China's One Child Policy Outline

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China’s One Child Policy Bo Chen and Blessing Nworji University of North Texas COMM 1010 Section 008 Ms. Denecia Spence November 2, 2009

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China’s One Child Policy China and the One Child Policy China's One Child Policy was originally established by former Chinese Premier Deng Xiao Ping in 1979 to control the rapid growth and population overshoot of the nation. Known natively as the Family Planning Policy, it was initially implemented as a "temporary measure" however it has shown to be so effective in controlling population that the policy continues to today. Although the One Child Policy limits Chinese couples to one child per family, it is not a blanket policy and has many built in measures and exemptions for certain circumstances. For example, rural couples, ethnic minorities, and parents without any siblings themselves are exempt from the policy restrictions; and China has also eliminated the one child policy for parents affected by the unexpected death of a child. In addition, this policy does not actually apply to many of the Special Administrative Regions of China, such as Macau, Hong Kong, and the disputed region of Taiwan. In total, only about 40% of the Chinese Han Mandarin population is currently subject to the latest iteration of the One Child Policy. China’s “One Child Policy” directly affects many of the larger intercultural, socialeconomic, macroeconomic, and hot-button geopolitical issues that we face in our global society today. Because population is interrelated on many levels and with such multifaceted aspects of social-economic, macroeconomic, and geopolitical dynamics in our globalized society, we aim to also demonstrate why China’s implementation of this policy has far-fetching consequences that reach beyond its sovereign borders.

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The Population Problem of Exponential Growth Many of the problems that China and the rest of the world are facing today can be attributed directly to the level of overconsumption of resources and overpopulation of humans on this planet. While these problems are local, national, and global, they are all tied together by the arithmetic of unchecked growth. Unfortunately the math tells us that our planetary population overshoot has made each and every fundamental problem that much worse by exacerbating, complicating, and compounding all situations with more and more numbers of people.

Peak Oil and EROEI Peak Oil is the point in time when the rate of global oil and petroleum extraction has reached a global peak and maximum, after which the world enters the stage of terminal decline in terms of global oil production. Peak Oil is based not only on the empirically observed production rates of individual oil wells, but also on the totality of combined production rate of a field of related oil wells in aggregate. While the United States entered terminal decline in the 1970's the world as a whole did not peak until late 2006. Many petroleum, energy, and economic experts and advisors have predicted that our civilization's high dependence on modern industrial production, transport, agricultural and food systems, and high technology systems all require the abundant availability of cheap and energy density sources of power in order to be sustained. After post peak oil the decline in total available net energy may signal the beginning of the end of our complex chain of modern global civilization as we know it to be.

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There is also a matter of EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested). Many so-called alternative sources of energy – even if they could be technologically achieved, and were economically feasible, and were scaled and brought online in time – are not energy dense enough to sustain the underlying foundations and fabric of modern civilization. As a result, the majority of all alternative and renewable sources of energy actually rely on the existence of petroleum power sources to be manufactured, installed, maintained, and decommissioned and all need conventional sources of energy to bring them to fruit; they are essentially derivatives of petroleum. Therefore, it is clear that modern civilization is structurally and fundamentally dependent on petroleum and its derivatives (such as coal, natural gas, etc.) as a necessary prerequisite to its very existence.

Eating Fossil Fuels Ever since the early 1950’s there has not been a positive correlation between net energy inflow and energy outflow in modernized agriculture. Due to many combined factors such as soil segregation and the loss of top soil and arable land, we have reached a point of diminishing returns in farming. The agricultural green revolution refers to the extensive use of fertilizers, pesticides, and technological farm equipment (all based on petroleum products or its many derivatives) to allow global food production to keep pace with worldwide population growth and exponential demand in rising standards of living.

Thus like China's population control

mechanism, this Green Revolution also has had significant social, ecological, and macroeconomic impacts. Quite literally, we are eating fossil fuels, and when petroleum runs out we will face worldwide food shortages – this is true even if we don’t convert a single arable acre of land to growing government subsidized corn/ethanol to power our SUVs.

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Fiat Currency, Fractional Reserve Banking and Petrodollar Hegemony The entire globalized modern banking and financial systems also rely devastating on the existence of cheap and abundant oil, petroleum, and other hydrocarbon sources of power in order to be sustain. Today much of our economies are actually debt-based economies that operate under a fiat currency, fractional reserve banking system where money equals debt and both are created out of thin air by central banks solely on the demand of it alone. The US dollar - the world’s current reserve currency – is pegged to barrels of oil (it has long since decoupled from the Gold Standard) by sheer force of America’s military might and the implicitly agreement of OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) to sell and export their oil with condition of accepting exclusively US denominated dollars. When the US Federal Reserve prints monies to the tune of trillions to prop up America’s debt happy tendencies, it is actually by and large the rest of the world – including major holders of US debt, securities and treasures such as China, Japan and the European Union – that pay for it through the devaluation of their dollar denominated assets. Essentially America has been raising the standard of living of its own citizens by inflating and diluting the purchasing power and eroding the savings of the citizens of every other nation in the world, and this in turn gives the United States an unfair advantage on the world stage, and allows it to continue consuming disproportionate amounts of the world’s last sizeable deposits of oil and of other dwindling resources. Our debt-based economies and global financial capitalistic markets are also based on the expectation of perpetual growth. In fact our entire monetary system is one giant pyramid scheme that by its very nature requires more and more able and willing participants to join in on the party in order to starve off the inevitable implosion and collapse. In essence, as a society and a global civilization we have always financed today’s expenses using the expectation of future

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generation’s expanded growth as collateral to pay off current debt. America’s (and also to a lesser extent the rest of the world’s) debt can only realistically ever hope to be paid off if and only if it can continue to growth economically and expand in prosperity at a fast enough rate. However, it is an inconvenient truth and a stark mathematically certainty that exponential and/or perpetual growth in a finite environment is an utter and absurd notion, a total and absolute impossibility. Many physical restraints such as resource depletion of energy and the laws of entropy and thermodynamics explicitly prohibit the fallacy of perpetual never-ending growth of any kind. With the limits of growth comes the collapse and demise of our modern capitalistic society and the Ponzi pyramid schemes that underlying modern macroeconomics – as with any other kind of scheme, when there is no more growth it simply collapses upon itself domino chain reaction supernova style.

One Child Policy Revisited After nearly 30 years today millions of single children are coming of age in China and transforming into the young adults of China's bright and prosperous future. The Central Chinese Government has recently enacted several newer special provisions allowing millions of couples to have two or more children legally and without penalty. Adults born and raised under the One Child Policy can now have two children of their own, thus preventing too dramatic of a population reduction and helping to alleviate the problem of China's aging population. China’s “One Child Policy” is aligned with the nation’s objective of a peaceful rise to power and beneficial towards the direction of one harmonious world. To put things into perspective, China’s One Child Policy has overwhelming succeeded in helping to reduce the burden of every other social-economic problem – a lesser overpopulated nation means less

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pollution, less disease, less completion, consumption, less social unrest, and greater freedom of wealth, prosperity, equality and equity for all to enjoy. A stable, healthy, prosperous and sustainable China is good for the world and for China – a peaceful and happy China is a China that is more empowered to lead the world and help achieve unity and one new world order in the coming interesting and uncertain times. In conclusion, it is important for us to remember that economically, physically, and even socially, there is no such thing as a “free lunch”. In everything we do there are always opportunity costs and tradeoffs. As with money, there is a time-value of “freedom”. Our choice to pursue prosperity and growth right now at the expense of sustainability and our environment will produce orders of magnitude more pain, suffering, and personal sacrifices (including the loss of freedom) required from future generations. China’s One Child Policy should be considered by the Obama administration to be implemented in the United States - even though American’s make up only 5% of world population, we consume more than 50% of the world’s resources, thus per capita we are actually significantly more overpopulated than even China.

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