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As of this week, China’s infamous one-child policy is gone.
But its paternalistic family-planning policies remain, in the form
of a “two-child policy.” This makes no sense.
There are no signs of the resource-straining baby boom that
family planning officials have long prophesied. In the many areas
where the one-child policy was already lifted, far fewer couples
than expected are planning on having a second child. What tiny
fraction would be entertaining a third? Plus, China needs those
extra babies. It’s getting older way faster than it’s getting richer,
making the country likely to languish in the dreaded middle-income trap.
On top of that, China desperately needs more girl children to begin closing
its yawning gender gap. Received wisdom holds the one-child policy
responsible for these problems. It isn’t (though it did exacerbate them).
The fertility rate began dropping in the 1970s, years before the one-child policy.
A preference for sons—due to cultural traditions, labor practices, and old-age
security—likely caused the gender gap, as Elizabeth Remick and Charis Loh
argue (paywall). Since the one-child policy didn’t create these problems,
scrapping it won’t fix them. Instead, bulking up social welfare would help
wean China’s poor rural residents off their reliance on sons for support in
old age (which may explain why the government just announced plans for
a universal pension). Better leave policies and education reform would
encourage couples to have more children. So too, of course, would letting
them have as many as they want. So why institute a two-child policy when
it could have ditched the policy altogether? For 35 years, the state has loomed
over the lives of its people, controlling uteruses and re-rigging family trees.
Letting them plan their families would imply new personal freedoms—and
those clearly still don’t jibe with the Communist Party’s vision.
Yawning Gender Gap
http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/
China's Skewed Sex Ratio and the One-Child Policy
A complete guide to Chinese data-doctoring. Gwynn Guilford draws on
her long experience of interpreting Chinese economic data to offer a
rundown on all the ways the government fudges the figures, including
ditching datasets, mixing up the methodology, faking numbers they think
no-one’s watching, and just stopping publishing inconvenient stats.
You’ll never look at a PMI the same way again
;
The most egregious examples from the Chinese government’
s long, sordid history of data-doctoring
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