[Related to a post earlier today, I am going to comment here on a NY Times article on declining laborers in China.]
China has had a strictly enforced one-child per couple policy for over two and a half decades. In an attempt to avoid a baseless threat of overpopulation, the communist regime implemented a program by which wives had to have permission to conceive, married couples were forced to use contraception and abortion became the widespread backup method for all the conceptions taking place outside of the governments strict policy. Through the watchful eye of family planning program workers, their policy has been a success, at least as far as prohibiting more than one child to be born per couple. But, was it really a success? Recent revelations from the worlds largest nation would suggest not prestige and power, but societal suicide that is desperately out of control.
Under this one child per couple policy, girl babies have been and continue to be aborted or abandoned in hopes of having a boy child to carry the family name and care for the parents in old age. Almost every single one of these Chinese children have grown up without siblings (except for a very rare sibling born illegally). But, these only childs are now reaching their early twenties and entering into the work force. Common sense and pure logic wont be surprised, but the mainstream media and the so-called population control workers sure are: These young adults are met with more job opportunities than they can possibly fill. Its quite simple; one child is filling the place of two retiring workers. And in the next generation, there will be half as many workers again. A story in todays New York Times highlights this growing problem.
Experts say the shortages are arising primarily because China's economy is sizzling hot, tax cuts have helped keep people working on farms, and factories are continuing to expand even as the number of young Chinese starts to level off. The solution, some say, lies in attractive wages and benefit packages for workers. One company has noted for a sign posted looking for five workers, only one shows up. No amount of wage or benefit package will make children rise from their bloody graves. Twenty five years ago, these children, still in utero, were seen as the biggest threat to the economy. Now, their brothers and sisterstheir own generationare starved for their siblings just to meet the needs of the export driven economy.
And, this new revelation about Chinas suffering economy has only been noted within the past three yearsnot surprising. If we do the math, we can see that a child born at the beginning of the one child policy has just reached the time of graduating from college. Now is the time when they look for jobs and look to settle down. Of course, this NY Times article only mentions the one child policy as aggravating the shortages not causing them, and this is only mentioned on the bottom of the second page.
Another surprising thing to note is that one of the countries that factories are moving to in search of cheap labor includes India, which is also becoming subject to an invasive one child policy. How long before they, too, will run out of workers?
A Guardian Unlimited article from July 2005 which I blogged about that that time revealed suicide as the number one cause of death of young people in China. In that post, I reflected on whether the government enforced one child per couple policy and the pressures that places on an only child helps lead to the suicide and depression of the young people there.
Certainly the lack of workers in China is a direct result of the fact that they have all been lost by abortion or not even conceived in the first place because of suicide plans for the Chinese society put in place by Communists. Certainly we will see more of this in the years and decades to come.
