Running head: CHINA’S ONE CHILD POLICY

China’s One Child Policy

Bo Chen and Blessing Nworji

University of North Texas

COMM 1010 Section 008

Ms. Denecia Spence

November 2, 2009
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Abstract

We begin by introducing the Chinese “One Child Policy” and giving the audience a broad

overview of the multifaceted benefits and global implications of China’s population control

mechanism. The “One Child Policy” directly affects many of the larger intercultural, social-

economic, macroeconomic, and hot-button geopolitical issues that we face in our global society

today. Later we will place China’s current population and consumption levels into perspective

by comparing and contrasting it quantitatively with that of the United States and several other

superpower nations. Our aim and objective in this paper is to show how population is correlated

and interrelated on many fundamental levels both large and small with every aspect of our lives

and also to demonstrate why China’s implementation of this policy has far-fetching

consequences that reach beyond its sovereign borders.

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China’s One Child Policy

China and the One Child Policy

China's One Child Policy was originally established by former Chinese Premier Deng

Xiao Ping in 1979 to control the rapid growth and population overshoot of the nation. Known

natively as the ‘Family Planning Policy’, it was initially implemented as a "temporary measure" -

however it has shown to be so effective in controlling population that the policy continues to

today. Although the One Child Policy limits Chinese couples to one child per family, it is not a

blanket policy and has many built in measures and exemptions for certain circumstances. For

example: rural couples, ethnic minorities, and parents without any siblings themselves are

exempt from the policy restrictions; and China has also eliminated the one child policy for

parents affected by the unexpected death of a child. In addition, this policy does not actually

apply to many of the Special Administrative Regions of China - such as Macau, Hong Kong, and

the disputed region of Taiwan. In total, only about 40% of the Chinese Han Mandarin

population is currently subject to the latest iteration of the One Child Policy.

China’s “One Child Policy” directly affects many of the larger intercultural, social-

economic, macroeconomic, and hot-button geopolitical issues that we face in our global society

today. Because population is interrelated on many levels and with such multifaceted aspects of

social-economic, macroeconomic, and geopolitical dynamics in our globalized society, we aim to

also demonstrate why China’s implementation of this policy has far-fetching consequences that

reach beyond its sovereign borders.

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The Population Problem of Exponential Growth

Many of the problems that China and the rest of the world are facing today can be

attributed directly to the level of overconsumption of resources and overpopulation of humans on

this planet. While these problems are local, national, and global, they are all tied together by the

arithmetic of unchecked growth. Unfortunately the math tells us that our planetary population

overshoot has made each and every fundamental problem that much worse by exacerbating,

complicating, and compounding all situations with more and more numbers of people.

Peak Oil and EROEI

Peak Oil is the point in time when the rate of global oil and petroleum extraction has

reached a global peak and maximum, after which the world enters the stage of terminal decline

in terms of global oil production.

Peak Oil is based not only on the empirically observed production rates of individual oil

wells, but also on the totality of combined production rate of a field of related oil wells in

aggregate. While the United States entered terminal decline in the 1970's the world as a whole

did not peak until late 2006.

Many petroleum, energy, and economic experts and advisors have predicted that our

civilization's high dependence and unhealthy reliance on modern industrial production, transport,

agricultural and food systems, and high technology systems all require the abundant availability

of cheap and energy density sources of power in order to be sustained. After post peak oil the

decline in total available net energy may signal the beginning of the end of our complex chain of

modern global civilization as we know it to be.

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There is also a matter of EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested). Many so-called

alternative sources of energy – even if they could be technologically achieved, and were

economically feasible, and were scaled and brought online in time – are not energy dense enough

to sustain the underlying foundations and fabric of modern civilization. As a result, the majority

of all alternative and renewable sources of energy actually rely on the existence of petroleum

power sources to be manufactured, installed, maintained, and decommissioned and all need

conventional sources of energy to bring them to fruit; they are essentially derivatives of

petroleum. Therefore, it is clear that modern civilization is structurally and fundamentally

dependent on petroleum and its derivatives (such as coal, natural gas, etc.) as a necessary

prerequisite to its very existence. With China’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growing at a

geometric rate of 9% annually and its 1.3 billions citizens all aspiring to live the “Chinese

Dream”, it seems the East and West will be inevitably locked in a scramble to secure the last

remaining sizeable deposits of oil and other nonrenewable natural resources with whatever

means necessary. Historically, the underlying motive of all major wars are rooted in resource

acquisition, so it is not a stretch to predict this geopolitical tension and strife between

superpowers and hegemonies could eventually lead to a third world war or nuclear Armageddon.

Eating Fossil Fuels

Ever since the early 1950’s there has not been a positive correlation between net energy

inflow and energy outflow in modernized agriculture. Due to many combined factors such as soil

segregation and the loss of top soil and arable land, we have reached a point of diminishing

returns in farming. The agricultural green revolution refers to the extensive use of fertilizers,

pesticides, and technological farm equipment (all based on petroleum products or its many
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derivatives) to allow global food production to keep pace with worldwide population growth and

exponential demand in rising standards of living. Thus like China's population control

mechanism, this Green Revolution also has had significant social, ecological, and

macroeconomic impacts. Quite literally, we are eating fossil fuels, and when petroleum runs out

we will face worldwide food shortages – this is true even if we don’t convert a single arable acre

of land to growing government subsidized corn/ethanol to power our SUVs. It has been

estimated that America would need as much new arable land as that of the size of the continent

of Africa to be able to grow enough corn to sustain our energy needs for transportation if we

were to switch entirely to ethanol. The implications are far fetching indeed, by not

understanding the second law of thermodynamics and going the ethanol (which is a net energy

sink) route, governments and supporting industries have inadvertently cannibalized global food

supplies by siphoning it away to use in a self-destructive manner and as a result priced out many

of the poorer nations by creating demand destruction on their food supplies and causing indirect

genocide of millions across the world. However if the hidden goal of the globalists in power is

actually an implicit population reduction, it could again be argued that they would be much more

effective at arriving at this objective by starting at the top, rather than the bottom, of the “food

chain”.

Fiat Currency, Fractional Reserve Banking and Petrodollar Hegemony

The entire globalized modern banking and financial systems also rely devastatingly on

the existence of cheap and abundant oil, petroleum, and other hydrocarbon sources of power in

order to be sustain. Today much of our economies are actually debt-based economies that

operate under a fiat currency, fractional reserve banking system where money equals debt and
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both are created out of thin air by central banks solely on the demand of it alone. The US dollar -

the world’s current reserve currency – is pegged to barrels of oil (it has long since decoupled

from the Gold Standard) by sheer force of America’s imperialistic military might and the implicit

agreement of OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) to sell and export their oil

with condition of accepting exclusively US denominated dollars. When the US Federal Reserve

‘prints’ (a largely digital bookkeeping entry) monies to the tune of trillions to prop up America’s

debt happy tendencies, it is actually by and large the rest of the world – including major holders

of US debt, securities and treasures such as China, Japan and the European Union – that pay for

it through the devaluation of their dollar denominated assets. Essentially for the past 30 years

America has been raising the standard of living of its own citizens by inflating and diluting the

purchasing power and eroding the savings of the citizens of every other nation in the world; and

this in turn gives the United States an unfair advantage on the world stage, and allows it to

continue consuming disproportionate amounts of the world’s last sizeable deposits of oil and of

other dwindling resources.

Our debt-based economies and global financial capitalistic markets are also based on the

expectation of perpetual growth. In fact our entire monetary system is one giant pyramid scheme

that by its very nature requires more and more able and willing participants to join in on the party

in order to starve off the inevitable implosion and collapse. In essence, as a society and a global

civilization we have always financed today’s expenses using the expectation of future

generation’s expanded growth as collateral to pay off current debt. America’s (and also to a

lesser extent the rest of the world’s) debt can only realistically ever hope to be paid off if and

only if it can continue to growth economically and expand in prosperity at a fast enough rate.

However, it is an inconvenient truth and a stark mathematically certainty that exponential and/or
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perpetual growth in a finite environment is an utter and absurd notion, a total and absolute

impossibility. Many physical constraints such as resource depletion of energy and the laws of

entropy and thermodynamics explicitly prohibit the fallacy of perpetual never-ending growth of

any kind. With the limits of growth comes the collapse and demise of our modern capitalistic

society and the Ponzi pyramid schemes that underlie modern macroeconomics – as with any

other kind of scheme, when there is no more growth it simply collapses upon itself domino chain

reaction supernova style.

But perhaps most disturbing of all is the rapid devaluation of the US dollar. This is in

large part caused by the US Treasury and Federal Reserve being reckless in their uncontrolled

creation of new money and America’s unsustainable ‘growth’ dynamic of borrowing more and

more with no indication of ever being solvent enough to pay anything back. Being the largest

holder of US debt, China now last little to no appetite to continue financing the never-ending

needs of the American people. Given that the dollar has already lost so much value when

compared alongside a basket of other foreign currencies, China in fact is at a strategic position to

for realignment of its wealth by converting its dollar assets into tangible commodities through its

global “shopping spree” process of acquiring petroleum, metals, commodities and other

resources throughout the world. While some have argued that China and America’s economies

are entangled and in lock-step, it is quite clear that with the growing aspirations of 1.3 billion

Chinese to live the new “Chinese Dream” China’s domestic and internal markets are now robust

enough to support its own continued growth and rising status without having to cater to a

dysfunctional and imbalanced trading reliance on the United States. With global resources

dwindling there can only be one remaining superpower, and it would not being in China’s best

national security interest to continue sponsoring the spending habits of the American people (by
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propping up the petrodollar hegemony) at the expense of depriving their own citizen’s wellbeing

and happiness back in the homeland.

One Child Policy Revisited

After nearly 30 years today millions of single children are coming of age in China and

transforming into the young adults of China's bright and prosperous future. The Central Chinese

Government has recently enacted several newer special provisions allowing millions of couples

to have two or more children legally and without penalty. Adults born and raised under the One

Child Policy can now have two children of their own, thus preventing too dramatic of a

population reduction and helping to alleviate the problem of China's aging population.

China’s “One Child Policy” is aligned with the nation’s objective of a peaceful rise to

power and beneficial towards the direction of one harmonious world. To put things into

perspective, China’s One Child Policy has overwhelming succeeded in helping to reduce the

burden of every other social-economic problem – a lesser overpopulated nation means less

pollution, less disease, less completion, consumption, less social unrest, and greater freedom of

wealth, prosperity, equality and equity for all to enjoy. A stable, healthy, prosperous and

sustainable China is good for the world and for China – a peaceful and happy China is a China

that is more empowered to lead the world and help achieve unity and one new world order in the

coming interesting and uncertain times.

In conclusion, it is important for us to remember that economically, physically, and even

socially, there is no such thing as a “free lunch”. In everything we do there are always

opportunity costs and tradeoffs. As with money, there is a time-value of “freedom”. Our choice

to pursue prosperity and growth right now at the expense of sustainability and our environment
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will produce orders of magnitude more pain, suffering, and personal sacrifices (including the loss

of freedom) required from future generations. China’s One Child Policy should be considered

by the Obama administration to be implemented in the United States - even though American’s

make up only 5% of world population, we consume more than 50% of the world’s resources,

thus per capita we are actually significantly more overpopulated than even China.
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