Using surveys of 421 men and women in Beijing and testing their skills in economic games, researchers in Australia found those born after the 1979 policy were more pessimistic, nervous, less conscientious, less competitive and more risk averse. They also found them to be 23 percent less prone to choose an occupation that entails business risk, such as becoming a stockbroker, entrepreneur or private firm manager.

[…] Xin Meng, a co-author of the study who grew up in Beijing and left China in 1988, said she detects a different behavioral attitude among the only-child population compared with the previous generation. A 2011 incident where a two-year-old girl in southern China died after she was struck by two vans and ignored by 18 passersby caused a furor, with domestic media and Internet users criticizing Chinese society for a lack of morality.

“An incident like this is just unthinkable 20 years ago,” said Meng, a professor of economics at the Australian National University in Canberra. “If you’ve lived in the Chinese society for a long time, you can sense the difference as people become more individualistic.”

Lisa Cameron, another of the study’s authors, discussed the findings (PDF transcript) with Sarah Crespi on the Science magazine podcast.

Some have expressed reservations about the study, however. From Rebecca Morelle at the BBC:

Professor Stuart West, from the University of Oxford, said the study was “very interesting”.

However, he cautioned against some of the conclusions that had been drawn.

He explained: “They are making very strong claims about differences in behaviour for people born before or after 1979, and they are inferring it is all to do with the introduction of the one child policy in that year.

“The problem is that is a potential explanation for that data – but there are almost an infinite number of other explanations of anything else that could have varied with time: variation of socio-economic environment, prosperity, nutrition, political environment – anything.”

And from Louise Watt at the Associated Press:

Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas in Austin who studies these children, was puzzled that the study’s findings showed poor performance so consistently in virtually all measures. She said she would have expected a more mixed picture, and she hopes follow-up research is done.

[…] Careful studies done elsewhere that look for certain qualities in the only child find that “on average, they’re pretty much like everybody else,” she said.

A recent survey of 51,100 people by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences supports the idea that Chinese society lacks trust, according to Xinhua. Its authors, though, point to a wider range of contributing factors including migration.

The Chinese public was given a “trust score” of just 59.7 points out of a total of 100, according to the results of the CASS survey conducted among residents in seven cities, including Beijing, east China’s Shanghai, south China’s Guangzhou, central China’s Wuhan and southwest China’s Chongqing municipalities.

The survey showed that residents in China’s central and western regions tend to trust others more than their eastern counterparts.

[…] Yang Yiyin, one of the survey’s organizers, attributed the lack of trust to migration, China’s transformation from a planned economy to a market economy and declining “family culture.”

“People are more concerned about trust, especially in a transformative period when a new system of trust has not been established,” said Yang.

Migration would not account for differences between the Australian study’s native Beijingers, but its role in loosening the traditional social fabric finds anecdotal support in the Wang Yue incident cited above by Xin Meng. In October 2011, The Telegraph’s Malcolm Moore visited the Foshan marketplace where the accident took place:

Although many other families live in the market above their stores, there is little sense of community. Just as in countless other hardscrabble suburbs across China, the residents are mostly migrants, drawn from all over the country.

They have little in common, beyond their shared desire to make money and improve their lot. And in the evenings, they close their shutters and retreat into their lonely stores.

“It is quite sad that we don’t really talk to each other because we all sell different things,” said a 50-year-old woman who would only name herself as Ms Hu, from a store selling abrasive pads a short stroll away from the Wang’s shop.

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Post tags: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, demographics, Foshan, little emperor, migration, moral vacuum, one-child policy, population control, trust, trust crisis, Yueyue
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Proposed changes would allow for urban couples to have a second child, even if one of the parents is themselves not an only child, the China Daily cited Zhang Weiqing, the former head of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, as saying on Wednesday.

Under current rules, urban couples are permitted a second child if both parents do not have siblings. Looser restrictions on rural couples means many have more than one child.

[…] President Hu Jintao dropped a standard reference to maintaining low birth rates in his work report to the ruling Communist Party’s five-yearly congress in early November, a break which some experts see as evidence of an imminent change to the one-child policy.

Demographers warn that the policy has led to a rapidly graying population that could hamper China’s economic competitiveness.

See more on the one-child policy and China’s demographics via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: aging populaion, demographics, gender imbalance, one-child policy, population, population control
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The following example of censorship instructions, issued to the media and/or Internet companies by various central (and sometimes local) government authorities, has been leaked and distributed online. Chinese journalists and bloggers often refer to those instructions as “Directives from the Ministry of Truth.” CDT has collected the selections we translate here from a variety of sources and has checked them against official Chinese media reports to confirm their implementation.

Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. The original publication date is noted after the directives; the date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source.

Guangdong Propaganda Department: Do not report or comment on expert discussion of a “two-child policy.” (November 6, 2012)

广东省委宣传部：有关专家学者讨论放开二胎生育问题，不报道不评论。

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
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The debate on China’s one-child policy has gone very public. A recent poll on Sina Weibo, a popular microblogging platform in China, asked the question, “Do you support allowing two children?” And it’s a 1984 Reagan-versus-Mondale style blowout. Out of 30,006 votes cast, 71.7% support abrogating the one-child policy, and only 28.3% want to keep it.

[...] When reading the survey results, however, the standard caveats apply: Those using Chinese social media tend to be younger, richer, and more educated than the Chinese population at large. Furthermore, only a small subset of that subset has chosen to participate in the poll. But the younger, richer, and digitally active Chinese who use social media regularly are many of the same people who will be making policy in the coming decades, and also making choices about whether or not to have children–and perhaps how many.

The most-read post on this debate appears to have come from Charles Xue, a well-known angel investor and web commenter. Xue describes how, “In the 50s…we blindly followed the Soviet Union, which had lost many people in the second world war and so encouraged births on a wide scale. They had few people and much land. The Dean of Peking University at that time, Ma Yinchu, felt that China had many people and not much [arable] land, with limited resources and primitive agricultural methods.” Xue describes how Ma thus suggested a limit of two children per household to keep birth rates normal.

[...] Now, thirty years later, “there are 20% fewer 20 year olds than there are 30 year olds!” The saddest part, according to Xue, is the shidu or “lost singles” families, Chinese slang for couples from the 50s and 60s who lived through great hardship, had their one child, then lost their one child to illness or accidents and are now forced to grow old with no one to care for them.

See also Report: China Should End One-Child Policy via CDT. Read more on China’s one-child policy via CDT.

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Post tags: aging populaion, demographics, family planning, one-child policy, online public opinion, population control, weibo
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The report, produced by the China Development Research Foundation and highlighted by the state-run Xinhua news agency, points to China’s plummeting birth rate and numerous impending demographic imbalances in arguing that the one-child policy has outlived its usefulness, according to Xinhua.

China should have no need for birth planning after 2020, and should in fact begin encouraging families to have more children to avoid dangerously low fertility rates in the future, Xinhua quotes the report as saying.

Chinese family planning authorities credit the one-child policy with preventing around 400 million births, but concerns over the economic implications of China’s rapidly aging population, a widening gender imbalance and growing rights consciousness have led increasing numbers of academics and regular citizens to openly question the policy, which is sometimes enforced in brutal ways.

The Associated Press reports that while the report has significance because it comes from a government-affiliated group, “it remains unclear whether Chinese leaders are ready” to implement its recommended approach:

Cai Yong, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said the report holds extra weight because the think tank is under the State Council, China’s Cabinet. He said he found it remarkable that state-backed demographers were willing to publicly propose such a detailed schedule and plan on how to get rid of China’s birth limits.

“That tells us at least that policy change is inevitable, it’s coming,” said Cai, who was not involved in the drafting of the report but knows many of the experts who were. Cai is a visiting scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai. “It’s coming, but we cannot predict when exactly it will come.”

Adding to the uncertainty is a once-in-a-decade leadership transition that starts Nov. 8 and will see a new slate of top leaders installed by next spring. Cai said the transition could keep population reform on the back burner or changes might be rushed through to help burnish the reputations of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao on their way out.

See also recent CDT coverage of China’s controversial one-child policy.

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Post tags: China Development Research Foundation, Hu Jintao, one-child policy, population control, State Council, Wen Jiabao
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“I think many people like to have these simple large numbers that are easy to recognize, and impressive, but unfortunately it’s baseless, it’s unscientific,” said Wang [Feng, director of Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy]. “The Chinese government likes to use this as a way to support, to justify the continued implementation of the one-child policy, which is long outdated.”

The scholars say that China’s biggest drop in fertility came from 1970-79 before the one-child policy was introduced and that the reductions since then have been largely due to economic and social reforms that make small families more attractive ….

“Thailand and China have had almost identical fertility trajectories since the mid 1980s,” he said. “Thailand does not have a one-child policy.”

See also Jonathan Watts’ excellent ‘Parents Benefit From One-Child Policy – If They Follow the Rules‘, on China’s immensely complicated and costly family planning system, via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
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A document on family planning in Guangdong’s 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), which will be issued soon, states that a low birth rate is to be maintained, said Zhang Feng, director of the provincial population and family planning commission, in Nanfang Daily on Sunday.

In July, Zhang said the provincial authorities had applied to the central government and were waiting for approval to lead the country in relaxing the family planning policy.

If the application was approved, couples in which either the husband or wife is an only child would be allowed to have a second child, he said in July.

According to Zhang then, the province had room to relax the one-child policy, which has been in place for more than three decades, because such a move would not lead to a fast increase in population, largely due to the increased costs of giving birth to and raising children.

An AFP report points out that it is unclear whether Guangdong had completely scrapped its plans or whether Beijing had rejected them.

In the vein of early-stage family planning, Shanghai prepares to introduce the city’s first set of sex education textbooks to primary school students just a couple months after Beijing’s first sex education textbooks drew heavy criticism.  A China.org opinion piece last month, with the accompanying cartoon, addressed the controversial textbook and its implications on Chinese society:

The book, titled, “Footsteps of Growing Up” shows some almost pornographic images of a couple engaged in sexual activities. Some parents see such ‘blunt’ and ‘influential’ teaching methods as being a constructive step forward in educating China’s youngsters about the ‘facts of life’. However, alerting those so vulnerable, curious and easily-influenced about such intriguing and fascinating issues will surely only encourage them to experiment with, and even re-enact what they are discovering at school.

My four-year-old-son has already been asking me questions about how babies are made. This is a natural query many young children make as they start to become inquisitive about their own bodies and notice the differences between the genders. Adopting an honest attitude to such questions is important. However, we need not go into the same graphic detail that we find in the illustrations in China’s explicit new textbook, “Footsteps of Growing Up”. More important than how parents educate their children about sex is the fact that parents themselves should do the educating, not a teacher in a biology lesson. It should not be a school’s right or responsibility to inform children about issues of a sexual nature. That is the job of the parents.

Meanwhile, at the upper levels of China’s education system, a series of regulations made public in September mandate sexual education for university students. From the People’s Daily:

Nowadays, though many college students are mature physically, they lack mental maturity, which leads to misunderstandings about sexual knowledge and sexual psychology.

Most of the college students adopt an inclusive and accepting attitude. Some 88 percent of students think one should be responsible for his or her sexual behaviors, while many students are not familiar with the consequences of pregnancy and the damages to a woman’s physical and mental health caused by artificial abortion.

During an activity in which free abortion services were offered to pregnant female college students launched by a hospital of another city, the hospital received about 50 phone consultations and did operations for 28 matched girls aged from 18 to 23. For most of the girls it was the first time, but other girls have had an abortion three or four times. Many college students do not understand that the abortion operation can cause permanent damage to uterus and infections in reproductive organs.

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Post tags: 12th Five-Year Plan, Beijing, Guangdong, one-child policy, population control, sex education, Shanghai
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The economies of China and India [according to Citigroup’s Willem Buiter] will together be four times as large as the United States, restoring the historic order of Asian dominance before Europe’s navies burst on the scene in the 16th Century. Panta Rei, says Dr Buiter: all is in flux; nothing will remain the same ….

Having rid themselves of calamitous nonsense – Maoism, the Hindu model, and other variants of central planning or autarky – and having at last achieved a “threshold level” of law and governance, nothing should stop them, or so goes the argument ….

HSBC’s report also sketches an era of unparalleled prosperity, yet the West does not sink into oblivion. China overtakes the US, but only just, and then loses momentum ….

Americans remain three times richer than the Chinese in 2050. The US economy still outstrips India by two-and-a-half times. This is an entirely different geo-strategic outcome.

Demography, naturally, is one of the main factors underlying these scenarios. At Reason, Shikha Dalmia contrasts China’s hukou restrictions and population controls with India’s more liberal policies, speculating on their likely consequences:

… India’s infrastructure issues, while difficult, are nothing compared to the problems China faces in assimilating its migrants. That’s because half-a-century of social engineering has decimated China’s civil society, something that will be much harder to rebuild than roads and power lines.

China’s one-child policy has undermined the safety net that the elderly normally rely on in traditional societies. This is one problem India does not have thanks to its democracy that put a decisive end to its brief flirtation with draconian population control through enforced sterilization in the 1970s. Hence, India’s tightly-knit extended family structure is largely intact, a gift of freedom to the country’s elderly.

Since China no longer has such a private safety net, its aging migrants will need a public one—just what hukou denies them. If China fails to extend hukou benefits, its large and disaffected underclass of deracinated, rural population might become a political tinderbox, ready to explode ….

China, then, has not yet fully absorbed the consequences of destroying its civil society—and India hasn’t yet fully reaped the rewards of letting its flourish. So when it comes to looking after the most vulnerable, appearances aside, India’s pell-mell democracy might yet outperform China’s hyper-rational autocracy.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: demographics, hukou, India, population control, United States
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The move came in response to complaints from ordinary people that the rich were having more children because they could afford the fines, officials said.

Measures could include recording violators’ names and making them ineligible for citizenship awards.

China established its one-child policy in the late 1970s in a bid to control its soaring population. [Full Text]

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Post tags: population control, wealth gap
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China is to bring in new financial incentives to encourage people in rural areas to have fewer children in another bid to control its rising population.

From next year, parents in the countryside will get an annual payment when they reach the age of 60, provided they have only one child, or two girls.

A lack of social security in rural areas has encouraged some families to break China’s one-child policy. [Full Text]

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Wang’s 12-page essay cites and documents facts essential to understanding earlier, present and likely future debates on this topic.

Emphasizing the plurality of China’s population policies, sociologist Wang corrects the common impression that China ever had a single policy, even during the same time period.

China’s birth rate was halved during 1970-1979. That decline occurred before China’s “one-child policy” was implemented with the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party’s “An Open Letter to Members of the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese Communist Youth League on Controlling Population Growth” in, September 1980 (cited in Wang, endnote ii). The sharp fall-off in the 1970s was the basis for earlier criticism that China’s “one-child policy” was Malthusian overkill –largely unnecessary.

(...)
Read the rest of China’s demographic policy- choices and consequences – Wang Feng (244 words)

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China on Thursday said it will expand aid to rural couples with only one child to promote family planning, but will not ease its three-decade-old one-child policy to limit population growth.

China limits most couples to one child, but lets some poor couples have a second child if the first is a girl.

Rural Chinese families depend on their offspring to support them in old age, and have traditionally valued sons over daughters for their earning power.

See also One-Child Families Get Cash Rewards from CRIENGLISH.com. For China’s population data in past fifty years (1949-1998), please click here.

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In “Research on the Overall Population and Female Fertility in the Chinese Mainland During the Late Twentieth Century” (article translated below) Liang Zhongtang of the Shanxi Province People’s Government Economic Research Center in the 5/2003 issue of Shengcanli Yanjiju [Productivity Research] pp. 147 -158 examines why Chinese data on population, fertility and other population characteristics are so unreliable. Liang Zhongtang is a demographer who has worked on family planning issues since 1979. This article is available on Chinese scholarly databases such as CNKI.

(...)
Read the rest of David Cowhig: Liang Zhongtang on China’s Population and Fertility (2,550 words)

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This raises a new problem in China’s population structure. “In Shanghai, 2.6 million seniors make up about 16% of the city’s population, which far outstrips the worldwide average of 7%. Their swelling ranks are straining the city’s pension and social service systems. At the end of last year, there were only about 450 senior nursing facilities in Shanghai, with enough beds for just 37,000 people. Although a higher birthrate won’t solve this problem, more young people entering the labor force would generate taxes to help pay for health and social services. ”

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2004. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
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