Review: “One Child Nation”

A truly horrifying film, it seems.

4 comments:

E Hines said...

From the linked-to: "I had no choice," she says. "We didn't make decisions, we only executed orders."

The outcome of the Nuremberg trials suggest she had a choice, however difficult it might have been.

The PRC has officially relaxed its one-child policy, but the only outcome of that seems to be a slight reduction in forced abortions and sterilizations. Today's parents and potential parents still are eschewing having a second baby, even with the occasional bounty being offered for the second one. That seems to flow from a couple of things. One is that today's parents are second- and third-generation survivors of the one-child policy and so don't have nearly as much social incentive or habit of having multiple children that their grandparents had.

The other is the relatively sharp increase in prosperity (albeit from a very low baseline). It seems to be part of the human condition that more prosperous parents and societies have fewer children than less prosperous parents and societies.

And this, from the end of the linked-to: One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.

Wow. It's the first time I've heard barbaric despotism being described as enlightened. I would have expected better out of Reason.

Eric Hines

MikeD said...

You miss that they were horrified that Friedmann took that opinion. They note it to point out the horror of people who flippantly wish for authoritarianism like this.

raven said...

Somewhere I read about a Polish fighter who was asked how it felt to take a life- "I don't know, I have only ever killed communists".

The more one reads about communists, the more appropriate that statement seems.

It seems to me the essence of politics can be summed up in one question. Who owns you? Communists are just a new class of slaveholders. Slaveholders do as they like with their property.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

No siblings. No aunts or uncles. No cousins. Those words ceased to have meaning.

Something similar is now happening in Italy and Japan, where birth rates have been only slightly above one for decades.