A few weeks ago I
announced that this blog was going to have weekly updates. I apologize for not following through on
that. I haven’t given up, and I intend
to keep writing here.
So, on to today’s
subject: changes in Chinese population control laws. It is now legal for Chinese couples to have
up to two children without special permission or pain of punishment. A seemingly simple change speaks volumes
about China. If you remember, the Communist Party
first announced plans for this round of reforms two years ago at the Party
Congress that also anointed Xi Jinping as paramount leader. In that post, I mentioned that Chinese
Communist Party reformers like to work slowly, carefully and very
deliberately. And here we are, two years
after they first announced it, the government of China relaxed the birth
control laws. The announcement made a
lot of waves, and raised a lot of questions about it’s actual significance to
China.
Every China-watcher
who has commented on the reform agrees the Party was driven to make these
changes to address an aging population and a looming labor crunch. So the biggest question is will the new laws
allow enough births in time to address labor shortfalls, and produce enough
income to care for a high population of elderly. For my part I simply do not know the
answer. When you read about Chinese
demographics, you hear that many Chinese couples wish to have more
children. In that case, it is logical to
expect more births per couple, which leaves the question of timing. When are they going to have those
children? People tend to voluntarily put
off having children, and tend to have fewer of them anyway as they grow in
affluence. That’s right: success and
wealth form humanity’s best population control strategy. It works like this: when your children have a better chance of
survival, you can invest more resources in their upbringing. But even abundant resources are finite, so
investing more resources in raising children creates pressure to have fewer of
them. Chinese couples may find themselves
in this environment soon, if they don’t already. I am talking about a situation in which
parents have autonomy over their reproduction, which hasn’t been the case in China. I suppose it still doesn’t count when the
limit is only raised to two children per couple.
The long time lag
between the announcement that the one-child policy would be reformed and the
actual promulgation of the new two-child policy indicates how the Communist
Party has approached reform since the tenure of Deng Xiaoping as China’s
paramount leader. They do them slowly,
and a few reforms at a time so that the authorities can observe the
consequences and make further policy changes to address unintended negative
consequences. Keep in mind, Chinese
officials are not especially talkative about this approach. Political scientists put this analysis
together over the decades. It derives
from the philosopher of Deng Xiaoping and his supporters and the father of
Chinese republicanism; Sun Yat-sen. Sun
Yat-sen described a system of governance he called “socialism with Chinese
characteristics,” and sometimes called “democracy with Chinese
characteristics.” Sun believed that
China could not simply introduce democracy and modern economics with a few
government edicts because too much of Chinese education and daily life was
still too backwards and medieval to accommodate modern philosophers without a
high chance of failure that would only enable the re-establishment of
monarchy. China would have to carefully
cultivate modernity on its own terms, and to do so required the guidance of
educated elites who understood the benefits of democracy and its prerequisites
of modern education and modern industry to support, how to write proper
democratic and industrial, and most importantly, implementing all of those
things in the first place. Deng Xiaoping
and his successors have governed by this philosophy. In fact, Taiwan was governed this way for
decades too. What does this have to do
with population control? Xi Jinping and
his team do not want to liberalize China’s population control laws only to send
China too far in the other direction.
They decided the one-child policy was no longer appropriate for China,
but they did not want to cause different population problems down the
line. They took their time to devise
what they hope is exactly the right
population for China. Xi and Deng govern
the way they think Sun Yat-sen governed.
It means President Xi thinks if he had loosened the laws anymore,
Chinese couples would not naturally stop at two, but have many more and leave
China with an excess of people it would not be able to care for.
As conditions
within a country such as China change, policy has to change with them. Statesmen introduce laws to address specific
problems. The way they change policies
tells us how statesmen understand the problems they try to address, and how
they understand the tools at society’s disposal.
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