The One Child Policy is a well known social policy of the People’s Republic of China that is still officially enforced in the PRC.
It restricts the number of children married urban couples can have to one, although it allows exemptions for several cases, including rural couples, ethnic minorities, and parents without any siblings themselves.
I remember thinking when i first heard about this that it was a rather barbarian and authoritarian concept. And that the bearing of offspring shouldn’t be the purview of governments, it should be down to individual rights.
More recently i have begun to think about this policy as a forward thinking and almost revolutionary idea. As we smash our planet through overuse what is it that we can do to slow the cost of human output and waste? Stop making more humans? Perhaps. I guess there are those amongst us who that think that we shall simply create a solution for these things. But what if we can’t?
China was looking at its own economic growth and trying to understanding that future population pressure would be an inhibitor of it..
Having only one child has had a number of unexpected effects. The so called 4-2-1 syndrome which means that 1 child is having to bear the economic burden of 2 parents and of 4 grandparents. More than economic – the effect of having children only associating with their parents (and not other siblings) becomes problematic as well.
Then there are the additional problems of infanticide of girl children, little emperor syndrome and uneven enforcement of the policy.
I was talking with Elaine Ho about the idea of family here and whether she thought that western individualism was breaking down this strong cultural trait. She thinks that it would begin to change, that it was inevitable.
As the younger people move out and get their own places and begin to think of themselves as separate entities and things like communal cooking and sharing of food becomes less and less important what then happens to this close family structure?
Globalisation has been breaking down the ideas of local culture for many years. Some places manage to still hold onto theirs while embracing the new. While considering this I found this in the amazing book by Sus Van Elzen – Dragon and Rose Garden
When a country is very large or has many inhabitants, the population is less afraid it will disappear. Cultural resistance springs from fear of disappearing. You see this in the cities where there is a china town…and they hang onto their culture and their identity. Which is why we are very open to things and wish to assimilate everything. Moreover for two thousand years or more China was fairly closed and completely focused on itself. We have now had enough of this. We wish to liberate ourselves from it and are not ready to impose limitations on ourselves…
This is very different to someone from Hong Kong or Taiwan or even Korea or Japan. These communities are on a far smaller scale then China. They feel they need to protect themselves, but this feeling does not exist in China. Here people tend to think more of the need to catch up with the developed countries or at least acquire relative well being compared to what they have now.”
My friend Thomas recently remarked that his local community of immigrants in Australia knew all the songs and dances and somehow thought this made them part of this ethnic group. The focus of any diaspora is to hold the line against assimilation, to somehow remain part of the homeland. So the songs are sung the food is prepared and the dances are danced.
The Scots (of whom I belong to through blood) are world travelers, injecting themselves into new worlds, holding Burns suppers, wearing kilts, listening to the pipes and singing the songs. But how many Scots actually do this now? If you went to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee – who actually carries out these traditions? In fact, did members of the diaspora even carry these traditions out when they were there?
But back to the One Child Policy, there is now talk they will formally end it sometime in the next few years. I wonder what the effects of this change will be, will we see an uncontrolled population boom?
I was considering that a one party state and a stable controlled government means that laying down long-term policy in a time frame of decades rather than years means that ideas like this can be shaped and carried out in a sustained way. I can’t imagine that any policy like this in a democratically elected country would get up because in two years time there would be new jostling for power as elections come around. I am not saying it is preferable one way or the other, but long term policy creation in a stable one party state seems far more viable.
Beijing has a ‘one-dog policy‘ which doesn’t seem to be enforced to severely. There have been a lot of dogs on the streets with full outfits on. I saw a dog with a red hoodie last night. He was pretty tough. Considerably tougher than this guy.
