- cross-posted to:
- longreads@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- longreads@sh.itjust.works
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.
This is why so many ‘industrialists’ are championing Mars bases and asteroid mining. Not because it would solve scarcity, but because it would provide another spatial fix, which like you said, is the ideal capitalist solution.
Reminds me of a bumper sticker that I once saw “Earth first! We can strip mine the other planets later.”
There was a 1950s radio drama show called X-Minus One that adapted stories from a science fiction magazine. There’s a comedic one that is a surprising critique of capitalism in 1950s America called “Snowball Effect” [spoilers ahead] about an economics professor who comes up with a formula for unlimited growth and tests it out on a small women’s organization in a small town in Wisconsin. It starts working too rapidly, but he has built a flaw into the formula where the organization will quickly collapse if they stop getting new members. But it becomes so successful that the organization takes over the world. At the end of the episode, the world leader (who started as the president of the organization in the tiny Wisconsin town) announces that they are landing the first people on Mars to look for Martians because they desperately needed new members.
If you’re curious to listen, it’s #64 here- https://archive.org/details/OTRR_X_Minus_One_Singles
Humanity divorced itself from nature long before capitalism existed. Without natural bounds on growth, any organism will multiply indefinitely. Every technology we’ve developed, from stone tools and fire to transistors and fractal antennas, has been in service of removing natural bounds. After the world wars, people were concerned about our ability to feed an exploding population, then the green revolution happened. Today, we’re grappling with how to feed 3 to 4 times as many people, as well our depletion of other natural resources and the effect we’re having on the planet as a whole. We’re developing fusion, solar & wind, carbon sequestration, desalination, vertical farming & hydroponics, and the asteroid mining and extraterrestrial colonization you mention.
It’s scary now because it feels like we’re truly on the brink of destroying ourselves - outgrowing our planet’s ability to host us in multiple different ways - without a nascent technology close at hand to save us from ourselves again. We’re smart, but are we smart enough to defeat nature entirely? Either we stay one step ahead of perpetual growth, or we finally realize that perpetual growth is the one natural thing about ourselves that we have not managed to truly grapple with.
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