Which shows a massive male surplus particularly in the young demographics, way larger than you would biologically expect. How can we claim this policy has no effect if clearly people are still killing female infants?
Wasn’t their some policy saying that rural mothers could have a second child if their first was a girl? If they each had the maximum number of children, it would lead to an average of about 1 boy and 0.75 girls per rural mother.
“Peasants” (their term, not mine) and minorities* could have more than one. It was very, very common. Apparently half of the country was effectively under a two-child policy.
It's actually even worse for the assertion than this, because the genders of babies from the same parents are not independent statistical events.
So, if you have 1 B, you stop.
If you have 1G, you may have another child, which is somewhat more likely to be a girl than a boy. So you'd expect this policy (in isolation) to produce a surplus of girls.
You’re totally right. I guess what I wrote above doesn’t hold water. And an intuitive way to think about it is that each child does not know the sex of the child before it—if you had a line of children and each mother simply took the next child in the line, you would expect a 50-50 sex distribution even if mothers followed the rules given above.
Assuming no selective-abortion shenanigans, every child you have is expected 50% male, 50% female (barring e.g. unusual men who only produce sperm of one gender—I think that exists but is extremely rare), so there's no possible strategy that leads to an uneven gender split, probability-wise.
But I think there were selective-abortion shenanigans, and that the policy was effectively in response to them. If we assume each family wants, as its first objective, to maximize the number of sons, and, as its second objective, to maximize the number of daughters, then each selective-aborting family would have exactly one daughter followed by one son under such a policy.
Those were local family planning board decisions and never really applied in the cities. In fact, family planning was applied so unevenly across China that some people got in trouble for having one kid at all (because of corruption), or on their second kid had to give up their government jobs even though they technically had rural hukou.
Yes, the article saying the one child policy remained untill2016 is an oversimplification. There were already exceptions introduced including when both parents had never had any siblings.
If everyone in the planet gets to toss a coin, and if it comes up heads you get to toss it again, that doesn't mean that there are any more tails than heads, each coin toss is just a coin toss, independent from any other.
Can you raise a unreported child in china? How would that work? With no papers at all and the communist buerocrats also really likes paper about everything. ?
Buddy of mine had two, one was illegal. When they make a law that you can have two, he made a third. I guess he will make a 4th now to send a clear message to the government :-)
It's also China, where they put toxic stuff in watered down milk to make it look as foamy as protein-rich good milk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal , i.e. a place with a lot of corruption and where gaps are possible.
Up until Covid stopped business travel, my Chinese colleagues brought home as much infant formula or follow up milk powder for toddlers as they thought they could get away with when visiting HQ in Germany, and always asked us to bring some with us when we went there. Lots of stores here had limits on how much you could buy at once because of that.
Are you suggesting that China is somehow unusual in poisoning the populace? Are you aware of Superfund? Nestle, who convinced mother's to starve and poison their babies with formula and dirty water that replaced and then blocked lactation?
I am amused at the phrase "communist buerocrats [sic]". I live in the United States, where a particular bastard hybrid of socialism and crony capitalism requires that every birth be well documented by bureaucrats.
It has less to do with socialism and cronyism and everything to do with your rights. Your birth certificate is your primary evidence of citizenship. Literally every right you enjoy springs from that one document.
It was both killing newborn infant girls, especially where there was no ultrasound, and intentional miscarriages of girls when the ultrasound was used (which is why ultrasound is illegal in some parts of China).
Both are well documented and account for the 30M extra males than females (Can’t hide this cultural bias).
For some people killing a foetus is the same as killing an infant. Please respect different opinion on a subject that has no definitive answer. Calling people racist as soon as you disagree is indeed very telling.
The anti-Chinese racism on this site is fairly evident on anything having to do with China. dang even had to tell people to tone down the rhetoric recently. This is just another case in point. Just because you’re not aware of it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
They indisputably did, though. No fact can be racist.
Not because they're inhuman, of course; that sort of behavior has happened all throughout human history. It's just that, with China in the 20th century, the scale was huge.
There is still a male surplus and culturally people still prefer to have boys because they carry their family name. Girls are married out of the family and if your one child is a girl there will be nobody to look after you in your old age.
What a sick little comment. The world is a lot larger than the rich West and historically children were what we have - in some wealthy places - a social security system for. But in many places where the state is barely functional and family ties are strong children tend to take care of their elders, because that's how it's been traditionally. The best way to reduce that factor in how many children people have is to up the standard of living, which more or less automatically reduces the number of children people will have because they no longer need to worry that much about their old age.
On another note: those societies have - of necessity - much stronger family ties than that same rich West, so something valuable is lost along with the social needs.
It looks like in China it's even a law[1] that old people use to take advantage of their children.
Just because it's a "tradition" doesn't make it good. It's been a "tradition" to beat your wife and children as well in many parts of the world or even worse.
If you are miserable why would you like to make your children's life miserable as well?
In the USA we have a similar law that allows older people to use the resources of younger people to survive. We call it social security.
My point is just that sometimes things seem very different in other cultures but are not so different when you drill down. In both cultures we recognize that the elderly deserve to be taken care of. We just get to that goal in different ways. Neither one is prima facie better than the other and each had advantages and disadvantages.
When you're in a hole: stop digging. Really, this has absolutely no bearing on the discussion. Bringing spousal and child abuse into this is ridiculous.
And even in the affluent West it isn't all that rare to find children caring for their elders: it's perfectly ok, even if there is a tendency to stick old people in old folks homes and to try to forget about them even though they are still alive that definitely isn't something everybody subscribes to. Those that came before us deserve some respect and care in their old age, they are still family.
The COVID-19 epidemic has brought out one thing quite clearly: that there are people who wouldn't care one bit whether older people die off en masse. I wonder what the overlap is between those egoists and the ones that want to live forever.
"Tradition" is often used to justify all kind of behaviours(many times abusive behaviours) so I don't think my remark is that misplaced. I'm not a fan of gerontocracy "traditions"/laws regardless if they originate in China, Italy or the U.S either.
I would not ask someone to take care of myself if I'm unable to do so. I think it's fairer to make sure the world you leave behind is prosperous and equitable enough instead to rely on close relatives or invisible powers to take care of you when you innevitable become old.
Make sure you get paid well enough during your youth so that you can live off your own savings/pension when you become a zombie.
Why is it easier to imagine that Chinese people murder infants than it is to imagine literally any other scenario?
Why is it easier to assume that a massive sex imbalance is the result members of a particular group of people being psychopaths rather than the result of some systemic cause? Hmm.
Infanticide doesn’t mean psychopaths. It’s been practiced, and I think super bad, by many cultures. I don’t think that means the culture is full of psychopaths.
Also, I assumed the reason there was no evidence posted for the Chinese infanticide claim is that it’s extremely common and has been known for a long time. I just assumed everyone was aware.
It doesn’t mean people killing literal babies, but does mean stuff like more abortions of female embryos. [0]
Wikipedia [1] has a more general article with more links to sources.
True story: when we got pregnant in Beijing, our first ultrasound that could tell the sex of the baby, the technician was hinting at it (look there!), but she wasn’t allowed to say it out loud.
That’s an important distinction. And why I called out that much of the ratio imbalance is due to abortion and not literally people killing their baby after birth, although this does occur nonzero and is really horrifying to me.
Ancient cultures practiced it much more frequently and I think shows how different cultures have different values for life.
Yes, abortion is murder and a new human being is formed at conception. It's just convenient to call it something else not to appear monsters.
If a girl were adopted in China she would still show up in this dataset. I haven't heard about foreign adoption being popular in China (like it would be in eg. Africa), so the unbalance is likely to be the result of aborting/killing baby girls.
Foreign adoptions from China were popular a decade or two ago, now they pretty much don’t exist. Still, those flows should have had some effect on today’s numbers.
The proportional male surplus in China is just over double that of the US. Of course there is something different happening in China, but asserting that this is mostly due to people "killing female infants" is ludicrous. By your logic, there "only" about 2/5 (portionally) of female infants getting killed in the United States as well.
The natural ratio between male and female births averages around 51:49, the US is almost bang on this number. China is currently closer to 55:45... clearly there is some unnatural pressure going on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/F...
Which shows a massive male surplus particularly in the young demographics, way larger than you would biologically expect. How can we claim this policy has no effect if clearly people are still killing female infants?