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China allows couples to have three children

217 points by jgilias 5y ago

TOSSAWAY_1 5y ago
Big of them
unnamed76ri 5y ago
Gotta love HN comment section on a story such as this. People here solving math problems more than questioning the power of a government to tell people how many children they are ALLOWED to have.
- konart 5y ago
  >the power of a government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence >Robert Hinrichs Bates argues that the state itself has no violent power; rather, the people hold all the power of coercion to ensure that order and other equilibriums hold up. Should we be discussing this?
  - Rompect 5y ago
    According to that argument, the capitol riot was justified.
    - potatoman22 5y ago
      How so?
- bluescrn 5y ago
  But perhaps it would have been the right thing to do for governments to limit population growth and not let us breed our way to destruction so fast, unsustainably stripping the earth of its resources and accelerating climate change. Personally, a one-child limit a few decades ago would have been much more tolerable than face being told in the near future that we can no longer eat meat, drive a car, or travel internationally, amongst other things.
  - qwytw 5y ago
    Or maybe, perhaps there are other ways to decrease birth rates to a more sustainable level besides forced abortions and infanticide? There is not a single in country in the EU with a fertility rate above 2 (the average in 2019 was 1.54) it's higher in the US but this is mostly a result of external immigration (either directly or immigrants having more children). At least in Europe this is going to cause huge issues in the upcoming decades due to huge increases in social and healthcare expenditures coupled with a shrinking workforce. *https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/tps00199/default/table?lang=en https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/tps00199/defa...
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
  Understandable. But I will say that the government in question is well known for doing whatever it pleases.
- Markoff 5y ago
  yeah, I found it amazing when my wife had to ask in China whether we can have our child, which will be foreign citizen after birth FFS
- sk5t 5y ago
  The state (just about anywhere) can use its powers to take your property, lock you in a cage, or send you or your children off to fight and die thousands of miles from home. What's the difference?
- adrian_b 5y ago
  I wonder if you also question the power of a government to forcibly take money from the people with no or few children and give the money to those with many children. This (allocation per child) is a policy very frequently encountered in a large number of countries. It is also frequent in those countries to raise the level of the allocation per child immediately before elections, which leads to quite an inflated level after many election cycles. Unlike with China's population control policy, I have not seen any questioning of these allocation per child policies from other countries, even if in that case the state also intrudes in the individual rights by extracting money from them. That policy also results in some kind of reverse eugenics, because the more responsible people delay having more children until having the financial means to raise them, but because they are forced to pay higher taxes they must delay even more, while some of the least responsible people choose to have as many children as possible, with the hope of sustaining the family only or mainly from the state aid. In my opinion all kinds of potential abuse from a government must be questioned, not only those for which there exists a tradition to be criticized.
- oreally 5y ago
  Ok, seems like you'd like no birth controls. Would you be willing to support the excess births in China with your own money then? As a US citizen? Because the excess births are going to put a burden on China's infrastructure and you're pushing for no birth controls.
- justnotworthit 5y ago
  Just wait a few hours before reading the comments and (as you see in this comment page) the ideology discussion will go above the computation.
- tediousdemise 5y ago
  Human rights are irrelevant when they are having a drastic impact on the environment. Human reproduction is one of the most detrimental things there is for the environment. The planet has a problem with human overpopulation. We must self-regulate as a species. Governments are good at making and enforcing regulations. China's government oversees one of the largest sectors of the human population. We have to give some praise to China for being forward-thinking. They have recognized their role and responsibility in stopping the rampant breeding that plagues our planet. All governments need to take the same steps that China has, or the planet won't be inhabitable for much longer. For more info, see http://www.vhemt.org/ http://www.vhemt.org/.
jasiek 5y ago
Who will want to have more kids, now that everyone was born a single child and has two parents to take care of?
necovek 5y ago
One of the most common things I see these demographic analysis miss is the changing average age of mothers: as they focus on careers, they might postpone giving birth to later in life (30-40yo), compared to the traditional (20-30yo). With this move happening over a couple of decades, it is only natural to have a diminished birth rate as motherhood catches up with the 10 year shift (since it's a cultural thing, it would be happening over a time span of, say, 20 years). I don't know if it's true in China, but if looked at carefully, it might not be the time to sound the alarms. The same happened in the West, just by 20-50 years prior.
dalbasal 5y ago
At this point, it seems that China's family planning policies aren't really directly related to population growth anymore. No policy/restrictions at all would probably not meaningfully impact gross population growth. It's just about maintaining family planning as a public prerogative, atthis point.
bsenftner 5y ago
I wonder about stories like this, how much western propaganda they are composed. I've been to China, and observed this number of children policy to be completely ignored outside their major cities. It is not uncommon to see large families with 5-8 kids in their farming and areas of less population.
ginko 5y ago
It feels strange to me why they're not just getting rid of the limit at this point. Especially since they already seem to have trouble getting couples to have two children.
- dirtyid 5y ago
  Probably don't want fringe groups to procreate without limit. Not just with respect to Uyghurs, where family planning sterilizations are being applied to those who had 3+ kids, but any potential (non-secular) groups.
- throwaway316943 5y ago
  I imagine there’s entire departments of people dedicated to managing this program. Probably dedicated party members. I don’t think they could take their titles away and reorganize them without starting a lot of infighting.
  - hackingthenews 5y ago
    It could also be that they see no scenario ahead where they want the average number of children per woman to be above 3. I don't think China wants back to exponential growth ever. They probably want to find their equilibrium. Consider if something unlikely happens that completely changes the dynamic of families, e.g. a cultural shift where women stay more at home and have more babies. If the average family started having more than 3 children, they would consider bringing back this system, which could cause big social problems, as it costs more social capital to bring back an unpopular system than to simply maintain it.
    - runawaybottle 5y ago
      China may not be as concerned about uncontrolled population growth anymore due to their broader strategy of exporting their workforce: https://qz.com/africa/1963566/how-many-chinese-workers-are-there-in-africa-now-2/amp/ https://qz.com/africa/1963566/how-many-chinese-workers-are-t...
throw0101a 5y ago
There is some question on whether the one-child policy was even needed. If you look at a graph of "children per mother" chart before and after the original policy went into effect, it's quite evident that rates were dropping for more than a decade beforehand: * https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/october/china-one-child-policy-effect https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/october/china... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Birth_rate_in_China.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Birth_rate_in_China.svg * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy Industrialization, urbanization, reduction in child mortality, and the education of women accomplished a reduction in the rate in China just like it did/does just about everywhere else. The ghastly human rights violations that led from the policy were completely unnecessary.
- stefan_ 5y ago
  There is another graph here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/File:China_single_age_population_pyramid_2020.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/F... Which shows a massive male surplus particularly in the young demographics, way larger than you would biologically expect. How can we claim this policy has no effect if clearly people are still killing female infants?
  - faitswulff 5y ago
    Interesting how the assertion that Chinese people kill infant girls en masse goes completely unchallenged without nuance on this site.
    - HDMI_Cable 5y ago
      Are there any other explanations for the massive male surplus?
      - faitswulff 5y ago
        Is adoption murder? Abortion? Why is it easier to imagine that Chinese people murder infants than it is to imagine literally any other scenario? Why is it easier to assume that a massive sex imbalance is the result members of a particular group of people being psychopaths rather than the result of some systemic cause? Hmm.
gregwebs 5y ago
What’s missing in this article is a proper discussion of the level of government for each child. This ends up being the limiting factor for most who are not wealthy.
hyko 5y ago
Won’t be long before three children are mandatory.
- jokoon 5y ago
  What? Has this ever occured in history? Not sure you can really force people to have kids. I doubt that chinese women would accept this.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  I think you were joking, but totalitarian regimes have done this before (Romania's orphan crisis was the result of similar policies, iirc). The poverty/immigration dance - if you reduce poverty, women have less children. Eventually you reach the point where you need to allow immigration to provide enough workers to keep your aging population from starving. Immigration is an existential threat if your country is based on a single ethnic identity (e.g. Han). Immigrants are poorer and therefore have more babies, and at some point will become the ethnic majority, or at least a sizable minority, large enough to cause problems (and economically vital so you can't just round them up and deport them). Getting middle-class people to have more babies is difficult. Edit: of course, this isn't a problem if you don't base your country's identity on an ethnic identity.
  - Clewza313 5y ago
    China internally makes a big deal about their 56 ethnic groups, living happily in harmony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_minorities_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_minorities_in_China And woe betide anyone who dares be less than harmonious about being ruled by their Han big brother.
    - infinity0 5y ago
      You seem to have a bit of sour grapes that a non-Western country dares to talk positively about their own policies. You should understand that translations often lose some cultural context, so when you have a prejudice against the English word "harmonious", understand that the Chinese equivalent is used much more freely in everyday speech. "Solidarity" might have been a better translation. -- Reply to the comment below: > I recall that, in the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony, China celebrated its ethnic minorities by having Han children dress up as them [..] In a big place like China or the US, there are always going to incidents like this. Furthermore, most news stories will exaggerate the headlines or twist the details, so I am not even sure if this particular incident is as you described. What matters is what the policies are doing for the larger scale of individuals. You can't judge anything about this larger scale by looking at a few incidents, especially when Western media have a vested interest in showing you these news items and ignoring the vast majority of what is going on. (To be fair, the vast majority is quite boring.) "Ask the people themselves" is used typically in these discussions as a weasel phrase, as if Western liberal democracies are truly "asking the people themselves". You have mass media bombarding the general population all the time with pre-ordained narratives. Nobody votes in elections with an independent analysis. So sure, it depends on what you mean by "ask the people themselves". There's lots of content on social media including from ethnic minorities, people are generally happy with their lives and the amount of freedom they have. Are you going to pick holes in that? Why not pick holes in what's happening with mass media de-jure "independent" de-facto manipulative elections in the West?
zed88 5y ago
Most of us in the west can't relate to the idea of government regulating how many children one can have, but hey, it might work for them.
29athrowaway 5y ago
The problem with China right now is the 4-2-1 problem. Because of their one child policy, you have a family generation consisting of 4 people (grandparents), followed by 2 people (parents), followed by 1 person. So now they are way on their way to an demographic crisis, where most people will be old.
- woutr_be 5y ago
  Another result of this, is that males outnumber females, so there’s a lot of single males unable to find a partner. This is because parents generally preferred boys as their only child.
  - nobody0 5y ago
    Yeah, however, the young generation is putting off their marriage year by year as in developed world. I can see the trend where people choose not to marry someone and/or not to have kids is picking up though may not be the mainstream any time soon. Partly because costs have been high, but also people find their interests elsewhere other than the traditional path.
    - woutr_be 5y ago
      True, many of my Chinese friends complain that their parents are urging them to get married before 30. And while plenty of young people still do this, more and more people are putting of getting married, and wait until they're really ready. Not just because society tells them to.
alialghamdi 5y ago
When changing it to 2 children didn't help, why would 3 help?
sd4ee3 5y ago
But not the Uyghurs, who have a -2 child policy.
temp8964 5y ago
After the communist "land reform", the Chinese communist party / Chinese Government owns all the land in China. Now, local governments use land control and land sales as their major source of revenue. The end result is that vast majority of Chinese people live in small apartments, which are designed for 1 couple + 1 kid families. In big cities, average apartment size is around 60-80 sqm. In small cities, it could be 100-120 sqm. For a family of three kids to live in those small apartments, life is gonna be really tough.
- patall 5y ago
  Pardon me, but how is 100-120 sqm small? 60 sqm is small for 4 people yes, but everything else subject to how rooms are organized. We had 105 sqm growing up with 5 people and we had a very large living room + 4 bed rooms, no second bath room though.
  - temp8964 5y ago
    Yes. In theory you can have 10 people live in one bedroom, and living room isn't even necessary. You can even share bathroom and kitchen in the apartment building. Sorry, I am too spoiled.
  - em500 5y ago
    It's small for most Americans, but not for most Europeans (especially not for European city dwellers). It's huge if you live in Hong Kong.
    - temp8964 5y ago
      Well, euro birth rate is 1.5, hong kong birth rate is 1.1. We are talking about having 3 kids here. This is the context of discussion.
jp555 5y ago
Good luck. With a shrunken generation of family to help due to 30+ years of one-child policy, and almost no social support (China does not really have socialized healthcare in practice) there's no one to help take care of larger families. But there is a HUGE number of rapidly aging parents and grandparents to take care of. Add a culture that puts accumulating wealth as the #1 virtue, and it becomes nearly impossible to reverse a low birth rate. In Canada Quebec has been paying French families to have more kids for a very long time. Today Quebec has the lowest provincial birthrate in Canada.
- Kaze404 5y ago
  If you omit the part about the one-child policy I would think you were talking about the USA.
  - jp555 5y ago
    US has one of the best demographics in the Western world. Millennials are larger than Boomers. Plus the US can use immigration to decide what population they want. Countries not built on immigration cannot really do this in practice. see Japan.
- simbas 5y ago
  Your comment is a bit bigoted, the government has been paying families, not "french families", to have more kids. This isn't segregated by language at all. Everyone gets their child allowance payments, whatever their origin.
  - jp555 5y ago
    It's not meant to be bigoted (that's you mind reading) - it's meant to give context to non Canadians. But I probably should have said "Quebec Families".
  - w0de0 5y ago
    Is the origin of the policy a desire to preserve and increase Quebec’s unique culture (“French families”), or not? If so, is it bigoted to say so?
Axien 5y ago
Peter Zeihan has an interesting take on it: https://zeihan.com/video-dispatch-chinas-demographic-decline/ https://zeihan.com/video-dispatch-chinas-demographic-decline...
MichaelRazum 5y ago
Just curious are such policies considered a human right violation. For example could US or let's say France implement such law as well? Let's say the government just want's to prevent families having more than 5+ children for whatever reason.
- iammisc 5y ago
  The short answer is yes, it's a human rights violation, and it doesn't matter what others 'consider' it. But no one will say anything because it's the Chinese Communist Party.
- oreally 5y ago
  Years ago there was a US president who questioned the birth control = violation of human rights thing to Deng Xiaoping, to which Deng answered: "Are you going to support the excess population then?" or something like shipping them off to the US. That shut his US counterpart up pretty quickly. Let countries be free to do birth control of their own violation - you do not want more births whose lives they cannot support properly which in turn threatens the social fabric of their societies. To push this as a human rights violation in support of the west's rhetoric is pretty hypocritical since they don't have to support the excess births.
- Traster 5y ago
  Western countries attempt to manage this through taxation and benefits. There are plenty of countries that encourage having children with tax benefits. The UK controversially introduced a limit to how much you’ll get in state support if you have more than 3 children- https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claiming-benefits-for-2-or-more-children https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claiming-benefits-for-2-or-more-...
  - barsonme 5y ago
    Taxation and benefits is not even in the same universe as forced sterilization and abortions.
mytailorisrich 5y ago
Globally, population growth is the single biggest problem, IMHO, and it won't be possible to meet both environmental and development targets with current and medium term population numbers. Sooner than later we will have to adapt to at best constant population, which will mean a large proportion of elderly. Trying to boost births (as everyone is doing) is just kicking the ball down the road at the expense of the environment. Now, in China specifically I think lifting restrictions won't have much impact. A child is very expensive and virtually all women work. They would need to look at a welfare system to help families for people to consider having more children. There is also the issue of migrant workers: many people from poorer areas work in richer cities and leave children with grand parents for years on hand. They are not going to have more children just because it is allowed.
MrsPeaches 5y ago
As far as I am aware [1] one of the big issues here is housing. With the one child policy all of the housing was built for 1 child families (i.e. 2 bedroom apartments). Even with the two child policy it was really difficult to find apartments built for larger families. [1] I know someone who lived in China, who said this was an issue, but I don't have any actual sources so this may be wrong.
lammalamma25 5y ago
Every story about China should include a note that the government decides how many children its citizens are allowed to have. We've grown numb to how terrible this is.
- xyzzy123 5y ago
  This doesn't seem intrinsically terrible to me, particularly if it's done through incentives and doesn't involve say, murder or sterilisation. If we accept that any biome will eventually have a finite carrying capacity while the possibility of human reproduction is exponential it seems inevitable that there must be some limits to reproduction. Regulation is crude but might be less bad than "direct environmental feedback" such as die-offs or drastically decreasing quality of life. Of course it's a co-ordination problem, which is very difficult. I can imagine many cultural and technological approaches to population control, some of which already exist, and might not be terrible. It seems to me that in particular any engineered habitats with well-defined carrying capacities, e.g. mars, would have to deal with this quite early on.
  - woeirua 5y ago
    It turns out that as countries develop their birth rates naturally decline and eventually turn negative without requiring the government to set the number of children you can have. Indeed Japan and others are doing almost everything possible to encourage people to have more children and cannot get their populations to return to growth.
    - xyzzy123 5y ago
      I agree that market forces and cultural trends seem to be curbing population growth in wealthy countries. I'm just not sure it's a sign of cultural maturity; it feels like we've quietly skirted a difficult conversation through low wage growth and expensive housing, health care and education (more humans are discouraged because of bottlenecks in key supports). In theory if there were "smooth" environmental feedback the population would nicely sigmoid without too much overshoot, maybe that's what is actually happening. I wish I knew.
zanethomas 5y ago
The government decides how many children you can have?
pepperonipizza 5y ago
This will not change the fertility rate, there was a bump for one or two years after China allowed 2 children, and the fertility rate went down again, and the tfr is at its lowest since it has been calculated. Only ectogenesis could reverse this trend. China and the world better start investing more in ectogenesis research.
roody15 5y ago
Interesting side note on china during the one-child policy era. This policy was enforced on the masses but highly educated people were given waivers. If you were a engineer, professor or any highly skilled professional you were encouraged to have lots of children. China’s one child policy was mainly about population control but also had a eugenics component to it as well.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  It seems the problem is in the use of force. Apart from that, if there's a group of people that would make better than average parents, and whose kids would be more likely to contribute more to society than they consume, then shouldn't that group be encouraged to have and adopt as many kids as they can afford to support?
  - milofeynman 5y ago
    You're describing eugenics. The same sort of casual propaganda that the Nazi party and others would use. Most people who are highly successful right now got there through privilege and parental wealth, not through some sort of inherent talent.
    - ackfoobar 5y ago
      > Despite full Maoist Communism in China, descendants of former landlords and rich peasants today earn 16% more than descendants of others. > They couldn't inherit wealth from grandparents, parents were barred from university in Cultural Revolution, but they inherited something https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/1301012672138285059 https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/1301012672138285059
      - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
        Just because one was barred from university or wealth doesn’t mean that the political entrenchment was eliminated. If I was a wealthy family that rubbed elbows with other wealthy families, such that all my family friends were from wealthy families, any success I gather would also have me nepotize my family friends into whatever companies I make and whatever government success I achieve.
bruiseralmighty 5y ago
I find it a bit odd how accepted a child mandate has become when it comes from the CCP with the global community. For instance, it seems that a large reason that China is hesitant to lift any limits whatsoever is a belief that rural women will have large families and urban women will not and that this would be 'unfair'. This cant help but feel like a eugenics argument about not wanting to swamp the gene pool with 'low IQ rural undesirables'. What would be the foreign response if some of the more distasteful ideas behind mandated birth rates were brought to the fore-front: * 'all able-bodied women must have at least one child.' * 'citizens in these jurisdictions can have as many children as they want.' I believe we would see a lot of outrage in other countries over these policy, but I worry the CCP sees no difference ethically in mandating one or the other. Instead opting for whatever is deemed necessary.
- officialjunk 5y ago
  the world summary of the policy is not the whole truth. you could always have more than one child, but there's a tax. so you get one child for "free" and the others you have to pay a tax. there are countless families with multiple siblings of all generations, even in cities.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  Rural families- especially farmers and ethnic minorities- have had exceptions to the one child policy for quite a while now. The reluctance to lift limits is perhaps better owing to the fact that means yielding a bit of control, and not wanting to appear to have been wrong (why today and not yesterday?). That said, you don't see much outrage in other countries (despite stories of infants being thrown out, forced abortions, forced sterilizations) because we have short attention spans and no real hope of forcing the government's hand. Look at all of the accusations, allegations and witness over the treatment of uighurs. Or, look at the middle eastern countries where women couldnt vote, drive, or even travel out of the county without their husband's permission. Even of we had pushed harder for faster reforms, we would have faced internal criticism for a "colonial" attitude.
m3kw9 5y ago
An observation is that birth rates were highest when 1 child policy was installed. I wonder if the psychological scarcity spurs more children.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
I wonder when they will have an infinity child mandate. Surely that will solve their demographic problems.
stanrivers 5y ago
A lot of people are asking why a policy is even still needed - why not go for no limit at all? 1) There is an entire family planning bureaucracy within the CCP setup to manage this; would do you do with all those people if they are not needed anymore? 2) China is more strict on population planning for certain minorities - not officially, but in the background; think Muslims in western China or Tibet or Mongolians, or ethnic Koreans in northeastern China... If you had no population planning for all the Han chinese, you might have a brighter light cast on this small in number but impactful population control actions. 3) Once someone has power, why let go of it? The CCP survives by creating a fairly good life for the majority in China - and it has done that extremely well - in exchange for control. It is easier to go from 3 back to 2, than it is to go from unlimited back to 2, for example.
- chitowneats 5y ago
  "The ASPI report said birth rates in counties with a 90 percent or greater indigenous population declined by an average of 56.5 percent from 2017 to 2018, far more than other regions in Xinjiang and China during the same period." https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-uses-coercive-policies-xinjiang-drive-down-uyghur-birth-rates-think-tank-2021-05-13 https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-uses-coercive-poli... 56.5% decline in birth rates in one year when the right sample is taken. Beyond shocking. Doing such a thing with your left hand while allowing more births for Han Chinese with your right hand must be seen for what it is: genocide.
  - elefanten 5y ago
    You’re absolutely right and this comment has no business being grayed.
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      Uncomfortable truths
    - chitowneats 5y ago
      Indeed, this seems to have touched a nerve. Interesting that no one has tried to refute my point directly. There are others in the thread who seem to be suggesting that because Han Chinese have also been subject to population control measures, that my point is somehow invalid. No one has yet explained why we see such steep birth rate declines, specifically in Uyghur regions, relative to the rest of China, only in the last half decade or so. You know, right around the time they started rounding up millions of people in that same ethnic group and putting them in camps. The Chinese government has many euphemisms and rationalizations for these camps, but they don't dispute their existence. In any case we have satellite imagery. What can one conclude about these coinciding actions by the Chinese state if not genocide? If it's not that, what is it?
rainworld 5y ago
Westerners so enthusiastic about “China’s demographic problem” would be well advised to worry about their own, local sub-replacement birth rates, in particular for natives (you know, the ones who built the countries everybody else seems so hell-bent immigrating to), as well as for the educated, the middle classes. Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19095925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19095925
- sudosteph 5y ago
  I'm guessing you don't mean "natives" in the modern sense. But I am still one of those people who's ancestors have been in this country since the 17th century, and I don't get what worries you. I was always taught that being American is not about being a particular race or ethnicity. Heck, my family couldn't even tell you our ethnicity other than "white". And I may be educated middle class, but my grandparents who grew up in the Appalachian mountains sure weren't. So long as the children of immigrants are adapting fine to the rest of American culture, who cares if our population growth depends on them?
- skybrian 5y ago
  Historically much of the US was built by immigrants, and it’s still the case that recent immigrants do a lot of work. They could do more if allowed. So, if you think that the demographic problem is not enough workers it could fairly easily be solved.
- pcbro141 5y ago
  I assume by 'native' you mean 'white'? Looking at the students/faculty of elite schools/research labs and staff of top companies, I see plenty of highly intelligent and educated non-white immigrants producing great work (sometimes they even make up the majority of these elite groups). And many (most?) Western countries do provide various incentives to have kids, as well as Asian countries, but the incentives don't ever seem to work to get above that 2.1 replacement level, so Western governments are 'worried'/concerned about birth rates, but boosting them significantly not an easy thing to do. Especially when part of the reason might be that people simply don't want more than 1 or 2 kids these days regardless of finances.
spinny 5y ago
Three ?? So noble of them
demarq 5y ago
Thanks government
whoevercares 5y ago
It boils down to three succinct word in Chinese: 养不起
screye 5y ago
The CCP (and often communist revolutions in general) underestimate the massive intergenerational effects of societal rehaul that can only be restored with policies more draconian than the ones that destroyed those norms in the first place. China now has 2 generations that've never known uncles, aunts, siblings or the conception of family beyond the nuclear unit. New norms have developed around the amount of investment that parents are expected to put in a child, with work being the only other thing that is supposed to matter. The soft incentives have realigned to strongly discourage children. Multiple children makes it difficult for parents to be invested in a single child or work in a way that society expects them to. The thousand year long values of sibling relationships have to be built back up from zero, and is not trivial in the least. For a country where maternity leave is punishing to a woman's career, a career that women are also taught to care deeply for, convincing women to have multiple children will be a tall ask. We are already seeing a plummeting marriage rate and an average marriage age that's steadily rising. With all of these things in mind, the only way CCP reverses the current trend, is if they pull a Mao and practically force people to marry more and earlier/have multiple children by introducing incentives as draconian as Mao's China.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Imagine being the government official who proposed a policy to make sure the country eventually disappeared if carried out indefinitely.
- frankbreetz 5y ago
  I feel like a ton of government policy would be a disaster if carried out indefinitely. Look at this last year with covid, somethings are intended to be temporary
ngcc_hk 5y ago
Allow ... for 1/5+ humanity. For a fundamental human rights. And we are ok with it, aren’t we?
aliasEli 5y ago
Many third world countries are trapped in a vicious circle. Because there is no functioning social security system, it is important to have many children because they will provide income for your family in the future. So on a micro level this makes sense. But on a macro level it is disastrous because the population growth will put even more pressure on your social security system. The draconian policy of China enabled it to spend more resources on economic development. It is not so long ago that China was also a typical third-world country.

217 points by jgilias 5y ago

Big of them

Gotta love HN comment section on a story such as this. People here solving math problems more than questioning the power of a government to tell people how many children they are ALLOWED to have.

konart 5y ago
>the power of a government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence >Robert Hinrichs Bates argues that the state itself has no violent power; rather, the people hold all the power of coercion to ensure that order and other equilibriums hold up. Should we be discussing this?
- Rompect 5y ago
  According to that argument, the capitol riot was justified.
  - potatoman22 5y ago
    How so?
bluescrn 5y ago
But perhaps it would have been the right thing to do for governments to limit population growth and not let us breed our way to destruction so fast, unsustainably stripping the earth of its resources and accelerating climate change. Personally, a one-child limit a few decades ago would have been much more tolerable than face being told in the near future that we can no longer eat meat, drive a car, or travel internationally, amongst other things.
- qwytw 5y ago
  Or maybe, perhaps there are other ways to decrease birth rates to a more sustainable level besides forced abortions and infanticide? There is not a single in country in the EU with a fertility rate above 2 (the average in 2019 was 1.54) it's higher in the US but this is mostly a result of external immigration (either directly or immigrants having more children). At least in Europe this is going to cause huge issues in the upcoming decades due to huge increases in social and healthcare expenditures coupled with a shrinking workforce. *https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/tps00199/default/table?lang=en https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/tps00199/defa...
BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
Understandable. But I will say that the government in question is well known for doing whatever it pleases.
Markoff 5y ago
yeah, I found it amazing when my wife had to ask in China whether we can have our child, which will be foreign citizen after birth FFS
sk5t 5y ago
The state (just about anywhere) can use its powers to take your property, lock you in a cage, or send you or your children off to fight and die thousands of miles from home. What's the difference?
adrian_b 5y ago
I wonder if you also question the power of a government to forcibly take money from the people with no or few children and give the money to those with many children. This (allocation per child) is a policy very frequently encountered in a large number of countries. It is also frequent in those countries to raise the level of the allocation per child immediately before elections, which leads to quite an inflated level after many election cycles. Unlike with China's population control policy, I have not seen any questioning of these allocation per child policies from other countries, even if in that case the state also intrudes in the individual rights by extracting money from them. That policy also results in some kind of reverse eugenics, because the more responsible people delay having more children until having the financial means to raise them, but because they are forced to pay higher taxes they must delay even more, while some of the least responsible people choose to have as many children as possible, with the hope of sustaining the family only or mainly from the state aid. In my opinion all kinds of potential abuse from a government must be questioned, not only those for which there exists a tradition to be criticized.
oreally 5y ago
Ok, seems like you'd like no birth controls. Would you be willing to support the excess births in China with your own money then? As a US citizen? Because the excess births are going to put a burden on China's infrastructure and you're pushing for no birth controls.
justnotworthit 5y ago
Just wait a few hours before reading the comments and (as you see in this comment page) the ideology discussion will go above the computation.
tediousdemise 5y ago
Human rights are irrelevant when they are having a drastic impact on the environment. Human reproduction is one of the most detrimental things there is for the environment. The planet has a problem with human overpopulation. We must self-regulate as a species. Governments are good at making and enforcing regulations. China's government oversees one of the largest sectors of the human population. We have to give some praise to China for being forward-thinking. They have recognized their role and responsibility in stopping the rampant breeding that plagues our planet. All governments need to take the same steps that China has, or the planet won't be inhabitable for much longer. For more info, see http://www.vhemt.org/ http://www.vhemt.org/.

jasiek 5y ago

Who will want to have more kids, now that everyone was born a single child and has two parents to take care of?

necovek 5y ago

One of the most common things I see these demographic analysis miss is the changing average age of mothers: as they focus on careers, they might postpone giving birth to later in life (30-40yo), compared to the traditional (20-30yo). With this move happening over a couple of decades, it is only natural to have a diminished birth rate as motherhood catches up with the 10 year shift (since it's a cultural thing, it would be happening over a time span of, say, 20 years). I don't know if it's true in China, but if looked at carefully, it might not be the time to sound the alarms. The same happened in the West, just by 20-50 years prior.

dalbasal 5y ago

At this point, it seems that China's family planning policies aren't really directly related to population growth anymore. No policy/restrictions at all would probably not meaningfully impact gross population growth. It's just about maintaining family planning as a public prerogative, atthis point.

bsenftner 5y ago

I wonder about stories like this, how much western propaganda they are composed. I've been to China, and observed this number of children policy to be completely ignored outside their major cities. It is not uncommon to see large families with 5-8 kids in their farming and areas of less population.

ginko 5y ago

It feels strange to me why they're not just getting rid of the limit at this point. Especially since they already seem to have trouble getting couples to have two children.

dirtyid 5y ago
Probably don't want fringe groups to procreate without limit. Not just with respect to Uyghurs, where family planning sterilizations are being applied to those who had 3+ kids, but any potential (non-secular) groups.
throwaway316943 5y ago
I imagine there’s entire departments of people dedicated to managing this program. Probably dedicated party members. I don’t think they could take their titles away and reorganize them without starting a lot of infighting.
- hackingthenews 5y ago
  It could also be that they see no scenario ahead where they want the average number of children per woman to be above 3. I don't think China wants back to exponential growth ever. They probably want to find their equilibrium. Consider if something unlikely happens that completely changes the dynamic of families, e.g. a cultural shift where women stay more at home and have more babies. If the average family started having more than 3 children, they would consider bringing back this system, which could cause big social problems, as it costs more social capital to bring back an unpopular system than to simply maintain it.
  - runawaybottle 5y ago
    China may not be as concerned about uncontrolled population growth anymore due to their broader strategy of exporting their workforce: https://qz.com/africa/1963566/how-many-chinese-workers-are-there-in-africa-now-2/amp/ https://qz.com/africa/1963566/how-many-chinese-workers-are-t...

throw0101a 5y ago

There is some question on whether the one-child policy was even needed. If you look at a graph of "children per mother" chart before and after the original policy went into effect, it's quite evident that rates were dropping for more than a decade beforehand: * https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/october/china-one-child-policy-effect https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/october/china... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Birth_rate_in_China.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Birth_rate_in_China.svg * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy Industrialization, urbanization, reduction in child mortality, and the education of women accomplished a reduction in the rate in China just like it did/does just about everywhere else. The ghastly human rights violations that led from the policy were completely unnecessary.

stefan_ 5y ago
There is another graph here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/File:China_single_age_population_pyramid_2020.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/F... Which shows a massive male surplus particularly in the young demographics, way larger than you would biologically expect. How can we claim this policy has no effect if clearly people are still killing female infants?
- faitswulff 5y ago
  Interesting how the assertion that Chinese people kill infant girls en masse goes completely unchallenged without nuance on this site.
  - HDMI_Cable 5y ago
    Are there any other explanations for the massive male surplus?
    - faitswulff 5y ago
      Is adoption murder? Abortion? Why is it easier to imagine that Chinese people murder infants than it is to imagine literally any other scenario? Why is it easier to assume that a massive sex imbalance is the result members of a particular group of people being psychopaths rather than the result of some systemic cause? Hmm.

gregwebs 5y ago

What’s missing in this article is a proper discussion of the level of government for each child. This ends up being the limiting factor for most who are not wealthy.

hyko 5y ago

Won’t be long before three children are mandatory.

jokoon 5y ago
What? Has this ever occured in history? Not sure you can really force people to have kids. I doubt that chinese women would accept this.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
I think you were joking, but totalitarian regimes have done this before (Romania's orphan crisis was the result of similar policies, iirc). The poverty/immigration dance - if you reduce poverty, women have less children. Eventually you reach the point where you need to allow immigration to provide enough workers to keep your aging population from starving. Immigration is an existential threat if your country is based on a single ethnic identity (e.g. Han). Immigrants are poorer and therefore have more babies, and at some point will become the ethnic majority, or at least a sizable minority, large enough to cause problems (and economically vital so you can't just round them up and deport them). Getting middle-class people to have more babies is difficult. Edit: of course, this isn't a problem if you don't base your country's identity on an ethnic identity.
- Clewza313 5y ago
  China internally makes a big deal about their 56 ethnic groups, living happily in harmony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_minorities_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_minorities_in_China And woe betide anyone who dares be less than harmonious about being ruled by their Han big brother.
  - infinity0 5y ago
    You seem to have a bit of sour grapes that a non-Western country dares to talk positively about their own policies. You should understand that translations often lose some cultural context, so when you have a prejudice against the English word "harmonious", understand that the Chinese equivalent is used much more freely in everyday speech. "Solidarity" might have been a better translation. -- Reply to the comment below: > I recall that, in the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony, China celebrated its ethnic minorities by having Han children dress up as them [..] In a big place like China or the US, there are always going to incidents like this. Furthermore, most news stories will exaggerate the headlines or twist the details, so I am not even sure if this particular incident is as you described. What matters is what the policies are doing for the larger scale of individuals. You can't judge anything about this larger scale by looking at a few incidents, especially when Western media have a vested interest in showing you these news items and ignoring the vast majority of what is going on. (To be fair, the vast majority is quite boring.) "Ask the people themselves" is used typically in these discussions as a weasel phrase, as if Western liberal democracies are truly "asking the people themselves". You have mass media bombarding the general population all the time with pre-ordained narratives. Nobody votes in elections with an independent analysis. So sure, it depends on what you mean by "ask the people themselves". There's lots of content on social media including from ethnic minorities, people are generally happy with their lives and the amount of freedom they have. Are you going to pick holes in that? Why not pick holes in what's happening with mass media de-jure "independent" de-facto manipulative elections in the West?

zed88 5y ago

Most of us in the west can't relate to the idea of government regulating how many children one can have, but hey, it might work for them.

29athrowaway 5y ago

The problem with China right now is the 4-2-1 problem. Because of their one child policy, you have a family generation consisting of 4 people (grandparents), followed by 2 people (parents), followed by 1 person. So now they are way on their way to an demographic crisis, where most people will be old.

woutr_be 5y ago
Another result of this, is that males outnumber females, so there’s a lot of single males unable to find a partner. This is because parents generally preferred boys as their only child.
- nobody0 5y ago
  Yeah, however, the young generation is putting off their marriage year by year as in developed world. I can see the trend where people choose not to marry someone and/or not to have kids is picking up though may not be the mainstream any time soon. Partly because costs have been high, but also people find their interests elsewhere other than the traditional path.
  - woutr_be 5y ago
    True, many of my Chinese friends complain that their parents are urging them to get married before 30. And while plenty of young people still do this, more and more people are putting of getting married, and wait until they're really ready. Not just because society tells them to.

alialghamdi 5y ago

When changing it to 2 children didn't help, why would 3 help?

sd4ee3 5y ago

But not the Uyghurs, who have a -2 child policy.

temp8964 5y ago

After the communist "land reform", the Chinese communist party / Chinese Government owns all the land in China. Now, local governments use land control and land sales as their major source of revenue. The end result is that vast majority of Chinese people live in small apartments, which are designed for 1 couple + 1 kid families. In big cities, average apartment size is around 60-80 sqm. In small cities, it could be 100-120 sqm. For a family of three kids to live in those small apartments, life is gonna be really tough.

patall 5y ago
Pardon me, but how is 100-120 sqm small? 60 sqm is small for 4 people yes, but everything else subject to how rooms are organized. We had 105 sqm growing up with 5 people and we had a very large living room + 4 bed rooms, no second bath room though.
- temp8964 5y ago
  Yes. In theory you can have 10 people live in one bedroom, and living room isn't even necessary. You can even share bathroom and kitchen in the apartment building. Sorry, I am too spoiled.
- em500 5y ago
  It's small for most Americans, but not for most Europeans (especially not for European city dwellers). It's huge if you live in Hong Kong.
  - temp8964 5y ago
    Well, euro birth rate is 1.5, hong kong birth rate is 1.1. We are talking about having 3 kids here. This is the context of discussion.

jp555 5y ago

Good luck. With a shrunken generation of family to help due to 30+ years of one-child policy, and almost no social support (China does not really have socialized healthcare in practice) there's no one to help take care of larger families. But there is a HUGE number of rapidly aging parents and grandparents to take care of. Add a culture that puts accumulating wealth as the #1 virtue, and it becomes nearly impossible to reverse a low birth rate. In Canada Quebec has been paying French families to have more kids for a very long time. Today Quebec has the lowest provincial birthrate in Canada.

Kaze404 5y ago
If you omit the part about the one-child policy I would think you were talking about the USA.
- jp555 5y ago
  US has one of the best demographics in the Western world. Millennials are larger than Boomers. Plus the US can use immigration to decide what population they want. Countries not built on immigration cannot really do this in practice. see Japan.
simbas 5y ago
Your comment is a bit bigoted, the government has been paying families, not "french families", to have more kids. This isn't segregated by language at all. Everyone gets their child allowance payments, whatever their origin.
- jp555 5y ago
  It's not meant to be bigoted (that's you mind reading) - it's meant to give context to non Canadians. But I probably should have said "Quebec Families".
- w0de0 5y ago
  Is the origin of the policy a desire to preserve and increase Quebec’s unique culture (“French families”), or not? If so, is it bigoted to say so?

Axien 5y ago

Peter Zeihan has an interesting take on it: https://zeihan.com/video-dispatch-chinas-demographic-decline/ https://zeihan.com/video-dispatch-chinas-demographic-decline...

MichaelRazum 5y ago

Just curious are such policies considered a human right violation. For example could US or let's say France implement such law as well? Let's say the government just want's to prevent families having more than 5+ children for whatever reason.

iammisc 5y ago
The short answer is yes, it's a human rights violation, and it doesn't matter what others 'consider' it. But no one will say anything because it's the Chinese Communist Party.
oreally 5y ago
Years ago there was a US president who questioned the birth control = violation of human rights thing to Deng Xiaoping, to which Deng answered: "Are you going to support the excess population then?" or something like shipping them off to the US. That shut his US counterpart up pretty quickly. Let countries be free to do birth control of their own violation - you do not want more births whose lives they cannot support properly which in turn threatens the social fabric of their societies. To push this as a human rights violation in support of the west's rhetoric is pretty hypocritical since they don't have to support the excess births.
Traster 5y ago
Western countries attempt to manage this through taxation and benefits. There are plenty of countries that encourage having children with tax benefits. The UK controversially introduced a limit to how much you’ll get in state support if you have more than 3 children- https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claiming-benefits-for-2-or-more-children https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claiming-benefits-for-2-or-more-...
- barsonme 5y ago
  Taxation and benefits is not even in the same universe as forced sterilization and abortions.

mytailorisrich 5y ago

Globally, population growth is the single biggest problem, IMHO, and it won't be possible to meet both environmental and development targets with current and medium term population numbers. Sooner than later we will have to adapt to at best constant population, which will mean a large proportion of elderly. Trying to boost births (as everyone is doing) is just kicking the ball down the road at the expense of the environment. Now, in China specifically I think lifting restrictions won't have much impact. A child is very expensive and virtually all women work. They would need to look at a welfare system to help families for people to consider having more children. There is also the issue of migrant workers: many people from poorer areas work in richer cities and leave children with grand parents for years on hand. They are not going to have more children just because it is allowed.

MrsPeaches 5y ago

As far as I am aware [1] one of the big issues here is housing. With the one child policy all of the housing was built for 1 child families (i.e. 2 bedroom apartments). Even with the two child policy it was really difficult to find apartments built for larger families. [1] I know someone who lived in China, who said this was an issue, but I don't have any actual sources so this may be wrong.

lammalamma25 5y ago

Every story about China should include a note that the government decides how many children its citizens are allowed to have. We've grown numb to how terrible this is.

xyzzy123 5y ago
This doesn't seem intrinsically terrible to me, particularly if it's done through incentives and doesn't involve say, murder or sterilisation. If we accept that any biome will eventually have a finite carrying capacity while the possibility of human reproduction is exponential it seems inevitable that there must be some limits to reproduction. Regulation is crude but might be less bad than "direct environmental feedback" such as die-offs or drastically decreasing quality of life. Of course it's a co-ordination problem, which is very difficult. I can imagine many cultural and technological approaches to population control, some of which already exist, and might not be terrible. It seems to me that in particular any engineered habitats with well-defined carrying capacities, e.g. mars, would have to deal with this quite early on.
- woeirua 5y ago
  It turns out that as countries develop their birth rates naturally decline and eventually turn negative without requiring the government to set the number of children you can have. Indeed Japan and others are doing almost everything possible to encourage people to have more children and cannot get their populations to return to growth.
  - xyzzy123 5y ago
    I agree that market forces and cultural trends seem to be curbing population growth in wealthy countries. I'm just not sure it's a sign of cultural maturity; it feels like we've quietly skirted a difficult conversation through low wage growth and expensive housing, health care and education (more humans are discouraged because of bottlenecks in key supports). In theory if there were "smooth" environmental feedback the population would nicely sigmoid without too much overshoot, maybe that's what is actually happening. I wish I knew.

zanethomas 5y ago

The government decides how many children you can have?

pepperonipizza 5y ago

This will not change the fertility rate, there was a bump for one or two years after China allowed 2 children, and the fertility rate went down again, and the tfr is at its lowest since it has been calculated. Only ectogenesis could reverse this trend. China and the world better start investing more in ectogenesis research.

roody15 5y ago

Interesting side note on china during the one-child policy era. This policy was enforced on the masses but highly educated people were given waivers. If you were a engineer, professor or any highly skilled professional you were encouraged to have lots of children. China’s one child policy was mainly about population control but also had a eugenics component to it as well.

nitrogen 5y ago
It seems the problem is in the use of force. Apart from that, if there's a group of people that would make better than average parents, and whose kids would be more likely to contribute more to society than they consume, then shouldn't that group be encouraged to have and adopt as many kids as they can afford to support?
- milofeynman 5y ago
  You're describing eugenics. The same sort of casual propaganda that the Nazi party and others would use. Most people who are highly successful right now got there through privilege and parental wealth, not through some sort of inherent talent.
  - ackfoobar 5y ago
    > Despite full Maoist Communism in China, descendants of former landlords and rich peasants today earn 16% more than descendants of others. > They couldn't inherit wealth from grandparents, parents were barred from university in Cultural Revolution, but they inherited something https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/1301012672138285059 https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/1301012672138285059
    - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
      Just because one was barred from university or wealth doesn’t mean that the political entrenchment was eliminated. If I was a wealthy family that rubbed elbows with other wealthy families, such that all my family friends were from wealthy families, any success I gather would also have me nepotize my family friends into whatever companies I make and whatever government success I achieve.

bruiseralmighty 5y ago

I find it a bit odd how accepted a child mandate has become when it comes from the CCP with the global community. For instance, it seems that a large reason that China is hesitant to lift any limits whatsoever is a belief that rural women will have large families and urban women will not and that this would be 'unfair'. This cant help but feel like a eugenics argument about not wanting to swamp the gene pool with 'low IQ rural undesirables'. What would be the foreign response if some of the more distasteful ideas behind mandated birth rates were brought to the fore-front: * 'all able-bodied women must have at least one child.' * 'citizens in these jurisdictions can have as many children as they want.' I believe we would see a lot of outrage in other countries over these policy, but I worry the CCP sees no difference ethically in mandating one or the other. Instead opting for whatever is deemed necessary.

officialjunk 5y ago
the world summary of the policy is not the whole truth. you could always have more than one child, but there's a tax. so you get one child for "free" and the others you have to pay a tax. there are countless families with multiple siblings of all generations, even in cities.
zdragnar 5y ago
Rural families- especially farmers and ethnic minorities- have had exceptions to the one child policy for quite a while now. The reluctance to lift limits is perhaps better owing to the fact that means yielding a bit of control, and not wanting to appear to have been wrong (why today and not yesterday?). That said, you don't see much outrage in other countries (despite stories of infants being thrown out, forced abortions, forced sterilizations) because we have short attention spans and no real hope of forcing the government's hand. Look at all of the accusations, allegations and witness over the treatment of uighurs. Or, look at the middle eastern countries where women couldnt vote, drive, or even travel out of the county without their husband's permission. Even of we had pushed harder for faster reforms, we would have faced internal criticism for a "colonial" attitude.

m3kw9 5y ago

An observation is that birth rates were highest when 1 child policy was installed. I wonder if the psychological scarcity spurs more children.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

I wonder when they will have an infinity child mandate. Surely that will solve their demographic problems.

stanrivers 5y ago

A lot of people are asking why a policy is even still needed - why not go for no limit at all? 1) There is an entire family planning bureaucracy within the CCP setup to manage this; would do you do with all those people if they are not needed anymore? 2) China is more strict on population planning for certain minorities - not officially, but in the background; think Muslims in western China or Tibet or Mongolians, or ethnic Koreans in northeastern China... If you had no population planning for all the Han chinese, you might have a brighter light cast on this small in number but impactful population control actions. 3) Once someone has power, why let go of it? The CCP survives by creating a fairly good life for the majority in China - and it has done that extremely well - in exchange for control. It is easier to go from 3 back to 2, than it is to go from unlimited back to 2, for example.

chitowneats 5y ago
"The ASPI report said birth rates in counties with a 90 percent or greater indigenous population declined by an average of 56.5 percent from 2017 to 2018, far more than other regions in Xinjiang and China during the same period." https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-uses-coercive-policies-xinjiang-drive-down-uyghur-birth-rates-think-tank-2021-05-13 https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-uses-coercive-poli... 56.5% decline in birth rates in one year when the right sample is taken. Beyond shocking. Doing such a thing with your left hand while allowing more births for Han Chinese with your right hand must be seen for what it is: genocide.
- elefanten 5y ago
  You’re absolutely right and this comment has no business being grayed.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Uncomfortable truths
  - chitowneats 5y ago
    Indeed, this seems to have touched a nerve. Interesting that no one has tried to refute my point directly. There are others in the thread who seem to be suggesting that because Han Chinese have also been subject to population control measures, that my point is somehow invalid. No one has yet explained why we see such steep birth rate declines, specifically in Uyghur regions, relative to the rest of China, only in the last half decade or so. You know, right around the time they started rounding up millions of people in that same ethnic group and putting them in camps. The Chinese government has many euphemisms and rationalizations for these camps, but they don't dispute their existence. In any case we have satellite imagery. What can one conclude about these coinciding actions by the Chinese state if not genocide? If it's not that, what is it?

rainworld 5y ago

Westerners so enthusiastic about “China’s demographic problem” would be well advised to worry about their own, local sub-replacement birth rates, in particular for natives (you know, the ones who built the countries everybody else seems so hell-bent immigrating to), as well as for the educated, the middle classes. Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19095925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19095925

sudosteph 5y ago
I'm guessing you don't mean "natives" in the modern sense. But I am still one of those people who's ancestors have been in this country since the 17th century, and I don't get what worries you. I was always taught that being American is not about being a particular race or ethnicity. Heck, my family couldn't even tell you our ethnicity other than "white". And I may be educated middle class, but my grandparents who grew up in the Appalachian mountains sure weren't. So long as the children of immigrants are adapting fine to the rest of American culture, who cares if our population growth depends on them?
skybrian 5y ago
Historically much of the US was built by immigrants, and it’s still the case that recent immigrants do a lot of work. They could do more if allowed. So, if you think that the demographic problem is not enough workers it could fairly easily be solved.
pcbro141 5y ago
I assume by 'native' you mean 'white'? Looking at the students/faculty of elite schools/research labs and staff of top companies, I see plenty of highly intelligent and educated non-white immigrants producing great work (sometimes they even make up the majority of these elite groups). And many (most?) Western countries do provide various incentives to have kids, as well as Asian countries, but the incentives don't ever seem to work to get above that 2.1 replacement level, so Western governments are 'worried'/concerned about birth rates, but boosting them significantly not an easy thing to do. Especially when part of the reason might be that people simply don't want more than 1 or 2 kids these days regardless of finances.

spinny 5y ago

Three ?? So noble of them

demarq 5y ago

Thanks government

whoevercares 5y ago

It boils down to three succinct word in Chinese: 养不起

screye 5y ago

The CCP (and often communist revolutions in general) underestimate the massive intergenerational effects of societal rehaul that can only be restored with policies more draconian than the ones that destroyed those norms in the first place. China now has 2 generations that've never known uncles, aunts, siblings or the conception of family beyond the nuclear unit. New norms have developed around the amount of investment that parents are expected to put in a child, with work being the only other thing that is supposed to matter. The soft incentives have realigned to strongly discourage children. Multiple children makes it difficult for parents to be invested in a single child or work in a way that society expects them to. The thousand year long values of sibling relationships have to be built back up from zero, and is not trivial in the least. For a country where maternity leave is punishing to a woman's career, a career that women are also taught to care deeply for, convincing women to have multiple children will be a tall ask. We are already seeing a plummeting marriage rate and an average marriage age that's steadily rising. With all of these things in mind, the only way CCP reverses the current trend, is if they pull a Mao and practically force people to marry more and earlier/have multiple children by introducing incentives as draconian as Mao's China.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Imagine being the government official who proposed a policy to make sure the country eventually disappeared if carried out indefinitely.

frankbreetz 5y ago
I feel like a ton of government policy would be a disaster if carried out indefinitely. Look at this last year with covid, somethings are intended to be temporary

ngcc_hk 5y ago

Allow ... for 1/5+ humanity. For a fundamental human rights. And we are ok with it, aren’t we?

aliasEli 5y ago

Many third world countries are trapped in a vicious circle. Because there is no functioning social security system, it is important to have many children because they will provide income for your family in the future. So on a micro level this makes sense. But on a macro level it is disastrous because the population growth will put even more pressure on your social security system. The draconian policy of China enabled it to spend more resources on economic development. It is not so long ago that China was also a typical third-world country.