Over the past decade or more, commentators have talked of the BreakPoint of China’s looming fertility crisis. This, of course, is the result of the Communist Party instituting what became known as the “one-child policy” back in 1979.
With very few exceptions, Chinese couples were permitted to have only one child. The policy, in the words of the Washington Post, “led to untold millions of forced abortions, sterilizations and horrific abuses of power.”
It also led to a huge demographic problem. As birthrates plummeted, there were fewer and fewer workers, and China’s overall population aged rapidly. China, instead of growing rich and then getting old, like European nations and Japan, will grow old long before it has a chance to get rich.
This has the Communist Party very worried. So worried that they’ve done an about face. They not only dropped the “one-child policy,” they’ve tried to convince Chinese couples that having two kids is their patriotic and political duty.
Clumsy party propaganda is telling people to “Train your body, build up strength, get ready for the second baby!” Another slogan read “Get to sleep early, stop playing cards, work hard to produce a child!”
The response? Yawns and outrage. You see, after 35 years of being told “one child is enough,” people have come to believe it. As a recent article in the Washington Post put it, “Having only one has become ingrained in Chinese culture and society, and people no longer believe the party should be telling them what to do in the bedroom.”
Actually, that’s an understatement. When officials in Hubei province, east of Shanghai, sent a letter to party members urging them to implement the new “two-child policy,” the result was “outrage” on Chinese social media.
One person wrote “You can’t just make people have kids when you want them to, or stop when you tell them, we are humans not pigs!” Even state-run media called the letter “ridiculous and illegal.”
The Chinese people’s response, or lack of it, has put the Party’s plans to arrest the demographic decline in doubt. Its goals were 2.5 million births this year. That is not going to happen. Even with the new policy, “in the long run it is very unlikely that fertility will go above 1.5 children per couple” according to Wang Feng of UC-Irvine. That’s even lower than it is today!
Eric Metaxas | BreakPoint |
