China's One Child Policy

I hear people, who consider themselves liberal (in the sense of believing in a free society built on individual rights and civil liberties) talk in an accepting manner about China’s one child policy[1] and correlated drop in children per woman. It starts with the logical argument that the increasing population places an unsustainable burden on the ecosystem of Earth. It ends with the acceptance that something needs to be done, so we might as well accept the policy’s benefits to us. This argument raises the question of how far away a poor and subjugated person has to be for us to comfortably ignore them.

My opinion is that the effect of the policy should not matter, such authoritarianism can't be justified. My argument is that it hasn’t even been effective. China has gone through a rapid birthrate drop, going from 5.91 children per woman in 1967 to 2.01 in 1993[2]. This is generally great news for the country and the world. However, the one-child policy was enacted in 1978, when total fertility had already dropped to 2.91. The majority of the drop occurred before the policy existed.

Not only that, but countries all around China have accomplished similar, and in many cases, larger, drops in total fertility, without a one-child policy. See the below graph (courtesy of gapminder.org).

It is important to note that all countries shown accomplished the transition while poor. When South Korea reached the replacement rate of births in 1983 (about 2.1), it had a GDP per capita of $5,373[3], poorer than China today.

There is a bit more to the story. One criticism of the one-child policy is that it has led to a sex ratio disparity[4] (117 boys per 100 girls in 2000); creating many negative social consequences. This unbalance infamously exists in India (whose total fertility dropped from 5.66 in 1967 to 2.69 in 2009) and many other Southern and Easter Asian nations. This would suggest the one-child policy is not to blame. The good news is that these problems have the same solution: education. Educating females leads to fewer kids and higher incomes, which eventually leads to people seeing how dumb and ignorant they were to value males more. South Korea has almost pulled this feat off. Its sex ratio disparity has declined from 117:100 in 1990 to a nearly normal 107.4:100 in 2005.

1. The one-child policy in fact only covers 35.4% of the population (mostly urban non-minority women), according to the Chinese government’s statistics. However, only 11% of the population is permitted to have more than two kids.

2. In 2009 total fertility was 1.77 children per woman.

3. GDP Per Capita in 2005 Purchasing-Power-Parity $s, inflation-adjusted.

4. In this usage sex ratio is male to female births, however that definition doesn’t fully account for the disparity in the countries mentioned as female infanticide is a factor. A natural average sex ratio is put somewhere around 105:100.