Child Policy Can the Chinese

¶ … Child Policy

Can the Chinese Government "Catch the Wind?"

The one child policy was enacted in the late 1970s to help promote economic growth in China. Thirty years later, the economy has exploded and the policy represents a risk to China's economy. The policy is coming under fire from families who can afford and desire multiple children. It is time for the one child policy to be reversed, and self-regulation to be allowed. This will lessen some of the damage the one child policy is creating, and appease the people.

"Little Emperors" and "Little Empresses"

China's one child policy was introduced about twenty years ago as a key element of China's economic development plan. Since then an entire new generation of Chinese people has arrived on the scene. In China, this new generation is called the "little emperors" and "little empresses," because in the world of the only child, this child receives privileges unheard of by all previous generations of Chinese families. Now the time has come when little emperors and little empresses want to have families of their own. This generation is not the tired and frightened Chinese generation who lived through Chairman Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. This is, indeed, the generation of Chinese people who watched the unprecedented tragedy of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and who sat by their television sets and wept as they saw the agony of Chinese parents who had lost their only child. This generation knows what it wants and they think that they know how to get it. In the following discussion, we will note the signs that seem to show that one day in the future we will be seeing large families in China once again.

Catching the Wind

Deng Xiao Ping: From Many to One

The late Deng Xiao Ping was not a man for emotional expression. Deng marched by the side of the Communist leader Chairman Mao Tse Tung on the Long March and fought through China's brutal and bloody Civil War (1937-1949) at Mao's side. Then, during the infamous "Let One Hundred Flowers" campaign, when Mao pretended to ask for criticism from his comrades and later punished the ones who spoke up, Deng was branded by Mao as a "capitalist roader," and was severely punished. In one sense, the former Communist emperor of China had been quite correct. Mao had sensed or suspected that Deng wanted to see China develop economically under a free market system. A few years after Mao's death, then, it was Deng who led China into its recent high-energy stage of capitalist development with the following slogan on his lips: "White cat, black cat, choose the one that kills the rat!" For Deng, capitalist development had been the "the one that kills the rat." Deng's one child policy, moreover, had been one of the most important insurance plans put in place to insure the speed and power of Chinese capitalist development.

What this mean was that Deng chose to channel the capital surplus of the Chinese people into factories, railroads, power plants, and the damming the Yangtze River with the massive Three Gorges Dam, rather than into an ever larger Chinese population.

Deng's One Child Policy: Positive and Negative

As often happens in periods of massive change in human history, the results of Deng's one child policy were partly good and partly bad. Let's begin with some of the negative consequences of Deng's policy. Most noticeable is the fact that there are more "little emperors" than there are "little empresses" in China today. Because another aspect of Deng's population policy was abortion on demand, many young Chinese who were about to become parents decided to abort fetuses that would have developed into little Chinese girls. At present, therefore, there is something approaching a demographic crisis in China as the number of single Chinese men who cannot find a wife increases, and the newspapers and the government complain angrily about the only too obvious use of hotel "massage parlors" as casual brothels.

Against Human Rights and Unequal Enforcement