China launches the Three Child Policy
Is this reform?
Or more authoritarian madness?
Welcome to China Uncensored, I’m Chris Chappell.
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This week, China announced a new three
child policy! That’s up from the two child policy launched in 2016.
Reuters says this three-child policy is a major policy shift.
The New York Times says China is “relaxing the policy”.
And the Washington Post calls it “a further unwinding of its
once-draconian regime of population control.”
Amazing. Every word of what they said is wrong.
The Chinese Communist Party is not unwinding its once draconian regime of population control.
It’s still there. Did you miss the part where they called it a policy?!
The Party is still telling people how many children they can have.
And the “family planning system” they set up four decades ago is still in place.
The family planning system was set up for the One Child Policy,
and it’s caused, “tens of millions of abortions and sterilizations”
...with the “corrupt and brutal family-planning officials
[who] demolished the homes of some who resisted”.
Where, “Women had their menstrual cycles recorded on blackboards, for all to see.”
And the three child policy certainly isn’t,
“a tacit recognition of the damage done” as the Washington Post says.
Because the Communist Party will never admit it did anything wrong. Even silently.
For instance, have you heard about the Hundred Childless Days?
It happened here, in Guan County, Shandong Province.
Locals also call it the slaughter of lambs.
In 1991, when you were watching Rugrats , this Chinese county
“was deemed to have too high a birth rate by the provincial government”.
And so local officials marked 100 days where no one was allowed to give birth. Think about what
that means. Anyone who was pregnant was forced to have an abortion. It didn’t matter if it
was their first child. It didn’t matter how far along into the pregnancy they were. Baby, gone.
Even if a woman had already given birth, it didn’t matter.
“One local official claims that these ‘procedures’ were sometimes no more than a kick in the stomach
from an out-of-town mercenary. Children who did make it into the world were reportedly strangled,
and their bodies tossed into open pits.
The families of pregnant women were publicly shamed in reprises of the Cultural Revolution.”
Now that’s socialized medicine with Chinese characteristics.
What the Chinese Communist Party will never do is give Chinese people freedom. The freedom to
decide for themselves how they think they should live, even in their private lives.
And when the Party tells people what’s best for society—the Party always screws things up.
You see, back in the day, Chairman Mao Zedong had the great idea that
a huge population would be good for China. Well, not so much for China, but for him.
He said he wasn’t afraid of nuclear war because, “China has a population of 600 million;
even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million people left.”
And so in the early 1950s, the Party began a mass political campaign to encourage people to have
babies. They limited access to birth control. And surprise! There was a population explosion.
But then, oh no, there was a population explosion! Time for a mass political campaign.
The One Child policy started in 1979, and the Party claims it prevented 400 million births.
But then, oh no! The population is shrinking!
I know, let’s have a mass political campaign
to encourage people to have more kids! And in 2016, that meant the Two Child Policy.
But even so, “Births have dropped for four straight years.”
Wow, sounds like the two child policy didn’t work. I know! Let’s have a mass political campaign.
If the people didn’t like the two child policy, they’ll love a three child policy!
This poll from state-run Xinhua asks, “Are you ready for the three child policy?”
20,000 out of the 22,000 answers said “I won’t consider it at all.”
Wrong answer! The poll was quickly deleted.
There are deeper societal problems in China
that aren’t going to be solved just by letting people have more kids.
Some Chinese men are literally choosing vasectomies over kids.
There’s a lifestyle called “Double Income, No Kids,” or DINK, for couples who don’t want to
have children. And it’s an increasingly popular thing with Chinese millennials.
Yeah, after decades of the one child policy,
Chinese people today don’t want more kids. They kind of want no kids.
One problem is, “Intense workplace competition, inadequate child care and widespread job
discrimination against pregnant women have made childbearing an unappealing prospect for many.”
Again, those things aren’t solved by a three-child policy.
China is still a relatively poor country.
900 million people—that’s more than two thirds of China—live on less than five dollars a day. Still.
A lot of parents had to leave their kid behind in the countryside,
so they could move to cities and make enough money to send back home to support that kid.
They couldn’t take their kid with them, because of China’s hukou system,
which controls where people are allowed to live. Yes, the Party controls that, too.
The New York Times interviewed one man who’s living the DINK lifestyle, vasectomy and all,
because “[His] parents were factory workers in southern Guangdong Province
and rarely came to visit him in Hunan, his hometown.
They never developed a relationship with him, even though he was their only child.”
So now he doesn’t want kids.
This is a big problem for the Communist Party.
“Demographers have long warned that the rising number of Chinese people choosing
not to have children is a major reason for the country’s shrinking population.”
So the real problem here is that the Party is still letting people *choose* not to have kids!
Clearly the only thing to do is to *require* people to have more kids. Problem solved.
And now it’s time to answer a question from a member of the China Uncensored 50 Cent Army,
fans who support us and our efforts to expose the
truth about the Chinese Communist Party on the crowd funding website Patreon.
Nikolay asks,
“Chris, Can you speak Mandarin? I would love to hear you saying "Taiwan is a country."
Nikolay’s question is in response to an episode we did on Monday about John Cena. He got in
trouble with the China market for calling Taiwan a country in a Mandarin interview he gave in Taiwan.
Now, obviously my Mandarin cannot compare to John Cena.
However I do speak a little. But unlike John Cena, I can say “Táiwān shì guójiā.” (台湾是国家) And I won’t
even apologize to the Chinese Communist Party for saying it.
Thanks for your question and your support, Nikolay.
And a big thank you to everyone who supports China Uncensored on Patreon. We could not do this show
without you. So thank you for joining us in the fight to expose the Chinese Communist Party to
the world. If you’re interested in joining, head over to Patreon.com/ChinaUncensored. You’ll get
a bunch of cool perks, including the chance to have me answer your question on the show!
Once again I’m Chris Chappell, see you next time.