I hate the Chinese method of population control, but are they right?

[Kepler]

Originally posted by Lancer
Kepler, the premise doesn't apply. The Chinese system might eventually prevent a famine. If it does it could be considered humane...in comparison. Kind of like nuking Japan in WW2. Nasty business but it prevented an even more costly invasion...maybe. Anyway, I just use that for comparison, I don't want to discuss it or even dwell on such horrors.

Forcing people to have kids is totally different. Consider an evacuation from an area about to flood. Authorities know that some people will die while moving them out of the way, sick, elderly...yet the move them, they force them out. Some do die in the move, but many are saved from the flood. The business of government is to protect the people. The Chinese always think in terms of hundreds of years...they are protecting their people from the coming famine.

I still find the forced-kids and forced-no-kids arguments to be fundamentally identical. You can imagine godawful social consequences being sighted for both. ("If we don't have enough people, we will be invaded and everyone will be enslaved" or "we will have insufficient population to have a workable economy, and the ensuing depression will force everyone into destitution.")

The flood analogy is insightful, I agree, but I venture that there is a world of difference between being forced off your land and being forced into sterility. The latter is deeply personal.

This may work for eastern morality, where the group is more important than the individual. It just aint for me, a dedicated enlightenment westerner.

Note that fellow Oregonians can carry on an intelligent debate without name-calling or silly rhetoric.

[Lord Merciless]

Sometimes you have to resort to some drastic and nasty measures to prevent a greater tragedy from happening.

Bombing Bosnian Serbs in 1995 was an example.

Nuking Japan was another example.

The current war against Al-Qaeda is another one. If we don't act ruthless against these guys now, we might have to resolve to concentration camp methods in the future. That would be really really bad.

The Chinese pop control methods were ugly. But now it appears that the growth has really slowed down and the government is confident enough to relax the rules. So, for a price of screwing over some people during the course of 20 years, a nation has saved itself from a potential social collapse in the future.

[Ecthy]

Lancer, the point is that all that stuff is destroyed in thge very same countries where it could be given to the people.

[Urban Ranger]

The PRC policy on birth control is economical. It's just saying having more than one child and you're on your own. Besides, the policy is not uniform: for rural areas the rules are more relaxed.

[Jon Miller]

we need as many children as possible

just the US could feed the world how it is now

and there are other parts of the world that can produce food also (despite everywhere trying to pollute themselves out of the food producing business)

as long as pollution begans ot be decently controlled, population will nto be a problem (the problem will be the lack in the capitalist system)

Jon Miller

[Ethelred]

Re: Little emperors?

Originally posted by Lancer
Little emperors?

little help?

What Chinese call the spoiled brats that often arise from one child families.

They have a problem with a shortage of women as well now. There have definitly been cases of infanticide and abortion because the baby was or was going to be female as the male to female ratio is abnormal to say the least.

What the heck are those parents thinking of anyway. They want a male child but refuse to consider just what that male is going to do for a wife. Stupid. Only India and Nepal have a more damning male to female ratio than China last I saw. In Nepal some women have two husbands. Usually brothers.

[Ethelred]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
we need as many children as possible


Jon Miller

Why? How do you justify that statement and what do you think the limit should be.

Try checking out that exponential curve sometime at the present rate of about four to nearly five doublings a century. Should we stop when the population equals the mass of the Earth or before that? How about the mass of the Universe? It doesn't take all that much time.

In just one century at the present rate with a start of six billion

12 billion in 2027

24 billion in 2052

48 billion in 2077

96 billion in 2102

Is this beginning to make sense? I know you can do the math but you obviously haven't so I will make a bit more clear yet.

Every ten doublings or about 250 years you add about three zeros. Which means:

6 trillion in 250 years

6 quadrillion in 500

6 Quintillion in 750

6 X 10 ^21 in a thousand. How long to the mass of the universe. Which is sometimes give as approximatly 10 ^89 and thats particles, not humans mass equivilents at that.

6 X 10 ^33 in two thousand years

6 X 10 ^45 in three thousand surely we have now reached the spead of light but still we need more people since the people that say what Miller said are never willing to set a limit SO

6 X 10 ^57 in four thousand years. Egypt is older than that right now.

6 X 10 ^69 in five thousand years - about the same as the time of human writing. Still not as long as the city of Damascus has lasted.

6 X 10 ^81 in six thousand year. The age of Damascus now and still less than the lifetime of the now dead city of Jericho.

Oh dear we won't have enough mass in the entire universe for another. I guess I can stop at a mere 6 thousand years in the future.

So, John, just how much is enough and why shouldn't we start to end the problem now?

[Kramerman]

Population control is a major issue. It is said that the Earth can support 12 billion humans, but with destructive consequences on the environment. Something must be done in Industrializing nations, where population growth is most. I dunno if Chinas methods are too harsh or what, but something must be done.

Kman

EDIT: My source was my precal teacher, so i dunno if it is reliable, but he was a smart guy.

[CyberGnu]

Wait a second, isn't this 'forced abortion' thing just a right wing hoax? If I remember correctly, the NYT had a story about it two or three years ago... Turned out that the incentives are all economic. If a family has one child, the kid gets free healthcare, schooling and such. If the family has more than one kid, neither of the kids get squat...

Furthermore, they relaxed the laws somewhat, allowing families with a girl a second child, at least doubling the changes of a male offspring.

[Urban Ranger]

I am sure bad things happen in the remote regions where the petty officials think that they are kings. Just recently a low ranking official of a county busted a tolling booth because he didn't want to pay the toll. Worse, he sent in a bunch of goons to harrass the people there afterwards.

So yeah, there are all sorts of stupid people.

[Az]

Wow, does anyone really think that they're forcefully aborting the second child????

and UR , it seems that the PRC needs a stronger central authority.

[Alinestra Covelia]

Here are my liang fen (two cents!) for the discussion.

China's potentially farmable land is minuscule compared to the US and to the European countries. America has vast stretches of rolling plains, and Europe has arguable the highest arable land percentage of any region in the world. China has plenty of hills and mountains (which explain why it has the largest hydroelectric power potential in the world) but these make for very poor farming. The Gobi and Xinjiang deserts are also extensive and useless for agriculture, although the government is trying to implement a vast irrigation project to divert water from major rivers at their source.

(As an aside, both the Three Gorges Dam project and the Northern Irrigation project have met with nothing but doubt and criticism from western press. Whether they are genuinely flawed, or whether this reaction is the result of spin and politics, is a question I'm still pondering.)

China also has the largest population on earth, but in the light of its poor farming area, it has a real crisis on its hands. The Communist government undertook a study in the mid 70s and determined that if the Chinese rate of growth per family exceeded something like 1.8 children per couple, then no amount of economic development could ever hope to raise the standard of living.

If every couple had one child and only one child, then economic recovery along the government plans could bring about second-world living conditions sometime in the 2020s. Of course, this study was conducted over twenty years ago, and also the Communist government has stopped being particularly communist, so the economic situation has changed. But even so the argument that population must be controlled is a strong one.

I can understand why the American viewpoint is heavily different from the Chinese. America has never known overpopulation and lasting insufficiency during its entire history. It has always been a land where immigrants can go and find a standard of living equal to or greater than their homeland. Furthermore, America has a strong religious history, and part of that religious background is still present in its social profile today. This, coupled with its constitutional "checks and measures" scepticism of leadership, leads to a fundamentally different viewpoint than the Chinese populace's.

Now consider China. Its population has known subjugation by foreign powers, civil war between Communists and Nationalists, and finally widespread chaos caused by internal power struggles near the end of the Mao era. China is a country where the traditional viewpoint has been that a leader must be strong foremost, and fair only if possible. Traditionally, weakness has always been a far greater crime for a leader than cruelty. So long as the ruler staves off the approach of chaos and disorder, the populace is much more willing to put up with authoritarian rule than, say, the liberated West tends to.

Of course, with China's emergence in the modern global community, this viewpoint may or may not change - some say it is changing most notably in the cities. (My Beijing massage doctor lamented the fact that in the days of Premiers Deng and Jiang, everybody is too busy making money to heed matters of politics... she harkened back to the halcyon days of Mao where communal spirit was "unbreakable".)

So we have a basic divergence of cultural views.

More specifically to hand, the Chinese official policy is to limit the population through economic means - namely, to terminate all state-backed funding and support for those families who have a second child. I do not know whether this policy is abused in the more rural areas - it certainly seems to hold fairly well in the cities, where a family thinks twice before having a second child, and usually only does so if they have enough personal savings to support both their children.

In the countryside, officials tend to have greater freedom in governing (and greater scope for corruption) than in the cities. Recent studies show that farmers and laborers rarely if ever heed the one-child injunction, as the aid they would receive from the government does not equal the usefulness of bearing another child to aid to the workforce.

The laws are relaxed for ethnic minorities (a point of great pride to the Chinese - they have 55 ethnic groups excluding the Han majority, and economic policies are aimed at preserving these groups and their traditions) and for families where the first child has birth defects. A couple who are only children themselves are allowed to have two children.

All these policies are economic, so they can be disregarded at will by those families who earn enough through private enterprise to support their own families. I have heard many lurid stories about infant murders but I have my doubts as to the veracity of these sources.

I don't hold the view that the rest of the world has some sort of duty to support China (or any other given nation for that matter). First and foremost a country ought to rely on its own government to sort things out, and then ask for help if all else fails. But I do think it's a duty for a press to get facts and stories right. This goes both for the state-controlled Chinese media (which suppresses anything it doesn't like) as well as for the viewer-orientated western media (which skews or suppresses anything it's afraid its viewers won't like). Both sides have room for improvement, especially in their attitudes towards each other, and given the potential gains of cooperation instead of antagonism, I don't see that there's really any other feasible alternative.

[Sava]

It just goes to show that human beings are animals and they can't control themselves. I believe that society's needs to protect against overpopulation far outweigh the individuals rights to have as many kids as they want. I think this world would be a better place if there were requirements for having children. So many problems in the world are due to bad parenting and stupid people having children.

[Ethelred]

I have heard many lurid stories about infant murders but I have my doubts as to the veracity of these sources.

Many of them are likely false. However there is still the unusual ratio of males to females. Usually there are slightly more males born but after one year of age there are more women than men. This is the case in nearly every country. ALL countries where this is not the case have a VERY strong cultural disire for male children and a very low social status for female children. Something has to be going on as the ratio in China is not natural.



China
Sex ratio: at birth: 1.09 male(s)/female

under 15 years: 1.1 male(s)/female

15-64 years: 1.06 male(s)/female

65 years and over: 0.89 male(s)/female

total population: 1.06 male(s)/female (2001 est.)

-----------------------------------

United States
Sex ratio: at birth: 1.05 male(s)/female

under 15 years: 1.05 male(s)/female

15-64 years: 0.98 male(s)/female

65 years and over: 0.71 male(s)/female

total population: 0.96 male(s)/female (2001 est.)

----------------------------------

United Kingdom

Sex ratio: at birth: 1.05 male(s)/female

under 15 years: 1.05 male(s)/female

15-64 years: 1.02 male(s)/female

65 years and over: 0.71 male(s)/female

total population: 0.97 male(s)/female (2001 est.)

---------------------------------------------------

France

Sex ratio: at birth: 1.06 male(s)/female

under 15 years: 1.05 male(s)/female

15-64 years: 1 male(s)/female

65 years and over: 0.68 male(s)/female

total population: 0.95 male(s)/female (2001 est.)

-------------------------------------------

Russia- which seems even harder on young men than the US is but Russians die a lot youger especially the men. Not a good sign for drinking vodka over whisky.

Sex ratio: at birth: 1.05 male(s)/female

under 15 years: 1.04 male(s)/female

15-64 years: 0.94 male(s)/female

65 years and over: 0.47 male(s)/female

total population: 0.88 male(s)/female (2001 est.)

--------------------------------------------

I didn't use World population for comparison because India and China have such large populations that they strongly effect the average, making up one third of the total world population. Here is India to make that clear. Its the about the worst.

Sex ratio: at birth: 1.05 male(s)/female

under 15 years: 1.06 male(s)/female

15-64 years: 1.07 male(s)/female

65 years and over: 1.03 male(s)/female

total population: 1.07 male(s)/female (2001 est.) India

Source

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html

Yes I know the CIA isn't liked but its still a good source for this sort of stuff.

[Lefty Scaevola]

As long as 30 years ago there were only six nation that could feed themselves: USA, Canada, Australia, Argentinia, Thailand, & South Africa. All other nations were net food importers. I expect the number of net exporter is down to 3, 4, or 5, currently. The Usa & Canada likely acount for 80% to 95% of net food exports.