One Child Nation
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| One Child Nation movie poster |
In the fantastic documentary One Child Nation, a communist propaganda video clip was shown, bragging that over 338 million babies were prevented (presumably by force), saving $130 million in resources. Although numbers from the Chinese Communist Party are always to be taken with a grain of salt, this is a stunning admission, that they would brag that they value a baby's life at 38.5 cents. Of course, any normal person touting this statistic would be branded either a crazy or evil person.
The documentary accounts tragic stories of babies aborted, born babies killed by government officials, unwanted baby girls being left out to die, fetuses and children discarded in trash heaps, children sold for adoption, forced sterilizations, lives ruined for defying the one child policy, and desperate pregnant women attempting to flee government capture. The horrors of infanticide from the one child policy is one of the most brutal policies ever implemented.
The documentary never covered the origins of the one child policy, but my suspicions are the hysteria of overpopulation in the west during the 70s and 80s. I remember my own fourth grade teacher scaring her students about overpopulation. This hysteria was fueled by Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb, published in the late 1960s. Two short decades after World War II and in the height of the Cold War and the baby boom, this message spread like wildfire.
Ehrlich posited that exponential population growth combined with limited agricultural growth would lead to worldwide famines by the 1980s. Of course, this never happened. With a much higher population today, hunger and poverty continues to decline. While famines are not extinct, the overwhelming reason is political turmoil such as wars and centrally planned catastrophes.
One major reason his predictions never came to pass is Ehrlich's faulty assumption that agricultural output had peaked. This, of course, is a ridiculous assumption to make as technological advances such as genetically modified crops greatly increased crop yields per acre.
Unfortunately, the communists in China decided to take this thesis at face value and crafted the cruel policy that caused infanticide for baby girls and a demographic catastrophe that is now starting to rear its head. Are they really surprised at the result? This is a culture that is dominantly a patrilineal one. The male carries the family name which is very important in the culture and often, when the female marries, they get integrated into the groom's family, which may live many villages away, effectively leaving the family.
In 2015, China lifted its one child policy and revised it now to two children per family.
Sadly, in the documentary, the narrator interviews many people, including her own mother, who still think the one child policy was a good thing and necessary for the survival of China, citing the same errors that Ehrlich made. It's difficult to lay full blame on them for thinking so. This is a very poorly educated populace, with the majority of its education being indoctrination camps. Throughout their entire lives, they are bombarded with state propaganda and have extremely restricted access to real information. Then heap on the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, which is extremely common in politics. Many of them were coming off the results of the disaster of The Great Leap Forward, which caused a famine that killed tens of millions of people, and they look around now, seeing a much higher quality of life, and think that the one child policy saved them instead of the real reason, which is the freeing of markets in Special Economic Zones.
In an interesting realization as the narrator recalled feelings of anger toward the apathy mired in helplessness people showed toward the situation, she said "It reminded me, when every major life decision is made for you, for all your life, it's hard to feel responsible for the consequences."
