Chinese Finance Minister Lan Foan didn’t have much to say about any fiscal stimulus for the Chinese economy at a news conference on Oct. 12, but he did have something to say about a potential stimulus for Chinese parents who are having more than one child, the Wall Street Journal opined Friday.
Foan alluded to a program that “will respond to the changing situation of China’s population development” (according to a translation prepared by state media journalist Fred Gao). This would confirm a Reuters report that China is pondering a monthly stipend of around 800 yuan for second and third additions to a Chinese family.
It would be a calculated repudiation of a policy that was castigated by so many for being both an authoritarian intrusion into privacy and a draconian birth control measure that involved coercive abortions and sterilizations in order for citizens to adhere to the demands of the state. As the Wall Street Journal notes, the policy also spawned a sex-selective abortion industry that favored male children being born and females aborted.
The apparent reversal in policy is not an admission of moral but economic failure, according to the Journal. The one child policy might have engendered all manner of trauma for Chinese people but it also produced severe economic dislocation. Although China promoted the policy as a means of containing population growth so it would not hinder economic growth, the Journal noted that the result has been a population that is getting older and smaller – and negatively affecting economic prosperity.
President Xi Jinping ceased the one child policy in 2016 and began allowing parents to have up to three children in 2021. But mere permission hasn’t been enough to change habits forcibly learned and so the state might now be offering the carrot to bear children as it once waved the stick to abort them. The Journal suggested that this might not work in China because it hasn’t worked elsewhere.
“Prosperity has reduced child-bearing across the developed world, but democracies let nature and individual choice take their course. China’s Communist Party chose brutal coercion, with damaging consequences that are likely to persist for the foreseeable future. Chalk up another defeat for central planning—and for Western intellectuals who wished we could be more like China,” the Journal concluded.
