Chinese women have had it. Their response to Beijing’s demands for more children? No.
Fed up with government harassment and wary of the sacrifices of child-rearing, many young women are putting themselves ahead of what Beijing and their families want. Their refusal has set off a crisis for the Communist Party, which desperately needs more babies to rejuvenate China’s aging population.
With the number of babies in free fall—fewer than 10 million were born in 2022, compared with around 16 million in 2012—China is headed toward a demographic collapse. China’s population, now around 1.4 billion, is likely to drop to just around half a billion by 2100, according to some projections. Women are taking the blame.
In October, Chinese Leader Xi Jinping urged the state-backed All-China Women’s Federation to “prevent and resolve risks in the women’s field,” according to an official account of the speech.
“It’s clear that he was not talking about risks faced by women but considering women as a major threat to social stability,” said Clyde Yicheng Wang, an assistant professor of politics at Washington and Lee University who studies Chinese government propaganda.
The State Council, China’s top government body, didn’t respond to questions about Beijing’s population policies.
Gerrymandered districts mean 40% of the population picks 60% of the legislators.
In China, I can get an abortion any time I want. The cost is trivial, the facilities are clean, and the doctors aren’t legally required to guilt trip me with far-right propaganda just for asking. I don’t need to block walk for ten years, canvasing uninterested men and begging them to support some Ivy League prat (D) over Local Car Dealership creep ®, in hopes that I maybe get the supermajority of democrats necessary to repeal an ill-conceived trigger law passed before I was even legally allowed to vote. I just get to do the thing, because it has been considered a fundamental human right since the 1950s.
An unelected body of bureaucrats green-lighting a state campaign of hyper-policing aimed at a vulnerable group, for the purpose of instituting an unpopular morality code, is a textbook example of state authoritarianism.
Even then, as you note
I could at least live with a certain amount of authoritarianism (because hey, that’s hierarchies for ya, and whatchagonnado?) but the current hierarchy has produced a local authoritarianist tendency that is also absolutely shit.
China’s authoritarian government gets people super fast trains and world leading hospitals and salt-fusion nuclear reactors.
My authoritarian government gets people daily multi-vehicle traffic fatalities and medical bankruptcies and big holes in West Virginia where we mine burnable rocks that clog our air and waterways and fill our fish food with mercury.
I can’t vote the authoritarianism out of Texas any more than I can vote the authoritarianism out of China. And since I don’t speak mandarin and I’ve got something of a large, well-established community of friends and loved ones in Texas, I’m stuck here for the time being.
You can move within your country and your experience will be entirely different. You can’t in China, because it’s an authoritarian hellstate.
I agree that Republicans are authoritarians, and that sucks. I also acknowledge that you likely view hierarchies as inherently authoritarian and that we’ll likely not see eye to eye on where to draw lines. Also fine - that’s what liberal ideologies want, is that disagreement.
But to compare China positively with the US in terms of authoritarianism is, frankly, a bit silly.
In the US, you can move within the US whenever you please and arrive homeless if you can’t afford market rents. In China, you can put out a request to move and get on a waiting list for available housing, then move when a spot opens up. China, you get arrested and returned home for moving without a permit. In the US, you get arrested and incarcerated indefinitely for living without a house.
The Authoritarian Hellstate of China is one in which state agents try to accommodate the demands of the population at-large in order to avoid the socially destabilizing effects of mass unemployment and homelessness. The Freedom-burger Utopia of America is one in which state agents simply assault and imprison anyone who steps out of line, with the expectation that we all make the consumer choice to remain in bounds.
I wish it was just Republicans. Houston and California and New York Democrats are more than happy to pile on the conservative-inspired panics, when they see these mass-media hysterics as politically convenient. Whether you’re Mayor Eric Adams or Governor Gavin Newsom or Sylvester Turner, you’re on the side of the police in a war against the ugly masses.
It is definitely silly to compare the Chinese Communist Party to the American Republican Party.