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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 don't understand that for most Chinese, the one child policy doesn't have effect. Because there are so many exceptions.
1) If you and your partner were single kids, you can have two kids.
2) Ethnic minorities have higher limits, and foreigners, including Hong Kong and Taiwan can have unlimited
3) Rich people just pay the tax and have another child, because they are so rich from corruption money is nothing for them.
4) Some provinces had already lifted the ban, or lessened it greatly.
5) Children born outside China, including HK and Taiwan, don't count. Hence the large amount of birth tourism.
So this is pretty much a symbolic act, but at least it's the communists admitting they can't control everything. I wonder how this will be spun off in China, since there the communists are still treated as nearly perfect, the thing everyone should aspire to be.
We have a lot of old people so need even more young people in the hope that some will look after them. ANother generation down the line - those young people become an even bigger population of old people. Rinse and repeat until the human population size causes complete eco collapse.
Whats the solution? Wish I knew.
So the solution to having to many people is to make more people? Got it.
China doesn't have too many people. Their working age population is already falling, and the population as a whole will begin to fall within a few years. By going to a two-child policy, they are not "making more people", they are just leveling off. Two kids from two parents is just population replacement, not growth.
The problem is extreme consumerism of a select few.
Even if every human lived like francis of asissi, which they won't because they are humans, and not every human wants to live like a monk, we still would face the problem of overpopulation a few billion humans down the line. The earth is limited, it has limited space. I don't want to live in a world where the environment is destroyed so that we can get room for feeding / clothing / housing / etc. billions of additional humans.
One day we find out how to eliminate natural causes of death, we perhaps might want to stop reproducing completely. Otherwise this little planet of ours gets crowded too fast.
20 billion humans, so be it. Ok with me. But unlimited growth leads to collapse. Why isn't this recognized on a global scale, why is population control frowned upon? And I don't say an one child policy is good. I guess a limit to have a stable population would be more between 2 and 3 children, as some people don't want to get children, some die, etc.
If China has had 1-child policy since '79, why has their population increased so much? Shouldn't it have halved by now (2 parents replaced by 1 child)?
When some species of spiders hatch, they eat their mother. In humans it is different. When a woman has a baby, she continues to live. So 2 doesn't become 1. 2 becomes 3.
In the long run, people die. So eventually, if the birth rate is below 2, the population will fall, but there is a lag of a generation before that happens. The women having babies in 1979 are only in the 50s and 60s today.
How will the past one child policy affect China's foreign policy? If a family only has only one child how ready are they to risk that child in a war? Are the parents who have only one child now of an age where they can affect national policy or are the present policy makers of a generation that was still able to have more than one and therefore more open to this risk? If there is an affect how will relaxing this policy affect China's foreign policy?
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.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Yeah, it's self regulating, but it also would leave those remaining with a hellish quality of life.
Just another day in Paradise
China needs more cheap labor, increasing the population will ensure that
This is also the justification I heard a European politician talking about the influx of Syrian refugees. Europe needs the labour to support their aging population.
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People in the west don't understand that for most Chinese, the one child policy doesn't have effect. Because there are so many exceptions.
1) If you and your partner were single kids, you can have two kids.
2) Ethnic minorities have higher limits, and foreigners, including Hong Kong and Taiwan can have unlimited
3) Rich people just pay the tax and have another child, because they are so rich from corruption money is nothing for them.
4) Some provinces had already lifted the ban, or lessened it greatly.
5) Children born outside China, including HK and Taiwan, don't count. Hence the large amount of birth tourism.
So this is pretty much a symbolic act, but at least it's the communists admitting they can't control everything. I wonder how this will be spun off in China, since there the communists are still treated as nearly perfect, the thing everyone should aspire to be.
According to China's Health Ministry, the one child policy had forced 336 million abortions as of 2013. It also had forced the sterilization of 196 million men and women.
In the grand scheme of things, this is something it's worth making a big deal about. Certainly more worthy of a mention than female stereotypes in media and other injustices against women that get a lot more coverage. But yeah, they've been relaxing the restrictions for awhile now.
It takes a capacity for being deliberately obtuse to fail to acknowledge that Malthusianism has been discredited for decades. Indeed, population growth is already going negative in many countries. All you need is to have good education and easy access to birth control.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
Meh, the 'invisible hand of nature' will regulate the population. Either China (and the rest of the collective globe) will get control of its population growth, or they will spew vast amounts of Co2 as a result of existing in a modern society and the Earth will heat up and kill off vast numbers of people. I don't see 20 billion people living in a carbon neutral fashion any time soon.
Nature will find a level.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The idea that we're facing a future of massive overpopulation, and that we have to take drastic measures to avert it, is pure bunk. Overpopulation is only a problem in grossly underdeveloped countries. In every moderately advanced country, the opposite problem is true - birth rates have fallen below replacement levels. Even countries that used to be considered underdeveloped show signs of this. What's causing it? Basically, it's a combination of not needing tons of kids to help with subsistence farming, having basic healthcare so you don't wind up with half your children dying before reaching adulthood, as well as having the ability to engage in family planning/using contraception/etc.
Don't believe me? Look at the birth rates in places like the US, Europe, East Asia, even South America. Consider places like Mexico or Brazil. In 1970, Mexico had a birth rate of 6.72 children per woman, and Brazil was at 5.02, compared to 2.48 in the U.S. In 2012, that has fallen to 2.22 for Mexico and 1.81 for Brazil, while the USA is 1.88. For comparison, the "replacement level" at which the number of births balances out the deaths from age/etc is around 2.1. China is at 1.66 as of 2012, which while not as bad as Japan (1.41) or South Korea (1.3), is still pretty bad. Even India has started slowing, down to 2.5 as of 2012.
Overpopulation is not going to be a problem, unless you're falling prey to an extrapolation fallacy (see https://xkcd.com/605/ ). Even if it is a problem in the shorter term, the answer is easy - improve living standards, access to health care, and provide access to voluntary family planning/contraception. You don't need to force it on people, they'll use it - and far more than most governments want them to. Lots of governments are starting to realize that their problem is how to convince their citizens to have kids, not stop having them.
I think we can continue to scale-up crops to satisfy linear population growth for many centuries to come. And at that point, humans should be colonizing other planets, which opens-up a whole new surface area to grow food upon.
Funny, the big thing people are bitching about right now is that California brought water to the arid central valley to grow crops... No forests were harmed, yet people object.
We have a LOT of empty, arid lands, which will work as farmland, once initially fertilized and irrigated. There's even more marginal lands, which will work great with the simple addition of a greenhouse. In fact we've only tapped the tiniest fraction, thus far.
And when that available farm-land gets scarce, the economics will shift to make it more profitable to grow staple crops (rice, wheat, potatoes, beans, etc), rather than feeding and raising cattle...
Genetic modifications of crops will help them continue to grow more efficiently... Requiring less fertilization, less sunlight, fewer insecticides, growing more dense, etc.
And further down the road, technology will intervene. PV panels are already more efficient than plants at turning sunlight into usable energy... LEDs have gotten extremely efficient, too, and they can be built monochromatic to produce just the wavelengths plants need, with little wasted energy. While it'll take many decades for the economics to work-out, in the future, fields will be covered with PV solar panels, with crops underneath, illuminated by LEDs, and still producing excess electricity to the grid. In fact that's what's needed for multi-story farms to work... One roof-full of PV panels producing enough power and light to grow multiple stories of crops. And later, maybe those solar panels will be up in orbit, much more efficiently harnessing the solar energy...
This kind of progress can continue for centuries, unhindered. With all the untapped land area, we could surely support several orders of magnitude higher global populations without even needing to start doing significant harm to the environment. Although, at some point we will also find ways to make those wild forests considerably more efficient, too.
Honestly, your fatalism is ridiculously myopic. There have been such fears of scarcity since the origin of humanity, but the future CHANGES, it doesn't just scale-up the same methods used in the past. I can imagine your counterparts hundreds of years ago were concerned that there weren't enough trees in the world to support building log-cabins for increasing populations of people... Which is why everybody simply doesn't live in a log cabin, today. Perhaps bronze-age man worrying about the limited available supplies of copper & tin, which in-turn led to the iron age... These problems practically solve themselves, when the time comes. But it's certainly not easy to predict accurately with distant foresight, long before there is any need to address them.
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