Human Quality: China's One Child Policy
January 22, 2008
WHEN CHINA’S family planning tsar, Zhang Weiqing, said that the government is about to strike hard against local celebrities and bigwigs who violate the One Child Policy, it is natural to be sceptical. Zhang said that the government will impose heftier fines on the rich who choose to flout China's tough family planning regime, saying that sports stars and models and tycoons "should not be given more privileges for having more children." It seems a fair enough argument, and it is exactly what you would expect a government spokesperson to say, but it flies in the face of Chinese political opinion.
Despite suggestions that the government has relaxed the policy in recent years, fertility rates are still way below replacement level, and 63 percent of couples are still restricted to just one child. But there is a rather complicated list of permitted exceptions, and for some years, many Chinese government officials have not been worrying about a small number of pampered pop stars paying for an extra child. Instead, they have been talking about the quality of the Chinese population as well as its quantity.
In worryingly eugenic tones, experts with the state family planning bureau have argued that in the crushingly poor Chinese countryside, where families are allowed to have a second child if the first one was a girl, or where ethnic minorities like the Tibetans, the Uighurs and the Hui Muslims are supposedly allowed to have as many children as they want, more pressure is being put on scarce resources in exactly the kind of region where it will do the most damage. There are also serious concerns that in the worst-off regions, the birth rate hasn't actually changed at all, and that there are millions of unregistered second and third children now tilling the country's already over-manned fields.
Meanwhile, government experts argue, the One Child Policy is being enforced the most effectively precisely among the sort of families who can afford to raise another kid, and where sub-replacement fertility rates are creating an ageing population and could lead to a catastrophic collapse in "social capital" within just a few decades.
Echoing the conclusions made in the scurrilous American satire, Idiocracy, officials have even been heard lamenting the fact that "poor-quality" people are out-reproducing the higher classes, and that the bulk of the projected rise in the official population figure - from around 1.3 billion now to 1.5 billion in two or three decades or so - will take place in the overburdened countryside. "If the population of China's prosperous regions is falling," argued an editorial in the China Youth Daily, "and the population of backward and rural regions is increasing, it is bound to cause social problems."
Possibly as a result of this thinking, relatively prosperous cities like Shanghai and Beijing have started to allow the offspring of single-child households to have more than one child.
Of course, anyone who has risked being trampled to death trying to get on a Chinese train during the Spring Festival knows that China has far too many people. The government - which still possesses an almost visceral sense that every single problem it faces can somehow be solved by a few well-designed decrees coupled with a bit more obedience on the part of the Chinese population - insists that there would have been even more if it hadn't begun enforcing its family planning regime in 1979, even though fertility rates had already plummeted since reaching a peak of about seven per couple in the 1960s.
But every policy has its unforeseen consequences, and some policies have bigger unforeseen consequences than others.
As a variety of pie-in-the-sky Marxist dictatorships and planned economic systems have discovered to their cost over the last hundred years or so, the more governing you actually try to do, the more governing you need to do as you try to handle a vast and chaotic proliferation of events, none of which were originally envisaged when you drew up your grand, Promethean schemes to eliminate kulaks and class enemies, collectivize the peasantry, overtake the west in steel output or divert Yangtze river water to the drought-ridden north (er, that one hasn't been done yet, Ed).
Things like the Great Leap Forward might have seemed like ideal solutions on paper, and at least you can comfort yourself - like Mao - by blaming other people when they go wrong, but real life is never quite so simple. By now, it seems obvious that banging drums for days on end in order to drive sparrows away from your crops would break a crucial link in the food chain and create a disastrous insect blight, just as it seems obvious that a strict one child policy would create a unparalleled gender imbalance, a potentially overwhelming number of unsupported pensioners and a hideous underground trade in infants.
And that's not all. Imagine a whole generation of spoilt only children that are put under further pressure by a system where there is no social safety net and where children traditionally carry the healthcare burden for the older generation. It is also a well-known fact that while the eldest conforms, it is the second and third child in a family who actually show the creativity and the spirit of rebellion required to achieve anything (shockingly, no American president has ever been first-born). So imagine a whole generation of people who have not faced the positive pressures of sibling rivalry. And imagine, if you can, a society with no uncles and aunts, and where four parents and eight grandparents are feeding Big Macs to a single bloated six-year old kid who knows that in ten or twenty years he has to find a job capable of supporting twelve aging relatives.
Perhaps future generations can rely on the social support provided by the umpteen children produced by the country's scofflaw celebs.
As the great biologist E.O. Wilson said about Communism: "Great theory, wrong species."
