Skepticism on China’s one-child statement

I appreciate but cannot share the optimism in my colleague Amanda Pawloski’s recent blog regarding the revision of China’s brutal one-child policy.

Chinese officials put these announcements out from time to time, no doubt because it elicits enthusiastic praise from reputable Western sources such as the Lancet, as it did this time.

The Lancet, International Planned Parenthood, UNFPA and their ilk are usually the only sources that regurgitate these statements with such alacrity. And they are hardly credible critics of coercive fertility suppression.

Meanwhile there is little evidence that China is letting up on the one child policy elsewhere in the country. Prominent China scholar Gordon Chang argues that the regime will never abandon the one child policy because it gives them what they need — control over the most intimate part of people’s lives.

Chang also finds that the regime knows its falling fertility will present real foreign policy challenges in the coming decades. But by now their problem is trying to get their educated population to have more children, not fewer. More cause for coercion.

We shall have to wait for a lot more evidence than the Chinese communists’ own statements to know that life is getting any better for families desiring more children. Right now, there is little evidence they have done anything worthy of our praise.

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