China's one-child policy

http://www.economist.com/node/16846390

“Rethinking China’s one-child policy”

Does China have enough people? The question seems ridiculous at first. China is renowned for having the world’s largest population, and many people, although appalled at the draconian measures employed in the brutal enforcement of the one-child policy, grudgingly agree that it was about time China did something to control its gargantuan population and lightning-quick population growth. However, recent censuses uncover some doubts about the one-child policy. The total fertility rate, calculated by dividing the number of new births by the total number of women in the country, may be just hovering around 1.4 – a far cry from the 2.1 rate needed for “natural replacement” when a country can replace its population, keeping it about the same size.

According to statistics published by the Brookings Institution, people above the age of 60 now represent 13.3% of the population, up from 10.3% in 2000, or 39 million more elderly above the age of 60. In the same period, the percentage of young people below 14 plummeted from 23% to 17%. The huge abundance of cheap labour supplied by the population boom – make that a population explosion – that spurred China’s industrialization in the past three decades is nearly over. In the next couple of years, the percentage of citizens above 65 will escalate exponentially, while the population comprising youths below 23 will dip dramatically. The untold effects on China’s breakneck economic growth will be devastating.

I personally think the one-child policy has to be seriously revamped and re-evaluated, if not completely done away with. If the slow population growth continues and results in the drastic dip in the size of the Chinese workforce, the shrinking number of working adults will have to carry the burden of supporting an escalating number of Chinese elderly, in the form of increased taxes. The government will have to increase spending on healthcare and benefits for the elderly. As a result, less money can be dedicated to other more meaningful areas, such as investing in technology to make their factories and industries more environmentally friendly, or in programs to reforest the severely deforested parts of China. These phenomena will take a large bite of China’s already slowing economic growth.

Furthermore, many Chinese prefer to have boys over girls. Boys can carry on the family name, and they have been the head of the house in Chinese traditional culture for millennia to date. While male-dominant cultures are also rampant in countries like India, the one-child policy has played a significant role in exacerbating the situation. Many families will do almost anything to ensure their one legal child is male, including female infanticide and going for ultrasound scans to check the gender of the foetus. This is not only a violation of human rights, it will achieve the effect of “pouring oil on the fire” as Queen Elizabeth once described it.

Some people contend that in the conservative world of politics, it is nigh on impossible to achieve the kind of overnight change China needs to counter the negative effects of its notorious one-child policy. They argue that policies cannot be changed on a whim, that the situation must be evaluated and re-evaluated before the government can take action to remedy the situation. They claim that this boosts foreign confidence in the country. Let me pose a question. Would it be better to have a sufficiently growing workforce or good foreign relations, given that the two are mutually exclusive? I think the obvious answer is a sufficiently growing workforce, for the aforementioned reasons. Yes, quick policy changes are rare in general, but the true mark of a good leader is that he knows when convention needs to be thrown out the window, when tradition can be upturned and trampled on, when policies that have become mainstream need to be kicked out. If and when the situation calls for it, such changes are not only possible, they are also necessary.

If the Chinese Communist Party sees fit to revamp the one-child policy into a two-child policy, well done. If not, China will face its most serious demographic problem yet. And when it does, it will probably be too late.