Peter Zhang
BrookesNews.Com
Thursday 14 August 2003

The number of self-professed Western liberals who support and publicly rationalise Beijing's brutal population control polices depresses rather than amazes me. It is an obvious fact that no true liberal (I am referring to the classical meaning of the word and not the linguistic corruption American leftists have foisted on us) would ever lend a shred of support to such brazen attacks on liberty and life.

That phoney liberals like Jane Fonda and Ted Turner are perfectly willing to defend totalitarian policies and those who implement them tells us a great deal about their real commitment to human rights and the values of the Open Society. (It never seemed to cause these humanitarians any concern that the policy they supported led to the starving to death of children because they exceeded Beijing's despotic mandatory one-child per couple ).

The one argument that these totalitarians fall back on is that China's exploding population left the regime no option but to implement these painful policies for the good of the whole. To leave matters in the hands of individual Chinese would result in disaster as population rapidly outgrew resources, or so it is sanctimoniously claimed. The facts, however, tell a very different story.

From 1947 to 1970 China's population rapidly increased with an average growth rate exceeding 2 per cent a year. Around 1970 when a demographic shift emerged as the fertility rate plunged bringing the annual population growth rate down to about 1.5 per cent, way below the replacement level of 2.1. Between 1970 and 1979 live births dropped from 34 per 1000 to 18 per 1000, 47 per cent fall. Yet the one-child policy was not implemented until 1979!

Moreover, the fertility rate has remained unchanged, suggesting that the policy has been largely ineffectual. All of this strongly suggests that China has entered the stage, or is rapidly approach it, of the demographic transition. The social implications of this phenomenon formed the basis of David Reisman's 1951 book The Lonely Crowd. Unfortunately the Chinese leadership is not a well-read one.

Though the forces behind the demographic transition are far from being fully understood, we do know that prosperity, or even the expectation of prosperity, can change fertility rates as couples alter their behaviour. Children no longer become economic goods or a form of social security. As this change in attitude takes hold the fertility rate drops, sometimes precipitously.

This is what has happened in Italy, Japan and Singapore and what is beginning to happen in China. I think this can be illustrated by contrasting the difference between China's urban fertility rates and her rural rates. Urban fertility rates are far below the replacement level while rural rates average about 2.5 per cent. The difference is not due to the one-child policy being more effectively policed in urban areas but to differences in living standards and expectations.

The tragedy is that a savage population control measure was needlessly implemented. Thousands of peasant women have been forced to endure enormous pain and suffering for nothing.

And it is always the women who must carry the awful burden of these policies, not the men who implement them and certainly not Western feminists like Jane Fonda, Maxine Waters and Dianne Feinstein.

(By the way, when Hillary and her fellow feminists were holding a gabfest in a five-star Beijing hotel children were being starved to death only a short distance away. No doubt Hillary's unthinking supporters will find nothing untoward in her total indifference to the plight of these children).

The final irony is that these policies have now been used, and rightly so, by the regime's critics to humiliate it. And about time.