“Chinese women ‘want more babies’ ”, BBC News, 16/1. A 2006 survey by Chinese family-planning officials found that most (70%) women want to have more than one child. The one-child policy, however, does not apply to everyone:
…in most rural areas couples are allowed a second child if their first is a girl. Different birth-control policies also apply to some ethnic-minority groups.
Other countries see the policy as draconian, but if it was not (mostly) enforced, the population would be even higher. There is a latent problem of a gender imbalance as female foetuses are sometimes aborted as male children are preferred, which will become increasingly socially disruptive with an increasing number of males not being able to find female partners.
The Chinese economy has to be kept growing in order to keep a growing population employed, but this is ultimately unsustainable in a world of finite space and resources, and environmentally destructive. As noted in “Chinese hit by growing pains”, The Age, 17/1:
“Unemployment of migrant workers on a mass scale implies severe political and social problems,” he says. “Any minor mishandling will cause social turmoil.”
(The migrant workers in this case are mostly peasants from the countryside who go to cities to look for work.) As I remarked in my entry, “Culling surplus males”, unmarried, unemployed young males tend to be the most troublesome elements in any society. Many will get killed off if a country goes to war, but this is a rather uncontrolled way to go about it. (If this seems rather callous, I am just looking at the problem from a pragmatic point of view.) Therefore if the Chinese government is to maintain control, it has to contain its population growth in some manner.
“How Many Chinese Are Enough?” by Gwynne Dyer also looks at the problem and comes to much the same conclusion: however unpalatable the one-child policy is, the alternatives are worse. One has to be realistic, not sentimental – individual rights must be overridden in this case for the survival of a society as a whole.
Most ecologists would say that China is well beyond its long-term “carrying capacity” even with its present population. Maybe the government is actually listening to them. Maybe it also knows that climate change will not be kind to China. There are things worse than a one-child policy. Famine, social disintegration and civil war, for example.
