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Communist Chinese Central Planners Stumped?
The most salient characteristic of communism is the government ownership and control of the means of production. This signifies that private ownership of businesses is rare, or absent entirely. And the economy is not the only feature of a society that communist governments seek to control. The press, education, religion (if it is allowed at all), and the social lives of the people are all areas that communist governments control, or attempt to control.
Communist China has been building a “social credit” system, where everyone is under constant surveillance and is awarded “points” for obeying the many social rules handed down by government. These rules are constantly changing, and it is sometimes the case that ordinary people are unaware of what they have done to get downgraded. And if a citizen steps over the arbitrary lines, he can be denied a job, the ability to travel freely, and use of communication channels.
In 1979, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) initiated its “one-child policy”, based upon the assumption, from population data at the time, that the country would become overpopulated, and the government might not be able to provide the population with enough food, water, and energy. This policy was carried out, sometimes brutally, with a combination of propaganda, forced birth control and abortions, financial disincentives, and other measures. Neighborhoods had party cadres whose sole function was to make sure that women did not have more than one child, and to dispense birth control and advice. Families were fined for ,more than one child, and single-child families were rewarded with better education and medical care for the entire family.
The policy was quite effective, and the rate of population growth in China slowed down significantly. There were other, more-unpleasant side effects from this policy. Ancient Chinese culture had, and has, a preference for male children, who were considered more valuable since they carried on the family name and did more work; female children were sometimes considered a burden, since they cost a “bride-price” when they were married off, which was a hardship for the millions of Chinese peasants who still populate the countryside. This preference for male children led to the surreptitious killing of female babies, and has had the result of causing a lack of marriageable women in later years. The one-child policy has also resulted in a higher poverty rate for elderly citizens, who now only have one child to care for them in their old age. The other large effect has been the rapid aging of Chinese society, with many more elderly than children.
The CCP decided in 2015 that the one-child policy had overrun its usefulness, and they decided that their policy around births needed to be changed. At first, the Party communicated that women would now be allowed to have a second child without penalty. Of course, they were hoping that the change would cause most reproductive-age women to fairly quickly decide to go ahead and get pregnant with the second child. Well, that did not happen. You see, the one-child policy also included delay of marriage by women, who were urged to have careers themselves, and not get married or have children until later. Of course, the CCP neglected the female “ticking biological clock,” which reduces fertility as a woman ages. Many women liked their careers and the income it brought them, too.
So this week, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Beijing Targets Low Birth Rate” about how the Communist Chinese government is attempting to juice the national birth rate. It turns out that even a controlling communist government cannot simply turn the spigot of births, and immediately expect the country’s women to start spitting out more babies. There is a huge population inertia around children, and the ingrained one-child policy is proving difficult to reverse. Here are some quotes from the article.
China is now racing in the opposite direction, closing abortion clinics and expanding services to help couples conceive. But a legacy of the one-child policy, scrapped in 2016, is a dwindling number of women of childbearing age as well as a generation of only children who are less eager to marry and start a family.…
Shandong province is known in China for sometimes extreme enforcement of birth restrictions, including a 1991 campaign in parts of the city of Liaocheng dubbed “Hundred Days, No Child”. A 2012 documentary…details how local officials, to make their birth data look better, forced women found to be pregnant to abortion centers, even if the baby was their first and allowed under the one-child policy.…
Today, Shandong pays compensation or subsidies to millions of couples who lived by the rules, including retirees who now don’t have support because their only child died or became disabled or women who suffered injuries in connection with abortions or other birth-control methods.…
Beijing’s about-face–in six years going from harshly restriction how many children couples could have, to now encouraging them to have more–makes little mention of the lingering effects of the one-child policy on demographics, nor its human cost.
You don’t say! The authoritarian Chinese Communist Party is discovering that there are some human behaviors that are very difficult for them to control, and society doesn’t turn on a dime, no matter how hard they push it. The central planners are discovering that social control is a very delicate thing, and their long-standing policies which have had many adverse effects, are not so easy to reverse. However, knowing the CCP, this will not make any difference to their mindset. They will go on attempting to force their women to marry earlier and have more children, to reverse the effects of their earlier population policy, but it may take many more years for these policies to have any effect. In the meantime, Chinese people will suffer, the workforce will shrink, and their booming economy may not boom so loudly.
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A means of production that lies beyond the control of the central planners?
Fancy that.
This is potentially troubling good news. As Mark Steyn pointed out in 2006, China’s population will get old before it gets rich.
The problem with large implosions is you need it to be either controlled or have a large buffer zone. President Trump was working on the buffer zone; pResident Biden is dismantling it. The dust cloud will be toxic.
Many American Universities have also adopted this Social Credit model, but they call it “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. (DEI)”
China could have solved their problem if the had made it a limit of two children, with a third occasionally available as a reward for Party loyalty or something. (2.1 is a little hard to manage.)
The central planners are supposed to be smarter than everyone else, but they apparently aren’t very good at arithmetic.
Unfortunately that is probably why they are eyeing Taiwan which won’t be enough mind you but would be a start. Expansion by war is a favorite tactic of powers that get behind that kind of eight ball. Additionally young men without marriage prospects are a problem for any society. I imagine China has quite a few social pathologies we never hear about.
China does NOT have a demographics problem. Communists will proudly kill off all their old folks, if they decide they are too much of a burden. If you think they have a problem, you are not thinking like they think.
Stop thinking of communism as a collective system. It is not. It is a simple authoritarian oligarchy, where a group of elites run a country and treat the majority of the population as labor. China is just like Russia. If you are a member of the ruling class or super-skilled, then life is great. Say the wrong thing and you are dropped in a river. You know what other country is starting too look like an authoritarian oligarchy? The USA. You need to work hard and obey what Pfizer/Facebook tell you to do.
It’s pretty simple. Send a bunch of young males off to war. They don’t have a low population they have a slight imbalance that is easy to fix and chances are they will. Poor old people can just die. Young women will do fine. We don’t have that problem we have a problem where the folks at the top are clueless, also have too much power, and are not capable of fixing it. Those two realities poses a fundamental threat to the US’s future.
Central planners are always deluded into thinking they can control all their people. That’s why they always fail.
I suspect that will be part of the plan but I doubt it will fix the problem. Authoritarians always overestimated their ability to use raw power to change things. That doesn’t mean it won’t be incredibly dangerous and that there won’t be a lot of pain and suffering for the world. It just means it is ultimately not likely to work out as they intend it too.
I agree completely about your diagnosis of the US’s problems though.
China does have a demographics problem. They have too many males and not enough females and they have a declining fertility rate brought about by “successful” restructuring of culture through the “one child policy” and an authoritarian state. If they were either a pluralistic society or open to inward migration they wouldn’t be in trouble; however, China is largely an ethnostate ruled by the Han Chinese. When your society is based on ethnicity and you have a concept of racial purity without enough women things are going to go to a bad place. I would not want to be a neighbor of China with a large ethnic minority of Chinese people.
Mark Steyn has written and spoken about this topic extensively. It doesn’t take that much imagination to game out a horrifying scenario for how an authoritarian racist oligarchy addresses the problem.
So you agree with the Leftists who continually recite “True communism has never really been tried.” Ha ha <wince>
That’s the good end of the worst case scenario spectrum. I haven’t studied demographics, but I think the difficulty in correcting the “slight imbalance” problem is addressed in the original post, where it discusses society not being able to turn on a dime, combined with the fact that a full child bearing lifetime has been consumed by the one child policy, so that entire population is unavailable to help fix the problem.
It will certainly be interesting to watch. What my late, great father out-law used to call “major clench factor.”
Like I say, major clench factor. An effective, caring international leader would be aggressively allying with, and arming those neighbor countries of China.
The reason the number of children has not gone up is that people’s expectations have increased and as a result children are expensive. Most Chinese can only afford one.
What will come next is that the Chinese will be REQUIRED to have x number of children.
Early 2000’s they made an exception. You could have 2 kids if both parents came from one Child Families. So its been slow.
Also the reason they implemented it was because the Economic Development Litiure and Data is clear. Even in the late 70’s. Lower birth rates lead to much higher economic growth. Now this has huge problems when you look over the data for more than one generation. As they are finding out.
That is not totally true. Its more a Rural versus Urban. Rural families mostly ignored the policy and had a lot of kids and so Rural Women actually have made the gap much smaller than previously thought. China does not exactly have accurate statistics. Ge I wonder why.
Not only that, they have a make/female balance problem. Central planning society is idiotic.
Mafia with an army.
I forget what the word for it is, but the young people that are mad at the communists just do enough to get by and they won’t marry or have kids.
Procreate for the state comrade.
I love this topic. Central planning is stupid. Government producing anything except actual strictly defined public goods is stupid. Every single government actuarial system is a disaster.
All of these things were invented at the same time: the pill, Abortion, Medicare, inflation, the Fed dual mandate (Communist guessing the price of money and shoving it down everybody’s throat), and feminism.
Within eight years, both parties recognized that Medicare was an actuarial disaster by a factor of dozens. Nobody did anything about it except they invented the congressional budget office. Which they used to lie about the ACA. Now we face distraction from unfunded liabilities.
Procreate for the state comrade!
FDR started the VA system and promised it to all of the soldiers.
Employer based insurance was a trick to get around wage and price controls during World War II and then they never got rid of it. Then they made it deductible to take the pressure off of the VA.
All of it causes more problems than it solves.
Central planning is stupid.
It is glorious to get jiggy with it.
Follow the G O S P L A N comrade!
I realize nobody is interested in this, but you might want to check out the hidden forces podcast where he interviews Jim Grant. He goes into excellent detail about when LBJ leaned on Arthur burns to print money in 1964, so he can central plan Vietnam, Medicare, and the Great Society. Then LBJ dies before he gets to see the chaos he unleashed. In the middle of that they invented the Fed Dual Mandate, which is just communist stupidity. Ronald Regan givees the greenlight to Paul Volker to shut it all down and then 41 gets rid of him. Then Greenspan starts all of these asset bubbles either in 1987 or 1996, take your pick. Now the whole planet will fall apart if they try to undo it.
It’s madness to expect ordinary libertarianism or conservatism to work or sell in this environment.
The sooner Rufus R. Jones is Dictator Of Everything, the sooner everything will get better!
That reason and that this makes two full generations of only-children being asked to expand their horizons and have two or three. These young folks were not just only children, their parents were only children. They have no aunts or uncles or cousins. An extended family is foreign to them.
That is old thinking. Males work hard and generate wealth for elites. They have enough population to run the world. There is no point in having more people than that. The only people that matter are the million or so CCP members. Everyone else is no different than cattle.
The problem is, a population reduction is deflationary and it reduces GDP. There are going to be big problems from it. If there wasn’t so much debt it might be different. Other than that, I agree with everything you are saying and it isn’t said enough.
Is this topic truly worthy of your affection? Have you considered that your love for this topic might be a result of Stockholm Syndrome?
They are all annoying to one degree or another, but the Fed dual mandate really frosts me.
The only thing that the Fed can actually do is set interest rates. Prices and unemployment are secondary effects. Unemployment is more tenuously related to interest rates than are prices. As long as Congress is mandating tenuously related goals, I think they should add a third mandate: reduction of national average Body Mass Index.
Off the top of my head, initial ten year projected cost of Medicare was ~$18 billion, at the end of ten years the actual cost was ~$118 billion. Maybe it was $8 billion and $108 billion, which is relatively worse.
Back in the early 80s, when I was a young professional, having recently graduated from engineering school, I expressed concern that government spending was unsustainable, and although I didn’t know all of the gory details, I knew that the entitlement programs exhibited exponential expansion, which would in relatively short order outstrip the taxpayers’ ability to fund the spending.
A dear friend of the family, a contemporary of my Depression era-raised, WWII veteran parents, a very smart man whom I’d known all my life, explained how his generation – which had invented many of the out of control entitlement programs, had done the responsible thing by fathering the Baby Boom generation, and that the problem was that the Baby Boom generation wasn’t doing the responsible thing by creating a yet larger generation to which it could bequeath the debt.
Procreate for the state comrade!
@libertydefender nailed it. Understand every word.