China's one-child gift to the world
Monday, September 17, 2007 at 8:01AM OP-ED: "China's One-Child Mistake: With a shrinking working-age population, who will take care of the country's retirees?" by Nicholas Eberstadt, Wall Street Journal, 17 September 2007, p. A17.
The efforts by India and China to control their population growth over the past several decades changes human history forever--and to our collective great benefit. All those predictions of a global population boom out of control never materialized as a result.
But, of course, some cost is involved. China heads into a demographic challenge of immense proportions. Eberstadt sees a slo-mo humanitarian tragedy.
What is it about demographers and their amazingly self-confident hyperbole? You'd think they'd be a bit more careful on the hype given their past mistakes (Too many people! No! Wait! Now there'll be too few!).
Eberstadt even goes so far to raise the spooky specter of all those Chinese males unable to marry. But, of course, there we've already seen a preview in the form of Korean males facing a similar problem right now. Their answer? They fly to Vietnam and marry a young woman over the weekend--just like that.
Guess what China's males will do (those that don't leave as economic refugees for work elsewhere, which is a huge informal escape hatch)? Will they riot or demand war with other nations? Or will they also simply go farther afield?
Ditto for China's demographic challenge in general. Is importing workers (meaning, immigration) a complete impossibility? Is China somehow a sealed unit that will collapse under its own weight over the next 30 years, or--GODFORBID!--might it simply open up its system further to tap the necessary labor and investment and technology?
Eberstadt sees a tragedy because he's operating with an image of China that he cannot shake: the isolationist system that's hostile to outsiders. But that image is dissolving with time, as China has proven to be amazingly open to outside influences, right down to the point of letting foreigners adopt baby girls en masse (if they can manage that, what's the big deal about Chinese males marrying non-Han?). Somehow China managed to cope with this "sudden and very rapid emergence" of unwanted female babies, so why can't this highly practical society deal with the "sudden and very rapid emergence" of unmarried men? I mean, we estimate that 100 million Chinese will travel abroad every year by 2020, so might we assume some of these "trapped" single guys might actually chose something besides instability?
Honestly, these things get presented all the time by social scientists as inexorable tragedies, as though humans aren't adaptable whatsoever. Hell, you give me the choice between no woman and a racially different woman and guess which choice I "suddenly and very rapidly" make? Or take a gander at Ireland with its "sudden and very rapid" influx of immigrant black Africans? Inconceivable I tell you!
Until necessity makes it happen.
We have to remember: this is the same Chinese culture where men have left behind families for years on end to earn money abroad. If this culture can handle that level of practicality, what's so unbelievable about China self-correcting on this issue down the road? After all, they had the guts to set it in motion in the first place!
Obviously, I see something very different from Eberstadt on the issue of demographics: I see the huge impracticality of China going hostile and isolating itself from the world. By setting in motion the demographic wave, China inexorably commits itself to interdependency. It simply cannot navigate future challenges without remaining amazingly open to the outside world, and that means its ability to turn hostile is severely circumscribed.
To me, as a grand strategist, this is very good news. Trying to hype it inside out to the point of turning this positive into yet another negative fear of China's possible threat to us is misguided (although Eberstadt does not do this, I hear this pitch from national security types all the time).
Yes, China will naturally do as Eberstadt argues: it will lift the restriction, confident that the economic dynamics already deeply in place will prevent any big uptick in births. The time for this temporary fix is done. Now is the time to return the decision making back to the people--yet another example of how power naturally devolves downward with China's rise.
But don't present this as a mistake. This huge effort was China's gift to human history and it's an incredibly valuable one: relieving the danger of uncontrolled global population growth, plus forcing China down a path of economic interdependency that keeps its "rising" peaceful.
Good deal on both points for us.
Reader Comments (9)
Long term they continue to go afield, as they have for generations. Short term, demobilized soldiers are indeed rioting in their retraining centers, though it seems to be more about future prospects in general, vice poor odds of marriage.
Xenophobic Japan would not be able to recover from a policy like this, but the assimilating borg that is China will of course be OK. If you think that the fifth generation leaders bringing back their Western educations will have an impact, wait until all the middle aged Chinese men return home with their foreign brides and hapa children.
The combination of Westernization in the time period encompassed by the the Boxer Protocol through the Open Door policy, Provincial governments that cut their own deals with the West ignoring Imperial demands and a dissatisfied and disenfranchised peasantry are all somewhat mirrored in the conditions in the PRC right now.
In particular central party control over the Provincial governments and the urban/rural standard of living disconnect.
While I have no doubt China will muddle through as it always has over the last few millennium I personally wouldn't want to venture a guess as to how smooth it's going to be.
But it's naive to expect a solution to a big problem not to result in smaller problems... and this one certainly has. But I don't often see it presented as a planet-wide problem, or even a continental problem, but more as a regional problem. And in that context, I have two observations: If the magnitude of the problem is the same for China now as it was for the planet thirty years ago... well, that's progress of everyone but China-- still sucks to be them. Also, there's no logical disconnect in going from "Too many!" to "Not enough!" if you've changed scale.
(I'm not saying the problem *is* as great for them now as it was then, it's just an illustration.)
It was 2% of the global environmental impact of the human race.
I'm less sure about these gender imbalance issues, however. That's war demographics right there. We shall see.
The same problem applies to foreign males in Korea, as well, alas... I suppose the same solution would apply as well, except that most of us aren't explicitly looking for anything so permanent as marriage.
If we're lucky, those excess males will be scattered throughout the world; small pockets of instability which will clear themselves out as assorted wars, monastic, criminal and law enforcement activities kill or incarcerate them. If we're not so lucky, the excess will be concentrated in one part of the world where they can wreak REAL havoc.