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From the article "All couples will now be allowed to have two children". So it seems China isn't so much ending its one-child policy, as augmenting it by one t

From the article "All couples will now be allowed to have two children". So it seems China isn't so much ending its one-child policy, as augmenting it by one to a two-child policy. This means the brutal and cruel enforcement will continue, only it will kick in at the third child instead of at the second.

oafitupa 11y ago
Any suggestions?
vincentkriek 11y ago
Brutal and cruel? I agree it's a severe limit on the personal freedom but China doesn't value personal freedom as highly as the west does. Brutal and cruel is not the right terms for this in my opinion, you can have a beautiful, rich and fullfilling life with 2 children or less. You can plan to have just two children (up to some point). Also, I think it could benefit the earth if more countries would limit children.
- EStudley 11y ago
  No one's denying that. "Brutal and cruel" was referring to forced abortions of pregnant women with more than one child.
  - brlewis 11y ago
    Perhaps nobody's denying that China doesn't value personal freedom as highly as the west does, or that you can have a beautiful, rich and fullfilling life with 2 children or less. Some, myself included, do deny that it could benefit the earth if more governments would enforce limits on children. I think humans are important to the future of the earth, and treating them in a cruel and brutal fashion will cause more problems than it solves.
    - Retric 11y ago
      US, Japan, and EU have negative population growth if you exclude immigration. What more do you want?
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Africa and India to play ball. The wealthy West limiting its procreation doesn't buy much for the Earth when somewhere else, poor families are pumping out children by the dozens.
        zhemao 11y ago
        Africa and India don't have widely available contraception, high levels of education, and low rates of infant mortality. Solve those problems and people will have fewer kids.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Exactly. I totally agree.
        srtjstjsj 11y ago
        The westerners are consuming far more resources per family of 4 than the African family of 10
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Yes, but we are a) not growing, b) moving to greener energy sources. Compare with Africa and Asia exiting poverty with positive growth, lots of people, and little clean energy infrastructure. I'm starting to think it's in our best interest to start building nuclear reactors pro bono all over Africa - you don't want them all to rise their standards of living by burning coal.
    - navait 11y ago
      You're in luck. human overpopulation is mostly a solved problem thanks to modern contraception. To curb it all one needs is to build a robust economy and make it avaliable. No need for state policy beyond it, people will do it themselves. http://www.economist.com/node/14743589 http://www.economist.com/node/14743589
- sahreeg 11y ago
  I completely agree with you. In terms of population alone, we are exceedingly multiplying; something that might not be of out best advantage. More even when you consider that there will be less opportunities for an increasing number of people, and we will lose this personal freedom you spoke of -to an extent- I am also pro child limit laws. I would suggest nothing too strict, just impose a tax on the third child and up. We know from psychology that little restrictions and the mere fact of a 'cost' would reduce the intrinsic desire of people to even take an action, in this case child bearing. Furthermore, I think a tax is a not an extreme measure, considering the fact that you would still be allowed to have children if you want. But do keep in mind that the poorest, less educated are often the ones to have plenty of children, which ends up harming the family, this might be good for them.
  - bko 11y ago
    Human ingenuity is the world's greatest resource and leads to wealth creation and advancement of living standards. Limiting population growth would be ill-advised.
    - dyeje 11y ago
      I suggest you read up on the carrying capacity of Earth.
      - bko 11y ago
        I would put any research or estimates into perspective. We have well surpassed predicted carrying capacities, but maybe these estimates are different? Example: > In a 1994 study titled Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy, David Pimentel and Mario Giampietro estimated the maximum U.S. population for a sustainable economy at 200 million The dangers of over-population myth assumes a naive view of a static society. For instance, we can reasonably have X land for food production, from that we can grow Y food and that can feed Z people so anything above Z would be harmful. The problem is that Y is dependent on human innovation and technology. Same can be said for most resources. We never did reach peak oil. These predictions of inevitable decline have been wrong for a long time. I don't know why you put so much faith into the modern day equivalents.
- zero_iq 11y ago
  The policy itself isn't cruel or brutal, but the enforcement can be terrible. Brutal and cruel acts include: * Killing of child immediately after birth * Killing of child whilst being born, e.g. in birth canal during birth * Termination of pregnancy as late as 8.5 months * Forced abortions (incorporating kidnapping and assault) All of these things have happened routinely as part of enforcement of the "one child" policy in China and have been widely reported on by human rights organisations. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#Human_rights_violations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#Human_rights_... The policy has also encouraged infanticide/gendercide, corruption, child abandonment, neglect, and abuse.
  - rottyguy 11y ago
    Also abandoning baby girls b/c they want a boy to carry on their name. Really interesting the effects of laws in the Macro.
  - nrser 11y ago
    i've lived in China for a few years, and no one's ever seemed to care much about the one child policy. i just asked some people, and they said it depends on where you grew up, but that it hasn't ever really been a big deal for at least their lifetimes (~30 years). you have to understand that laws here usually range from completely unenforced to strong discouragement with possible financial implications. it wouldn't surprise me if there were incidents of the stuff you mention, but doesn't seem like any of it was ever common place.
    - haukilup 11y ago
      The context you likely have is that of the more urbanized parts of China - not the rural towns and villages where most of the more extreme ("brutal and cruel") practices take place.
      - nrser 11y ago
        yeah, i know, i live in a big city. but i'm talking to some people that came from rural areas... no one's even heard of this stuff. that in no way means it doesn't happen - China's a really big place - but it certainly doesn't seem to be the status quo. friends actually said the opposite: people in rural areas would tend to have a lot of kids trying for a boy (something about boys getting to go to school and being able to work the farm), though i guess that's getting better with the education and gender equality stuff. did you grow up in one of those areas or something? or know people that did? which areas are you talking about?
rubidium 11y ago
The most disgusting thing about the policy is that the citizens let the state have that much power. It's a terrible thing to let economic concerns so dominant the public arena and politics that people let the gov't decide how many kids they have.
- hvs 11y ago
  It's a communist gov't. The people "letting the gov't decide" has little do with it.
  - bigfudge 11y ago
    No matter the history, using communist as a synonym for totalitarian is lazy.
    - freehunter 11y ago
      No matter the history, using terms as they are applied in real life is generally accepted. The definition of communism means one thing, the real world applications of it are something else. How many communist governments have there been that weren't totalitarian?
      - hackerboos 11y ago
        Well since Communism advocates a stateless (and classless) society there will probably never be one.
      - hodwik 11y ago
        In this case they're not totalitarian though. China is a Republic, it's just a Republic with a taller pyramid than our own. You elect district leaders, who elect state leaders and the congress, and they elect the president and prime minister. Technically, that's roughly the same system we have here with the electoral congress and faithless electors. The difference is that in the US, faithless electors are much less common than in China. But you can look here and see that there is a history of faithless electors in the US too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector#List_of_faithless_electors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector#List_of_fait... China's system is actually not so different from ours was 150 years ago, so they're not that far off all-told. Or, actually, in a sense even more recently when the congress decided between Bush and Gore.
funkyy 11y ago
China managed to succeed in increasing people wealth and loosening laws (still bad for Western standards, but huge step comparing to China 30 years ago). Only because West thinks this is "brutal and cruel" dosent mean our laws would ever worked there. Some tried giving Arab countries democracy and it turned out they never really wanted it and most of the dictators were much better alternative (still bad, just better - to clarify). Same with China - imagine them exploding with an extra 1 Billion people over next 20 years. Who will feed them? What would be social implications of such a move? Our freedoms are not always applicable in other parts of the world.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- mkaziz 11y ago
  Democracy is typically a thing that is grown at home, not a thing that is "given".
  - funkyy 11y ago
    It should be that way. But some cannot understand that some countries do not want Democracy. Its not that they don't matured - they just don't want it. Even in some European countries we can see the move to shift much more power to presidents (Hungary, Slovakia, Poland).
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - crdoconnor 11y ago
      TIL some people actually believe the things Mubarak says.
      - vlehto 11y ago
        "Royalists" have been a phenomena everywhere. Then again population of a country is able to change it's mind. Just before WWI lot's of European intelligentsia favored communism. Same happened before WWII with fascism. It is still completely possible that spread of democracy is just multinational fashion trend. And something else will come after it. For any given moment, it's even probable that majority of some country does not want democracy. There are ~200 countries and several somewhat convincing ideologies.
methou 11y ago
I think they are more likely to enforce two-child policy, by "encouraging" married couples to have more-than-one-and-less-than-three children.
kailuowang 11y ago
The brutality and cruel enforcement is not a widespread problem at least in the eyes of general Chinese population. The only lawful enforcement for the one-child policy is a financial fine (which more and more people can afford now). Any other forceful abortion is against the law. And that is the more common situation in China. The problem of illegal and brutal "enforcement" only exists in some rural areas and nowadays with the popularity of Internet, it a lot more rare than before. And thus it's not part of the incentive to end the one-child policy.
kyllo 11y ago
Agreed, but it should also be noted that in practice, families that want to have more than two children are quite rare in urban China today, as they are in most developed countries. Meanwhile, rural families in China have been allowed to have two or more children (depending on a few rules) for several years already.
cccooo2015 11y ago
it is just as brutal and cruel as US cop.in china,one child was a law,you want more child,you pay more money,it was called Social maintenance fees.but someone did not want to pay the money,so come the brutal and cruel just like US cop shoot on blacks,but in china the one child law-executor has no gun,and they are base officer,they have more pressure and want more benefit than US cop
justicezyx 11y ago
LMAO From a country that could not even control their gun problem, comes a comment saying an effective policy is a brutal and cruel enforcement... I am not saying it's not brutal or cruel, it is. But please, I dont want to hear it from a country people literally are killing each other everyday...
vectorjohn 11y ago
Am I the only person who thinks population control policies like this are a great thing? This strange notion people have that they should be able to breed without bound is baffling to me. People talk about the dangers of overpopulation as if they're theoretical. They're not, numbers don't lie. At some point people have to stop having babies, whether humanely by a government mandate, or by the inhumanity of war and poverty.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  You're not the only one. I'm in that camp too. Yes, I can imagine perfectly well the happiness a parent gets from having a child, and maybe I will want to have a child of my own in the future. Nobody says we can't breed. When the population levels off, everyone will be able to have two children. If you want more, then there's only one solution - push harder for science and technology, so that we may use our resources in a more efficient way (Earth has a lot of carrying capacity on the surface, and we haven't even begin to colonize oceans). And then we may move to other planets. But people need to grow up and realize they're not free to do anything they like, not yet. Freedom to breed is just another one we need to collectively decide to restrict for now. And then, like with every other coordination problem, you have to punish the defectors, because coordination is not a statically stable state.

oafitupa 11y ago

Any suggestions?

vincentkriek 11y ago

Brutal and cruel? I agree it's a severe limit on the personal freedom but China doesn't value personal freedom as highly as the west does. Brutal and cruel is not the right terms for this in my opinion, you can have a beautiful, rich and fullfilling life with 2 children or less. You can plan to have just two children (up to some point). Also, I think it could benefit the earth if more countries would limit children.

EStudley 11y ago
No one's denying that. "Brutal and cruel" was referring to forced abortions of pregnant women with more than one child.
- brlewis 11y ago
  Perhaps nobody's denying that China doesn't value personal freedom as highly as the west does, or that you can have a beautiful, rich and fullfilling life with 2 children or less. Some, myself included, do deny that it could benefit the earth if more governments would enforce limits on children. I think humans are important to the future of the earth, and treating them in a cruel and brutal fashion will cause more problems than it solves.
  - Retric 11y ago
    US, Japan, and EU have negative population growth if you exclude immigration. What more do you want?
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Africa and India to play ball. The wealthy West limiting its procreation doesn't buy much for the Earth when somewhere else, poor families are pumping out children by the dozens.
      - zhemao 11y ago
        Africa and India don't have widely available contraception, high levels of education, and low rates of infant mortality. Solve those problems and people will have fewer kids.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Exactly. I totally agree.
      - srtjstjsj 11y ago
        The westerners are consuming far more resources per family of 4 than the African family of 10
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Yes, but we are a) not growing, b) moving to greener energy sources. Compare with Africa and Asia exiting poverty with positive growth, lots of people, and little clean energy infrastructure. I'm starting to think it's in our best interest to start building nuclear reactors pro bono all over Africa - you don't want them all to rise their standards of living by burning coal.
  - navait 11y ago
    You're in luck. human overpopulation is mostly a solved problem thanks to modern contraception. To curb it all one needs is to build a robust economy and make it avaliable. No need for state policy beyond it, people will do it themselves. http://www.economist.com/node/14743589 http://www.economist.com/node/14743589
sahreeg 11y ago
I completely agree with you. In terms of population alone, we are exceedingly multiplying; something that might not be of out best advantage. More even when you consider that there will be less opportunities for an increasing number of people, and we will lose this personal freedom you spoke of -to an extent- I am also pro child limit laws. I would suggest nothing too strict, just impose a tax on the third child and up. We know from psychology that little restrictions and the mere fact of a 'cost' would reduce the intrinsic desire of people to even take an action, in this case child bearing. Furthermore, I think a tax is a not an extreme measure, considering the fact that you would still be allowed to have children if you want. But do keep in mind that the poorest, less educated are often the ones to have plenty of children, which ends up harming the family, this might be good for them.
- bko 11y ago
  Human ingenuity is the world's greatest resource and leads to wealth creation and advancement of living standards. Limiting population growth would be ill-advised.
  - dyeje 11y ago
    I suggest you read up on the carrying capacity of Earth.
    - bko 11y ago
      I would put any research or estimates into perspective. We have well surpassed predicted carrying capacities, but maybe these estimates are different? Example: > In a 1994 study titled Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy, David Pimentel and Mario Giampietro estimated the maximum U.S. population for a sustainable economy at 200 million The dangers of over-population myth assumes a naive view of a static society. For instance, we can reasonably have X land for food production, from that we can grow Y food and that can feed Z people so anything above Z would be harmful. The problem is that Y is dependent on human innovation and technology. Same can be said for most resources. We never did reach peak oil. These predictions of inevitable decline have been wrong for a long time. I don't know why you put so much faith into the modern day equivalents.
zero_iq 11y ago
The policy itself isn't cruel or brutal, but the enforcement can be terrible. Brutal and cruel acts include: * Killing of child immediately after birth * Killing of child whilst being born, e.g. in birth canal during birth * Termination of pregnancy as late as 8.5 months * Forced abortions (incorporating kidnapping and assault) All of these things have happened routinely as part of enforcement of the "one child" policy in China and have been widely reported on by human rights organisations. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#Human_rights_violations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#Human_rights_... The policy has also encouraged infanticide/gendercide, corruption, child abandonment, neglect, and abuse.
- rottyguy 11y ago
  Also abandoning baby girls b/c they want a boy to carry on their name. Really interesting the effects of laws in the Macro.
- nrser 11y ago
  i've lived in China for a few years, and no one's ever seemed to care much about the one child policy. i just asked some people, and they said it depends on where you grew up, but that it hasn't ever really been a big deal for at least their lifetimes (~30 years). you have to understand that laws here usually range from completely unenforced to strong discouragement with possible financial implications. it wouldn't surprise me if there were incidents of the stuff you mention, but doesn't seem like any of it was ever common place.
  - haukilup 11y ago
    The context you likely have is that of the more urbanized parts of China - not the rural towns and villages where most of the more extreme ("brutal and cruel") practices take place.
    - nrser 11y ago
      yeah, i know, i live in a big city. but i'm talking to some people that came from rural areas... no one's even heard of this stuff. that in no way means it doesn't happen - China's a really big place - but it certainly doesn't seem to be the status quo. friends actually said the opposite: people in rural areas would tend to have a lot of kids trying for a boy (something about boys getting to go to school and being able to work the farm), though i guess that's getting better with the education and gender equality stuff. did you grow up in one of those areas or something? or know people that did? which areas are you talking about?

rubidium 11y ago

The most disgusting thing about the policy is that the citizens let the state have that much power. It's a terrible thing to let economic concerns so dominant the public arena and politics that people let the gov't decide how many kids they have.

hvs 11y ago
It's a communist gov't. The people "letting the gov't decide" has little do with it.
- bigfudge 11y ago
  No matter the history, using communist as a synonym for totalitarian is lazy.
  - freehunter 11y ago
    No matter the history, using terms as they are applied in real life is generally accepted. The definition of communism means one thing, the real world applications of it are something else. How many communist governments have there been that weren't totalitarian?
    - hackerboos 11y ago
      Well since Communism advocates a stateless (and classless) society there will probably never be one.
    - hodwik 11y ago
      In this case they're not totalitarian though. China is a Republic, it's just a Republic with a taller pyramid than our own. You elect district leaders, who elect state leaders and the congress, and they elect the president and prime minister. Technically, that's roughly the same system we have here with the electoral congress and faithless electors. The difference is that in the US, faithless electors are much less common than in China. But you can look here and see that there is a history of faithless electors in the US too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector#List_of_faithless_electors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector#List_of_fait... China's system is actually not so different from ours was 150 years ago, so they're not that far off all-told. Or, actually, in a sense even more recently when the congress decided between Bush and Gore.

funkyy 11y ago

China managed to succeed in increasing people wealth and loosening laws (still bad for Western standards, but huge step comparing to China 30 years ago). Only because West thinks this is "brutal and cruel" dosent mean our laws would ever worked there. Some tried giving Arab countries democracy and it turned out they never really wanted it and most of the dictators were much better alternative (still bad, just better - to clarify). Same with China - imagine them exploding with an extra 1 Billion people over next 20 years. Who will feed them? What would be social implications of such a move? Our freedoms are not always applicable in other parts of the world.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mkaziz 11y ago
Democracy is typically a thing that is grown at home, not a thing that is "given".
- funkyy 11y ago
  It should be that way. But some cannot understand that some countries do not want Democracy. Its not that they don't matured - they just don't want it. Even in some European countries we can see the move to shift much more power to presidents (Hungary, Slovakia, Poland).
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    TIL some people actually believe the things Mubarak says.
    - vlehto 11y ago
      "Royalists" have been a phenomena everywhere. Then again population of a country is able to change it's mind. Just before WWI lot's of European intelligentsia favored communism. Same happened before WWII with fascism. It is still completely possible that spread of democracy is just multinational fashion trend. And something else will come after it. For any given moment, it's even probable that majority of some country does not want democracy. There are ~200 countries and several somewhat convincing ideologies.

methou 11y ago

I think they are more likely to enforce two-child policy, by "encouraging" married couples to have more-than-one-and-less-than-three children.

kailuowang 11y ago

The brutality and cruel enforcement is not a widespread problem at least in the eyes of general Chinese population. The only lawful enforcement for the one-child policy is a financial fine (which more and more people can afford now). Any other forceful abortion is against the law. And that is the more common situation in China. The problem of illegal and brutal "enforcement" only exists in some rural areas and nowadays with the popularity of Internet, it a lot more rare than before. And thus it's not part of the incentive to end the one-child policy.

kyllo 11y ago

Agreed, but it should also be noted that in practice, families that want to have more than two children are quite rare in urban China today, as they are in most developed countries. Meanwhile, rural families in China have been allowed to have two or more children (depending on a few rules) for several years already.

cccooo2015 11y ago

it is just as brutal and cruel as US cop.in china,one child was a law,you want more child,you pay more money,it was called Social maintenance fees.but someone did not want to pay the money,so come the brutal and cruel just like US cop shoot on blacks,but in china the one child law-executor has no gun,and they are base officer,they have more pressure and want more benefit than US cop

justicezyx 11y ago

LMAO From a country that could not even control their gun problem, comes a comment saying an effective policy is a brutal and cruel enforcement... I am not saying it's not brutal or cruel, it is. But please, I dont want to hear it from a country people literally are killing each other everyday...

vectorjohn 11y ago

Am I the only person who thinks population control policies like this are a great thing? This strange notion people have that they should be able to breed without bound is baffling to me. People talk about the dangers of overpopulation as if they're theoretical. They're not, numbers don't lie. At some point people have to stop having babies, whether humanely by a government mandate, or by the inhumanity of war and poverty.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
You're not the only one. I'm in that camp too. Yes, I can imagine perfectly well the happiness a parent gets from having a child, and maybe I will want to have a child of my own in the future. Nobody says we can't breed. When the population levels off, everyone will be able to have two children. If you want more, then there's only one solution - push harder for science and technology, so that we may use our resources in a more efficient way (Earth has a lot of carrying capacity on the surface, and we haven't even begin to colonize oceans). And then we may move to other planets. But people need to grow up and realize they're not free to do anything they like, not yet. Freedom to breed is just another one we need to collectively decide to restrict for now. And then, like with every other coordination problem, you have to punish the defectors, because coordination is not a statically stable state.