Thirty-five years after enacting draconian birth control rules blamed for millions of forced abortions and the creation of a demographic “time bomb”, China could be on the verge of introducing a two-child policy.
The new regulation, under which all Chinese couples would be allowed to have two children, could be implemented “as soon as the end of the year if everything goes well,” a government source was quoted as saying by the China Business News.
Liang Zhongtang, a demographer from the Shanghai Academy of Social Science, said the one-child policy “should have been abolished long ago”.
“The core issue is not about one-child or two-children. It’s about reproductive freedom. It’s about basic human rights. In the past, the government failed to grasp the essence of the issue.”
If there's one thing the world needs right now, it's a baby boom in China. Yeah, right.
4 comments:
Capitalism loves baby booms. More customers. Perpetual growth.
Also continual increase of workers --> higher unemployment --> people more malleable due to large "reserve army of labour" waiting to take their place.
Marx pointed it out but the capitalist love of unemployment has been a thing ever since the Enclosures and other land grabs created a mass of poverty-stricken landless in England who had no option but to go work in the "Dark Satanic Mills". More recently we had apologetics for unemployment like the NAIRU, and lately high unemployment just seems to be taken for granted and smoothed over with misleading statistics.
But I've noticed that hysteria about demographic shifts drying up the supply of workers has been impressively strong given high structural unemployment today and the simultaneous worries over increasing automation eliminating jobs. Again, it's 'cause capitalists are basically horrified by the idea of full employment or anything near it allowing the proles to get all uppity and threaten to withhold work if they don't get better paid.
Anyong said....Having lived in China, I was surprised to learn, people who live outside of cities, especially farmers can produce two children. Mention that when ever that conversation comes up, and you are looked at as if you are completely mad.
Anyone who scoffs at China's "one child policy" is self-appointed village idiot. That policy, while draconian, was a lesser evil, for China and the whole world...
A..non
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