China's Demography and the One Child Policy

Well, in last years census the population was actually lower than expectations. (it was 1.34 Billion, estimates are 1.38 -1.4 Billion)
People are just having less kids, regard less of policy. Are with most of the post-80s already qualify for second child, and many not going for it. People are urging the entire policy to scrapped since fertility ratio is heading below 1 in many locations and it seems there is no way for it to head north of 2 even if no restrictions are in place.

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Also here is CCTV program I translated on population, keep goes pretty deep into the issue. Far deeper than any western reports I has read or programs I have watched. It's the first translation job I did, with a terrible software, so bear with it.

Part 2 of my translated CCTV program

I talked to some of my friends who live in China; they said the one child policy actually bound the rural people only. Urban people nowadays don't want to have children or can't afford to have a child. Marriages are too expensive for normal people in China, especially in cities. People just don't get married. They live with each other as partners or just register for marriage without a formal celebration.

Originally Posted by SteelBird

I talked to some of my friends who live in China; they said the one child policy actually bound the rural people only. Urban people nowadays don't want to have children or can't afford to have a child. Marriages are too expensive for normal people in China, especially in cities. People just don't get married. They live with each other as partners or just register for marriage without a formal celebration.

China should not go down the Japanese route. Its a ticking time bomb.

Originally Posted by SteelBird

I talked to some of my friends who live in China; they said the one child policy actually bound the rural people only. Urban people nowadays don't want to have children or can't afford to have a child. Marriages are too expensive for normal people in China, especially in cities. People just don't get married. They live with each other as partners or just register for marriage without a formal celebration.

To add to this:

China is going to have same scenario as developed nations. Cost of living higher - less incentive to have kids. Women more educated and more freedom - getting married at older age and less likely to have kids. More liberal society - less likely to have traditional view of family unit.

Besides, one child policy is not absolute. Minority group people are exempted. Couples from single child family are exempted too. People who can afford the not small fee to have 2nd child, can do so too. And these are usually the people you want to have more than 1 kid. Privileged rich people lol.

Good points, all of you. I am particularly worried about the extreme fall in fertility rates among urban residents because it indicates a decline in the family. The family (nuclear or extended) has always had an important social and economic function in society. The family imparts wisdom and guidance to the young. The family is the social safety net when someone got sick and couldn't work, and government aid wasn't available. The family is a mutual aid network that the government cannot match. The family is essential to building a better future by raising the next generation. The family is an exercise in benevolence and love.

It's ridiculous that people say it's too expensive to get married and have a child when their grandparents were a lot poorer than them and still had half a dozen kids. The poorest people in the Third World find the money to have kids, how can a middle class Chinese person not? And this is the same Chinese person who has an iPhone, iPad, maybe even a car. The idea that marriage and children are too expensive reveals a change in values that disturbs me. Urban residents increasingly a prefer career-oriented lifestyle at the expense of family. This change in values is a short-term economic payoff with long-term economic and social harms.

China is at the point now where it needs every baby it can get. The government and society should be heaping praise and money on anyone willing to have several children, not shaming and taxing them.

Demography is the one characteristic of society that is extremely difficult to change. If a country needs more roads, it can build them in a few years. If it needs democracy, it can hold elections and liberalize the media. But if it needs more young people, it's very difficult to encourage people to have babies. The Singaporean, Hong Kong, French, Swedish, and Japanese governments are trying hard with little success. China should heed their experiences and reverse its demographic decline before it has reached the stage of Japan.

Originally Posted by Geographer

China is at the point now where it needs every baby it can get. The government and society should be heaping praise and money on anyone willing to have several children, not shaming and taxing them.

Have you ever lived in China? Do you have any idea of the degree of competition that Chinese youths face in both school and in the job market?

If you had any actual knowledge of China, you would realize that the one-child policy is one of the best decisions made by the PRC.

One has to ask the question, if there are no problems with having an open faucet with population, why aren't people practicing it now? This is what I categorize as utopian meaning impossible. There are so many factors that would have to work perfectly and that's impossible. It's a fantasy. It would spell disaster trying to engineer it because so many things in a chain have to work all at once and if one link breaks the whole thing falls apart.

I wouldn't bring up India as if it were a shining example. Having a whole bunch of young people with no jobs ain't a plus. India has more young people than China right now. Are they ahead of China? So it shows that all those young people aren’t giving India an edge. Were they ever ahead of China in the modern age? That pretty much says it all. And India does the same as China when it comes to gender selection. Racing to have the biggest population isn't a crown to be desired except for those that value the superficial. So India is no counter of China of what to do. Just look at China since reform. Has India ever bested China? Yeah, maybe a hundred years ago while China was occupied by Western powers and in turmoil because of it. But no one can say that was because they had it right. So there is no track record that India has ever had it right. Anyone who brings up India as a positive example of what a country should do socially has to be questioned about their motivation especially in comparison to China since this automatically is an inflammatory topic just by the India vs China nature. Do we see Western countries following what India does if it's so great?

Now let's look at the major economic powers today. Did any of them ever have a billion people? Let's use simple logic as to believe younger is always better despite you have no more jobs for them compared to China. Which direction sounds the pragmatic path? Yeah China should drop the one-child policy but to promote essentially younger is better as paramount regardless how big the population is just as unethical as the one-child policy. That’s the same logic as in the city where I grew up. The poor expects the government to throw money at them and that will solve all their problems. Yeah throwing money at things like education will do nothing for your kids if you taught them not to value an education in the first place. So what’s throwing money at education going to do? If your kid is not learning, it’s because they don’t want to learn. That’s a basic fact. What do they need? Maybe they can’t learn without an iPad or a laptop computer. Maybe the government has to give them more money so they can buy their children the latest expensive fashion and an iPad. Just birthing a lot of young people to solve one problem isn’t the answer either. It’s much more complicated than that.

Singapore and Hong Kong are prosperous and look how they are without arable land? The same can be said of old vs. young population. No arable land is the same as not enough young people. And Singapore and Hong Kong worked it out on how they can be prosperous without arable land, right? I’ve seen old Chinese women carrying 50 pounds on their backs. There’s a reason why in the US migrants do the farm labor. It’s because Americans from young to old don’t want to do those jobs. It’s too labor intensive for them. I’ll bet an old person in China is more productive than their Western counterparts. Because of the size, China will probably never be at a comfortable level like in the West where they’ll need immigrants to do low-level labor because it’s become just too beneath them to do themselves. Some ethnicities joke that they don’t do labor. Others romanticized how productive they are as laborers. My sister told me a co-worker of hers, who was Mexican-American, was talking in the break room and China came up in the conversation. She made a comment that’s she’s afraid to go to China because she thinks Mexicans will be kidnapped to a factory or something because of how hard they work. The Asians in the room smartly told her poor Mexicans don’t go to China. Only the rich ones do. The Chinese have a history of doing the hard labor to this very day. The only difference is the Chinese don’t romanticize it.

Sorry to again bring this up but this is another Western concoction that inspires anger either way and that's how they like it because it's a reason to hate no matter what happens. They fear you because there are too many of you. Then on the flip side of the coin they can turn it into a human rights issue if you try to control it. Either way they vilify you. By that hypocrisy alone you don't take their advice. Look at how they complain how China wants to reign in adoptions of female babies by foreigners. Aren't they concerned about the gender imbalance they themselves say will cause social problems for China in the future? But apparently not at the expense of their need to adopt a trophy child. So who's the one thinking about themselves first and not what's best for China? And you really think you can trust their advice when their personal needs outweigh what's best? Why the contradictions all the time? Hypocrites contradict themselves as nature. Why does everyone hate a hypocrite when even hypocrites hate other hypocrites? Hypocrites know themselves that they are motivated by their selfishness and not concern for others.

As always the West looks at themselves to get an idea how things will work with people who are different from them. One of the main reasons why they say an older population is a negative is the burden on social security. China has no social security as charged. Even with no social security, China will have problems but not like how in the US where social security is a significant portion of the US budget. And it's not like in the West where austerity measures are sparking riots because they feel something they were used to having is being taken away from them. In China they're already living in a society with no social security so it's not like they're going to riot over something they never felt having in the first place. That's why in China they save because that's their social security. Who's going to have more turmoil? The people who saved for social security because they can’t count on the government or the people who gave their money to the government for social security and they end up with little or nothing because of mismanagement? And guess who wants China not to save and instead spend to buy their products? The very outsiders contradicting themselves about what they say is best for China.

What if I suggested that China do nothing about smoking? Why? Since a large portion of Chinese men are chain smokers, they’re more likely to die early from cancer. The more uneducated are less likely to heed warnings about health hazards. It’s nature balancing itself. It sounds horrible. Just like thinking birthing endless amounts of children to solve one problem that arrogant outsiders focus on as important is a good thing.

I think people often take an ideological and sentimental view towards procreation that has little grounding in reality. People most opposed to the one child policy are opposed because that policy clashes with some of their beliefs, be it freedom or choice or pro-life or fear of a big brother government.

In this world, quantity is not all that matters, quality matters far far more.

The western media often report gleefully about China's greying problem, but that is more an extension of the imminent collapse of China these same people have been preaching for decades in one guise or another.

Yes, a greying population presents problems and challenges, but then so does an abundance of young and talentless youths.

Take India for example. Indian fanboys and their cheerleaders in the western press often cite their 'healthier' demographics as a reason for why India will overtake China someday, somehow. Yet they pay no heed to the appalling illiteracy, and infant mortality rates amongst India's young. Just what bright future could the 25.96% Indians who could not even read dream of?

Even China, with it's one child policy has a huge challenge in creating enough jobs for it's young. The same problem exists in India, but is many times worse, yet the world turns a blind eye because dogma states that because India is a democracy, somehow all of it's problems will solve themselves of their own accord, much like the defunct 'free market' myths that are at the heart of the current financial crisis.

For all of the problems and troubles facing China now, things would have been far worse had China's leaders allowed unchecked rampant population growth.

Yet, one of the biggest benefits of the one-child policy that the west will never acknowledge is that the quality of children has improved massively. I am not speaking of some eugenics conspiracy by the evil red commies before anyone gets too exited, I am talking of the effort and attention Chinese parents put into educating their child to make sure they get the best possible start in life.

Granted, this has led to coddling and some kids being spoilt, but in the vast majority of causes, it has meant that Chinese children have been pushed harder to fulfil their potential. I think that is one of the biggest, unspoken and unacknowledged factors behind China's rise today.

A nation is only as strong as it's people, and despite what might be assumed, Chinese schools are not that great at teaching. It is the hard work and diligence of ordinary parents that make the biggest difference, and it is not hard to understand how parents of single child families might have more time and energy to devote to each child than families with several kids of a similar age.

China's one child policy has it's massive faults, and an entire generation of Chinese will never know the joy and comfort of having siblings, and that is a tragedy beyond measure. However, the one child policy is not without it's merits, and those need to also be acknowledged if one is ever to come to a balanced and fair assessment of it's impact and legacy.

Originally Posted by getready

Couples from single child family are exempted too. People who can afford the not small fee to have 2nd child, can do so too. And these are usually the people you want to have more than 1 kid. Privileged rich people lol.

Well that sounds appalling on the face of it, but I think it carries far more truth than what many in the west would care to acknowledge.

I often think that western society, especially those with strong social safety nets, are quietly but steadily building up towards a social economic disaster.

All you have to do is have a look at demographics and social economic indicators in the west. The media often obsess about people placing career over family which results in fewer kids per household or even no kids at all as fertility rates drop off a cliff at the age the modern professional couple start to think about having kids, but that is only half the story.

The far graver problem lies at the bottom of the social economic ladder, with teenage moms who are still kids themselves having litters of kids they are plainly unprepared and unequipped to raise in a manner that would allow them to advance beyond the life they have been born into.

For such people, having kids is either the result of stupidity in not knowing about basic birth control methods, or it is seen as a cash cow, since mothers without a means to support themselves and their kids get an allowance from the state for each kid they have. The more kids they have, the more $$$ they get, and even though many of these child mothers have questionable numeracy skills, even they can figure out the basic arithmetic of this equation.

For the children unfortunate enough to be born into such families, chances are they will do exactly as their parents have, since that is one of the few things of worth such parents could teach them, and the whole cycle continues.

So, at one end, the high fliers with the highest intelligence, best education and all the tools, skills and resources to raise children to given them the very best possible start in life are having fewer kids or no kids. On the other, the people with the lowest IQs, least education and no understanding of the responsibilities and obligations of raising children are having kids like their lives depended on it (and actually, for a lot of them, it probably did).

It's pretty much evolution backwards, survival of the unfittest. How could anyone not see a massive problem in how this works?

Say what you will about the one-child policy, but at least nothing like this will ever happen under it.

People like to bring up the examples of Hongkong and Singapore as two countries doing fine despite not having arable land and for that China should not be worried about greater population. Those two countries' combined population are less 13 million, 1% of China's. When you have that small a population, you can still rely on imported food but with 100x that population to feed, supply of imported food becomes more rigid and far less stable. Drought and diseases can reduce the supply of food and prices and rocket up the food chain. Having a huge population reduces your ability to reply on other countries.

The reason why they say the West is having a slow recovery is because they don't have a monopoly over the world economy anymore. Because of China and other emerging economies, they have to compete in the traditional capitalist way, over world resources they before just took for granted. So what's Singapore and Hong Kong going to do when they have to compete with others for the things they can't produce themselves? Look at Hong Kong. They're already getting a taste of it. A lot of these recent protests are because of how Hong Kong business is catering to Mainland Chinese and not the people of Hong Kong. In the capitalist spirit that's called going where the money is. This is in parallel with what's being discussed and the prosperous people of Hong Kong have a problem with it.

All you have to do is read about how some believe the world already has an abundant amount of food. There was a story recently that said Americans waste something like 40% of the food that the US produces. The poor around the world aren't going hungry because enough food can't be produced. It's because of the problems of distribution. Why is the US wasting 40% of the food they produce? Can't Americans send that food somewhere that needs it? If anyone can they should be able to do it more than anyone else. Whatever reason it is shows that thinking having people create litters of babies at a time means the world will rally together and distribute it properly so everyone gets fed is pure utopian fantasy. It also smacks of socialism and welfare. Try getting Americans to pay for another country because they're having too many babies born and they need to be taken care of until they're an adult.

What a lot of Westerners can't seem to grasp is that the one-child policy can be relaxed as easily as it was implemented. In fact, the relaxing has already come, in the form of rural families allowed a second try for a son, and urban families, where the couple are both the only children of their families, are allowed to have 2 kids.

Certainly, China will be seeing challenges from a graying population. However, we are seeing the same challenge in Canada and the US, as the baby-boomer generation go into retirement. These are challenges, not catastrophes.