The effects of China’s one child policy today

With my environmental philosophy class continuing our unit on climate change and possibly solutions, I have continuously noticed many connections to some of the themes and discussions that have been focused on in this class. Just the other day in my philosophy class we discussed a paper that argued for a one child policy. The basis of the argument was that having multiple children was not necessary to lead a happy and fulfilling life, and that having more than one child would infringe on other people’s right to have a happy life. It has been statistically proven that having one less child is the best way to reduce carbon emissions, and its miles ahead of the second best thing (living without a car). I found this argument very persuading and there were a lot of different aspects of the argument that I found very interesting. The author of the paper mentioned things like tax breaks for families that only had one child and various other economic factors similar to that. After reading through the paper I was interested to look more into China’s former one child policy and how it was still effecting the country today. As I was looking for information on the one child policy I found an article from the guardian and I was very surprised on the information I got from reading it. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/02/china-population-control-two-child-policy) In this article, almost every opinion on the one child policy is extremely negative. Even with China removing the policy a couple of years ago, their population is still rapidly aging and shrinking. With this China has been trying to engineer a baby boom to combat the shrinking population, to no success however. Even though the policy makers are trying to get people the have more kids, many families are deciding against it, as it is hard enough to raise only one child in China. I found this difference in view points between the normal families and China and the policy makers to be very interesting. It almost seems to me as the people of China are thought of as no more than economic tools by the policy makers. The families job is to pump out more children so that the economy can grow. However, this clearly shows zero care for the current state of climate change and global warming. It is good to see the families of China still continuing to have less children, even with the government try to push back against them. Overall, this was a very interesting article to read, and there was a lot to take in that I wasn’t aware of.