It's Time for Another, Genuine Cultural Revolution

The Good Old Days

China is finding out that you cannot just turn babies off-and-on.  The government was hailed for recently easing the draconian restrictions upon married couples to just one child.  It was a start, but a stuttering beginning, at best.  The social dislocation in Chinese society from the One Child Policy will take decades, generations to redress and put right.  

A recent article in Epoch Times describes how nothing much has changed in a town lauded for its adherence to, and its disciplined alacrity over, carrying out the former "one child" policy.

In the 1980s, the county of Rudong in China’s coastal province of Jiangsu was lauded for its strict adherence to China’s infamous one child policy. Three decades later, the county’s residents are paying the price of the Chinese regime’s efforts at population control.  Rudong County has come under scrutiny recently for having negative population growth for 17 straight years, and for having a rapidly aging populace, according to a report by the semi-official Beijing News on March 29. And the county’s residents haven’t taken to recently instituted pronatalist measures.

The problem is that a social cluster (such as a town) eventually reaches the tipping point of death--the point at which it is not possible to rebuild the town or area.  Like other cities and regions throughout history, living there becomes too hard, or costly, or inconvenient and people move.  The city or town dies.  That's what is happing in Rudong now.

After the turn of the millennium, schools in Rudong have been forced to close owing to a lack of children—a kindergarten teacher who’s contemplating shutting her school said that there were 5 junior high schools, 7 elementary schools and at least 5 kindergartens back in 1999, but only 1 junior high school, 1 elementary school and 3 kindergartens now.

Meanwhile, the buildings of many closed schools have been reappropriated for senior homes. For instance, Binshan Senior Apartments, the largest senior home in Rudong, was formerly Gangnan Elementary School, which wound down in 2012. There are currently more than 20 senior homes in Rudong.  Senior workers are a common sight in Rudong. The 20-odd tricycle drivers plying a busy commercial street in town are all above 60 years old. Workers in their fifties are hailed as “young people” at a construction site in Fengli Town.

Why would younger families move to a ghost town?  It is not just the town infrastructure becoming inadequate for families and children, the attitudes of the people in town have become anti-children under the one-child policy.  Rudong had been a town celebrated for its anti-reproductive orthodoxy in the nineteen eighties.

Rudong’s skewed population was the result of having been the testing ground for the regime’s population control measures. In the 1950s, women in the county were having 5 children on average. Anti-birth controls were introduced in 1963, and twenty years later, over 99.5 percent of couples in Rudong had only one child.

In 1986, the Chinese regime’s State Council honored Rudong by declaring the county a “Family Planning Red Unit” and presenting a gold medal to the local government. The local government even erected a monument to commemorate the accomplishment.  However, “the award is no longer glorious today,” Pan Jinhuan, a former Party Standing Committee member, told Beijing News.  Pan added that his wife had an abortion four months into her pregnancy to comply with the nationwide one-child policy in the 1980s, a decision he “couldn’t afford to regret” if he wanted to keep his Party membership and political appointment.

Now the attitude is, Why bother? when it comes to children.  Less than 1 percent of couples in Rudong has applied for a permit to have a second child.  For decades Chinese have been lectured on the ideal Chinese family being two adults and one child.  Overnight, suddenly, it's two kids.  Give me a break, the Chinese say.

But far more serious is the deep resentment towards the Communist State in Rudong:

On China’s popular microblogging site Sina Weibo, netizens were bitter at the intrusive family-planning policies and their legacy, as well as the family-planning honor that was bestowed upon the county 30 years ago.  “The monument you enshrined is stained with the blood of many deaths. You can erect a monument and remove the monument, but can you remove the resentment in people’s hearts,” wrote netizen “Carbonizing” from Shaanxi.

“It is not a question of whether we want to have a second child. But why the state has the right to interfere in our decision to have children, and how many,” wrote “Qin Ke Qin Ke” from Hebei. “Torn Down Berlin Wall” from Shaanxi asked: “Who should be responsible for this erroneous national policy?”

Who indeed?  In the good old days of the Cultural Revolution, deviants were made to stand forth in public and confess their "errors", usually prior to their execution or being shipped off as slaves to the State's collective farms.

How about a very public confession of wrongdoing by the Communist Party for the tyranny it has exerted over the people and for all the innocent blood it has shed in carrying out its mass murder upon the not-yet-born?  That would be a good place to start.