Very Clever, Those Chinese
Famously, Mark Steyn claimed that China would be the first country to “get old before it gets rich,” thanks to its one-child policy. I scoffed at that for two reasons.
1. Beijing almost certainly didn’t enjoy enough control outside the cities.
2. You can’t trust any statistics, but especially the ones coming out of (officially) communist countries.
Well, it looks like I was wrong and Steyn was right. Read:
For the first time in 30 years, officials in the country’s economic capital have urged eligible parents to plan for a second child. The move was prompted by the growing demographic imbalance in the city and fears that the younger generation will not be able to support the ageing population. The one-child system, where all pregnancies are monitored and sometimes terminated by order, was enforced to control a population that is the largest in the world at more than 1.3 billion.
“We advocate eligible couples to have two kids because it can help to reduce the proportion of the ageing people and alleviate a workforce shortage in the future,” said Xie Linli, the director of the Shanghai Population and Family Planning Commission.
That’s only a partial reversal, but still quite stunning.
With any luck this will also start to reverse the gender imbalance in China. In fact, I suspect that’s part of the strategy.
Well look at you Stephen Green, admitting your wrong. Makes me a bigger fan of your blog. I’m never wrong – it’s always my wife’s fault. Big fan of Mark Steyn America Alone
There’s still about twenty years of backlog before this can catch up, and it will only lead to some unrest as people in other areas (and of other net worth, ethnicity, and other factors) wonder what’s so special about some parts of the country. It’s a risky plan, but probably less risky than the status quo.
Look at it this way, even in a deeply communist country like Communist China where it still lives under the centralized control of just about everything, yet even a small amount of free market policies managed to produce a surplus in the economy large enough to allow the Chinese population and its economy to grow at the same time.
Mr. Martin,
I’m not sure that’s an endorsement of capitalism so much as a statement in favor of central control. In China, the government can play heads-we-win-tails-you-lose even if some favored people get rich, and with their huge population and the allowing of factories into controlled areas, there was no other likelihood but economic growth over the past few decades. It’s not easy to proclaim a victory for capitalism if it’s built on the backs of an overpopulated and underdeveloped state that controls its people like China does, in fact it’s easier to look at it as a disgusting display of greed. But that’s just me looking at Chinese workers as slaves and their rent-a-master program run by the Chinese government, a view that’s just as simplistically wrong as proclaiming the recent growth as a victory for free markets. It’s just not easy to see in black and white terms when China is undergoing so much change.
I truly believe that china and russia will survive the so-called “demographic winter” better than most “advanced” western european states (though Russia is plainly in a bad spot). Chiefly, they will survive because they are not gynocentric, anti-male, anti-patriarchal cultures that revile men and the unborn with equal measures disgust and loathing. A country like canada, which appears to revel in its increasing irrelevance and political correctness, has a birth rate far below either nation and no political will to make changes that might facilitate a replacement level birthrate. Instead, what canada does is rely HEAVILY upon immigration to make up for all the absent workers of tomorrow that it is not producing today; it is also a country where the “needs” of women are privileged far above and beyond the needs of men – which means that fathers, sons, and young men (as well as the unborn, of course) are treated as shabbily in that country as you will find them treated anywhere in the world.
Canada is a loser’s nation – the classic case of what happens when social engineers grab the wheel – and I don’t see a happy ending for the demented dominion.
but yet, some americans actually want America to be more like canada – which makes you wonder if they truly have america’s interests at heart.
bk,
We rely heavily on immigration as well, no matter how much we’d like to deny it. As for Russia being in a bad spot, I disagree. Russia has nowhere to go but up, lots of spare energy to sell, and autocrats galore. I wouldn’t want to live there, but that’s not saying they’re in a bad place. They’ll be rich with foreign laborers moving their natural resources to the higher cost markets of the future. China has its foreign laborers within its borders, but is in a bad place in regard to energy.
As for Canada, they’ve got a high standard of living, a stable economy, and seem to be chugging along quite nicely. It isn’t paradise, but I usually hear complaints about them being boring much more than a demographic self-genocidal terror state. It almost sounds like someone’s imaginary Canadian girlfriend hasn’t been putting out much lately.
Nations with a one-child-only rule run the risk of producing spolied brats. These kids don’t have to share with siblings or cousins and get all the attention from parents and both sets of grandparents. Anyway, that’s what I’ve heard from my friend who lives in Japan.
Japan doesn’t have that rule, and spoiled children aren’t exactly caused by governmental intervention alone. When I read about Ivy League preschools, see the Your Baby Can Read infomercials, and listen to all the variants of the “My baby is special” crap from all corners of this country, I don’t get happy that China is raising a bunch of very special high self-esteemed brats who will expect the world on a plate. We’ve been there for generations now, whether we admit it or not.
I’m not so sure a self-indulgent China that is fat and lazy is so bad, considering the alternatives. I just hope those Japanese love robots get market-ready in time, since China will be needing them.
A little off topic-
Want to know how to tell the difference between a Conservative and Liberal blogger?
This sentence:
“Well, it looks like I was wrong and Steyn was right.”
Thanks Steve… interesting stuff.
The surprising thing is it took the Chinese so long to realize what was inevitable and fairly obvious. Now they have a surplus of old people with no one to take care of them and young unemployed males with no romantic possibilities. Hardly a formula for stability.
It seems like a better program would be to encourage emigration and set up large friendly Chinese communities in countries throughout the world–if they’re ever going to dominate the way they want to, that’s how it’s going to happen.
Stephen, never argue with Mark Steyn on matters demographic unless you really, really, stumble upon a truly new factlet. That is all.
Seppo –
Wasn’t an argument, really. I just take public statistics from China with a very large grain of salt. But it seems they were (at least slightly) more honest than we had any right to expect.
Who’d have thought it?
Other than Mark Steyn, I mean.
I’ve heard from China-adopting friends that overseas couples are being encouraged to adopt “waiting children”, while Chinese families (!) are being encouraged to adopt infants, even if they already have a child.
Perhaps its simply time for them to settle for equilibrium – two parents, two children to replace them. Zero population growth.
I heard China is building the equivalent of a city for 1.25 million million people every month right now (a rate which–for comparison purposes only–would have the US making space for all our illegal aliens well within a year.) Sure, much of it is high-rise hellholes that make Chicago projects look like Frank Lloyd Wright designs, but it’s better than that farm they didn’t own. The one-child policy (which still hasn’t been rescinded) makes this modernization possible, but they still have a lack of women and a surplus of old people to deal with. But having more cities can make those facts less problematic.
Tim Maguire,
China is at a tremendous disadvantage in emigration, since most of the people who want to leave want to go to places completely unlike China. You know, places with human rights and decent standards of living and such. China doesn’t want to lose its best and brightest, and already has a problem with foreign-educated students not coming back. And since we need engineers and scientists, that’s not bad for us. But like India, China is building universities at a fast rate, too. China is busy making energy deals in Africa and South America to ensure its place in the future, trying to build a modern navy, and generally having its people staying put in China. They’re trying to become America, not the British Empire.