CHINA WANTS MORE BABIES

On July 11^th 2918, I published an article about China wanting to lower the birth rate. I said in part that its “one-child” policy was created in hopes of reducing the ever expanding population and that it was enforced by the Chinese government resulting in forced sterilizations and abortions which had exacerbated gendercide leading some parents to take matters into their own hands by murdering their own newborn baby girls.

Now the Chinese government has decided that it made a mistake. I will explain why they have canceled the original law with respect to their policy as only one child per family.

The country’s old one-child policy had created a future labour shortage, with not enough young workers lined up to replace the existing workforce as older workers retired. And with a fast -growing number of retirees, China’s state-run pension system was facing a burden that threatened to drag it into a huge deficit resulting with less money in payments going to the retirees.

Further the Chinese government credited the one-child policy with preventing 400 million births but in the process, it helped to alleviate poverty.

A preference for male babies under the regime led to a huge gender imbalance that has left millions of men unable to marry because there weren’t enough women available for the men to marry.

South Korea had a similar policy regarding a sex imbalance that resulted in men importing “migrant wives” from nearby Asian countries. Because the imbalance is significantly bigger in China, this has not really been a viable solution.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics in China in the beginning of 2014, stated that China had about 700 million men to 667 million women which would mean that as many as 33 million Chinese men would not be able to marry a Chinese woman.
 

If China did what South Korea did when it too found a shortage of women to marry, where would the Chinese unmarried males find 33 million Asian women to marry these men?  

The famed Chinese film director had to pay the government more than $1.2 million in fines for having three children instead of two in violation of China’s strict family planning rules, officials said in January 2014.

The two child policy had become disastrous for the Chinese people and that is why China needs its people to have more babies to address these problems down the road, according to Yong Cai, an associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina’s Carolina Population Center.

“The idea of controlled fertility at the time was not wrong, but it’s been so disastrous, that it’s created all kinds of social problems along the way,” Cai told Global News by phone.

He further said that while the country still has a pension surplus, many provinces in Chin are slipping into a pension deficit that will only grow worse in the coming years. The younger labour force numbers are already getting less, and that’s partly because the fertility rate has been declining for the last 30 to 40 years as a direct result of the one child per family policy.

This is where the new babies come in. The government has already canceled its decades-old “one-child” policy in an effort to drive up the birth rate and strengthen its future labour force. However, the lacklustre results have stoked speculation that the allowable family size might grow even further in the near future which could increase the population to unmanageable consequences such as too much unemployment brought about by creating too many people for fewer openings in the workplace and again create an exploding population that will place a strain on the availability of food.

As of 2017, people aged 60 and above accounted for about 16.2 per cent of China’s population, compared to 7.4 per cent in 1950, according to the UN Population Division. The global percentage of people over 60 was currently at 12.7 per cent.

American and Canadian numbers are much higher than China’s numbers with 23.5 per cent of Canada’s population being over the age of 60 and 21.5 per cent of the United States that are over that age.

The country (China) was of its incapacity to care for the population and to provide everyone with what was needed,” said Ka Tat Tsang, a professor of social work at the University of Toronto. He added that the uncontrolled exponential growth of the population also put an undue strain on the country’s production of goods and services.         

In a message from the Chinese governing party’s Central Committee carried by the state Xinhua News Agency said that the decision to allow all couples to have two children was “to improve the balanced development of population” and try to stem an aging labour force.

Having elderly workers in factories would result in those workers being unable to do the work safely. Further, older people are more susceptible to being ill, thereby slowing down the production numbers.  

The working-age in China comprise of those workers who are aged 15 to 64 and it is drastically shrinking and the United Nations projects that China will lose 67 million workers from 2010 to 2030. The elderly population is expected to double from 110 million in 2010 to 210 million in 2030, according to the United Nations’ figures.

There were 17.2 million births in China last year, down from 17.9 million in 2016, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics reported in January of this year. With almost 1.4 billion people, China has the world’s largest population but its population is growing too fast even before reaching its expected peak of 1.45 billion in 2029.

The government of China recently hinted that it might expand the allowable size of families when the newspaper, China Post announced a new stamp depicting a family of five pigs—two parents and three children. The stamp is slated for release in 2019, the Year of the Pig.

 The question that must be on the minds of China’s couples is; will they be permitted to have three children? If so, will female babies still be killed so that more male babies will be alive to help the families become more viable?