The largest social-engineering experiment in human history

According to TIME magazine (China, the World´s Most Populated Nation Needs More Children, Time.com), China needs more children. In an interesting article written for this prestigious magazine, the one-child policy, “the largest social-engineering experiment in human history,” may be the cause of serious demographic and social problems.

An article written by three of China’s leading demographic experts published in Population and Development Review of the Population Council in New York, states that “the one-child policy will be added to the other deadly errors in recent Chinese history” during the turbulent 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. “While those grave mistakes both cost tens of millions of lives, the harms done were relatively short-lived and were corrected quickly afterward.  The one-child policy, in contrast, will surpass them in impact”.

More specifically, the recently announced family-planning reform will allow couples in which one partner is an only child to have two children; but according to TIME, this political decision is not enough to counteract the fact that the world’s most populated country, with 1.35 billion inhabitants, will soon have an insufficient number of working-age individuals that will help maintain the country’s current level of social services, a prospect that, according to the China’s National Bureau of Statistics is of concern to the Chinese government, which depends on plentiful labour to maintain China’s current economic growth rate – a necessary condition for adequate social stability. According to Mu Guangzong, a demographic expert at Peking University, “the people who made the policy never imagined all the problems we’re facing now”.