However much you plan and pray,
Alas, alack, tant pis, oy vey,
Now — heretofore — til Judgment Day,
The drunken driver has the right of way.
~Ethan Coen
What principle should guide a wife and husband concerning the number of children they bring into the world? A dictate of Thomas Malthus, namesake of the Malthusian trap of merely arithmetically enlarging resources set against geometrically expanding human populations, who regarded war, famine, and epidemic as the only effective checks on massive imbalance? Or perhaps the couple pays mind to the God of Genesis 1:28, who blessed the first humans and urged them to “Be fruitful and multiply?” Are decisions about human reproduction of such great national and civilizational interest that they should be made only by a society’s elite, economists and demographers with PhDs, and politicians with the power of violence to enforce them? Or should they be left to the consciences of couples, who are far more cognizant of their own circumstances than a far-removed ruling elite in a national capital?
For about 25 years, beginning in 1979, the People’s Republic of China (an increasingly inapt misnomer) determined that such decisions were simply too societally momentous to be left to individual discretion. Instead, the state needed to intervene and tell people how many children to have, or (more to the point) not have. The “one-child policy,” grounded in a Malthusian fever dream of impending overpopulation, sought to reduce the fertility rate from about six children per woman in 1970 to one child per woman, and to do so overnight. Officials used both persuasion and coercion that extended in some cases to mandatory contraception, sterilization, abortion, and even infanticide to ensure that the dictates of the National Population and Family Planning Commission were followed, backed up by substantial penalties for failure to comply.
In one sense, the “one-child policy” may have worked. For many years, the Chinese Communist Party loudly touted its success, pointing to a fertility rate that did indeed decline to one birth per woman, crediting itself with preventing some 400 million births that would have threatened the nation’s “economic miracle.” But there were many unintended and unforeseen effects. For one, many women, especially in rural environments, were forced to hide their pregnancies and avoiding public healthcare facilities for prenatal and pediatric care. The cultural preference for sons meant that many female fetuses were aborted and female infants abandoned, resulting in today’s excess of at least 34 million males who, in a monogamous society, are left without a mate. Moreover, mothers who had given birth to girls experienced a 43 percent higher divorce rate than women who had a boy.
In addition to these horrors, the “one-child policy” was not nearly so efficacious as its proponents have argued. For example, in 1950, the fertility rate in China’s neighbor Taiwan was about seven births per woman. By the mid-1970s, it had declined to about three. By 2020, it was around one, far below the “replacement rate” at which a population is maintaining its size. In fact, both China and Taiwan now have among the lowest fertility rates in the world. And yet the Taiwanese government never instituted any “one-child policy.” It is reasonable to suppose that many non-governmental forces were at work reducing birth rates in both nations. Such factors include massive urbanization, increased levels of educational attainment, the availability of contraceptives, and rapid economic development, all of which generally track with declining fertility worldwide.
The consequences of this shift in reproductive patterns in China are likely to be severe and enduring. Tens of millions of “surplus males,” known culturally as “bare branches,” may turn out to be less socially content and more prone to criminal activity and political unrest. Less speculative are two additional mutually reinforcing changes: a dramatically higher proportion of older people in the population and a growing shortage of younger adults, who typically constitute the workforce. Preventing 400 million births means there are 400 million fewer laborers, with the result that a declining number of workers supports each pensioner. Today this ratio is about five to one, but it will decline to about two to one by 2040. The problem is compounded by the fact that China largely relies on the production of labor-intensive, low-end commodities, an unsustainable approach absent a large, skilled workforce.
Faced with such projections and the social unrest that may accompany them, how is China responding? Predictably, it is not decentralizing decision making and relying more on the discretion of individual couples and communities. Instead, it is doubling down on centralized expertise. Beginning in 2016, Chinese couples were “allowed” to have two children, and in 2021, this number was increased to three. Such approaches betray a mistaken view that the government controls fertility rates, which it can manipulate by fiat, a misapprehension further exemplified by even newer governmental programs to incentivize childbearing. For example, the government is providing increasing subsidies and tax breaks for families with small children, extending maternity leave to six months, and doubling tax breaks for childcare.
Yet the downward spiral continues. The fertility rate is not rising, many Chinese women report no desire to have more than one child, and only about 30 percent of couples with one child express a desire to have a second. New marriage registrations are in sharp decline, having fallen 25 percent year-on-year. The governmental slogan “later, longer, fewer” – delaying the first birth, waiting at least four years between births, and producing fewer offspring — appears to have become deeply embedded in the Chinese psyche, although it is debatable whether this is a direct result of government policy. Loneliness and the mental and physical health consequences associated with it are on the rise, as aging parents have fewer adult children and receive fewer visits, many young adults have no siblings, aunts, uncles, or cousins. People lead more socially isolated lives.
Headlines naturally focus on the macroscopic demographic collapse — the fact that, according to United Nations estimates, China will lose half its population by the year 2100. But the real story is far more nuanced and instructive. In a society that values the collective over the individual and allows a few rulers at the top to direct the lives of a vast and diverse populace, persons tend to be treated as mere statistics. The state does not see individuals or families, but only population trends. As a result, its power-drunk rulers implement befuddled policies that distort personal spheres of life that they cannot even perceive, let alone regulate responsibly.
And instead of learning from their failures, they simply double down on autocratic methods, wielding bulldozers and wrecking balls when they should be entrusting their citizens with needles and thread.