The Wall Street Journal reported last week that China will be removing the last legal barriers to families having as many children as they want.1 In 1979, China was worried about over-population, so it instituted a strict one-child policy. Enforcement got quite nasty.
By the 2010s, China had a problem: not enough babies. The population was aging. The workforce was going to start shrinking. In 2015, the one-child policy was changed to two children.2 The increase from one child to two children didn’t work, so earlier this year, the limit was increased to three children. Now, all of the birth limits will be repealed.
1. Does the Chinese Communist Party really think that, at this point, they can get women to have more children by changing the law on the number of babies a woman can have? If so, then they aren’t as smart as I thought they were.
2. In which case, maybe we don’t need to worry about China as a competitor around the world as much as we thought.
3. Unless, their lack of understanding on something as relatively simple as this carries over to other things, in which case we may have to worry about them even more. We will need to worry about them making miscalculations and stumbling into disputes, or worse, because they think they can control things that they can’t. Which may be the biggest worry.
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1 Also, here.
2 The limit never applied to minorities, like Tibetans.
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