The Chinese are starting to publicly criticize their government.
The Economist reports on a rather surprising event in China: the public criticism of the long-running family planning policy of the state by an official in the nation's most populous province. According to their report, Zhang Feng, director of Guangdongâ??s Population and Family Planning Commission, has proposed a rather modest reform of the current system, which would allow families where one parent is an only child to have more than one child. He may be sensing the political benefit of speaking out against a policy which is decidedly unpopular, but the incident of such a public challenge is still notable:
Whatever lies behind it, Mr Zhangâ??s demand is significant both because it is an implied public criticism of the one-child policy and because Guangdong was always likely to be in the forefront of any campaign for change. The province suffers many of the worst problems attributable to Chinaâ??s population control, notably a grossly skewed gender imbalance among newborns. The combination of a strong cultural preference for boys and prenatal ultrasound imaging has led to couples identifying and aborting female fetuses so that their sole permitted child is male. This is a nationwide problem, but Guangdong has consistently had some of the worst sex ratios. Normally, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. In 2010, Guangdong had 119 male babies for every 100 girls. Ten years earlier, the ratio was a shocking 130.The province also has big worries about the balance between its working-age population and their dependants in the decades to come. Guangdongâ??s boom has sucked in huge numbers of young migrants from elsewhere (children and elderly migrants are deterred from moving by the household-registration system, or hukou). But as economic growth spreads to new areas, potential migrants may opt to stay at home, leaving Guangdongâ??s labour-intensive export industries vulnerable to labour shortages. This is a microcosm of Chinaâ??s broader worries about ageing and the coming rise in the number of dependants for each working-age adult.
Zheng Zizhen, a demographer at the Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences (GASS), says even a modest change would help. â??Every couple, in Guangdong and all over China, should be able to have two children. But before we take a second step or a third step in that direction, we need to at least take a first step like this one.â?
Jonathan Last has written extensively about this problem, and I interviewed him about the challenges facing societies at similar points a few months ago. He noted the example of Singapore as one that illustrates the difficulty of shifting from population restriction to population encouragement:
Singapore began modernizing late, in the mid '60s. And they embarked on a China style one child policy, because China had a policy to stop people from having kids because they thought fertility was what was keeping them poor and they wanted to get industrialized and rich really quickly. So, they did a really eugenic program - forced sterilizations, increased taxes on people who had more than one kid - that sort of thing. And their program was fantastically effectively.Within seven years their fertility rate was down by 60% and they realized dear God, weâ??ve made a huge mistake. They saw their fertility rates collapsing so quickly that they threw all the machinery into reverse and for now coming on 20 years they have been trying desperately to get people to have more kids. They hand out a full year of paid maternity leave. They give you a $10,000 bonus just for having the baby, each time you have the baby. They have what is essentially a 401k plan for kids where you put away money for your kidâ??s expenses every year and the government matches it for you. So, itâ??s a combination of like a 401k plus flex spending. In Singapore the government controls all housing allocation. And so if you have kids you get access to better housing. And in fact if you have more than a couple kids they will make sure that your grandparents get to live near you so that you have, you know, convenience and free child care...
But the scary thing is that theyâ??ve done all this for 20 years, and all thatâ??s happened is that their fertility rates has continued to drop further, and further, and further, and further. And it stands right now at about 1.3 which is about as low as any country has ever recorded a fertility rate in the history of the world... in societies, once it becomes common for people to not have kids, for people to be child free and they get to see what that really means to their lifestyle, it becomes very hard to convince them to take the enormous hit and actually go around, get around to having kids.
This brief rightly notes that "China now has too few young people, not too many. It has around eight people of working age for every person over 65. By 2050 it will have only 2.2." This is a demographic nightmare, an unsustainable economic picture and one that - if Singapore's example proves accurate - is almost impossible for alter via shifts in public policy.
