This piece, which I found interesting, argued that the One Child Policy actually had a sort of "feminist" effect and was not exactly to blame for the gender imbalance:
> Besides, there were benign aspects of the one-child policy, especially for girls. Traditionally females were used as domestic help, birth machines or clan assets to marry off or trade. Women didn’t go to school, and were encouraged to internalise the saying that ‘a woman without talent is virtuous.’ Illiteracy was their proper condition: they were there to clean, farm, and above all to give birth to a male heir. They could not dine with men at the same table. Even today in many rural areas, all the family resources are invested in the male heir. The one-child policy forced people to review many of their assumptions, and at least try to treat girls as they would boys: parents, after all, were not able to choose their child’s sex, and had to come to terms with whichever they got. The policy also ended the nonsense that having a girl put paid to the family line. I have only one male cousin on my father’s side (regarded as the precious ‘trickle’ of the family bloodline), but when he had a girl, our family promptly abandoned their absurd talk about the male line. Cheers.
> Western scholars and human rights activists are inclined to blame the one-child policy for forced abortions, female infanticide, the under-reporting of female births and so on. These issues were deadly serious but they resulted less from the policy than from the nature of Chinese patriarchy, which the policy threw into sharp relief. People were willing to break the law, to pay a fine to have a second go at having a boy, even to murder or abandon female babies. Paradoxically the one-child policy undermined the atavism of tradition, even while seeming to encourage it. I grew up in Hefei, about 500 km west of Shanghai, where I remember a striking young girl from the countryside who attended a private violin class; she was the daughter of peasant parents who spoke poor Mandarin. Without the one-child policy, her father would have tried fanatically to conceive a second, third, fourth child, until the family produced a male heir. His daughters would have led miserable lives. Instead, he invested in his only child’s violin lessons.
That wasn't the only issue with the one child policy.
Countries that depend on children caps also generally see sex-selective abortion, because generally in most marriage customs the man is favored over the woman and no one wants to be unfavored. (Interestingly, as regulations have eased and also with both increased gender mobility in general and the current lopsided situation favoring women, the sex ratio is starting to swing back in China.)
If anything, lopsided sex ratios are even more dangerous, because revolutions do often get started by young, restless men.
I think the 1 Child Policy means that China is a paper tiger. Every single casualty is the end of a Chinese family (more or less) - and this is in a culture that already strongly privileges male heirs
"In the West, there’s a tendency to approve of it as a necessary if overzealous effort to curb China’s population growth and overcome poverty. In fact, it was unnecessary and has led to a rapid aging of China’s population that may undermine the country’s economic prospects."
Let's see how this unnecessary policy, which is not visionary or far-sighted, was implemented:
"All fertile married women in their region were obliged to pee into a cup for a pregnancy test every three months; a positive result could lead to a mandatory abortion. Any couple that somehow evaded the controls risked a fine, the demolition of the family home, and forced sterilization."
In the US we like to talk about the so called "war on women" and infringing on reproductive rights and the right of a woman to do what she wants with her body. What they were doing to women in China pales in comparison to anything women in the West go through. This is a precipitously high price to pay to mitigate the toll on the environment of having more people there.
The article mentions that China even had a better method of family planning before implementing the one-child policy. It dramatically reduced the average children per family, and more importantly it was completely voluntary:
"by the early 1970s China had adopted a highly successful voluntary family planning program called “Later, Longer, Fewer.” Its slogan was “One child isn’t too few, two are just fine, three are too many.” And within about a decade it managed without coercion to reduce the average number of births per woman from six to three, a remarkable achievement. It’s rarely acknowledged that the biggest drop in Chinese fertility came not from the one-child policy, but earlier during this voluntary birth control campaign. If it had continued, China’s birth rates would have continued to drop"
Far from visionary or far-sighted, the one-child policy was disastrous for families and threatens the Chinese economy, and was completely unnecessary. The Party wanted dramatic cuts, instead of the gradual decrease that was occurring with "Later, Longer, Fewer". In spite of several high ranking Party officials warning it would be disaster, the Party pushed forward with the policy, and it took them over 35 years to walk it back.
Part of the reason they're walking back may be that, as China's economy continues developing, it is starting to cost families more to raise children, so economic forces may be forcing them to one or two children anyway:
"One survey found that of Chinese families who today have one child, 60 percent say the reasons have nothing to do with the one-child policy. The cost of educating a child is often the foremost obstacle."
Disastrous family planning didn't save Beijing from disastrous city planning. Shanghai is larger still than Beijing in terms of population, yet Beijing still has the worse solution problem. (To be fair, Shanghai still has a pollution problem, but there is little precedent in city planning at the scale of Shanghai and Beijing.)
The article paints a vastly different picture to the idea that the one-child policy was one of the most visionary and far-sighted policies of any government at any time. In fact, the evidence presented by the article says the one-child policy is almost the complete opposite of a visionary and far-sighted policy.
It's certainly an intriguing demographic issue that China is grappling with, and the repercussions of the one-child policy, which notably skewed the population towards males due to cultural preferences, are becoming increasingly apparent. With the birth rate continuing to fall and the population aging, the imbalanced gender ratio will likely have profound social and economic consequences.
It is not because of one child policy that results in male babies birth rate higher than female’s. Actually,in China,this policy is not “powerful” to everyone,especially in poor area.however,birth rate in poor area is much severer(in many villages,it is possible that girls were killed when they were born).In ancient times,birth rate was still not equal(sometimes even worse than today’ )without one child policy.
The one-child policy also resulted in the worst gender imbalance in the world, which "could lead to instability as more men remain unmarried, raising the risks of anti-social and violent behavior."
Just look at it backwards. Even before the 1 child policy, both china and india have had a gender imbalance favouring males. After the 1 child policy in china alone, both india and china had a strong growth in gender imbalance, with china being only somewhat stronger. Your "control" without the 1 child policy also exhibited the same strong growth. A scientist would reasonably conclude that the 1 child policy seems to have little relevance to the issue, considering that another comparable country behaved in exactly the same manner without have such a policy in place.
"Son preference is traditional in Chinese Confucian patriarchal culture" ... "China implemented its one-child policy from 1979 onwards" ... "Given strict family-size limitations and a preference for sons, girls have become unwanted in China because they are considered as depriving the parents of the possibility of having a son" ... "About 37–45% of China's missing females may have been missing at birth [due to Sex-selective abortion]", and other factors include infanticide, poor nutrition leading to poor health conditions, and under-registration.
China's one child policy has had debatable effect and a number of unintended side effects. If China wants smart people to reproduce more, then skewing the population towards a male majority is only going to work through repression of large numbers of men who no longer have hopes of reproducing.
You can't really knock this one on central planning alone, more that central planning didn't really understand the context of the society around them when they made the policy. If China hadn't been so insanely patriarchal, a one-child policy wouldn't have given parents there an incentive to abort their baby girls.
There was nothing benevolent about the one-child policy. It was based on the idea that high birth rates were something for poor agrarians, but that the modern industrialized nation that China would become wouldn't need all those people and should in fact prevent them from being born to avoid overpopulation. Then when early efforts to promote voluntary birth control didn't drop the birth rate far enough, they added punitive fines, forced abortions and routine sterilizations to the toolbox.
The switch to the two-child policy was not due to a realization that all of that was unethical, but simply an adjustment of the target. Hence the simultaneous existence of programs promoting childbirth in regions below target, while people who have more children than planned are still punished harshly. It's all about staying on target.
China's one-child policy was unnecessary. Fertility rates were already dropping for at least a decade before it went into effect:
> China’s controversial one-child policy continues to generate controversy and misinforma- tion. This essay challenges several common myths: that Mao Zedong consistently opposed efforts to limit China’s population growth; that consequently China’s population continued to grow rapidly until after his death; that the launching of the one-child policy in 1980 led to a dramatic decline in China’s fertility rate; and that the imposition of the policy prevented 400 million births. Evidence is presented contradicting each of these claims. Mao Zedong at times forcefully advocated strict limits on births and presided over a major switch to coer- cive birth planning after 1970; as much as three-quarters of the decline in fertility since 1970 occurred before the launching of the one-child policy; fertility levels fluctuated in China after the policy was launched; and most of the further decline in fertility since 1980 can be attributed to economic development, not coercive enforcement of birth limits.
> There are two leading candidates for explaining the pre-1980 drop in fertility. First, family planning existed before the one-child policy became a part of it. Pressure was placed on Chinese men and women about the “appropriate” age at which to marry, about the number of children to have and about how rapidly. A 1994 paper by researchers Judith Banister and Christina Wu Harbaugh argued that these measures alone were effective enough to explain the pre-1980 decline, before the one-child limit.[1]
> Second, China was growing during the 1970s. It is therefore possible that it experienced the same declining trend in fertility caused by growth that all currently developed countries experienced at some point. This is typically referred to as the “demographic” transition.
China's one child policy did essentially that - financially encouraged people to have less children and the result was the murder of female babies. So many that there is an alarming amount of boys versus girls today: 118.06 boys to every 100 girls born (measured in 2010).
Remember that high birth rates are only a problem in poverty.
(Can't seem to edit my post so I'll add an additional comment)
One of biggest issues with the 1-child policy is that it affected the middle class much more severely than the ultra-wealth and the rural countryfolk,
> Min was born in 1986, six years after the one-child policy came into effect. She is the second of five children, a reflection of lax enforcement of family planning in the Hebei farming village where she grew up. (Min's father told me that one family in the village had six children; another man, who had fathered seven children, had been the village chief.)
> Min herself, along with everyone she knows, has two children.
> When history's largest social experiment in state-regulated childbearing comes to an end, it will have been borne disproportionately by the Chinese urban middle-class. The elaborate machinery built to enforce these policies barely touched Min at all. She was ignored by the government, living at the margins--in China, that's often the best place to be.
>Citizens: "well, if we can only have one, we better make sure it's a boy!"
I get the feeling that the people who invented the "One child policy" where at a different stage in civilization/education/whatever you call, than the people for whom they made the rule. So they didn't even consider that the public might choose to get rid of their girls.
China has been extremely focus on reaching the western standards of living, but their culture haven't been able to keep up. I think it's great that they addressed the issue of over-population, something that a country like India has failed to do. Their error was that they didn't try to bring about lower birth rates though education and welfare programs and instead opted for punishment. The Chinese where given an incentive to abort girls, so in hindsight it's not a surprise that things have worked out the way they have.
This piece, which I found interesting, argued that the One Child Policy actually had a sort of "feminist" effect and was not exactly to blame for the gender imbalance:
> Besides, there were benign aspects of the one-child policy, especially for girls. Traditionally females were used as domestic help, birth machines or clan assets to marry off or trade. Women didn’t go to school, and were encouraged to internalise the saying that ‘a woman without talent is virtuous.’ Illiteracy was their proper condition: they were there to clean, farm, and above all to give birth to a male heir. They could not dine with men at the same table. Even today in many rural areas, all the family resources are invested in the male heir. The one-child policy forced people to review many of their assumptions, and at least try to treat girls as they would boys: parents, after all, were not able to choose their child’s sex, and had to come to terms with whichever they got. The policy also ended the nonsense that having a girl put paid to the family line. I have only one male cousin on my father’s side (regarded as the precious ‘trickle’ of the family bloodline), but when he had a girl, our family promptly abandoned their absurd talk about the male line. Cheers.
> Western scholars and human rights activists are inclined to blame the one-child policy for forced abortions, female infanticide, the under-reporting of female births and so on. These issues were deadly serious but they resulted less from the policy than from the nature of Chinese patriarchy, which the policy threw into sharp relief. People were willing to break the law, to pay a fine to have a second go at having a boy, even to murder or abandon female babies. Paradoxically the one-child policy undermined the atavism of tradition, even while seeming to encourage it. I grew up in Hefei, about 500 km west of Shanghai, where I remember a striking young girl from the countryside who attended a private violin class; she was the daughter of peasant parents who spoke poor Mandarin. Without the one-child policy, her father would have tried fanatically to conceive a second, third, fourth child, until the family produced a male heir. His daughters would have led miserable lives. Instead, he invested in his only child’s violin lessons.
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