By Dave Andrusko

Yesterday we ran a story about the 30th anniversary of China’s brutal “One Child Policy.” That draconian policy was denounced at a press conference Friday by human rights leaders who charged that it “has led to forced and coerced sterilizations and abortions and has led China to become the only country in the world with a higher rate--three times higher--of female suicides than male suicides.”

Almost on cue, the Associated Press reported yesterday that “China will continue to limit most families to just one child in the coming decades, state media said Monday, despite concerns about the policy's problematic side effects, such as too few girls and a rapidly aging population.” As Alexa Olesen explained there had been a lot of speculation “about whether the government would relax the policy soon, allowing more people to have two children.”

But it was not to be. The head of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, Li Bin, was quoted yesterday in the China Daily newspaper as saying, “[W]e will stick to the family planning policy in the coming decades.” This after the incredible hypocrisy of “extend[ing ] profound gratitude to all, the people in particular, for their support of the national course."

In its relentless and coercive campaign, Chinese officials have created two “unanticipated consequences,” both of which, in fact, were utterly predictable.

Since there is a widespread preference for males, countless numbers of female babies were aborted or killed at birth.

Consequently, the ratio between the sexes is highly skewed.

“The male-female ratio at birth in China is about 119 males to 100 females, with the gap as high as 130 males for every 100 females in some provinces,” Olesen writes. “In industrialized countries, the ratio is 107 to 100.”

In addition, “The strict family planning rules, which limit urban couples to one child and rural couples to two, have curbed China's population growth but brought new problems, such as an expanding elderly population that demographers say will be increasingly hard to support as the young labor force begins shrinking over the next few years.”

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