China's One Child Policy

There is a new study out that looked at the sex ratio in China and how it has been affected by the one child policy. An accompanying commentary had some interesting information.

Rapid population growth is an unforgiving task master. Even with the one child policy—as a result of the high birth rate a generation before—China still has one million more births than deaths every five weeks. The Chinese State Council launched the policy in 1979, "so the rate of population growth may be brought under control as soon as possible." However, the root cause of the policy lay back in the 1960s with Mao Zedong's belief that "the more people, the stronger we are"—an ideology that prevented China from developing the highly successful voluntary family planning programmes that countries such as South Korea and Taiwan had put in place in the 1960s.

Deng Xiao-ping, the acknowledged architect of China's contemporary economic miracle, was a major sponsor of the 1979 policy. He said that unless the birth rate fell rapidly, "we will not be able to develop our economy, and raise the living standards of our people." Economists and demographers now recognise that a falling birth rate offers a demographic dividend, as the economically productive proportion of the population grows more rapidly than the general population. Without a rapid decline in fertility, China's economy would not have grown by 7-8% a year over the past decade; such growth has lifted an unprecedented 150 million people out of abject poverty....

Undoubtedly, the one child policy caused great individual pain and it has been heavily criticised. For people in the United States especially, the idea that society's long term interests could ever be more important than individual rights was anathema. A veritable media industry has arisen in the US criticising the one child policy, although it chooses to overlook the tens of millions of coercive pregnancies in other countries where family planning and legal abortion are not available. The Bush administration refuses to fund the United Nations Population Fund because it works in China, even though this fund has never supported the one child policy.

The Chinese demographic crisis arose because between 1960 and 1973 the population grew by 2% or more each year. Today, the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, along with Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Philippines, have population growth rates of at least 2%. Between now and 2050 the population of Niger, West Africa, is projected to grow fivefold from 14 to 53 million. As the World Bank acknowledges, without a rapid decline in fertility, tens of millions of Nigeriens will be uneducated, unemployed, and desperately poor; they will either starve or be fed by Western humanitarian aid.

The birthrate has fallen in Western countries, something both secular and Church leaders (pdf) have noticed.

I'm inclined to take an Ecclesiastes view: there is a time to multiply like rabbits, and a time to refrain from multiplying--as much.

(There was a discussion of birthrate at the Bloggernacle Times almost a year ago.)