More on the one-child policy's legacy

From the Quartz article yesterday:

In a study questioning the government’s claim that the one-child policy was responsible for preventing 400 million births, Feng Wang of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center called the rule “the most extreme example of state intervention in human reproduction in the modern era.” He added:

History will also likely view this policy as a very costly blunder, born of the legacy of a political system that planned population numbers in the same way that it planned the production of goods. It showcases the impact of a policymaking process that, in the absence of public deliberations, transparency, debate, and accountability, can do permanent harm to the members of a society.

Needless to say, the one-child policy has been a lightning rod for criticism of the communist dictatorship. It's quite a shame that such baby-killing horrors as the ones recounted here have been a regular occurrence in mainland China until practically this very day (if even relatively rare as a percentage of the total population).

On the other hand, whether it prevented 400 million extra births or only 200 million (as this article mentions as a lower estimate), there's no question that my fellow millennials got a living standard boost from all the missing siblings. True, this improvement was bought at the price of a rapidly aging population, but the declining workforce over the next couple of decades won't be such a disaster for China given that automation is likely to more than compensate for the loss of human labor. In fact, Chinese demographers and economists back in the 1980s were already incorporating increased usage of robots necessitated by a smaller workforce into their projections, so it's not accurate to say that Beijing was completely blindsided by the precipitous plunge in the fertility rate (now well below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman).

This article assessing the impacts of ending the one-child policy quotes one economic expert as saying that decreased demand - not insufficient supply - is the main threat posed by graying populations. But at only $8,000, China's per capita GDP is still very low compared to Japan and South Korea, meaning it doesn't really need more people to significantly boost demand at this juncture, anyway. With widespread adoption of technological advances and further productivity gains, low-workforce China is actually set for some pretty healthy growth for the next couple of decades, if only its leaders get reforms right. And this also means that now is the time to start incentivizing two-child families, so that when China finally reaches high-income status 20 to 30 years hence, its young population won't be so thin.

Overall, the one-child policy will probably be remembered as an unfortunate method which nonetheless helped achieve what economic development alone would have mostly accomplished as a natural matter of course anyway.

One day, the hundreds of millions of my fellow millennials who were victims of the one-child era will be honored in a national memorial thanking their sacrifice of blood and soul to build 21st century Chinese civilization.