In 1979, Deng Xiaopeng, instituted the one-child policy in the Peoples’ Republic of China. Deng is sometimes lauded by “liberals” who are soft on communism for eliminating collective farms and for opening empowerment zones in China where “private enterprise” could exist. The PRC has thus become the poster child for “peaceful coexistence” between the mixed economy of the capitalistic U.S., and the mixed economy of the communist PRC. Their experiment in so-called free enterprise becomes our common ground.

This sense of the PRC as a legitimate player in the family of nations is now commonplace since Richard Nixon, supposedly a fierce and rigid enemy of communism, normalized relations with the PRC in 1972, and allowed it to come into the United Nations. Even Donald Trump with his newfound conservatism repeatedly declares that we are “dumb” when dealing with the Chinese, that he “loves” the Chinese and has hotels there, and that when he is president, we shall be “smart” in our trade dealings with them. Trump rejects PC speech and writing as a social and political oppression in the U.S., but neither he nor anyone else sees fit to mention that the PRC is one of the most horribly coercive states on the planet.  Their control over family size is a glaring example of their oppressive governance. 

The PRC’s totalitarian political reality was revealed starkly with the Chinese abolition of its one-child policy this week. The New York Times reported on this change with enviable detachment, reviewing the issue in terms of the sociology and economics of implementing said change. The morality of the original policy or the change to a two-child policy (it’s fortunate for the second one that they did not come up with a one-and-one-half child policy) was never mentioned. The fact that a draconian policy about how many children are “allowed” is totally and absolutely at odds with the search for and maintenance of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was never mentioned.  The last sentence of the Times article quoted a Chinese demographer who seemed offended by the very presence of a policy, but it was offered as a parting, nerdy afterthought about “reproductive rights.”

The problem with the policy supposedly is that they have a surplus of males who cannot find women to marry. Why? Because with the one-child policy women, who bear children, have been killed and abandoned. Also, women are not as apt to help out the family in its struggle for survival as are men. They are obliged to take care of their husband’s parents in their old age, not their own parents.  Men are stronger and there is still a lot of manual labor in China. With there being fewer women to marry, there are fewer families. Thus, the one-child family led to a decline in population, and the declining numbers of families in turn led to further declines in population. By the logic of the worldwide anti-birth, anti-child brigade, this was to lead to greater prosperity because it would mean fewer mouths to feed. However, predictably, it has led to less productivity and an aging population with fewer young ones to take care of them.   

In order to enforce the one-child policy, the PRC had an armory of negative incentives. Couples would be fined, they could lose their apartments, or applications to transfer to more roomy housing could be and routinely were denied. There was a tremendous increase in both forced and voluntary abortions and sterilizations. Female babies were being left to die or to be found and taken to orphanages. Many of those babies who survived were later sold to Westerners for $10,000 each (this writer knows of three such adoptions) who, for various reasons, wanted to adopt abroad. This proved an additional source of income for the corrupt, evil leaders of PRC society. Adoptive parent cash became more essential than adoptive parent suitability, the standard in the USA. Nevertheless, many of these discarded children did find good homes, but the venal character of the Chinese bureaucrats remains repugnant.

Now the new law will promote two-child legitimacy. Prospective parents will still need permission to have the second child. The Times notes that people have gotten used to thinking in terms of only one child so the transition may go very slowly. There will be resistance. Further, they interviewed Chinese who discuss the cost of raising another child which may prove to be prohibitive. Eerily, in their interviews, there was no talk about love, no talk of a mother’s or father’s yearning heart to nurture, to procreate, to trust in God as well as exercise economic prudence. There was no talk about the joy and nurturance for the one existing child to have another sibling.  Rather, the interviewees and the Times are comfortable with economic prudence as being the sole criterion for family planning. This is liberal and left-wing dogma at work. Economics trumps all, especially individual liberty. So when the economic projections fail, as they have in the PRC, the fallback is some more economic projections.

One other important point to make:  enforcement of a two-child policy poses a different sort of problem to the controllers than the one-child policy. Now, they want to incentivize having a second child. Although there is a pre-communistic docility in the Chinese personality owing to so many centuries of Confucianism with its emphasis on obeying authority, it is much easier to force people not to do something than to do something. How does one promote copulation? You laugh. But please do not think that their communistic masters are deterred by the patent absurdity of the challenge. 

The Times, with its Western bourgeois bias, depicts one-child couples now weighing the economic logic of having a second child.  While their original option was limited to one and only one child, now they will have the freedom [sic] to have one or two. However, the totalitarian mindset is not motivated by such niceties. A coercive beast is always coercive. Therefore, it is to be expected that the Chinese politburo will assign and command many one-child families to apply for a permit and then to have a second child within a specified period of time or else face various harsh fines and/or other penalties. One may even envision the Chinese incentivizing procreation.  Perhaps “Baby Making Rooms” will be set up for couples to copulate before taking the long, tiring commute home from work?  One can imagine sex shows being piped into their state-run home TVs to stimulate the procreative imagination.  One can easily imagine birth control pills and devices becoming more expensive and difficult to find, or teams of gung-ho citizens being authorized to go into apartments and homes to search for and destroy condoms. Compliance is not merely an option in the PRC.

The PRC is run by wicked, ideology-driven, totalitarian masters. The very existence of a child birthing policy should reveal to all why we can never be on good terms with that country.