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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 t
by 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 agoProbably 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 agoI 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 agoIt 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 agoChina 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...
- riffraff 5y agothat is not really "exporting". If you export bananas, the bananas do not come back to you, while these workers are only temporarily abroad, they're not (for the most part) emigrants who moved there to stay.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> I don't think China wants back to exponential growth ever. Any policy defined in terms of "X children per couple" or "X children per woman" is, by definition, exponential growth. When X is 3, it's very rapid exponential growth.
- alva 5y agoX = 1 is not exponential growth
- thaumasiotes 5y agoYes, it is. Since the population is shrinking over time, it is more often called "exponential decay", but mathematically there's no difference. It just means the value of the exponent is negative.
- beowulfey 5y agoSome people pick the strangest hills to die on. Per this argument, I would think that an exponential function is different to something experiencing exponential growth. One of them is a definition, the other is a description. They aren’t really interchangeable when it comes to communicating a point.
- anoncake 5y agoSure it is: x = 1^t
- yakubin 5y agoWhen X is 2, then 2 people replace 2 in theory, so there is no growth. In practice, some of those children will die early, so 2 is actually a minor reduction, not growth, forget about exponential.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoWhen X is 2, you have one of the most important functions in the family of functions that display exponential growth. It is the one in which the exponent is 0. > not growth, forget about exponential. This is really weird phrasing, since you're on much stronger ground saying "not growth" [arguable] than you are "not exponential" [flat wrong]. I just pointed out that defining results in terms of "X children per woman" will always necessarily produce an exponential curve. That's the definition of an exponential curve. If you want to distinguish between "growth" and "decay", you can say so, but you're still stuck with labeling them "exponential growth" and "exponential decay".
- refurb 5y agoConsidering countries who have tried to increase their birth rate have failed to even budge the number by 10%, I’m pretty sure the risk of too many births is pretty much non-existent.
- hackingthenews 5y agoAgreed. But if you could maintain a system that avoids a very unlikely scenario with possibly huge disastrous consequences, then why not?
- jelsisi 5y agoThis has to be looked at country by country. Unlike Europe, China still has a large rural, poor population. Without regulation, their population will explode, something the chinese government probably wants to avoid.
- throwaway316943 5y agoInstead of regulating their lives like they do with the child policy and making migration illegal maybe they should try improving their lives a little so they don’t need to have a ton of kids or work illegally and without services in order to get by? Who would have thunk a communist country would treat their poor workers so badly?
- blueblisters 5y agoI think the idea is to bring the average up to 2.1, which is the accepted "replacement" fertility rate, to stem a population decline. One way to achieve that level is when a majority of women have 2 children but a few have 3 children. For a population the size of China, a "few" might mean a few million. I don't see that happening without a few carrots.
- hackingthenews 5y agoYup agreed, commented the exact same below.
- dragonelite 5y agoIts a hard problem to solve don't even know a developed country that actually managed this problem well.
- hutzlibu 5y agoI am not sure, that this is a problem that needs centralized "solving". I don't want anyone tell me, how much children I can or should have. We got to make sure the work life balance is in order for people to have the time and money to afford a family and give adequate support like daycare etc. But apart from that, I really don't like some buerocrats in some buerau somewhere calculating the "correct" number of births. That regulates itself. There is immigration and emigration. There is automatisation (elderly care), better medicine, so older people can tend to themself longer and less need of a "dumb" workforce etc. etc. Trying to calculate it and declare meassures based that, can only fail in my opinion.
- WillDaSilva 5y ago> We got to make sure the work life balance is in order for people to have the time and money to afford a family and give adequate support like daycare etc. Stuff like this can and does result from bureaucrats / policy-makers deciding what an ideal number of children (for the well-being of the society) is. You say "that regulates itself", but clearly the things you listed (work-life balance, economic prosperity, daycare, etc.) are not self-regulating. You also mention specifically that this matter doesn't need centralized solving, but that's different from what you went on to say, that the factors that go into determining how many children are had are self-regulating. A decentralized approach does nothing to guarantee that. Whether you like it or not, the government has a large influence over all of these matters. Choosing to not regulate them is a choice that will affect how they turn out. Likewise, the very structure of the economy and social systems will affect these things. A government can not avoid determining what those are like, whether by the government's active influence over them, or its more laissez-faire approach. When you have a monopoly on violence, you cannot truely recuse yourself from what happens in the society around you, and if you lack a monopoly on violence then you aren't really a government.
- TheCoelacanth 5y agoIt seems like they should be pivoting into getting people to have more kids.
- axiosgunnar 5y agoTFA talks about this, saying they fear a child number explosion in poor rural areas.
- rfoo 5y agoThis is a big factor, but poor rural areas usually just blatantly ignore child number limits anyway. So, unlikely to be the sole reason.
- amelius 5y agoPerhaps time for better social security then.
- lucian1900 5y agoWhich also happens, there are significant anti-poverty efforts in China that have been quite effective. Attacking both sides of a problem is sometimes necessary for effectively dealing with it.
- TimPC 5y agoI was under the impression the one child policy never applied in poor rural areas. If it was universally enforced I’d like to see an explanation for China’s population growth over a period where it would have experienced a decline.
- riffraff 5y agoIf people don't die as early as before and you have few newborns you can still experience growth for a while.
- TimPC 5y agoI agree but definitely think 1979 to 2016 is longer than that while.
- woutr_be 5y agoIt generally wasn’t strictly enforced anyway, as in, if you had a second child, you could pay a fine, and legally register your child. And yes, it didn’t apply to rural areas as well. I had a friend in China who lived in Shenzhen and has 3 children, he essentially just payed two fines (not even sure how much it was).
- Proven 5y agoNot sure how to put it.... Have you been following the main news from China in recent years?
- slver 5y agoWhen I see how our governments evolve I always compare global restrictions to similar processes in multicellular organisms. Cell division is globally and locally restricted in the body in ways single cellular organisms aren't. We have "growth hormone" which encourages or suppresses division at certain periods of life and even certain periods of day and night. And uncontrolled growth we call "tumors" and "cancer" and it leads to the rapid decline and death of the multicellular organism, and with that, the death of all those cancer cells as well. So who knows what the future holds. Maybe that's not a China thing. Maybe it's a society thing, that we've not wised up to yet.
- WhyNotHugo 5y agoNot sure it's that simple. You might end up having couples with 10 kids, and many others with 1 kid. As a very broad generalisation, it's usually less educated couples that go for the far higher numbers.
- simion314 5y agoI have no idea , just a random idea , maybe they want to prevent people from the "wrong" group having 10+ children.
- tsss 5y agoProbably because exactly the wrong people will have five or more children while the highly educated that they want to reproduce continue to have only one.
- OminousWeapons 5y agoI agree. From what I understand from Chinese friends, this is sort of an irrelevant move. Chinese culture demands fully supporting your children financially throughout their adult lives, including fully financing education, purchasing homes for them, and purchasing vehicles for them. As you might expect, this is extremely expensive and difficult to scale up to 3 kids.
- oreally 5y agoSeems like you some rich chinese friends. It's a bit of a stretch though to say the culture is to purchase homes and vehicles for each child though. It's more likely they'll be sharing sharing 1 ancestral house and 1 family vehicle.