China: On the subject of only one child

It was 1966. We were in the throes of cultural Maoism in the West; remember the series of colorful portraits painted in New York by Andy Warhol of the Great Helmsman. A Frenchman, Jacques Dutronc, sang "500 million des chinois et moi et moi." Let's retain the figure of 500 million Chinese and 1966. Shortly after, in 1970, the urgent challenges of providing food, shelter, or work prompted the government and the Party (which are the same thing) to prohibit - and penalize - having more than one child per couple. However, in 2020 and despite the implementation of this strict policy, China reached the figure of 1,400 million inhabitants, 20% of humanity.

I have always been convinced that the current large figure has to do with the fact that the one-child law was not fulfilled with the rigor that the Party expected in rural areas and in the western reaches of this gigantic country, and the flow of Much needed cheap labor continued to be produced from the countryside to the city and factories. Therefore, in 2015, given the aging of the population, the PC admitted a second child per couple. However, and except for a slight rebound in the birth rate in 2016, it has been sinking to 0.66 children, instead of 2.1 that the government wants. In 2020 only twelve million boys and girls were born in China and the alarmed government has just allowed a third child per couple.

The Chinese government knows that the declining fertility trend will not change. Economic development implies that marriages and children are postponed. Women's job expectations, rising living standards and urbanization processes are stubborn in China and the West. The PC has excellent economists and knows it. So why introduce a law that will not change anything about an unstoppable trend? The PC states: "there is a demographic crisis and the party has to guide young people to have the correct perspective on dating, marriage and family."

The Party, which turns 100 this year, is above everything and controls even the intimate lives of individuals or families, and this is surprising in the West. That is why the CP prefers to regulate the birth rate, even knowing that its objective is not going to be achieved, because it prefers not to renounce the principle of control over that part of the freedom of the citizen and the citizen. Nor was it alien to the different imperial Chinas where the collective was always imposed on the individual, following Confucian doctrine. On the contrary, the history of the West is a process of liberation of the individual with respect to power and whose milestones are the French Revolution (1789) and the American Revolution (1776). In the East this is considered counterproductive to the need to keep this country together and this takes precedence over the rights of the individual. In that perspective, we must focus, for example, what has happened to the president of Alibaba, Jack Ma, the richest man in China, who, for questioning in public, even with a constructive nature, the government's banking policy was interrogated in an unknown place and for four months to remind him: you have become rich thanks to China, the Chinese and the Party. We have allowed you to do so and we can take it away from you right now. This occurs outside the law or the judges since there is no regulation in this regard, simply that power cannot be questioned or challenged. Can you imagine that Warren Buffet, or Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates were told and did that for commenting that the Federal Reserve interest rates were not to their liking?

This is a big difference between the two civilizations. It is not just communism, because in today's China there is little trace of Marx or Engels, but rather the millenary, imperial and Confucian China that is slowly emerging, at least in some respects. When will China change towards our parameters based on individual freedom thanks to its blazing economic development that makes it the second world power? The answer to this question is worth at least a trillion dollars in Washington today.

Manuel Valencia

July 2021