By Dave Andrusko
By complete coincidence, I read Jonathan Last’s terrific piece on the “epic disaster” that is China’s One-Child policy the same day (today) that I learned that pro-life Congressman Chris Smith will hold a hearing this Thursday on “China’s One-Child Policy: The Government’s Massive Crime Against Women and Unborn Babies.”
Our readers may remember Mr. Last’s devastating analysis of the book “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men,” by journalist Mara Hvistendahl (www.nationalrighttolifenews.org/news/2011/06/selected-out-of-existence). Last moves from the worldwide “loss” of 160 million girls (the victims of cultural preferences for boys + sex-selective abortions) to the specific horrific policy of China in a piece that appears in the Weekly Standard.
The “hook” for the story is why so many Westerners are apologists for China’s brutally repressive policy (see Biden, Joseph) that included forced abortion, infanticide, and involuntary sterilization. In the end Last charitable settles on they don’t know what it involves, or where it came from.
I very much would encourage you to read “The Lost Girls’ , so let me highlight just two of Last’s many keen insights.
I didn’t know that before the policy’s official start in 1980 that China had already halved its fertility rate (from 5.5 children per woman to 2.7). From a “concern” to lower its fertility rate in the 1970s—which worked extremely well—the Chinese underwent a “sea-change” in its approach, thanks in no small part to a serendipitous meeting between a Chinese scientist and a Dutch mathematician, Geert Jan Olsder. The result, according to Last,
As he [Olsder] explained to Song, he and his colleagues determined that the key to demographic stability was controlling the number, and timing, of births. Song would go on to incorporate Olsder’s theoretical work into his own, which, in turn, shaped the formulation of One-Child.
But the result of China’s brutal one-child policy is an impending demographic catastrophe: A hugely distorted sex ratio–far more males than females—and a radically altered age pyramid–far too few younger people to support a growing population of elderly Chinese.
The bitter irony is that even when the government has gone out of its way to relax restrictions—to actively encouraging additional births—women are having fewer than the 2.1 children needed to stabilize the population.
“The overall result of this concerted effort is a Chinese fertility rate that now sits somewhere around 1.54, depending on who’s doing the tabulating. Demographer Nicholas Eberstadt notes, ‘In some major population centers—Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin among them—it appears that the average number of births per woman is amazingly low: below one baby per lifetime.’”
To come full circle back to the Westerners “who claim to admire China’s One Child policy: they may have adopted this position out of ignorance. But, according to Last,
The people who care most about One-Child—the Chinese—spend a lot of time these days not praising the policy but trying to figure a way out of it. Because it turns out that One-Child wasn’t so much a policy as a trap.
