It should be noted that they increased the number, and had higher numbers in rural areas and for ethnic minorities. As for why, I'd have to assume it was related to why the restrictions on where someone could live and work stuck around and have just gradually been loosened: one of the single biggest material problems China faced after the revolution was a general lack of industrial capital, a lack of industrialized agriculture, and a constant struggle with rural poverty and the pressures that creates for people to leave and move to the cities; despite the rural conditions being bad, they needed a large chunk of the population to continue to endure them in order to continue to have food for everyone. That means they needed the population to have controlled growth while they industrialized and stabilized the food supply: with only so much farmland and so much industrial capital to work with, more people would just strain their limited resources even further.
Presumably it's only in the past decade that they've felt their economic growth is outstripping possible population growth and so they'll benefit or at least not suffer for increased population growth. This is also the timeframe for Xi's anti-corruption campaigns and anti-poverty programs, so it could also be an ideological change away from the cautious liberalism that had been the status quo towards what seems to be a more leftist focus on what the public wants.
So yeah, if anyone questions it just say the one child problem was a conservative liberal policy and repealing it was a popular communist policy and watch their brain melt in real time.
my useless and mostly uneducated guess is that it was to try and make sure that population growth didn't exceed the pace of industrialization/number of houses that could be built, but that's simply just my brain from playing too many 4X games
I was talking to people at a bar and they brought up the one child policy as an example of China being authoritarian and I tried to say that was a just a policy when famines were a real concern but yeah I thought this was like a 1970s thing. Why did China keep this policy for so long?
I see the word abortions in the Wikipedia article a lot, and while I haven't dont the reading to properly understand the topic, there's also mentions of 'fines', imo its comparable to western nations giving tax breaks/ financial incentive to families with x amount of children, abortions are still available in (many) places.
I'd suggest that the one child policy has been greatly blown out of proportion in terms of it's 'big scary bad communist government' propaganda
if you do the work and find more information i'm sure a lot of people here would love to read more about it
I'd suggest that the one child policy has been greatly blown out of proportion in terms of it's 'big scary bad communist government' propaganda
When I lived in Oklahoma and went to a fundamentalist christian school, I specifically remember my social studies teacher (an Israeli christian convert I shit you not) talking about how parents in China will often drown their newborn babies either because they already have one child and/or they want a son so much that they kill the girls since they're only allowed one child.
I will say I called the west an empire and the two people I was talking to didn't even blink or push back at all and the guy told me he's read confessions of an economic hitman before. Very encouraging.
like, objectively too many
Wtf do you mean by this lol
So many it was a problem
Don't take my word for it they had a whole one child policy about it
The number of children people have is heavily influenced by economic factors: poor or insecure people have a lot more kids than wealthy or secure people. As soon as the overall prosperity (along with a few other factors like urbanization and healthcare) reached a certain level where the fertility rate would subside, the policy was rolled back.
After a certain point, there are aspects of liability with a greater population. More moiths to feed, more clamor for goods, but beyond a certain threshold it doesn't give you any more economic or cultural diversification. On the personal level, each person loses some of their their distinction and individuality when there are more hundreds of millions of people out there.
