China, a start

A lot of people know a little bit about China's one-child policy, which I learned today has been in place since 1979 and will likely remain for at least the next ten years. If you know as little about this as I did a few hours ago (and I only know a very little more now), I might ask you to stop with me before we go further and agree that we ought not to be looking for an equivocal stance on whether the policy is good or not – a discussion which always seems to implicate China as a whole, as if our opinion of the regulation of family sizes would indicate an opinion of China as either a practical, prosperous economic engine or as a faceless government-controlled land bereft of basic human rights. Issues that are this complicated do not have on/off switches for answers, and there may not exist a single person anywhere who understands the history and circumstances of the issue well enough to make a judgment that approximates something like objectivity. All we can do – all we can ever do – is learn as much as we can, and remember that our own understanding is always partial. Only then will we be open to others' partial understandings and more reasonable in our suggestions of what might be done.

The Wikipedia entry on the one-child policy is a good start, and led me to one article that seems an example of What Not To Do. It’s a petition published ten years ago in the Washington Times that aims to browbeat its readers into adopting the author’s rather extreme views, and thereby attempts to prevent the funding of population control programs like China’s family planning policy. Many of the points raised by the author – such as the very real problems concerning the favouring of sons over daughters, a cultural proclivity which results in a staggering imbalance in the gender ratio, something like 120-100 nationwide – have also been raised by other, more even-handed writers, but the present author mixes in what might be truth with such obviously militant pronouncements and rhetoric that it’s hard to take him seriously. It is of course a good thing that many will be introduced to the subject through this article, and will hopefully be motivated to read further and think for themselves, but the corollary danger is that the real injustices and crimes mentioned, the rates of infanticide and the cultural bias against girls, may be dismissed by readers who object to the writer’s caustic, bullish prose.

Stephen Moore (the author) writes that “no sane person” would subscribe to the view he objects to, which, if you think about it, is sort of just a mild way of saying “you’re all crazy.” It’s not a long stretch from this to the adjectives he appends to any mention of the fund or the family planning policy, which include “genocidal,” “fanatical,” and “demon-like.” With the exception of “genocidal,” which is a real and serious accusation, the language Moore employs is emotional and imprecise, and doesn’t tell us very much. I always think in situations like this: if this person thinks a system is “fanatical,” there must be one other person who thinks it isn’t, and wouldn’t it be nice if I had a glimpse of the opposing argument to compare? But Moore’s article is staunch and impenetrable.

I don’t want to turn this in to a catalogue of all the pros and cons of family planning in countries such as China, because I don’t know enough on the subject and don’t pretend to. That being said, I know enough already to raise my eyebrows when Moore writes that

family planning services do not promote women's and children's health; they come at its expense. There are many Third World hospitals that lack bandages, needles and basic medicines but are filled to the brim with boxes of condoms -- stamped UNFPA or USAID.

It’s not clear how the lack of resources in third world hospitals is related to the promotion of smaller families, but I would think that increasing the number of births in such hospitals would not in itself lead to better all-round sanitation. I also don’t see the connection to condoms, which are freely distributed in clinics in many other countries, including in the west. Contraception, whose purpose is to curtail unwanted pregnancies, is surely good sense and has nothing to do with the ability of couples to control the number of offspring they have, except perhaps to improve it. Moore thus makes a false monster (or a straw man) out of a population-control initiative that I can’t imagine anyone objecting to: that of reducing the number of unplanned, accidental and unwanted pregnancies in a population already bursting at the seams.

I will only say one more thing here, which is that Moore’s own solution to the problem seems to be that we ought to inject more capitalism into China and watch as it solves everything. This is evident even before his last paragraph, in which he basically says that all Third World countries should model themselves after the U.S. in order to improve themselves. I won’t address Moore’s contentions directly, except to say that when the problem is as complex and variegated as this one is, in a country as large and politically bristly as China, and your solution is a one-liner combined with a dismissal of all the cultural, economic, social and historical realities that underscore the daily lives of nearly a billion and a half people - well, your solution may not get us very far.