On CNN: Mao Offered US 10 Million Women

[Nobody]

On reading this article

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/02/14/chinese.women.ap/index.html

I wonder if Mao knew what would happen when he instituted the one child per family law. He must have, since he considers women to be nothing more than trade goods and the kind you try to get rid of, not acquire.

"After Kissinger noted Mao was "improving his offer," the chairman said, "We have too many women. ... They give birth to children and our children are too many.""

By Mao's logic....

Too many women, but not too many men. After all, it takes a woman nine months to bring one child into the world, but a man can impregnate numerous women in the same amount of time.

As it happens, Chinese girls have been adopted by many other countries in large numbers, but there are still way too many girls abandoned.

[tekisui]

1. Why are we honoring this regime with the Olympics?

It is disgraceful.

[noamnety]

7. That's a two way question

Why are they honoring us by letting us participate?

[tekisui]

10. Point taken.

[Boojatta]

16. Can you explain the point that you took? It seems rather mysterious to me.

Perhaps the word "esoteric" would be more appropriate than "mysterious."

[MikeNearMcChord]

2. Right now I am reading a biography

and right now just at the start of the Great Leap Forward campaign, one of the greatest human disasters visited to a people by a government, in term of numbers of deaths.

[Triana]

3. No effort to get the Chinese men to keep it in their pants eh?

Why am I not surprised.

Kill women / girls instead - or sell them off or give them away to other countries - as if they're some type of farm animals.

But for gawd's sake DON'T DO ANYTHING to encourage men to control themselves. Poor babies, they're not capable of thaaat. They can run countries and dominate the world but they can't control their 'urges'?

Pfffffffft!

[gaspee]

4. Yeah

I was thinking China could have an awesome Castrati Choir and solve their population problems.

Somehow, I don't think that would be an acceptable solution...

Hey, but don't worry - there's no such thing as sexism or misogyny and feminists are old relics who should just retire... :sarcasm:

[Nobody]

5. Exactly

If I had the power to do it, I'd make it so that no one in all of China could conceive or beget a female baby, since they haven't valued the women and girls they have.

That would solve their problems and make them extremely happy not to have any of those pesky girls around. No mind to the next generation, but that's what you get.

I'll never get that four year old girl out of my head that I read about when I was in high school. US News had a story on female infanticide back in the 80s. The girl's mother was pregnant and her father thought so little of his daughter that he told a reporter about putting her in the well and ignoring her cries for daddy to come and get her out.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. Their misogyny is coming back to bite them

I read that after years of the one-child policy, sex-selection abortions, and abandonment of female infants, there are something like 10 million young men who will never be able to find wives.

In the American West, a similar imbalance (not 10 million of course, but a similar percentage) coincided with the first wave of the feminist movement. Since there were so few women and they had been influenced by the developments going on in society back East (the suffrage campaign, reform of property, inheritance, and child custody laws), they took the view that they didn't have to put up with mistreatment. One quote I read said, "If he don't treat me right, there's them as will."

They also proved that they could work just as hard and surmount dangers just as well as any man. It was impossible for sexists to argue that women were too weak or easily influenced to vote--try telling that to a woman who had walked halfway across the country (settlers didn't usually ride in horse-drawn covered wagons as in the movies; they walked alongside ox-drawn covered wagons), built her own sod house, and farmed a homestead claim by herself.

You have to wonder what will happen in China. One reasons that sons have been preferred is that the parents typically lived with their oldest son in their old age, while daughters took care of their husband's parents. There was no other form of "social security." But with sons unable to marry and looking forward to having no one to take care of THEM, anything could happen. Will China do something sensible and institute services for the elderly so that they're not dependent on their children? Or will only wealthy men be able to marry?

What seems to be happening among the poor now is that they are kidnapping young women if none are available in their area. That's certainly not a desirable outcome.

The one-child policy is another example of the disadvantages of a dictatorship. The people at the top can make sweeping decrees that no one dare disobey, and they don't listen to advisers to who offer cautions.

I've been to China and seen how crowded it is, so I know WHY the Chinese government felt compelled to act. However, the demographic nightmare, one person responsible for four grandparents and unable to marry, should have been predictable to anyone who ran the numbers. Those kinds of numbers even make it difficult to set up an old age pension system. Allowing everyone to have two children would have caused the population to level off without distorting the demographics so much.

[shimmergal]

9. China HAS, recently, passed a law that offers

old-age pensions to parents whose first and only child is a daughter, to encourage them to keep girl babies. Apparently they recognize some bad consequences of the social policy combined with the preference for boys who'll take care of parents in their old age.

They're also trying to encourage domestic adoptions, for childless Chinese couples to adopt more of the abandoned babies.

Still, there are over 900 orphanages in China, and the pace of international adoptions (which in the best of times only provided homes for a minority of abandoned children) has slowed to a trickle. There's some speculation that after the Olympics it'll pick up again.

[Nobody]

11. I heard a while ago that families are now allowed to have two children

If the first one is a girl.

I read an article a few years ago that of the industrialized countries, only the USA has mothers who prefer girls, but not by a wide margin. The reasons they stated in the article was that they wanted someone to dress up cute.

[Warpy]

8. Mao started the mess by telling women to have as many children

as possible. That was official policy until people with more sense started to look at the country's ability to feed itself long term. Mao's pronatalism was overruled the second he kicked the bucket.

It came in during the time of the Gang of Four trials when the people with more sense blamed his widow and 3 others for their part in the Cultural Revolution that set the country back for a decade and sacrificed a generation to poor education.

Girl children were always despised in China since they cost money to raise and would then join somebody else's family to repay what they'd learned. Mao was offering little girls, not women. He was after WORKERS, not breeders, and hadn't counted on the near parity of the sexes being born.

Mao was a brilliant military and political strategist who managed to unite a country that hadn't been a truly cohesive whole for a long time. He just proved unable to govern it and became quite dotty in his later years. His pronatalism in an over populated country prone to famine was one of his policies that made the least amount of sense.

[hendo]

12. Warpy is right

Mao had originally wanted a population boom in China because he thought that Malthus was pushing a perverse theory regarding over population. Mao wanted as many Chinese as possible so that China would become a military power.

The one-child policy came into fruition in 1979. Mao on the other hand passed away in 1976.

Mao did do some horrible things, but the one child policy is actually quite the opposite of what he wanted.

[Quantess]

13. Here's the logistics of family planning:

Each woman can only have a limited number of babies, definitely no more than 20, realistically. Even 6 or 7 offspring is a lot for a human female.

Each man, however, can have indefinitely many offspring, as many as how many women he impregnates.

Hopefully, everyone knows this already.

So, by reducing the number of females, you severely cut back on the number of offspring. Women are the ones who give birth, remember? Cut back on us, and you drastically cut back on the amount of babies born, of any gender. Not saying it's good or bad, that's just the way it is.

[Boojatta]

17. You have a good point if you're talking about...

a polygamous splinter group of Mormons. If such a group has fewer women then it will probably have a lower rate of output of new baby boy and girl mouths to feed. However, how does your point apply to China?

[shain from kane]

14. Hold the Mao noise.

[Librado]

15. How degrading

Shameful.