I've recently returned from 2 weeks visiting the north-western portion of Yunnan Province which is situated in the south west of China, with Burma to the west and Tibet to the north. As a country woman I noticed much planting of fruit trees - young trees none more than about 5 years of age. Around the ancient city of Lijiang there are many young plum, peach, cherry and apple trees being planted in plots of ground already growing vegetable crops. Was it for increased productivity, I wondered?
Many of the lower hills of the mountain ranges were planted with young pine forests.
Kunming, at lower elevation is warmer and many of the hills are planted with eucalytus trees and they are also planted for windbreaks or eroded gullies.
It is to do with marriage and children. Although China has had a 1 child policy, a few years ago the government understood the need for farmers to have sons to maintain the family land so that the older people were cared for by a younger generation, thus it allowed country families to have 2 children providing they met certain obligations.

Firstly, the marriageable age for girls is 21 and for men 23 years. When a couple decide to marry they must give a year's notice to the authorities.
Then they are told they must plant 50 trees and return 12 months later. The trees are inspected and if all 50 trees have survived the couple may marry, but if not they must plant more trees and wait another year. That accounts for why so many fruit trees are being planted.
Once married they may then have their first child. Although allowed to have a second child, there must be a 5 year interval between births.
If the young couples flout any of these rules, like marrying at a younger age, or having a second child in less than 5 years, they are ordered to "Green a hill", and not with grass. Hence the hills covered in young pine trees or eucalytus trees.
The affect is the 'Greening of rural China'.

The author is correct in saying there is tremendous pressure on students to study hard, but this is not always coming from parents. Most Chinese people believe that rural life is hard and financially unrewarding. The ambition of most young people is to pass their high school certificate examination, which will allow them to apply for public service positions or attend universities. Their aim is to escape hard work. Apart from the need to work at their studies, they are not motivated by a work ethic, rather by a goal to find an easier lifestyle than farming.
Many rural families have now experienced the situation of having educated their sons and daughters, only to be abandomed as they moved to the city and easier work.
In some instances young couples, too busy with their new city lives are sending their children home to be raised by grandparents.
Unfortunately some of these grandparents see no value in allowing their grandchildren to be educated beyond primary school, so refuse to pay the cost of further education, fearing that once more they will be abandomed.

hope you enjoyed your yunnan holiday, cgal, sounds interesting. i suspect treeplanting has more to do with making a living in the country than just marriage. whatever reason, always heartening to hear of large scale treeplanting.

china has vast problems, one of them a result of the one child policy: many more young men in china than young women. don't know how this will play out, but family gossip suggests that young women can afford to be very choosy about who they marry.

a lot of poor young men a going to be lifelong bachelors. this demographic group must be worrying the party bosses. it may explain why they are not nearly so tough on prostitution as they were 10 years ago.

i look at china as the leading edge of human social evolution. they are a micro-cosmn of the overburdened planet the west is waking up to. china has been over-populated for a thousand years and a lot of their 'quaint' customs are methods of living in a society where there usually are three other people in arms length. i vastly prefer australia, but since no one will say the magic words "population control", it's just a matter of time.

The problems being faced by China as a result of their attempts at population control should give us an insight into what might happen when we inevitably are forced to go down the same path. We do have the advantage of observing what has happened there, so that we might be able to do it better, but let us not get too cocksure. It is interesting to note that the populations both here and in China have increased by a factor of roughly three times since the end of the second world war, even though the Chinese have tried to do something constructive about reducing numbers whilst our government seems hell bent on going in the other direction.

May you live in interesting times ... the old Chinese Curse seems to have found its mark on many of the gods (both male and female) of the new China who face the prospect of dull, unimaginative and humourless lives.

Social engineering was bound to have unintended consequences. Human nature is way too complex and unpredictable. It's laws are akin to quantum mechanics - uncertainty principles determine outcomes and counter-intuitive results are common.

When will mankind learn from history? The temptation of powerful people to meddle in reproducive behaviour of citizens occurred in Germany during Hitler's rule, spurred on by his vision of a master race.

The only warming story to emerge is that the progeny meet often to give each other much needed moral support. These good people still bear the scars of that failed social engineering experiment. Where would the world be today if Hitler had won?

And what of home here? Could Australia face unwelcome 'consequences' under the Costello 'baby bonus' plan for Australia?

I'm not referring to Cardinal Pell's possible sanctions to Catholic claimants under the scheme - as I don't know, or really care, what the Papal position is on that score.

I suspect our B-bonus generation will sooner or later come to realise that their existance originated in a grubby cash-bonus deal offered by a smug treasurer, intent on striking on the perfect deal with trinkets to bolster the population of tax payers, thereby keeping imminent wealthy superannuants such as himself, in fabulous comfort before he enters the next life.

It's enough to make our sun-burnt gods drop out and live subsistence lives as Centrelink clients. With a peak oil crisis looming, 5 to 15 years away, that may be the most rational choice of all.