it exists now, is large enough to support double or triple its current population. The popular Malthusian myth - that the world is close to being full, that we are teetering on the brink and running out of space and food - is incorrect.
posted by koeselitz at 10:10 AM on October 29, 2015 [7 favorites]

Australia alone has enough agricultural output to feed the world

Do you have a cite for that? A quick search came up with this article, which casts doubt on that statement (I'd love to be wrong).

State mandated family planning is horrible, and no one in the world should be starving, but that doesn't mean earth can "easily" support nine billion inhabitants.

"In the world's temperate climes human agriculture has supplanted 70 percent of grasslands, 50 percent of savannas and 45 percent of temperate forests. Farming is also the leading cause of deforestation in the tropics and one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, a major contributor to the ongoing maul of species known as the "sixth extinction," and a perennial source of nonrenewable groundwater mining and water pollution." [link]

Granted, some of that has to do with modern farming methods and diets, but still, we're asking a lot of the planet.

on preview: Balna Watya beat me to it.
posted by crumbly at 10:19 AM on October 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Australia alone has enough agricultural output to feed the world

What a curious factoid. The figures here lead to a guess that Australia and Oceania feed approximately 3% of the world's appetite with the total of their agriculture and other land use. The area is home to about 5% of the world's people. If net primary productivity in Australia could be somehow appropriated and devoted to the task at the same rate as is more easily accomplished in India, they could hypothetically feed 16% of the world.
posted by sfenders at 10:31 AM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

The threat of overpopulation is an outdated, unscientific boogeyman that seems to exclusively get trotted out to justify eugenics for poor people in far-away countries.

We have enough water and food for more humans than currently exist - according to Eric Holt-Giménez in an article published in the Journal of Sustainable Agriculture, we already grow enough food for 10 billion people - and yet 3.1 million children starve to death each year.

Meanwhile, the USA makes up just over 4% of the world's population yet produces 20% of the world's greenhouse gases.

To look at these stats and think "the problem is too many poor people" instead of "the problem is unjust access to resources and unsustainable practices in wealthy countries" is a big leap in logic to make. In fact, it leaps right over the many things we know contribute to lower birthrates and healthier families, like women's education. Telling.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 10:33 AM on October 29, 2015 [26 favorites]

Because I'm not sure everyone realizes this: the one child policy was never a blanket policy directed at every single Chinese person.

In accordance with China's affirmative action policies towards ethnic minorities, all non-Han ethnic groups are subjected to different laws and are usually allowed to have two children in urban areas, and three or four in rural areas. Han Chinese living in rural towns are also permitted to have two children. Because of couples such as these, as well as urban couples who simply pay a fine (or "social maintenance fee") to have more children, the overall fertility rate of mainland China is close to 1.4 children per woman.

As of 2007, only 35.9% of the population were subject to a strict one-child limit. 52.9% were permitted to have a second child if their first was a daughter; 9.6% of Chinese couples were permitted two children regardless of their gender; and 1.6%—mainly Tibetans—had no limit at all.

Not saying this makes it better or worse, but a lot of people seem to talk about the policy as if it applied to every single person in China.
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:46 AM on October 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

We know that if you raise living standards, decrease child mortality, and give women a better lot in life with more control over their reproductive health, families stop having exponentially more children.

So, people keep pointing out the living standards thing, etc etc, but whenever I've looked into the numbers, the main influence is just one of those factors.
Access to birth control.

Humans don't choose when they are fertile. Birth control gives us part of that choice.
Poor mothers still, no especially, want to be able to feed all their children.

You don't have to legislate it. You just have to give women the choice to have the number of children that they can support.
And that means free, national birth control programs.

The problem with schemes to limit population is that they are totally pointless if what you want to do is fix ecology.

Well, why yes, not further increasing resource consumption is just one of the many, many benefits of widely available birth control, but it's not the only option available.

You know what would be a really great option for our planet?
If we could get any of the (our own, presumably) really resource-greedy countries to decrease resource consumption!
I very much agree that would be a preferable option.

One small problem.
Have we been able to do it so far? Have we even made much progress on this much, much better solution?
Pretty much... Nope.

Population control via widely available birth control, will not be enough, but pretty much one of the biggest pieces of progress we HAVE made in the last 50 years to not be in a major shitshow by now. Do you think America would be using any less global resources if there were more people in America?

I would LOVE for us to be hitting a state of global population decline. Given global climate change, fisheries stocks, and other environmental stresses affecting us, that will alleviate a lot of suffering, and leave us in a better position to cope! An aging population still has children and young people. A bigger proportion of old folks home carers than house builders is not that terrifying a prospect. Sorry, that sounds a little facetious, but an aging population is not the nightmare scenario that keeps me up at night.

As I said, I would love for us to hit global population decline, but I'm not so sure we are. Growth is still increasing, and according to the most recent forecasts:
World population to hit 11bn in 2100 – with 70% chance of continuous rise...
posted by Elysum at 10:51 AM on October 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

I think I might have mixed up Australia with the American Midwest. Anyway, the main point is that actually a small area can suffice as the world's breadbasket. The point is, raw output is not the problem. Especially with lifestyle changes, such as phasing out red meat. The problem is structural and logistical issues. Better to fix the beams in your house to keep the roof from collapsing, than condemning it and banning new tenants.
posted by Apocryphon at 10:57 AM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

There is a debate over the health effects of grain crops though. I'd therefore suggest repeating that assessment without grains, corns, rice, etc. How many people can you feed on the fruit and vegetables that we could grow in a given area?

I'm happy with phasing out red meat of course, but I doubt that's progressing terribly quickly. Are any western countries anywhere near imposing taxes on meat? We're managing to phase out fish though, by phasing them out of the oceans.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:30 AM on October 29, 2015

I learned from Frank Capra's Our Mr. Sun that we should all be eating algae by now.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 12:00 PM on October 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Growth is still increasing, and according to the most recent forecasts:
World population to hit 11bn in 2100 – with 70% chance of continuous rise...

That particular Science article assumes that sub-Saharan Africa won't in our lifetimes have the kind of sharp demographic transition that's happened pretty much everywhere else in the world. Perhaps that pessimism is justified, but their argument seems to be that since Africa didn't shift when Asia did, Africa must be different and won't have a similar shift, rather than considering that it might have a demographic shift later.
posted by straight at 12:34 PM on October 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

a huge cohort of people who have had much more limited opportunities when growing up to learn about sharing, socialization with peers, etc.

I'm an only child (thankfully because my mother had the right to choose how many children she wanted to have, not because the government mandated it). Somehow I managed not to become a feral, snarling thing that hordes resources and nips at others when they get too close.

The tired old adage about selfish, poorly socialized only children is, well, tired and old, and frankly insulting. We can do better.
posted by jesourie at 1:19 PM on October 29, 2015 [10 favorites]

As these "one child" children age into the workforce (I guess it is already underway) it will be interesting to see how this shifts Chinese culture, a huge cohort of people who have had much more limited opportunities when growing up to learn about sharing, socialization with peers, etc. But these will also be more developed kids, having had much more focused and exclusive attention from their parents. Any articles around on this topic?

There have been hundreds (if not thousands) of articles written about this. Like most articles about China, they're mostly anecdotes from Western businessmen or English teachers, maybe a "man on the street" quote, plus a little armchair analysis. Google Little Emperor Syndrome.
posted by bradf at 1:49 PM on October 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

The idea that human population is NOT related to poverty or ecological decline is contradicted almost everywhere one turns for evidence. The main thing is that it is never a local problem. Over-consumption in North America cuts down trees in Central Africa, etc. Another problem is that overpopulation is a root religious viewpoint and probably nothing will change that. Below is one take on the problem, and even when it attempts to minimize one point, it lands on a bigger point, ie, population levels in developed countries might be worse for poverty and ecology everywhere else.

5 The Role of Poverty and Overpopulation
Poverty, while undeniably responsible for much of the damage to rainforests, has to a large extent been brought about by the greed of the rich industrialised nations and the Third World elites who seek to emulate them. Development, which is often seen as the solution to world poverty, seldom helps those whose need is greatest. It is often the cause rather than the cure for poverty.
The claim that overpopulation is the cause of deforestation is used by many governments and aid agencies as an excuse for inaction. In tropical countries, pressure from human settlement comes about more from inequitable land distribution that from population pressure. In general, most of the land is owned by a small but powerful elite which displaces poor farmers into rainforest areas. So long as these elites maintain their grip on power, lasting land reform will be difficult to achieve.
Overpopulation is not a problem exclusive to Third World countries. An individual in an industrialised country is likely to consume in the order of sixty times as much of the world's resources as a person in a poor country. The growing populations in rich industrialised nations are therefore responsible for much of the exploitation of the earth, and there is a clear link between the overconsumption in rich countries and deforestation in the tropical forests.
posted by Brian B. at 3:53 PM on October 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

There seems to be a lot of assumptions in this thread that all countries are just like the US. In terms of the raw ability to feed people, the US is underpopulated, and has the attitudes that go along with that— including the notion that having three or more children is a human right.

China has 70% of the arable land of the US, and more than 4 times the population. We could triple the number of people we feed— half our grain goes to feed livestock. China has always produced food efficiently, and it's done miracles to handle its increased population, but it's not easy to see how it could triple production.

I don't understand the idea that increased population doesn't correlate with environmental stress. More First Worlders means more oil use, more wilderness lost, more global warming, more trash, more fishery stocks destroyed. More Brazilians and Indians and Chinese means more deforestation, water problems, and eventually intense competition for oil. And China's size means that though it uses far less resources per capita than the US, it adds up to a very hefty number— e.g. China produces 4 times as much coal as we do, 9 times the steel, 2.5 times the cotton.

What should Chinese policy be? I don't know, and neither, I think, do most of us here. We have a lot more leeway in increasing population; try to be aware of that when dictating to the Chinese what policies they should follow.
posted by zompist at 4:40 PM on October 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Excellent piece explaining that the effect of the original policy - and the effect of its scrapping - will be relatively minor.

This picture brilliantly illustrates how the one child policy was more about optics than anything else
posted by smoke at 4:56 PM on October 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

more about optics than anything else

If that is all it takes to so brilliantly illuminate what's going on, strange that the writer there will only go as far as "its likely role in driving down fertility has probably been overstated." But thank you for linking to something that links to something substantial at last, i.e. what appears to be the damn paper that was alluded to earlier. It makes a convincing argument that 400 million births averted is an over-estimate, but does not make any convincing estimate of its own. Seems as if nobody has really studied it properly.
posted by sfenders at 7:05 PM on October 29, 2015

It's clear, though that any resultant increase in China's fertility resulting from this policy change is going to be a mere drop in the bucket compared to what is going on across parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. A lot of people don't realize the kind of population explosion that is occurring.

Nigeria alone will likely pass 750m people this century. They started the 21st century with 120million people. That's insane.
posted by Justinian at 10:09 PM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

the US is underpopulated, and has the attitudes that go along with that— including the notion that having three or more children is a human right.

The US doesn't originate the idea that reproductive freedom is a human right - and that bodily integrity is a human right, since it is difficult to forcibly restrict someone's fertility without touching their body. You'll find both in the UN Declaration of 1948, emerging as a response to the eugenic policies of the Nazis, which were experienced in Europe not the United States. Those articles of the UN declaration were ratified by a number of countries, apart from the US and Western European countries, and pre-PRC China was one of them.

In any case, the US itself has hardly been free from any temptation to forcibly sterilise its people, over its history. Whether that's a good idea isn't a West v The Rest issue, it's an absolutely basic question about fundamental human rights and whether they can be trumped by state arguments about the public good. If you think they can, it's naive to believe that only worries about the environment and pressing problems of resource allocation will count; there are lots of countries where certain populations are considered undesirable (welfare recipients, the disabled, the poor, the wrong ethnic groups) and where the temptation to sterilise has existed. That list absolutely includes the US.
posted by Aravis76 at 12:53 AM on October 30, 2015 [6 favorites]

I had to step out of this thread all day because some of the comments minimizing the effects of the one-child policy and casually supporting similar steps, even if it's just trolling to get a rise out of people... the least inflammatory word I can think of to describe them is "insensitive." You can't untangle restrictions on fertility from association with the most oppressive forms of racism and eugenics because that is the actual history of those kinds of policies, worldwide; if something about this kind of conversation smacks of the ideologies underlying the violent genocides of the 19th and 20th centuries, well, there's a reason for that.

(It's not new, but it just blows my mind every time to hear people in Western countries-- and I am one!-- talk about entire continents of individuals as if they represent some kind of inconvenient logistical problem. Colonialism lives on, every day.)

As in the article Aravis76 linked just above, attempts to set limits on fertility for the "greater good" in practice invariably affect the most vulnerable and stigmatized populations. People living in poverty, ethnic and racial minorities, indigenous peoples, intersex and gender minorities, those with disabilities, always and forever women: these are the people who have been repeatedly considered "undesirable," upon whom accusations of excessive reproduction and enforced sterilization are inflicted.

The one-child policy in China is not the most horrific example of this sort of restriction, but it has demonstrated amply that efforts to restrict fertility that sound even a little pragmatic on paper will be carried out in ways that reflect existing structural inequalities and that brutalize people. I mean, there are plenty of examples of it listed in this very thread, if you don't want to research it, but even in an ostensibly communist country, those without connections and resources are the hardest hit.

And this is all just talking about the way these policies are carried out, before you even get to the question of their fundamental morality. If you believe in unfettered access to contraception and abortion-- and if you believe women are full human beings, you should, for reasons enumerated at length elsewhere on this site-- you believe in bodily integrity as a human right, and the ability to conceive without restriction and to control one's own pregnancy and childbirth are aspects of that right.

Whatever the answers to environmental destruction and the earth's future are-- and the U.S. maybe taking baby steps away from starting wars to control an obscene share of the world's resources would be a nice fucking start-- this is not a viable one, period.
posted by thetortoise at 2:21 AM on October 30, 2015 [8 favorites]

some of the comments minimizing the effects of the one-child policy

I should have been more clear with my comment: I didn't link to that piece to minimise its effects as a human rights abuse, only to minimise its effects as a form of population control.

As a human rights abuse, it was terrible.
posted by smoke at 3:03 AM on October 30, 2015

You know what's going to be horrific? Destroying our planet's ecosphere. If your "fundamental morality" tells you that it's your inalienable right to use more and more of the planet's limited resources... well, when you and a couple hundred million other Americans think that way, global catastrophe becomes that much more likely.

If we want a sustainable world, we have to do a lot of things differently. I hope we'll do it by persuasion and innovation. It hasn't been enough so far, but we can only keep trying.

As for colonialism, this thread is full of Westerners giving political and moral advice to China. It might be worth remembering that the average American consumes 50 times the resources of the average Chinese. Who needs to learn from whom?

(Just to be clear, I'm not defending the one-child policy. But not even understanding why it was originally adopted, in 1979, is profoundly Americocentric. At least consider the possibility that you are not more of an expert on developing high-density post-communist nations than Deng was.)
posted by zompist at 3:24 AM on October 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

You know what's going to be horrific? Destroying our planet's ecosphere. If your "fundamental morality" tells you that it's your inalienable right to use more and more of the planet's limited resources... well, when you and a couple hundred million other Americans think that way, global catastrophe becomes that much more likely.

If we want a sustainable world, we have to do a lot of things differently. I hope we'll do it by persuasion and innovation. It hasn't been enough so far, but we can only keep trying.

As for colonialism, this thread is full of Westerners giving political and moral advice to China. It might be worth remembering that the average American consumes 50 times the resources of the average Chinese. Who needs to learn from whom?

(Just to be clear, I'm not defending the one-child policy. But not even understanding why it was originally adopted, in 1979, is profoundly Americocentric. At least consider the possibility that you are not more of an expert on developing high-density post-communist nations than Deng was.)

Seems like your point here is that I'm a hypocrite and typically arrogant American? Sure, guilty. But if you don't want to defend the policy, you might want to consider... not doing that? I don't really know what to tell you.
posted by thetortoise at 4:10 AM on October 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

In case I wasn't clear enough:
What drives me nuts, is that a one child policy was never needed - you don't, you shouldn't legislate the ability for people to have children. But the vast majority of the decline in China's birthrate was not FROM the one child policy, it was from wide availability and access to birth control.
Checking out Smoke's links, if anything, the One Child Policy increased the birthrate. If you're allowed 2 or 3 children, and it's perceived as an honour or a privilege, you'll be more likely to go ahead, regardless of whether you would have been happy to stop after 1 or 2 children.

Legislating it comes from the patronising, condescending point of view that assumes poor people and women can't and shouldn't make rational decisions for themselves.
Iran had most of the same population drop, again from access. They've now turned round and are trying to ban contraceptive options, to increase the birth rate. It's the same top-down, patronising approach. Just give people the choice!

Africa hasn't undergone a 'demographic transition', because not-so-coincidentally, birth control access is still very low across most of the continent, and it isn't going to undergo a 'transition' until that changes.

I came in to the conversation because yes, we are facing ecological crisis, but the One Child Policy, and opposition to birth control access are both wrong and ineffective options. All you need to do is give people the choice. Yes, a few women will decide to have 6 kids, cool, more power to them. Most women won't.

Development is not the best contraceptive, contraceptives are. Poor countries that have wide access to birth control (rather than top down requirements), still have lower birth rates. Rich countries have wide access to birth control options, just by virtue of the fact that access to birth control is a privilege that the rich can afford.
posted by Elysum at 4:25 AM on October 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

Africa hasn't undergone a 'demographic transition', because not-so-coincidentally, birth control access is still very low across most of the continent, and it isn't going to undergo a 'transition' until that changes.

Sure doesn't help having the Catholic Church around talking about the evils of birth control either.
posted by Drinky Die at 4:29 AM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

To be clear about my point, which may have gotten lost in being mad at people on Metafilter: I don't know anything about how to address national demographic concerns or fix climate change, and I don't claim to, though caring about Deng Xiaoping's feelings is admittedly low on my priority list. What I am saying here is that policies like this one, policies where the major effect is inflicting harm and suffering on poor women, are human rights violations and should be off the table anywhere, anytime. That's the beginning and end of it.
posted by thetortoise at 4:31 AM on October 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

If your "fundamental morality" tells you that it's your inalienable right to use more and more of the planet's limited resources... well, when you and a couple hundred million other Americans think that way, global catastrophe becomes that much more likely.

Don't call me an American. And, actually, now that I consider it, don't lecture me on colonialism - I'm British but my family is Indian and I'm well aware of what colonialism is and how it, for example, has fed into eugenic experiments in post-independence India and elsewhere. It is astonishingly arrogant of any American to believe that human rights discourse as such is American cultural property - I ground my criticisms of global human rights violations in the language of human rights because I believe in the validity of that moral framework, and I think I can do that without my Indian ancestors all rising from the dead to call me a secret American or a colonialist or whatever.

If you don't share a belief in universal human rights, and instead hold some utilitarian or relativist or Marxist perspective on rights, that's a reasonable position - feel free to argue it. But don't argue it by telling others that their beliefs are necessarily grounded in secret American indoctrination and ignorance of world history, as opposed to rational thought. Yes, the Chinese adoption of the one-child policy was deeply grounded in the particularities of the social and economic challenges facing China at the time. So what? It doesn't alter the moral claim that the one child policy, as implemented, is a rights violation. The factual context only matters to that claim if you think any set of facts would supply a justification for forcibly sterilising someone without their consent. If you believe that, fine, but there are reasons to believe otherwise that aren't necessarily grounded in ignorance.
posted by Aravis76 at 5:58 AM on October 30, 2015 [8 favorites]

If unlimited reproductive rights exist, someone should argue it, rather than imply that limited rights is violating the bodies of poor women after God and the religious men have already laid claim to them (as if having lots of kids in poverty is an alternate path to autonomy). And nobody should imagine that families actually pay for all these kids, wherever they may be. In America, it costs 245,000 dollars to raise a child on average. In a poor area, large families puts stress on the entire economy, and their resources are poached or sold cheaply out of social desperation. So nearly everyone has a say in how this unfolds, except the wildlife. Some may say the extra kids all pay the debt back, but never environmentally, and only in proportion to their family advantages, including a limited number of children.
posted by Brian B. at 7:49 AM on October 30, 2015

Brian B., you're kind of answering your own question there.

The idea is that humans are not dumb animals content to pop out infinite children until Something Is Done to stop them. As has been shown time and again, fertility is dependent on economic and social conditions.

Because kids cost $245,000 in the US, people in the US have fewer kids. This is true across the first world where countries are experiencing or approaching negative birth rates. As shown by someone upthread, the US grows due to immigration.

The point is we don't need totalitarian reproduction controls lest we breed ourselves out of existence. We need to do what has been demonstrated conclusively to work: improve economic conditions, provide access to birth control and family planning education, and educate and provide opportunities for women.
posted by Sangermaine at 8:00 AM on October 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

(Just to be clear, I'm not defending the one-child policy. But not even understanding why it was originally adopted, in 1979, is profoundly Americocentric. At least consider the possibility that you are not more of an expert on developing high-density post-communist nations than Deng was.)

You might want to actually try understanding why the policy was adopted yourself, since you seem to be under the impression that Deng received it from the heavens one day.

As shown above, it was in large part a result of interaction with Western organizations pushing population hysteria in the 70s. If you had bothered to learn about the history, you would also know that prior to the birth limit policy there had been a decade of policies encouraging later marriages and family planning (see smoke's links). These policies accelerated an existing downward trend in fertility to yield two decades of sharp birth rate decline when the one child policy was enacted.

The fertility rate was already sharply dropping without it, and it's unclear what additional effect the one child policy had that wouldn't have already happened. So stop hiding your defense of the policy behind wailing appeals to preserving nature, this is just about controlling people.
posted by Sangermaine at 8:11 AM on October 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

The idea is that humans are not dumb animals content to pop out infinite children until Something Is Done to stop them. As has been shown time and again, fertility is dependent on economic and social conditions.

You're only hinting that we don't need enforcement, and I agree, but we need incentives for men and women in poverty to make decisions today and not wait for the curve to flatten out at 20 billion.
posted by Brian B. at 8:13 AM on October 30, 2015

I didn't hint at anything. We don't need enforcement. As I said:

We need to do what has been demonstrated conclusively to work: improve economic conditions, provide access to birth control and family planning education, and educate and provide opportunities for women.

If places like the European Union, the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, Russia, Brazil, Iran, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Taiwan, Ukraine and Lithuania and many others have somehow arrived at sub-replacement fertility levels without "enforcement", the Africans and other poorer areas can too.

Maybe instead of wondering what sort of draconian control schemes we or they can impose, we could consider ways to provide the things that have actually led to lower fertility rates without "enforcement".
posted by Sangermaine at 8:27 AM on October 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

we need incentives for men and women in poverty to make decisions today and not wait for the curve to flatten out at 20 billion.

I mean, I know what it is you're getting at... But all the same: isn't it weird to ask, "How can we get those suffering through poverty to do what we think is best for society as a whole?" rather than "How can we get those suffering through poverty out of poverty?"

Yeah, the discussion is about population and what measures are worthwhile to control population, so you made a comment about how to deal with population control... But the whole point of what a lot of people like Sangermaine are saying is that the decision to have a child falls within a giant web of other decisions and background conditions. And acting like all of the rest of that web of background conditions is just going to remain constant means treating poor people as if naturally, unchangeably poor and treating the conditions that lead to poverty as if naturally, unchangeably a part of human life.

The decision to have a child is personal. The conditions that lead to it being a good decision to have 10 children or just one, along with the conditions determining the cost of raising a child, as well as the conditions determining the environmental impact of a child, are all social. Not only does focusing on those social conditions, rather than an individual's particular choices as a response to those conditions, help maintain the dignity of each person, it's also way more efficient.
posted by meese at 8:41 AM on October 30, 2015 [6 favorites]

zompist: “(Just to be clear, I'm not defending the one-child policy. But not even understanding why it was originally adopted, in 1979, is profoundly Americocentric. At least consider the possibility that you are not more of an expert on developing high-density post-communist nations than Deng was.)”

Was Deng actually an expert on developing high-density post-communist nations? Did he ever claim to be? He was very good at leading a nation waking up from communism toward liberalism. I'm not entirely sure he was right about the scientific ramifications of population control; in fact, I'm tempted to say that Sangermaine is correct in indicating that Deng was influenced strongly by very mistaken Western Malthusian ideas about overpopulation being a serious and imminent threat to the world.
posted by koeselitz at 8:56 AM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

The thesis of Mara Hvistendahl's book, which I cited above, is precisely that Western ideas and anxieties about overpopulation generated the spread of forced sterilisation and other aggressive population control measures in countries like India and China (with their knock-on effect of a huge gender imbalance). She traces not only the ideas but identifies the individual Western academics and organisations that spread the message that population growth was an appalling crisis that justified the state in using aggressive measures to combat it.
posted by Aravis76 at 9:13 AM on October 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

If unlimited reproductive rights exist, someone should argue it, rather than imply that limited rights is violating the bodies of poor women

I don't understand how this is an implication rather than a logical consequence. How does the state limit reproductive rights - i.e. not merely influence reproductive decisions but limit the very right to make those decisions - except by medical procedures that violate bodily autonomy? There's forced sterilisation, forced abortion, and forced use of contraception (with the state either carrying out the procedures or imposing criminal penalties on men and women who refuse to undergo them) -- what are the other options, exactly?
posted by Aravis76 at 9:18 AM on October 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

what are the other options, exactly?

Financial penalties are used in China. It's not much better, but it's not violating bodily autonomy.
posted by Etrigan at 9:38 AM on October 30, 2015

As I've said, the financial penalties are criminal and coercive in effect - if you can't pay, your children will be penalised and you or your relatives may be detained. This isn't just because China enforces its laws with a lack of respect for human rights, it's just how criminal fines have to work - if people don't pay them, what do you do except impose a further penalty for not paying, like a prison sentence?
posted by Aravis76 at 9:45 AM on October 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

I was talking to my co-worker yesterday about this. Both he and his wife are from China, and both migrated to the U.S. 9 or 10 years ago. He knows first-hand the cruel and harmful impacts of the one-child policy.

My co-worker had a friend whose wife was 8 months pregnant with her second child. When the authorities discovered this, they forced an abortion on her. The mother did not survive the late-term forced abortion. The state literally killed 2 people in his view - the mother and the unborn child. And his friend was left to raise their first-born alone. The state officials, of course, did not provide any compensation for the deaths they caused.

The relaxation of the one-child policy is too little, too late in his view. All the unnecessary death and suffering it caused.
posted by cynical pinnacle at 9:49 AM on October 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

if people don't pay them, what do you do except impose a further penalty for not paying, like a prison sentence?

So you're saying that any sanction ultimately violates bodily autonomy, because a further sanction could result in prison. Okay, then no, there is no way to enforce such a law, or any other, without violating bodily autonomy under that definition.
posted by Etrigan at 10:02 AM on October 30, 2015

Yes, that's what I'm saying. Perhaps there is an intuitive difference between the state performing an abortion and the state telling you that you'll go to jail if you don't have one and also happen to be poor, but they both seem like obvious violations of bodily autonomy to me.
posted by Aravis76 at 10:08 AM on October 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

Oh, I missed your "or any other law" clause. I think laws that don't mandate invasive surgery actually escape the objection. I'm not saying sending people to prison violates their bodily autonomy; I'm saying coercive medical procedures violate bodily autonomy and that telling people to undergo such procedures under threat of going to prison is coercion. The state certainly coerces me not to commit murder, by threatening to jail me if I do, but that's all right because not-committing-murder doesn't violate any of my human rights.
posted by Aravis76 at 10:19 AM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

But all the same: isn't it weird to ask, "How can we get those suffering through poverty to do what we think is best for society as a whole?" rather than "How can we get those suffering through poverty out of poverty?"

Poverty and having too many kids too young go hand in hand. Paying people not to have kids through qualifying tax credits is how we would do it in the US, though crypto-fundamentalists would cry foul, and they're still a majority.
posted by Brian B. at 2:28 PM on October 30, 2015

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