Well I thought about it and hereby decree:

China's rutterati should go like the clappers and breed an army like India.

No longer should there by Population-Control Mamas with riding crops whacking the gonads of cowering couples "Slow down. Speed up. Jiggy-jiggy! Got it?"

This question has a very simple answer.

>>But why was there a one-child policy in the first place?<<

Because the government believed - as, to be fair, do a considerable number of Australians who post in these pages - that restricting population growth is automatically a "good thing".

>>The aim was to achieve 'xiaokang shuiping' – a 'comparatively comfortable level of living' for every citizen – by 2000.<<

Well, truth to tell, they didn't do too badly on the standard-of-living front, did they? And in the fifteen years since, even greater strides have been made, economically speaking.

But reality has a way of intruding on even the best of "sounded good at the time" ideas. In the family-oriented society in which most Chinese have been raised, under "normal" circumstances you would have more grandchildren than grandparents. In the one-child world, a single progeny would have (count them) two parents, and four grandparents, all of whom would expect little Chun to support them in their old age.

Replicate that across society as a whole, and you have the makings of a serious problem.

plantagenet, your dry wit is too high intellectually, Pericles did not get it all.

Pericles, oh dear, Maoism was right for once, they needed the one child policy & should keep it still, along with India & many other continents which are already horribly over populated, still growing too.

Their problem was the same as yours, namely left wing corruption. China always was a traditional patriarchal society as were the Soviets, so they were allowed to abort female babies & try again for a boy. If they had any morals, they could have had their women conceive one child naturally & let the gender chips fall where they may. Then they would have had a roughly 50/50 gender spit in their now natural births. Then the mother could have been sterilized permanently in the hospital after giving birth to one healthy child. But they were left wing, therefore totally corrupt & incapable of getting anything right.

Thanks imacentristmoderate

I try :)

Pete

An odd reaction, imacentristmoderate.

>>Pericles, oh dear, Maoism was right for once, they needed the one child policy & should keep it still, along with India & many other continents which are already horribly over populated, still growing too.<<

As I took pains to point out, the one-child concept is one that is absolutely, 100% bound to fail. No exceptions. It is not even a matter of politics, left, right, Fascist or Communist.

It doesn't matter a damn either, whether you are able to reproduce in exactly the balanced numbers of males and females, you will always end up with an inverted pyramid in which an ever-smaller complement of working folk will be required to support an ever-increasing number of ageing dependents.

Work it out for yourself. One single child ha two parents, who are a generation older. Each parent will have two parents of their own, a generation older still. Ultimately, of course, a replacement rate of 0.5 will, as a mathematical certainty, wipe out an entire population.

However, long before that mathematical certainty comes to pass, society will have degenerated into a vicious fight for individual survival in a massively deteriorating economy, in which forms of compulsory euthanasia and even ethnic genocide will be employed, justified entirely by the individual's will to live.

Population control is ultimately a personal matter, driven both historically and presently by individual prosperity, which then impacts education standards as well as living standards.

I suspect you may be one of those people who believes that Australia is over-populated too - would I be right?