Wednesday, April 2, 2008
China
The new colonialists
Mar 13th 2008
From The Economist print edition
China's hunger for natural resources is causing more problems at home than abroad
THERE is no exaggerating China's hunger for commodities. The country accounts for about a fifth of the world's population, yet it gobbles up more than half of the world's pork, half of its cement, a third of its steel and over a quarter of its aluminium. It is spending 35 times as much on imports of soya beans and crude oil as it did in 1999, and 23 times as much importing copper—indeed, China has swallowed over four-fifths of the increase in the world's copper supply since 2000.
What is more, China is getting ever hungrier. Although consumption of petrol is falling in America, the oil price is setting new records, because demand from China and other developing economies is still on the rise. The International Energy Agency expects China's imports of oil to triple by 2030. Chinese demand for raw materials of all sorts is growing so fast and creating such a bonanza for farmers, miners and oilmen that phrases such as “bull market” or “cyclical expansion” do not seem to do it justice (see special report). Instead, bankers have coined a new word: supercycle.
Not all observers, however, think that China's unstinting appetite for commodities is super. The most common complaint centres on foreign policy. In its drive to secure reliable supplies of raw materials, it is said, China is coddling dictators, despoiling poor countries and undermining Western efforts to spread democracy and prosperity. America and Europe, the shrillest voices say, are “losing” Africa and Latin America.
This argument ignores the benefits that China's commodities binge brings, not only to poor countries, but also to some rich ones, such as Australia. The economies of Africa and Latin America have never grown so fast. That growth, in turn, is likely to lift more people out of poverty than the West's faltering aid schemes. Moreover, China is not the only country to prop up brutish regimes. Witness the French troops scattered around Africa, some of whom recently delivered a shipment of Libyan arms to Chad's embattled strongman, Idriss Déby.
A new nuance
China could—and should—use its influence to curb the nastiest of its friends, including the governments of Sudan and Myanmar. And it is beginning to do so. It has ceased to resist the deployment of United Nations peacekeepers in Darfur, and is even sending some of its own military engineers to join the force. Wen Jiabao, China's prime minister, has called publicly for democracy in Myanmar—which, even though Chinese officials' understanding of democracy is different to Westerners', is a bold step for a government that claims not to meddle in other countries' internal affairs. The more business China does with the rest of the world, the more nuanced its foreign policy is likely to become.
Still, China's hunger for natural resources is creating plenty of problems. Most of them, though, are in China, not abroad.
China is hoovering up ever more commodities not just because its economy is growing so quickly, but also because that growth is concentrated in industries that use lots of resources. Over the past few years, there has been a marked shift from light manufacturing to heavy industry. So for each unit of output, China now consumes more raw materials.
That may sound like a minor change, but the implications are dramatic. For one thing, it has encouraged the sort of foreign entanglements that are now causing China such embarrassment. More worryingly, it is compounding China's already grim pollution. Heavy industry requires huge amounts of power. Steelmaking, for example, uses 16% of China's power, compared with 10% for all the country's households combined. By far the most common fuel for power generation is coal. So more steel mills and chemical plants mean more acid rain and smog, not to mention global warming.
These are not just inconveniences, but also an enormous drag on society. Each year, they make millions sick, cause hundreds of thousands of premature deaths, sap agricultural yields and so on. Pan Yue, a deputy minister at the government's environmental watchdog, believes that the costs inflicted by pollution each year amount to some 10% of GDP.
No fire without smoke
It is no wonder, then, that pollution is the cause of ever more protests and demonstrations. There were some 60,000 in 2006 alone, by the authorities' own count. Some are led not by impotent peasants but by well-organised burghers from Shanghai and Xiamen, a development that must horrify China's rulers. And the potential for even more disruptive environmental crises is great: northern China is already running out of water, and the glaciers that feed its dwindling rivers are melting, thanks to global warming.
The government is aware of these problems, and is trying to address them (see article). It has used this month's People's Congress to raise the status of Mr Pan's agency to a ministry. It has increased fines for pollution, reduced subsidies on fuels and scrapped tax breaks for heavy industry. It is also promoting cleaner sources of power, such as windmills and natural gas. Yet despite frantic efforts to clean up Beijing in time for the Olympics in August, athletes still doubt the air will be fit to breathe. The world's fastest marathon runner, for one, has threatened to drop out of that race because of pollution.
All the government's green schemes are being undermined by an artificial abundance of cheap capital, and by bureaucrats' enthusiasm for channelling it to grubby industries. Chinese banks, with the government's blessing, pay negative real interest on deposits and so can lend to state-owned firms very cheaply. Many of those firms also benefit from free land and pay negligible dividends to the state, leaving lots of money to invest in more dirty factories. Chinese depositors and taxpayers are subsidising the very industries that are slowly poisoning them.
China is bound to consume enormous amounts of raw materials as it develops. But given how polluted the country already is, and how much unrest that pollution is causing, it should curb its hunger for resources. A less wasteful development strategy would be a healthier one.
Labels: natural resources, posted by Eunice
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BUSINESS
Industry in China
Where is everybody?
Mar 13th 2008 GUANGZHOU
From The Economist print edition
Manufacturers struggle in southern China's industrial belt
AT FIRST, the managers of the factories spread throughout Guangdong province thought the lack of returning workers after the Chinese New Year break in early February was merely because they had been delayed by the huge blizzard that disrupted rail and power lines, and left roads impassable. But now that the mess has now been cleaned up, it is clear that the vast annual migration of around 20m people that has fuelled the manufacturing boom in southern China over the past two decades is beginning to diminish.
The Guangdong Labour Ministry reckons 11% of the workers did not return after the holiday; other estimates are as high as 30%. Whatever the precise number, many factories are reeling. Wages were already rising; now they will surely go up further, adding to surging costs for credit, materials, energy, environmental compliance and health care. Meanwhile, revenues are falling due to slowing demand from America and a reduction, following pressure from other countries, in China's complex system of export subsidies.
A survey of conditions in southern China conducted in the aftermath of the Chinese New Year, covering 162 members of the Federation of Hong Kong Industries, produced reams of gloomy figures. Members estimated 10-20% of the 70,000 factories in Guangdong province had closed in the past year, and expected a similar number to close within the next two years. Two-thirds of those polled said they were unsure whether to invest more in the region; one-third planned to cut investment. Only one respondent was optimistic.
To some extent the upheaval in southern China follows a government plan to force dirty, low-paying industries out of business or into poorer interior regions that have so far missed out on the country's growing industrial wealth. The hope is that the gaps in Guangdong will be filled by factories producing more sophisticated, high-value products that are cleaner and less energy-intensive to produce. There are signs that this is indeed happening.
Factories are opening up in China's interior, providing opportunities for those in rural areas to find employment closer to home, rather than having to leave their families for an entire year. This may explain the reduced flow of migrant workers. At the same time, discriminating industrial parks are popping up in Guangdong and Suzhou, among other places, that will only permit factories producing sophisticated electronics and medical equipment. The factories in deepest trouble are said to be in low-cost, low-skill areas: toys, plastics, shoes, clothing and so on. Many are sweatshops with poor working conditions.
Firms that provide relatively high wages and good working conditions do not seem to have problems attracting employees. Nike's sneaker factory in Dongguang, one of the grimier sections of Guangdong, has 27,000 workers, including 4,500 that have returned over the past year and 40% who have been around for at least three years. The workers receive 1,400 yuan a month ($200), well above the minimum wage, receive subsidised food and (for the 7,500 living inside the factory) clean dormitories. Nike is not competing for the low end of the market: shoes produced its is Dongguang factory can cost as much as $185 a pair.
But Nike has been steadily spreading manufacturing from southern China to the rest of the country, and the rest of South-East Asia. Indeed, the idea of shifting away from China seems to be gaining adherents. A study by Booz Allen Hamilton, a consultancy, on behalf of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, says more than half of foreign firms believe China is losing its edge over other low-cost Asia countries, and 17% intend to relocate.
This shift will be a good thing, as production shifts to Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia and even Africa, spreading wealth and deepening manufacturing skills. Whereas China was once desperate to grow through exports, it is now developing its own domestic economy and has other ways to thrive beyond merely producing cheap goods. But these shifts are at the very least disruptive. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of unskilled workers still depend on southern China's low-cost factories for their livelihoods.
And as the rusted hulks of manufacturing plants throughout the Western world attest, the transition to higher-value products can be difficult. Clement Chen, the chairman of the Federation of Hong Kong Industries, says the Chinese government is understandably clamping down on lots of dirty industries—leather tanning, dyeing, finishing, electroplating, and the like—but that this can disrupt the broader manufacturing supply chain, including industries China wants to develop. Business environments, like ecosystems, can be fragile—and once lost, competitive advantage can be hard, if not impossible, to regain.
Comments:
I feel the shift of many low cost industries in China to regions like Bangladesh will only serves to exacerbate the problem of rural urban divide in China. More middle income citizens in China will sink into poverty, increasing the government’s burden. Such problems are also capable of sparking of more “mass incidents” in China. However, one positive sight would be the shift of industries to the inner regions in China as they can effectively help to ameliorate the poverty problem in those regions.Labels: economic challenges, posted by Eunice
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Health care in China
Losing patients
Feb 21st 2008 BEIJING
From The Economist print edition
An orthodox approach to fixing the unavailability of decent health care
STARTLING economic growth in China has not been matched by similar improvements in health care. The cost of treatment is becoming ever more prohibitive for the poor. Government spending is meagre. But nearly three years after declaring the system a failure, officials are at last getting ready to unveil a plan to fix it.
Some Chinese press reports say the long-awaited and much-debated reform plan is likely to be revealed at the annual session of China's parliament, which opens on March 5th. The outline is already clear: a stronger role for government, including more money from the central budget, and a drive towards universal health insurance. Changes are already in train.
The reforms reverse the market-driven policies of much of the past two decades. The outbreak in 2003 of SARS, an often fatal respiratory disease, made the government realise what a mess the health-care system had become. Government hospitals and clinics, starved of funding, had turned to raising money (and boosting ill-paid doctors' salaries) by prescribing ever more expensive treatment and diagnostic procedures. With the collapse and privatisation of state-owned enterprises, the vast majority of citizens had been left with no insurance. Many began avoiding even desperately needed treatment.
In 2003 the government introduced a new medical-insurance scheme in the countryside. This involves contributions from rural residents as well as local governments and, for the first time, the central government. The number of people taking part rose from 80m that year to more than 730m now. This month Wu Yi, a deputy prime minister, said all rural residents (about 800m is the usual official figure) should be insured by the end of this year.
The scheme is only a slight relief, if at all, for the poor. It often does not cover routine outpatient treatment. The average reimbursement rate is only 30-40%, and bills have to be paid in full first. So hospital stays are beyond the means of many. There is also a big loophole: those insured can get benefits only in their own localities. Many younger people from the countryside are working in cities where they have to pay all of their treatment costs. A new labour-contract law introduced this year requires employers to pay medical insurance for such workers. But migrants are often hired informally, making it easy for employers to evade such requirements.
Even though urban health care receives a disproportionate share of total government spending on health, many urban residents fare just as badly. Li Ling of Peking University estimates that more than half of the urban population has no insurance. Those who do are mostly civil servants and the staff of state-owned enterprises. At least until the labour-contract law was enacted, many private enterprises provided nothing. Last year the government introduced an urban insurance scheme (similar to the rural one) aimed at non-working residents, including children and university students. The aim is to have every urban citizen covered by 2010.
Much detail, however, is still unclear. A big issue is how to wean hospitals off their dependence on revenue from user payments. Policymakers and academics have been furiously debating whether the emphasis should be on government subsidies for hospitals or on reimbursements for patients. No target has yet been set for the maximum share of health expenditure to come from patients' own pockets. Ms Li, who has been advising the government on health reform, suggests a goal of 20% compared with over 50% at present.
Unlike for education, Chinese officials have also yet to set any specific targets for government spending as a percentage of GDP. The government spends a mere 0.8% of GDP on health (it was more than 1% in the 1980s). Henk Bekedam of the World Health Organisation says it could easily afford around 2.5%. But the government is being cautious. Reform, said Ms Wu last month, would be complicated. “Patience is needed,” she said. Patients would say they have shown more than enough already
Comments:
Despite the efforts to improve the health care situation in the rural areas, there are no specific targets for government spending as a percentage of GDP. Also, given the large number of people in these rural regions who requires such services, the amount of money involved is going to amount to a very huge sum of money. With rampant corruption at the grassroots level, the situation is not very promising.Furthermore, this problem has been going on since the reform era. The injustice that the rural chinese suffered from may eventually result in serious social upheavals similar to that of the TianAnMen incident in 1989. The problem is worsening and i feel that immediate action and concrete steps should be taken to address the issue before it starts to go out of hand. Labels: posted by Eunice, Social
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Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Chinese inflation
Sweet and sour pork
Mar 13th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Are rising prices in China driven by the supply of meat or money?
IN A country where bouts of inflation have triggered social unrest, the jump in China's inflation rate to a 12-year high of 8.7% in February is cause for concern. But economists are sharply divided on the cause of this inflation and the degree to which policy needs to be tightened.
The People's Bank of China (PBOC) is expected soon to lift interest rates and banks' reserve requirements once again. Some people fear a repeat of 1987-88 or 1993-94 when high inflation forced the government to tighten monetary policy sharply, causing a hard economic landing.
One difference between today and previous surges in inflation is that the increase over the past year has been caused mainly by food prices, which jumped by 23%. Vegetable prices are 46% higher than a year ago, pork is 63% dearer. The impact of various supply shocks, notably blue-ear disease which killed thousands of pigs, were aggravated last month by the worst snowstorms for 50 years, damaging crops and disrupting transport. Non-food prices rose by only 1.6% over the past year. In 1994, by contrast, non-food inflation hit 20%.
To the extent that food prices have been pushed up by one-off supply factors, they should flatten later this year, causing inflation to fall. If so, it is argued, there is no need to slam on the brakes. Moreover, higher interest rates would do little to curb food prices. Some policy makers also worry that if China raised interest rates sharply at the same time as America is cutting them, this would attract bigger capital inflows and the extra liquidity could actually worsen inflationary pressures.
Indeed, some economists believe that excess money is already partly to blame for rising inflation. In the past there has been a tight correlation between China's inflation and money-supply growth. Monetary growth surged before both bouts of inflation in 1987-88 and 1993-94. In 1993 the annual rate of growth of the M2 measure of money hit 40%.
Today it is less clear that the money supply is out of control. Over the past year M2 rose by 17.5%, not much faster than the average during 1998-2003 when prices were flat or falling. But Hong Liang, an economist at Goldman Sachs, reckons that the M2 measure of money understates the amount of liquidity sloshing around in China. She prefers M3, a broader measure, which includes deposits in non-bank financial institutions and securities issued by financial institutions. According to her calculations, M3 growth has risen sharply since 2005, from around 15% to 23%. This suggests that higher inflation could prove to be more persistent and spread from food to other goods and services, requiring the PBOC to tighten by much more.
But another difference between today and previous bouts of inflation is that in the past rising inflation went hand-in-hand with a widening current-account deficit—a classic symptom of overheating. Today China has a huge surplus. This offers another tool to fight inflation: a more rapid appreciation in the yuan alongside a modest interest-rate rise could curb imported inflation and cause less harm to domestic demand. Indeed, this is something that most economists can agree on: regardless of what is driving inflation up, a stronger yuan would help to pull it down.
Labels: inflation, posted by Eunice
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Playing with the old blood rules With the death of filial piety and the rise of 'kids for hire,' no Chinese family value is sacred anymore.
Melinda Liu
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 12:45 PM ET Mar 8, 2008China's one-child policy is broken. After years of public grumbling, international scandals over forced sterilization and government tinkering, that's a truth of which most Chinese are aware. So when a senior official announced two weeks ago that Beijing was considering scrapping the policy, it didn't come as a complete surprise. Speaking at a press briefing in Beijing, Zhao Baige, vice minister of China's National Population and Family Planning Commission, cautioned that she couldn't say exactly what changes the government would make, or when. But she did make one thing clear: that Beijing knows the policy doesn't work any longer, and it needs to be rethought. "This has become a big issue among [China's] decision makers," she explained.
It's no wonder. After almost 30 years in force, China's unpopular one-child rule—though it was never as strict as usually portrayed—has distorted the population in a manner that threatens China's future. Coupled with the tumultuous impact of rising wealth, the policy has reshaped families in a number of unintended ways. It has limited the number of children available to care for parents in a rapidly aging society in which the state provides few services. The one-child rule also has turned China's traditional bias for sons into a motivation to screen out girls, yielding a population heavily overweight with men. Beijing knows full well these trends won't produce the "harmonious society" that is its official goal, and so it has begun tweaking its policies anew. But tweaks may not be enough.
The most pressing problem is a breakdown of filial piety, the sense of loyalty and shame that drove generations past to protect their elders no matter the cost. Chinese experts say the nation of only-children is increasingly self-centered, more and more inclined to abandon old obligations. Drawn to the booming big cities, many young people are also throwing themselves into the newly rich urban lifestyle (and helping to save for retirement) by opting to have no children themselves.
Those left behind are being forced to adapt. Most strikingly, many Chinese parents are now even reconsidering their long-held prejudice for sons, on the new assumption that daughters are more likely to grow into loyal caregivers. In a striking recent online survey, a thin majority of Chinese said they would now rather have girls than boys. Aged Chinese, meanwhile, are scrambling to find new ways to care for themselves, including private insurance programs and more-bizarre measures like "kid for hire" systems.
The government is seeking creative solutions of its own. Recognizing that the breakdown in filial piety is likely irreversible, it is moving to create a nationwide system of home care for the elderly—in part because it's still considered shameful to send mom or dad to a nursing home. Of course, the simplest fix would be to free people to have more kids, and in some cities, officials are doing just that. But since the 1980s, when the state routinely conducted forced sterilizations, Chinese authorities have largely lost the will and capacity to enforce family-planning policies. Beijing is also still fearful of setting off an uncontrolled population boom. Thus no sooner had Zhao said the one-child policy was being reconsidered than Prime Minister Wen Jiabao tried to squelch the news, insisting no change was in store. "We will adhere to the current policy of family planning [and] keep the birthrate low," he told the National People's Congress last week.
But the changes underway are too big to contain. The problem of a rapidly aging population is common to prospering nations worldwide—but it's made more complicated in China by the impact of its family-planning policies. As China has developed, life expectancy has shot upward, from younger than 50 in 1949 to older than 72 today. The elderly (over 60) share of the population has grown, from 10 percent in 2000 to 11.3 percent in 2006. Though China's Constitution says children must support their parents, many now neglect them. That's partly because the offspring of one-child families are "more likely to be spoiled and self-centered," says Cai Feng, a demographer. But the result is that, as of 2005, 42 percent of Chinese families consisted of an old couple living alone, according to government statistics. In some cities, that figure is now more than 56 percent—comparable to the United States, where aid and the elder-care infrastructure are more comprehensive.
For centuries, a healthy Chinese brood dominated by male children was considered the best form of social security. It still is in many rural areas, where boys can work the fields alongside their parents and won't transfer their earning potential to their in-laws after they marry. After the one-child policy was implemented in 1979, such sentiments led many Chinese parents to do whatever they could (including resorting to female infanticide and selective abortions) to make sure they had boys. As a result, the male-to-female birth ratio in China today is about 1.18 to 1, as opposed to the standard ratio of 1.03–1.07 to 1.
In China's modernizing cities, however, many young couples now recognize that daughters are better caregivers. "Girls are more thoughtful," says Feng Xiaotian, a sociologist at Nanjing University. Not for nothing are girls known in Chinese slang as tie sheng xiao mian ao, or "a thin padded jacket," owing to their perceived ability to provide parents convenience and warmth. As a result, an online survey conducted by the China Youth Daily in early 2007 among 2,603 people from 29 provinces and cities found that more respondents would now choose to have a daughter (29 percent) than a son (28.4 percent). This change hasn't shown up in national birth statistics yet, and the sample set wasn't entirely representative (since Chinese who participate in Web surveys tend to be more liberal and well educated than average). But the numbers represent a stunning shift all the same.
Many Chinese who are too old to bear daughters of their own, meanwhile, are finding other ways to acquire them. Adopting adult children—which was common in feudal times—is becoming prevalent, says Nanjing University's Feng. Take Wu Shaoqiu and his wife, a retired couple living in the central city of Wuhan. After their kids immigrated to the West, they decided they needed "someone to stay and talk" with them, says Wu, 75. So in 2006, he attended a meeting, cosponsored by the city government and a local newspaper, where lonely elderly couples were introduced to prospective adult "daughters." There he met Fang Fang, an executive, whom he brought home to meet his wife. "She brought flowers [and] called me 'Papa' and my wife 'Mummy'," Wu says. Fang Fang soon joined the family—as did two other women she brought along. On weekends and holidays, all three women, who are in their 40s and married, now visit the couple to cook and clean, and maybe play cards or surf the Web. '
Wu and his wife never offered any financial compensation to the women; he says they're happy to act as surrogate children "for the good of society." But in other cases, the terms are more explicit. Tian Zhendong, a retired construction expert, also in Wuhan, says he and his wife felt "lonely and lost" after his son moved to Canada. So he published an ad titled "Elderly couple desperately seeking daughter," promising successful applicants would inherit the couple's apartment. To his surprise, 100 people applied, though the couple abandoned the talent search after their son objected.
Attacking things from the other side, the Chinese government has been trying to quietly liberalize the one-child regime for decades. Since the policy's introduction, rural families, who make up more than 60 percent of the population, have been allowed to have a second child if their first was a girl, and ethnic minorities have been allowed to have two or more kids. And since 2000, provincial governments have allowed only-children who married other only-children a second child as well, to prevent what's known as the "8-4-2-1" syndrome, where a single couple has to support four parents and eight grandparents. Authorities in wealthy cities such as Guangzhou and Beijing have begun publicly urging only-children couples to take advantage of this exception.
Yet finding takers is proving complicated. Many young Chinese urbanites, like yuppies everywhere, don't want more than one kid; some don't want any. A Beijing survey late last year revealed that 52 percent of adult single children didn't want to have more than one child, and more than a quarter said they preferred the DINK lifestyle: double income, no kids. That's a big problem for a city with an estimated 2 million only-child adults.
The answer, says Hou Yafei, an expert of the Beijing institute that conducted the survey, is for the government to make it clearer that only-children couples can now have two kids without incurring the draconian fines of the past. But financial problems will linger. Many of the survey respondents explained their aversion to larger families by pointing to economics. Fang Meiqin, 30, a telecom analyst who is expecting a baby in about four months, spoke for many of her generation when she recounted with horror media reports that said that raising a child through college could cost about $422,000. Fang, a Beijing resident, laid out just how expensive it is to bring up baby these days. She figured she would have to budget $1,400 for annual living expenses, $8,440 to $14,000 for primary education and $7,035 for six years of middle school. Tutoring would cost extra.
Beijing could help defray these costs. But it has its own reasons to be cautious. The stop-and-go course of family-planning reform reflects lingering fears of instability in a population already 1.3 billion strong. Many officials still remember what happened in 1983, when public discussions of changes in family-planning regulations led to a reported 30 million extra births that year and the following one. With the population now growing by 8 million to 10 million annually, Beijing is determined to retain some control lest its hard-won economic gains be undone by a rampant population boom.
The less troublesome fix is to offer parents new aid to support them in old age, rather than new incentives to have kids. One key reason the one-child policy is so contentious in the first place is that China lacks an adequate social safety net—an abiding irony in a supposedly communist country. To address this gap, last year authorities introduced a social-security scheme for farmers and a new program of rural medical cooperatives. Residents who choose to participate in the medical cooperative program now pay 10 yuan (about $1.50) annually for access to local clinics and partially subsidized hospital stays. "In the past, when a farmer was ill or needed an operation, the whole family would go bankrupt," says Prof. Wu Changping, a prominent expert on population and aging at Renmin University.
Caring for the elderly remains a huge challenge. Less than 1.2 percent of China's retirees have access to nursing homes, compared to 8 percent in developed countries. And packing parents off to a nursing home is still seen as shameful. The government also lacks adequate facilities, funding and staff. China required 1.8 million nurses to care for its elderly in 2006, and that figure is slated to mushroom to 6.5 million by 2020, according to the China National Committee on Aging (CNCA).
As an alternative, Beijing is now trying to promote home-care services for the elderly. In late February, CNCA unveiled plans to complete by 2010 a nationwide home-care system that would offer things like house calls by health professionals, meals-on-wheels and volunteers who help with household chores. Of course, nothing beats having your kids around to do the job. But until China finally resolves to scrap its dysfunctional birth-control policies, that's unlikely to be an option.
Comments:
Reading the article questions the need for the Chinese government to implement the one child policy in the first place. The increasing preference to have only one child and the increasing number of DINKs (dual income no kids) in china might actually suggest that the one child policy is unnecessary. The birth rates will eventually fall as the Chinese society westernized, as money making becomes a priority (with the introduction of the reform era) and as the cost of living increases. The one child policy was deemed as redundant, as china now faces an ageing population just like the developed countries, but unlike them, China has limited resources.Labels: china's one child policy, posted by Eunice
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