Thursday 28 July 2011

China’s Creeping Catastrophe


It’s over thirty years since China adopted its one-child only policy, a draconian measure designed to cope with the perceived problem of overpopulation. But the agrarian China of 1979, not long emerged from the nightmare of Mao, is a very different place from the high-tech China of today.

High fertility rates are most often a consequence of poverty, not wealth. Economic modernisation and the growth in personal wealth have the effect of reducing the number of children people have anyway, without the need for state intervention, which almost invariably has the effect of making things worse, or creating new and unintended problems.

China is facing a demographic crisis alright, but not the kind originally anticipated. It’s not that it has too many people: it now has too few of the right kind of people; there are too few young people to carry the future burden that has been placed on their shoulders. China, in other words, is growing old.

But the crisis, or the potential crisis, goes still deeper. Despite over sixty years of Communist rule, China is a nation wedded deeply to tradition, to a tradition that places a far greater importance on male over female children. No male child means that a long chain with the past is broken, that the family name disappears, that one’s ancestors have been consigned to a deeper oblivion.

When preference, and politics, meets with technology, when tradition meets the ultrasound, the outcome is depressingly predictable: female foetuses are aborted until nature gets it ‘right.’ In the more heavily populated eastern provinces of the country, places where the one-child policy is imposed with all the rigour at the disposal of officialdom (forced abortions, even at a late stage of gestation, and the confiscation of ‘illegal’ children were routinely deployed at one time) the ratio of male to female children is now shockingly out of balance.

This femicide is bad enough in itself but it means that there are thousands of males born in China today who will never find a partner. And as problems tend to be built on problems there is evidence that girls are being kidnapped for forced marriages.

There is also the issue of corruption, a huge problem in a country with a political system fearful of any kind of popular scrutiny. According to Caixin, the Beijing-based news agency, surplus children were routinely taken into orphanages, there to be sold on to foreign parents at a price up to $5000 a head, with kickbacks to the bureaucrats involved.

Reporting on this whole issue recently, a leader in the Economist made the point that demography is like a super tanker; it takes decades to turn around. If change is to come it has to come soon. But with the Chinese gerontocracy tied to the one-child policy as an act of political faith it’s difficult to see how the country can escape a creeping catastrophe.

14 comments:

  1. O, what a mess! And that mood lifting painting!

    China certainly is suffering from its tradition: by Confucionism, the worst "crime" children do for their parents is not having any children.

    Seriously, I do not know what this "gerontocracy" can do other than "one child" policy?

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  2. They could import more migrant workers, something that is already happening on a significant scale. But that still leaves the problem of the female deficit.

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  3. There is also the question of outward migration - a route that some Chinese have been following for centuries. What happens when a sole male heir leaves the homeland and his ancestors' graves untended?

    There are multiple overlapping problems here: the disparity in numbers of sexes, the collision between tradition and progress, the burden of too many people on resources, the tyranny of economic models based on perpetual growth . . .

    China has faced all these problems and more - such as invasion - a number of times in its long history and I think the usual result has been a change of dynasty every time the difficulties became too intractable. A change of dynasties, and a vast purging of the population in the concurrent upheaval. No wonder they fear 'interesting times.'

    The one issue I think is most easily overcome is that of survival of the family name: they could so easily adopt the practice your own family chose, Ana.

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  4. China is surrounded by countries with lots of nice females. They will just take them by force. Who is going to stop them? Obama?

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  5. I suspect they will do the same thing w/their excess males as you Brits did in the 19th Century - expand their empire! (or more precisely, their area of influence). Unlike modern Western armies, the People's Liberation Army (which includes their rapidly expanding naval and air serices) has no regrets about having too few women. Add to this their growing economic presence (the Chinese are absorbing extraction processes {oil and metals} across the planet), and they can easily use up their 30M or so excess guys.

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  6. There is no female deficit, there is just a male surplus. Chinese woman could embrace polyandry, couldn't they?

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  7. I can go to China with a suitcase full of viagra and solve their problem.

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  8. Calvin, I suppose that's possible, though it might get a tad complex. :-)

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  9. Michael, the Mongolians! Have a look a piece I posted on 11 February called Heil Big Brother.

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  10. CB, yes, that's possible. As I said to Yun Yi, they are already importing migrant labour, something which is adding to internal tensions.

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  11. Jean Paul, a possible solution but one that goes against every Chinese tradition. :-)

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  12. Anthony, that would seem to be the last thing they need!

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  13. Do not confuse quantity with quality.

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