[07/08/08] In which I write a bit (a lot?) about China

So there's all this Beijing/Olympics hype. Personally, I would feel claustrophobic in Beijing, as their population is about 767 people per square kilometre. Kind of glad I'm not going there. That basically means that each person in Beijing has about 1.2 square metres of breathing space. Yay population questions! I really should be doing them right now. I do find demography quite interesting. Though there are some things that aren't particularly impressive about China's population.

The fertility rate in the mid 1960s was high - about 7.5 children per woman. This is because in the 1950s (not sure about this date, but I'm too lazy to look it up) there was the Communist revolution (though China's political history is quite unstable) and their population policy was basically "go forth and multiply", so the population rose quite significantly to the point that the Once Child Policy, or Chinese Population Policy was implemented in 1979. Duh duh DUUUUUUH! Good idea at first, but there's always a loophole.

The aim of the policy is to bring the population back down to a manageable rate, and they hand out free condoms in work factories and such. There is a problem to this though, and it has to do with China's cultural values, which is that they would prefer to have sons. So what happens? Daugters are 'stillborn', and a Chinese couple can easily discover the sex of their unborn child while having an ultrasound screening. If the baby is a girl it can be aborted. This happens a lot. Basically what happens in Chinese culture is that when a couple marry, the wife joins the husband and they look after the husband's parents in their old age. So many couples are having sons, which means that the male to female ratio is pretty screwed up. In a way it kind of means that it's working, but smaller numbers of men will be able to find wives, and the reason you can say it's working is because a smaller percentage of the population is able to breed. Um... that's all for now, I need to go back to getting this work done for tomorrow.