Colonization by stealth?

“The Unintended Consequences Of China’s One-child Policy”, io9, 3/10. I usually emit a groan when this topic comes up, as the critics of the policy come out in force. The article points out the issues with such a policy:

• Males outnumbering females due to a long-standing cultural preference for boys.
• “Surplus males” – men greatly outnumbering women, which can be an instigator of social unrest from frustrated males. This was “traditionally” (if not consciously) dealt with by war.
• The elderly outnumbering the young in a declining population.

As more than one commenter remarks there, however, what else was the Chinese government to do? If they allowed unrestrained reproduction the population would be even greater than the already huge figure (1.4 billion or so), with all the social problems and environmental damage that result (and still are afflicting the country, anyway). The policy does not apply to everyone, anyway – some ethnic groups, for example, are exempt (perhaps to keep them mollified?), and some cities are reversing the policy to address the aging problem (see previous entries with the China label).

Another traditonal way of dealing with “surplus people” is to export them, and China is certainly doing this – Australia is a popular destination. However this strategy can incite resentment amongst the host country’s citizens as they face increased competition for living space and jobs, as described this article: “In Africa’s warm heart, a cold welcome for Chinese”, Reuters, 18/9. Many African citizens are growing resentful of increased Chinese immigration there, as the latter can undercut them with cheap imported labor and goods. They also have no qualms about bribery when deemed necessary.

China is also, to put it bluntly, plundering the rest of the world for resources, such as Australia and Africa for minerals and farmland. This is also another potential source of conflict, though those raising alarm about this – such as recent controversy over the sale of a large cotton farm to Chinese investors – are invariably branded “xenophobic”. With future food and resource security at stake, though, why is this so unreasonable? I doubt the Chinese government has any scruples about their activities. In Africa’s case, China is effectively colonizing and exploiting the continent, as Europe did in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries – the term for this new version is neocolonialism.

Edit, 28/10: forgot to mention Tibet as an example.

Rats in a cage

“Police called to more than 100 disputes every day”, Herald-Sun, 29/5 (copy URL into Google search, click on link results to get around paywall). This was the headline for yesterday, the article saying that “Overcrowding is being blamed for rising neighbourhood violence”. Well, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to come to that conclusion!

The 000 [emergency] hotline sent police to almost 42,000 neighbourhood disputes in Melbourne and Geelong postcodes - a 12 per cent jump in a year. Violence and ugly verbal feuds between neighbours are as common as family disputes, the focus of a decade-long police campaign. Police have less power to intervene in neighbour disputes. Residents have told of incidents including vicious verbal abuse and terrifying attacks with knives, fireworks and slingshots, often after complaining about noisy parties or local hoons. Freedom of Information data obtained by the Herald Sun reveals the most crowded and fastest-growing suburbs are most affected. […]

Sgt Amanda Napier, of St Kilda police, said “paper thin walls” in overcrowded suburbs drove residents to the brink. “The incidents in St Kilda I think would be attributed to the fact that there are so many flats which have paper thin walls and any sort of noise can be heard,” she said. Dandenong police Sgt Paddy Hayes said alcohol often fuelled noisy parties and fights. He said it was an issue in growth areas such as Casey, where housing density meant residents were “living on top of each other”.

Some cultures, such as that of Japan, have adapted social behaviors that enable their populations to live high density without too much conflict (though I suspect frustration comes out in other ways). Australian culture, however, likes its space, and the crowding and urban density resulting from sustained population growth is driving many mad (myself included). I will link yet again to an article from a few years ago, “London’s a rat hole”:

His scathing assessment was being submitted to the main opposition Conservative Party’s policy group focusing on quality of life. “Putting 10 million aggressive hominids into close proximity and inviting them to engage in serial acts of competitive individualism … for jobs, schools or parking spaces, could not be considered a reasonable idea,” Bayley said. “You put rats in claustrophobic circumstances and they become homosexual, murderous and cannibalistic in no time at all. Instead humans find ingenious solutions, underground car parks, coffee shops, Chinese takeaways, one-man buses, cycle lanes, tall buildings.”

H-S letter in response, 30/5:

Overcrowding so bad for society

IT is to be expected that all this overcrowding and high-density housing being forced on us is causing social problems (“Battle in the burbs”, May 29).

All you need to do is go back to the famous study of the behaviour of rats when forced to live in overcrowded conditions. The more overcrowded, the more aggressive they became. We behave much the same as the rats.

We all need a bit of space around us to keep our sanity and balance. The more packed-in they make our city, the more the police will be called on. When will any government wake up?

– Mary Drost, convener, Planning Backlash Inc

A future timebomb

“Sir Bob Geldof calls for women to have fewer children”, The National (UAE), 16/3. The musician and activist made these remarks during a visit to the United Arab Emirates, but the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, rejected this suggestion:

“It’s not entirely clear to me that the way to succeed is to stop having children,” said Sheikh Nahyan, also at the forum. “They are the future.”

He said it would be better to focus on food production and consumption, as well as energy, water, pollution, deforestation, biodiversity, urbanisation and disease.

Sheikh Nahyan also quoted the UN as saying “we should not ask whether we are too many, but what can we do to make the world better”.

A foolish and short-sighted response. The Middle East generally has a large and growing population of young people, many of whom are impoverished, and even some of those educated have little in the way of job opportunities. This has been one unpublicized motivation behind the “Arab Spring” – venting anger and frustration at their situation.

Like China, Middle Eastern countries are facing a “perfect storm” of rising populations and dwindling resources, and are scouring the world to alleviate this, mainly by buying up farmland in countries such as Australia and Africa, something which understandably meets with resentment from many citizens there. Something has to give.

But Geldof called on the UAE to accept the harsh reality now and avoid disastrous consequences later.

“They either find a cultural way to make this acceptable or they’re going to have an anthropogenic critical event,” he said.

Global consumption is also expected to increase by 1,600 per cent in the next 90 years.

“I think the tipping point has been reached,” Geldof said. “There can’t be more people on the Earth than we can feed.”

They can’t say that they haven’t been warned.

Speaking of celebrities, “Cherryl Barassi on hoons, suicide pills and ratbags in sport”, H-S, 3/3. The wife of a well-known former Australian footballer had a few incisive things to say, including opinions on population growth. In the print article this was also included in a sidebar:

“Overpopulation and rabid consumerism are destroying our one and only beautiful little planet. Even the one-percenters who run the show can’t be happy in this climate of greed and denial. We are the ka-ching dynasty.

“How about we cancel public funding of the IVF program, and any other breeding incentives, and make it easier to adopt around the world?

“I’m tired of hearing about rights, the right to have 12 children, 12 cars and 12 televisions in one household. I’d like to hear more about responsibility.”

Escape to Australia

“Greek community flies flag to help homeland”, The Age, 14/2; “Melbourne in a Greek rush as new wave of migrants arrive”, H-S, 19/2. Greece’s economy continues to implode, so guess where many citizens there are looking to escape to? Yes, the far-off paradise of Australia, where despite having our own problems with hundreds of people losing jobs every week, the Victorian Premier urges Greeks to migrate to Victoria:

THE Baillieu Government wants Greeks hit by the economic crisis to migrate to Victoria. Greek-born Multicultural Affairs Minister Nick Kotsiras yesterday put out the welcome mat for his former countrymen and women. “It’s important that we build this nation and I think that migrants add to our capacity to grow and develop and to provide jobs,” he said. “And so I encourage people from all over the world, including Greece, to apply.”

Mr Kotsiras said the Victorian Greek community’s Antipodes festival this weekend would be a chance to show solidarity with the ethnic homeland. He said it was estimated that thousands of Greek Aussies based in Greece had returned to Australia because of the country’s debt crisis.

The Baillieu Government has given the Greek community more than $3 million to build a cultural centre and to spruce up Lonsdale St’s Greek precinct.

There is a similar situation in Ireland, as noted in my 15/12/2011 entry. I guess you can’t blame people for wanting to escape bad situations, but what happens if Australia is beset by a similar crisis? There would be nowhere else to go. I doubt I would want to leave, even if I had the means (which I don’t).

The whole “nation-building” ethos is so anachronistic (along with colonialism and slavery); I can’t believe some still espouse it. An alternate slogan I would like to see adopted for Australia: “Small, smart and sustainable”.

A broken society

The madness of last week’s London riots appears to be mostly contained, but the many issues that provoked it are unlikely to be resolved soon (if ever). Some of the rioting was simple criminal opportunism, but a lot of it was a venting of frustration from people who have few prospects and no say in their society. Is overpopulation one of the contributing factors? I would argue, yes – in my 18/7/2009 entry I said that crowding thousands of people together leads to more stress and thus violence, as humans are not evolutionarily adapted to live this way. This was the opinion given in the article “London’s a rat hole” (21/1/2009 entry).

It is hardly surprising that many rioters seem to live in the ugly, inhuman, modernist housing projects that afflict London like the plague.

– David Thomson, St Kilda, 16/8

A counter-argument might be that countries such as Japan are even more overcrowded and their populations do not riot, but their pathologies merely are expressed in different ways. Their culture insists on extreme self-control, necessary for living so closely, but the suicide rate has long been one of the highest in the world, and the hikikomori phenomenon amongst mostly young people – extreme withdrawal for years on end – is well-known. Anger is turned inward rather than outward.

Many of the rioters are unemployed, and there are little in the way of jobs for them. It is simply impossible to provide meaningful jobs for everyone in a growing population, especially as many businesses and industries are “downsizing” to become more efficient, and outsourcing a lot of work to cheap (slave) labor in developing countries. Such frustrations were also a factor in the “Arab spring” uprisings earlier this year (which are still ongoing), and the Israeli housing protests over the rising cost of living (Israel is very overcrowded). Too many people competing for dwindling resources, living space and jobs.

An article in Business Week from earlier this year, “The Youth Unemployment Bomb”, looks at the social consequences of having a large, unemployed and educated youth population, and the inevitable disorder this creates. The article, though, somewhat unhelpfully suggests that the solution is to create entrepreneurs – start one’s own company. But not all people have the aptitude for that (I don’t), and there are only so many products and services that can be created; the market is arguably saturated with “stuff”. The article does not address the basic issue: that there is simply a massive overpopulation of young people (who will one day become old).

So that’s the situation in this year of 7 billion – how much worse will things get if and when the population reaches 8, then 9 billion?