Two much to bear Steven W. Mosher is the author of “Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order” (Regnery), out now.
China’s new two-child policy is as inhumane as its law to have just one
Iwas living in China in 1980 when the one-child policy — one of the most brutal political campaigns any government has unleashed on women — began.
Under that policy, it became a crime to be pregnant without official permission. The authorities went on to scour the country in search of suspected violators. Millions of young women were detained and ultimately aborted.
I visited one rural clinic where long lines of women were being given assemblyline abortions. Some of these expectant moms were only days away from giving birth. It was a gut-wrenching experience that neither they, nor I, are ever likely to forget.
Now — nearly four decades and 400 million abortions later — China’s President Xi Jinping has suddenly decided to change course. He has decided that he wants more babies, not fewer.
To raise the birth rate, the Communist Party’s Central Committee this year decided to “comprehensively implement a policy of each couple giving birth to two children.” In plain English, the new policy is for every couple in China to have two children, whether they want to or not. Why the about-face?
It turns out that forcibly eliminating hundreds of millions of people from your population isn’t such a good idea after all.
China’s population is aging more rapidly than any population on the planet. Projections indicate that by 2040, 24 percent of the population will be aged 65 or older.
And as its workers retire with no one to replace them, its workforce is shrinking from year to year.
Perhaps most worrisome of all to President Xi, his “China Dream” of global domination is being threat- ened — and not just by Trump’s tariffs. His country’s demographic decline is slowly strangling its economic prospects.
Some in the Western media initially celebrated this “relaxation” of the one-child rule, thinking that the new “two children for all” policy would be voluntary.
In fact, it is just another expression of the Chinese Communist mania for state control over everything, including reproduction.
Having earlier forced many women to bear no more than one child, Xi’s state planners are back with an equally Draconian plan to force women to bear no fewer than two. Once again, young women are going to bear the brunt of China’s bent to plan births.
Some aspects of the new “two children for all” policy are unobjectionable. For example, the state will deliver a woman’s second child for free and she will enjoy a longer maternity leave. Those womenunable to conceive and bear children, especially those nearing the end of their reproductive lives, will have access to infertility services.
Of course, the intent of providing, say, infertility services is not to empower women, but to ensure that they bear their required quota of children. Understanding this puts these new pro-natal policies in a rather different light.
The burden of enforcing the party’s new policy, as always, falls on its 90 million members. They are instructed to “take the lead in responding to the Party Central Committee’s call” to have a second child. “Younger comrades” are told that they must help implement the “comprehensive two-child policy” by leading by example.
“Older comrades are instructed to “educate and supervise their children” in the new policy, meaning they are to ensure that their own child goes on to give the country two children.
Finally, party comrades are told they must go all out to “strongly encourage the masses, especially women of childbearing age, to adopt the two children policy as their own.”
For China’s young, professional women, many of whom are not eager to marry, much less have children, these are chilling words. They understand that, for the one-party dictatorship that rules China, it is only a small step from “strongly encourage” to “strong-arm.”
How could they not, when each one probably has a mother — or an aunt, or a cousin — who in past years has been coerced into an abortion under the previous population policy.
Lastly, even if the Communist au- thorities succeed in imposing their “two children for all” policy on every young woman in China, this will not completely solve China’s demographic dilemma.
The long decades of the one-child policy have created a massive imbalance in the sex ratio. Sex-selective abortions and female infanticide mean that there are 33 million fewer women than men in China.
In fact, there are so few young women of childbearing age that each and every one would have to bear three children in order to stave off population decline.
So, will the Communist authorities eventually move to a “three children for all” policy?
Only time will tell.