- cross-posted to:
- longreads@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- longreads@sh.itjust.works
Chinese women have had it. Their response to Beijing’s demands for more children? No.
Fed up with government harassment and wary of the sacrifices of child-rearing, many young women are putting themselves ahead of what Beijing and their families want. Their refusal has set off a crisis for the Communist Party, which desperately needs more babies to rejuvenate China’s aging population.
With the number of babies in free fall—fewer than 10 million were born in 2022, compared with around 16 million in 2012—China is headed toward a demographic collapse. China’s population, now around 1.4 billion, is likely to drop to just around half a billion by 2100, according to some projections. Women are taking the blame.
In October, Chinese Leader Xi Jinping urged the state-backed All-China Women’s Federation to “prevent and resolve risks in the women’s field,” according to an official account of the speech.
“It’s clear that he was not talking about risks faced by women but considering women as a major threat to social stability,” said Clyde Yicheng Wang, an assistant professor of politics at Washington and Lee University who studies Chinese government propaganda.
The State Council, China’s top government body, didn’t respond to questions about Beijing’s population policies.
China’s problem is a universal problem. They’re “communist” in name only. Their economy has capitalist demands for growth/metastasis, same as ours and most developed economies.
People want to have kids when they can expect those kids to live at minimum the same quality, and preferably better quality, than they themselves did and do. That just isn’t the case anymore as the global economy has run out of massive new sectors for growth/metastasis and has begun eating itself. You can see this in all the entire sectors here merging into monopolies and duopolies. Constant merging isn’t a business strategy, it’s just trying to buy time in a failing economic model.
Capitalism has always been a long-term pyramid scheme to concentrate all the power/wealth/means/capital to a small owner class. The problem is, the con has run out of new places and ways to exploit people as you eventually can’t squeeze more out of a fully exploited stone. No pensions, laughable pay, no future. Just expected to thanklessly generate capital for the owners in larger and larger quantities for the love of what? The nation trying to commoditize your entire life to profit the right people? Why would you bring another poor, desperate child to suffer such a world?
Now, in their desperation, these economies that lead their societies and governments around by the nose are desperately screaming “MORE LIVESTOCK TO EXPLOIT GOD DAMN IT!” because in lieu of not being able to squeeze any harder on existing capital batteries without being correctly told to ‘get fucked,’ that’s all they have.
I firmly believe that is why the federalist society that runs our SCOTUS is trying to get abortion banned, as the most profitable capital batteries are desperate, poor ones. I also believe the intentional decline of our public education system is meant to address the same problem, if they can make the population stoooopid enough not to consider the lives the children of already struggling peasants would have.
This world is finite. Its resources finite. An economic model literally based on infinite continuous growth/metastasis or die is not compatible with the world as it is. In every sense, it is killing us, whether by climate change from without, and loss of actual personal meaning within, at least for the non-winning vast majority. The goal of global economics should have been to establish a sustainable population that could find equilibrium/homeostasis with our shared, COMMUNal environment we all rely on from one breath to the next. Not a lot of room for Super Yachts and private jets in such a world though…
This is why so many ‘industrialists’ are championing Mars bases and asteroid mining. Not because it would solve scarcity, but because it would provide another spatial fix, which like you said, is the ideal capitalist solution.
There was a 1950s radio drama show called X-Minus One that adapted stories from a science fiction magazine. There’s a comedic one that is a surprising critique of capitalism in 1950s America called “Snowball Effect” [spoilers ahead] about an economics professor who comes up with a formula for unlimited growth and tests it out on a small women’s organization in a small town in Wisconsin. It starts working too rapidly, but he has built a flaw into the formula where the organization will quickly collapse if they stop getting new members. But it becomes so successful that the organization takes over the world. At the end of the episode, the world leader (who started as the president of the organization in the tiny Wisconsin town) announces that they are landing the first people on Mars to look for Martians because they desperately needed new members.
If you’re curious to listen, it’s #64 here- https://archive.org/details/OTRR_X_Minus_One_Singles
Humanity divorced itself from nature long before capitalism existed. Without natural bounds on growth, any organism will multiply indefinitely. Every technology we’ve developed, from stone tools and fire to transistors and fractal antennas, has been in service of removing natural bounds. After the world wars, people were concerned about our ability to feed an exploding population, then the green revolution happened. Today, we’re grappling with how to feed 3 to 4 times as many people, as well our depletion of other natural resources and the effect we’re having on the planet as a whole. We’re developing fusion, solar & wind, carbon sequestration, desalination, vertical farming & hydroponics, and the asteroid mining and extraterrestrial colonization you mention.
It’s scary now because it feels like we’re truly on the brink of destroying ourselves - outgrowing our planet’s ability to host us in multiple different ways - without a nascent technology close at hand to save us from ourselves again. We’re smart, but are we smart enough to defeat nature entirely? Either we stay one step ahead of perpetual growth, or we finally realize that perpetual growth is the one natural thing about ourselves that we have not managed to truly grapple with.
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Exactly I don’t understand how building an economy on screwing over each other is viable… It is present in everything as corporations are running out of metrics to gain income we are seeing either lower quality products on the market, shrinking quantity of consumables or everything becoming subscriber based at ever increasing prices as everything is commodified… If you stop producing you just die.
This despite having 2/3 of the countries GDP in SOEs and 60-90% of the workforce in SOEs, having 5 year plans, and political leadership primarily under a Communist party. Why do so many people think communism is only when everyone makes the same paycheck or when the economy is managed bureaucratically?
That’s just what kids are taught in high school in the US and most people don’t question it. You have to go out of your way to learn otherwise.