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The absurdly high birth rates of the 1960s were due in no small part to government policy. The communist leadership under Mao Zedong encouraged people to have l
by zhemao 11y ago
The absurdly high birth rates of the 1960s were due in no small part to government policy. The communist leadership under Mao Zedong encouraged people to have lots of children, believing that a large population would power economic growth. While I agree that controlling population growth is necessary, it could have been done without the draconian and invasive measures imposed by the one-child policy. With proper government incentives for having smaller families, widely available birth control, and decreased infant mortality rates, people would have chosen to have only one or two children.
Compare the mainland's One-Child Policy with the similar "Two is Enough" and "Stop at Two" campaigns in Hong Kong and Singapore, respectively. Those campaigns were successful in reducing the birth rate (too successful, in Singapore's case) without the abuses and demographic issues that plagued China's implementation of the one-child policy.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoIsn't this a case of hindsight being 20/20 though? Maybe when China was first considering population control, there was no one there to think of applying just economic pressure? Or maybe the voice got lost in the usual $politics? Fortunately, future decisionmakers now have competing examples of China, Hong Kong and Singapore to learn from.
- zhemao 11y agoSingapore started the Stop at Two campaign in the 1970s. China's one-child policy was instituted in 1981. Granted, the effects of Singapore's program wouldn't have been clear at that point, but there was already a precedent for population control measures that didn't involve heavy-handed government control and quotas. A lot of the negative effects of the one-child policy were due to uneven enforcement and perverse incentives. Though female infanticide, forced abortions, and gender-based abortions were made illegal, they still happened in rural or poorer urban areas where there was less scrutiny from the central government.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoThanks for the information on the timeframes. > Though female infanticide, forced abortions, and gender-based abortions were made illegal, they still happened in rural or poorer urban areas where there was less scrutiny from the central government. From the subthread under [0]: "Some of the examples you listed have only one report. And it's policy that lasted almost 40 years in a country with a billion people." It's a good point. Makes me wonder how much the negative opinion about China's one-child policy is just overblown and/or pure propaganda. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10470733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10470733