Household Responsibility

Matthew Franklin Cooper writes:

A very interesting abstract of a paper at NBER, and the accompanying article at Foreign Policy magazine, argue that the market liberalisation policies after 1976 are a heavily contributing factor to the sex-selective abortion phenomenon in China, even more so than the actual One Child Policy.

I certainly would not be surprised at this, as the destabilising effects of the household responsibility system on China’s socioeconomic landscape have been immense, but I imagine that the assertion that the HRS is more to blame for China’s sex imbalances than is the OCP will be a controversial one, and not only in China.

Also, the Foreign Policy magazine article also links the piece by Mara Hvistendahl about the causes underlying sex selection in Asia. Unfortunately, the issue of sex-selective abortions is already something of a political football, and Ms Hvistendahl points out some of the shady - to say the least - history of the joint involvement of the pro-abort and green Malthusian movements in engineering the institutional and physical infrastructure necessary for sex-selective abortion to become widespread.

These two factors in China, privatisation (and thus the introduction of market logic into decisions about family planning) and easy access to the infrastructure needed for sex-selective abortions, driven by a confluence of ideologies in the global technocracy valuing population control as a positive end, have produced a tragic condition for millions of what are commonly called here ‘bare branches’ and ‘leftover women’, which will very likely take multiple generations to undo.

Whether privatisation and technologically-driven control over reproduction, the primary sufferers of the fallout are always, always the working class. And it isn’t merely the over 330 million foeti who have been aborted since these policies were introduced; it is also the living young men and young women who are forced to navigate a demographically-shattered society with growing wealth and education gaps.

We inheritors of the modern pseudo-West have a great deal to answer for in China. Not merely for the Opium Wars and the legacy of colonialism, but for the ideological imports which continue to poison Chinese culture and hinder the basic needs of its people.