China on Monday said it would allow all married couples to have three children, up from the limit of two, as it further loosened decades of population controls that have left the country in a demographic crisis.
The policy change, announced at a Politburo meeting chaired by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, was aimed at “maintaining national security and social stability” and keeping “our country’s advantages in human resource endowments,” the powerful decision-making body said, according to state news agency Xinhua. [WaPo]
For those of us of a certain age, we recall when Chinese families were limited to a single child, limits which were “… often brutally enforced, through forced abortions, sterilizations and steep fines,” even when they were winked at in certain economic areas.
Plans for world domination will come to naught, though, without the manpower to fuel all the various fronts – military, technology, manufacturing. So the limit was pushed up to two in 2016. That does not appear to have had an impact, though, which leads to the question of Why should pumping the limit up to three have an impact on population growth? The fact is that one of the results of a sometimes brutal and always autocratic Communist regime is increasing education of the entire Chinese population. And it’s a well-known observation that the more educated a population becomes, the lower the birth rate dips.
Therefore, I find this observation, from the same article, persuasive:
One user on [Chinese microblogging site Weibo] wrote, “Whether you change the policy to five children or eight children, housing prices are still the best sterilization tool.
Which is in line with Professor Turchin’s observations concerning agrarian societies which are entering the disintegrative phase of a demographic secular cycle: as land prices rise for the peasants, or is acquired by land owners, birth rates fall for those who are doing all the work. After all, they have to feed the extra mouths. Fueled also by wars, famine, and pestilence, the disintegrative phase of a secular phase persists until the land is effectively depopulated and, often, the owners are dispensed with through the aforementioned causes, along with possibly outright murder by either members of the classes above or below. There can be more atypical causes, too, such as the acquisition of new lands by the military, which I mention only for completist reasons.
Or to explain any Chinese military build up, and aggressive moves against neighbors, such as India.
China has ambitions, but it also has burdens. An aging population needs either care, or to be dispensed with, but each response has potential negative results. Perhaps the wisest course for China is medical investments: how to keep that aging population active and productive. Anything else could lead to costly societal disruptions.
