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China Ends One-Child Policy
jones_supa writes: China has scrapped its one-child policy, allowing all couples to have two children for the first time since draconian family planning rules were introduced in 1979. The announcement followed a four-day Communist Party summit in Beijing where China's top leaders debated financial reforms and how to maintain growth at a time of heightened concerns over the economy. China will "fully implement a policy of allowing each couple to have two children as an active response to an ageing population," the party said in a statement published by Xinhua.
People in the West think that government telling people how many children they can have is one of the highest forms of tyranny, regardless of actual results.
It still is especially when you consider actual results.
China is already in a situation where their foreign policy can afford to be belligerent - they have LOTS of potential soldiers to spare. Do you know what decades of one-child policy, plus a cultural emphasis on male children, has produced? There is a HUGE difference in the number of men to women - tens of millions of men in China for whom there is no chance of a wife, simply because of the numbers.
No family of their own, no children to go home to, and quite possibly no parents alive. China has tens of millions of potential soldiers, none of whom have to worry about what they leave behind when they ship off.
As others have said it might be due simply to the policy not being 100% effective, but even aside form that math can easily provide another answer.
For simplicity let's assume a perfect 50/50 male/female ratio, that everyone gets married, and every family has six children been ages 20 and 40, thus tripling the population every generation. Let's also assume everyone lives to sometime between 60-80 before dropping dead from old age. That means the population of people from 0 to 20 will be thee times that of the population from 20 to 40. However that also means that the population from 60-80 will be one third of that from 40 to 60, which will be one third of that from 20 to 40.
So every 20 years for a given X people in the child bearing range, there will be 3X children being born, but only X/9 old people dying. If you enforced a birth rate of one child per family then for the next twenty years instead of 3X children you would have X/2 children, but that would _still_ be more than the X/9 old people dying during the same period, so the _total_ population would continue to rise for awhile. If you enforced that policy for another 60 years you then would have a steadily decreasing population instead of a steadily increasing one, but the effect does not happen instantaneously.
Obviously the math doesn't work out nearly as neatly in the real world* and the numbers we're talking about usually aren't that extreme. But that should demonstrate how such a thing is possible and this kind of thing is pretty common in delayed feedback loops.
(*Among all the more usual factors, i'm guessing the combination of WW2 and the Cultural Revolution had a significant effect on demographics. I believe such things usually disproportionately affect older people and lead to "bubbles" in the population pyramid.)
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what is the solution that all the whining masses and spineless politicians are likely to accept.
1. Improve education, especially early education of girls. Literate women have fewer babies than illiterate women.
2. Improve healthcare, especially for early childhood diseases. People have fewer babies when they are confident their kids will survive.
3. Public pensions. People will have fewer kids if they don't need them for financial support in old age.
4. Make contraceptives available and affordable. Many women have more kids than they want.
Population growth has declined, often dramatically, everywhere these policies have been adopted.
If even the chinese can't keep a policy like this going then what chance anyone else?
The Chinese are not ending it because it failed. They are ending it because it succeeded. Their population has stopped growing and has leveled off.