Last week, news came out of China that its “one-child” population control strategy was being “abandoned.” This is ABSOLUTELY NOT TRUE. The PRC has merely adopted a “two-child” policy. The entire institutional structure of coercion has been left in place, and the government will still require birth permits. Also, existing second children are not going to lose their non-person status.
That said, this relatively minor change is being forced on the central planners by the complete demographic cataclysm they have brought upon their own nation. See my colleague Rob Schwarzwalder’s excellent article in the Christian Post for background information.
The Communist Party is not going to relinquish coercive population control because this policy and its implementing apparatus lie at the core of the Chinese security state.
Lucy Hornby discussed a different aspect of the news in her article for the FT Weekend entitled “Bleak Future for China’s Hated Family Planners.” It appears that forcing people to abort their children with violence, threats of familial torture, and demands for bribes is not the Dale Carnegie way.
I think Hornby’s fascinating article probably overstates the gravity of the threat to the population control bureaucracy. That said, there are some great observations describing the way the Chinese people feel about these population thugs. She notes that there are “millions of hated government officials” working at this. They cause “heartbreak” to the population by “enforcing abortions and sterilizations, meting out crippling fines and punishments…” Their actions include “even removing infants from their families on behalf of the state.” (It’s probably more like killing them on behalf of the state.)
She observes, “Family planning workers are not required to have any medical education – and they are hated.” Apparently, “[i]n the 1980s, when the forced abortion campaign was at its peak, hostility ran so deep that family planning officials travelled by convoy into villages where they were sometimes greeted with a hail of stones….” In social media, one person wrote an excellent question: “Why do we hate the Japanese army but not the family planning officials?”
And, of course, the officials are incredibly corrupt. Bureaucrats have to grant permission to have even the first child. Villagers are “fined” arbitrarily for random infractions that can be leveraged for a bribe. In thirty-five years since 1980, the government has accumulated $315 billion (with a “b”) one analyst estimates. That is a massive amount of money given the poverty in China’s rural areas, and the money has never been audited.
The expert Hornby consulted believes the whole system will be terminated in three years. We shall see. I have my doubts. It is hard to imagine a bureaucracy this evil going softly into the night.
Clearly, the “two-child” policy makes no sense, and the legitimacy of the program has been shattered. An American administration that cared about human rights might be able to push it over, but that would not be this cold-hearted, inhumane administration. That will have to wait until 2017.
