China WANTS Teen Pregnancy

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TBH, it was never quite that. it was one child for members of the Han majority. But, there have been a series of policy changes over the last few decades allowing for more children. For quite a while they had a 1.5 child policy where if the first child was a girl, they'd let you have another child.

The real problem is that there has been enough improvement in quality of life that having a half dozen children is no longer necessary or desirable.

You can tell they're inaccurate just from watching the China Uncensored channel alone.

I'm very much critical of communism and of the Chinese government to the point were I've been called a "reactionary".

I'm no friend to China yet even by my standards, those two guys have an anti-china bias.

If you really want an uncensored view of China which is not afraid to be critical of China yet not biased, check out ADVchina and laowhy86

Yes. The far eastern countries love to do their top-down social engineering. Singapore also...goes back and forth...encouraging late marriages and few babies one decade, and then the next does an about face and encourages young folks to marry young and to crank out more babies.

But it also a lesson to everyone how there is no free lunch. Growing populations create problems, and static, and shrinking populations also create problems. Either way there are tradeoffs.

Yes, and once growth gets out of control the way that it did in the PRC, it's tough to get it back under control without serious risks.

In retrospect, they should have made it a 2 child policy, as you need somewhere a bit north of 2 just to maintain your population. You never get 100% of people in marriages or other unions where they have one kid per person, so a bit north of that is required for population replacement.

That being said, even without a formal policy as the prosperity of the typical Chinese citizen has increased, the pressure and benefits of having more children has diminished.

The situation is probably not nearly as dire as it seems, as there were a number of births over the last few decades that were kept off the books by local governments that didn't want to be responsible for angry parents of children that weren't authorized.

If they're going to try social engineering they shouldn't base it on knee-jerk overreactions.

Thats exactly what they dont do, and we do do.
The Asian societies are into long range thinking.

But they also have a populace that goes along with each turn on the dime.

Traditional rural societies have high birth rates because in such societies a child is a capital good (tools you need to help on the farm). In urban industrialized societies (like the US, Europe, and Japan) children are a "consumer good"- like vacation cruises. So you only buy as many as you can afford. China is rapidly moving into the later and in coastal provinces is already there. So the one child policy just speeded up something that was going to happen anyway when China industrialized which was to follow the Western world in getting a lower birth rate.

China is forecasted to have its population shrink rapidly in the next half century or so & it wishes to reverse that trend, I think.

Shrinking per se wouldnt be bad. In fact that was probably the goal back in Mao's day. China has like five times the US population but only about one forth to one third our land area (on the map China is actually slightly bigger than the US, but only about a quarter of china is farmable livable land (China proper) and little bit more is rich grazing grassland (like our Prarie in Inner Mongolia, and Manchuria) the rest is little better at supporting humans than the Moon (Tibet, Xinjiang). 90 percent have to live in 30 percent of the country because the rest is waistland.

Its not the total number shrinking- its the shape of the population that results. Too many retired old folks and not enought working young people to support them.

I didn't really think about livable land versus existing land but that is a good point.

Yeah, not enough people working is an issue for China and many countries I think, particularly to the interests of 'the economy' or capitalist yardsticks in general.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxENdlE ... naObserver

The Chinese government never act on policy without a plan
This has been in the pipeline for a long time
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5gw8vn/ ... ng-program
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/01/china-w ... astic.html

What isn't reported is that as with most east asian countries, they want more babies, but they want to smart people to have more kids to boost the country's IQ.

But as with the rest of the world the smarter and wealthier you become the less kids you have. If you read Deng Xiao Ping's ideas many years ago he wanted the best genes from Chinese and Europeans to be combined invoking eugenics and breeding farms to pump out designer kids.

I heard there has been a seismic shift in the dating and "baby making" scene in china if you can call it that.

Apparently, a huge problem for chinese men is the tradition of providing a gift to the wife as a condition of marriage. In the past, this would have been something simple like a kettle or bicycle, now however, it's often exceeding a typical mans life savings and many men find it impossible to get a woman to take them seriously now.

There have been numerous news articles on this subject that make for interesting reading as many see it as a significant contributing factor for the plummeting birth rate..

Another factor is that China's old one child only policy has become part of the countries psychological mindset, an old habit that is hard to break so to speak.

Thats all well and good...but they might want to deal with the discrimination a teen mother faces in China and also aid them in financial support as there seems to be a loophole for unmarried woman in the workplace there..

Else its not a particularly desirable route for young women..

In Ancient Sparta, it was customary for an infertile/eldery man's wife (in case she's much younger) to be impregnated by another fertile man..

The things human societies do for reproduction.

I doubt the Spartans are considered role models for any modern society though. Women aren't considered broodstock hens anymore.