“The Nonexistent Child: Yet Another Ineffective Population Policy” by Grace

The distended stretch marks of overpopulation sprawl over almost every country on Earth; however, few countries have come as close as China is to rupturing that dainty fabric of carrying capacity and human rights issues. The Earth will usually heal itself, given enough time… if not, humans have to step in and try to fix our mess ourselves. China’s most infamous coping mechanism started in 1979: the One Child Policy. Made to forcibly limit the natural increase rate, mostly what it accomplished was illuminating some of the most garish flaws in humanity: the inequality and prevalence of the patriarchy and the widespread corruption of government.

For years the fact of China’s ‘missing children’ has been ominously interpreted by demographers and other political scientists; census takers have simply assumed that the children, mostly girls, were either aborted or sent away to some remote location. Now, the ugly truth is coming to light - and as with most ugly truths, the monster is not nearly so despicable in real life as it was imagined to be in the dark.

The true ugliness:

People do bad things. They have always done bad things, and they will always do bad things. A bad thing that happens in China is that some kill or abandon their children upon occasion based on their gender - boys  preferred, as they are able to carry the family name further into history. This has been the case in China throughout the centuries, from the Qing Dynasty to the recently reformed One Child Policy. As analyzed by Cotin Chang of the U.S. National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health, “...discrimination against females, [resulting in the ‘missing women’ phenomenon] as a reflection of the patriarchal and patrilineal systems in China, appears to have intensified in these periods of stress on family resources.” Basically, when there are limited resources available to families due to conflict of society or environment, they will allocate those resources to the most valued members. Thus, the sex ratio of China is about 116 males born for every 100 females.

Turmoil of the Qing Dynasty      Typical Contemporary Family in Rural China

Removing the mask of the magical monster mystery:

While the One Child Policy has been effective in driving up the sex ratio, it also been useful for curbing the population - only not to such a stringent degree. This is because of corrupted government - even at the local level.  In the words of Kansas State University political professor John Kennedy, "There is no coordination between cadres saying 'we're all in agreement… Actually it's just very local. The people who are implementing these policies work for the government in a sense. They are officials, but they are also villagers, and they have to live in the village where they are implementing policies. Hence, if more than one child is born in rural regions (which make up almost half of China’s total population, according to World Bank Organization data, although interregional migration from rural to urban is quite common) the officials turn a blind eye, allowing the families to register a child of their choice - in some cases, the third or fourth child, if it takes that long to have a boy - for the free education and childcare incentivized by the federal government. The other children in farm families have literally come to be known as ‘the nonexistent ones’. This helps explain how more than three million women of middle-age showed up on the census, literally nonexistent on censuses when they would’ve been younger children. These ‘nonexistent children’ finally become visible as they get married and have to register or independently pursue their own jobs or education [and have to register for that].

Overpopulation has caused China to be held back from economic and social development. “Graphing the interaction between differential income growth and population growth showed strong correspondence between the rise in one factor and the decline in the other… The blockage of economic growth from population growth was evidenced in 13 specific years.” (Zhang, National Public Library of Medicine and Health). It has also re-enforced gender bias and brought along the catalog of issues associated with that: “marriage squeeze”, widespread inequality, and a future of very questionable fertility due to lack of females. In the future, this will affect the dependency ratio by giving the decreasing working population a great aging population to support. What can possibly be done at this point with China’s population? Are they past the point of no return? China must find a more effective and wholesome anti-natalist policy if it is to truly deal with its overpopulation problems. It has already loosened the grip of the ineffective, authoritarian One Child Policy and now allows two children per couple. Along with this, China needs to provide better healthcare, education, and contraception for the public, which would lower the crude birth rate and crude death rate by increasing life expectancy and standard of living for its huge poverty population. China should use its technology and science to find more ecologically sound ways of sustaining its population, which would dramatically increase the carrying capacity. Doing these things would bring China into the fourth stage of the Demographic Transition Model and usher in the many benefits that come with that - the greatest of these, for China, being a smaller and more stable population.

Works Cited

“China's 'Missing Girls' Theory Likely Far Overblown, Study Shows.” The University of Kansas, Oct. 2017, news.ku.edu/2016/11/22/study-finds-chinas-missing-girls-theory-likely-far-overblown.

“The Effect of Overpopulation on Public Health.” MAHB, mahb.stanford.edu/library-item/the-effect-of-overpopulation-on-public-health/.

“GCSE Bitesize: Case Study: China.” BBC, BBC, www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/geography/population/managing_population_rev3.shtml.

Jiang, Quanbao, et al. “Estimates of Missing Women in Twentieth Century China<Sup></Sup>.” Continuity and Change, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2012, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3830941/.

Jozuka, Emiko. “Study Finds Millions of China's 'Missing Girls' Actually Exist.” CNN, Cable News Network, Jan. 2016, www.cnn.com/2016/12/01/asia/china-missing-girls/index.html.

War, Earth No. “Earth No War (Nonfiction) : ENW.” The Japanese Army Beheaded Chinese Farmers with Swords, While the Police Officers of the Qing Dynasty Saw It around Them., 2016, earthnorwar.blogspot.com/2016/06/blog-post_24.html?m=1.

Zhang, S. “The Effect of Population Growth in China in the Course of Economic Growth.” Chinese Journal of Population Science., U.S. National Library of Medicine, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12345584.