A Safe Environment for Social Engineering
By Miguel Guanipa (11/29/06)
One of my favorite cartoons of all time is one in which Calvin and Hobbes are engaged in casual banter and midway through the conversation Calvin makes an unusually insightful observation. Hobbes looks at him and remarks in a somewhat condescending manner that Calvin's philosophical musings would have sounded better if they had come from someone else; the implication being that the weight of Calvin's profound repartee bore no connection to his lack of wisdom and eminence to utter it in the first place.
Since we live in a world where celebrities and experts hold enormous sway over much of what is often accepted as the authoritative viewpoint, this principle may not necessarily apply to recent comments made by Pan Jiahua at a U.N. Global Warming Conference, in which he asserted that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will require implementing social measures not unlike China's one-child policy, which he claimed had helped his own country reduce energy demand by 300 million people.
Pan Jiahua is not George Clooney; he is the Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of the Research Centre for Sustainable Development at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He has also authored about 150 papers and articles in academic journals on subjects like Economic Analysis of Alternative Approaches to Sustainable Development. Suffice it to say that when he makes such pronouncements, many people with high powered positions in government tend not to dismiss him offhand. I believe that should be cause for great concern to the rest of us who may have to adjust to the social conditions that would result from the actualization of his weighty proposition.
Mr. Jiahua’s “modest proposal” for arresting the imminent ecological disaster posed by Global Warming is derived from a government policy that has been in place since 1979. Back then the Chinese government felt threatened by what it perceived to be an brewing overpopulation problem and decided the best way to solve it would be to “encourage” its citizens to have only one child if they lived in urban areas and no more than two if living in rural areas.
This policy was enforced with relative success under the banner “One is good, two is ok and three is too many”. Those who birthed more than two children in unauthorized regions would be subject to a “Social Maintenance Fee” and forced to pay for the additional children’s education and health care which would have been otherwise subsidized by the benevolent communist state.
The alleged success of this ambitious program is still being debated today as many of these population requirements were reportedly met through the use of forced sterilization and pressure from Chinese officials who would stake out mostly rural neighborhoods suspected of violations, equipped with portable ultrasound devices and specific quotas which had been assigned to them. It did not help that they had to confront a rather skeptical Chinese population that was unable to appreciate the purported benefits of a social experiment which required a form of infanticide in order to forestall an overpopulation pandemic. In many cases abortions up to the 9th month of conception were “voluntarily” acquiesced to by those who violated the government’s decree.
One of the unintended consequences of China’s one-child policy is the high rate of abandoned female children for which the government would have imposed an added financial burden on the trespassing parents who chose not to abort. Additionally, as a consequence of widespread use of sex-selective abortion in rural families whose economic survival depended on the raising of male offspring, there is a highly skewed male to female ratio in today’s Chinese young child bearing population.
The program has also created a vexing sub-replacement fertility rate problem for third generation beneficiaries of the one-child policy, leaving a replacement ratio of two grandparents and two parents to one adult child who is essentially vulnerable to dependency on retirement funds, charity or other government financial support programs in order to not only replace but financially support the ageing workforce.
Not surprisingly, this program enjoys full support under the auspices of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), the world's largest international source of funding for population and reproductive health programs.
Established in early 2002, part of the UNFPA’s stated mission is to foster “…support (of) countries using population data for policies and programs to reduce poverty and to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted…” It also lists “Changes in atmospheric composition and consequential environmental degradation” among some of the problems associated with and exacerbated by human overpopulation, which can result in the inability of local environments to sustain us and eventually lead to human extinction.
All of the aforementioned negative repercussions of the One Child Policy would present a very compelling argument against Mr. Jiahua’s utopian recommendations, especially for those whom Secretary-General Kofi Annan recently deemed as being "out of step" and "out of time" For denying Global Warming or delaying any preventative measures against it. But many in the Sustainable Development field still see a call to aggressive action in the connection between economic growth and environmental protection, which is why the subject of Global Warming is so near and dear to the hearts of people like Mr. Jiahua.
So when you hear rumors of a projected overpopulation catastrophe and its foreboding connection to Global Warming, beware of the zealous envoys heralding the arrival of a brave new world; because it is not just reducing greenhouse gas emissions that they are interested in.
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