Meister said:
Prosperity sounds like a noble goal, however, the way they are achieving it is more than questionable. Here some tidbids:
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It absolutely is questionable. But, without discounting ANY of the problems you enumerate, let me point out that you can also calculate the number of people who would die, per day, if China had not achieved the prosperity it has now. In China in the 1970's and 80's when this policy was at its peak "added prosperity" did not mean an extra TV set or car. It meant not starving, teaching children to read rather than having them slave in fields, and having at least a minimally trained "barefoot doctor" in every village rather than no access to medicine at all.
What I'm saying is that from the comfort of our heated apartments with 24/7 pizza delivery, ambulence service, and small class sizes it is easy to overlook just how desperate the situation was in China when this policy was enacted.
I would agree with you--if these draconian policies were just helping a few people to a 2nd car it would be out of whack. But if it's helping people to avoid starvation, receive crucial medical care, and get a very basic education for their kids, then perhaps some fairly severe downsides are an acceptable trade-off.
One side point that does need to be mentioned -- the communist party in China, for all its fuckups, has always been an extreme advocate of women's rights, and Chinese women had equal status in China, legally, and practically, long before they did here in Canada. It is persistant rural sexist attitudes that survive despite heavy government attempts to change them that lead to the female infanticides, abortions of female children, and not some sexism on the part of the government itself. That does NOT change your argument, but it does need to be pointed out that the govt. that enacted the one child policy was a fairly pro-feminist government. China's failures politically are in the area of power-preserving repression and economic fuckups. In the realm of gender equality they took the communist notion of "to each according to their needs" and extended rights to women earlier than Western nations did.
Hence the thumping that communist nations used to deliver in the women's sports in the olympics, if you want a visible example--communist nations funded womens sports *equally* to men's sports, while Western nations generally and to some extent still do just threw a few crumbs to female athletics. The result, until we were humiliated enough by it to change our ways, was absolute Eastern Bloc dominance of all women's sporting events for several decades as we sent our untrained and unfunded amateurs to compete with their well trained, well funded professionals. You can compare male vs. female olympic results and notice that we DID hold our own in mens events, so it wasn't just across the board athletic superiority--it was OUR failure in female athletics. That attitude towards female equality was not confined to sports in China but extended throughout the culture--China used to dress men and women in the same garb, when even what people wore was centrally controlled, to push the message that women and men were equals. In part that's why today there are nearly as many Chinese female business owners as male, something we have never achieved in Canada, to take a more modern economically relevant example.
At any rate, it's true that sexist rural attitudes combined with the one child policy may be responsible for some of the imbalance. On the other hand, it may just be that women in those places would have been forced to abort female children even WITHOUT the policy--the imbalance might just be worse today if there were lots of families with 7 male children and no women. Perhaps all that changed was access to modern technology and medical procedures that enabled sexist rural chinese to find out whether they were carrying a female child and abort? Maybe the one child policy has nothing to do with it.
If you want to find govt. sponsored sexism in an asian nation try democratic, capitalist Japan which undertook NONE of the chinese govts. steps to end sexism.
