Total Human Yield
Last week, China’s Communist Party announced that it would rescind its one-child policy, a controversial program born in the late 1970s. Under this policy, Chinese families (with exception to certain ethnicities and regional backgrounds) were initially encouraged—and then eventually forced—to have no more than one child.
There is, certainly, a moral argument against the enforcement of such a regulation. Reproduction is widely considered a universal human right, and for it to be restricted by a governing institution is a harrowing thought, one that is anathema to the liberal charter borne by the modern West. Under the Communist Party’s attempt at “family-planning,” millions of Chinese families have been exposed to the cruelties that have come to define what is clearly an authoritarian government. Simon Worrall of National Geographic writes that the Party’s draconian policy resulted in “-millions of forced sterilizations, abortions, infanticide and marital misery.” And as an anecdotal point, keep in mind that any government that advertises itself as a “People’s Republic,” does so out of necessity, not aspiration.
But in the interest of cold rationale, and not just sentiment—a fickle thing—let us sharpen our perspectives with reasoning independent of ethics. For a moment, yield your “inalienable” rights to the Chinese government. Then, sympathetically ask, what was the ideology behind the one-child policy?
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Communist Party implemented its family-planning protocol in the backdrop of worldwide concerns of a “population bomb.” Laurie Mazur of The Los Angeles Times writes that in 1968, “biologist Paul Ehrlich famously declared, ‘The battle to feed all humanity is over’…he warned that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the next decade...” This Malthusian prediction never came true; the advent of the “Green Revolution,” and its agricultural innovations staved off any immediate risks of global starvation.
China’s implementation of the one-child policy was not entirely based on emergency food forecasts. Fundamentally, the one-child policy was an offshoot of a societal impulse: a desire to rationalize, delineate and regulate nature—including reproduction. In his book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, political scientist James C. Scott calls this attitude “high-modernism” and outlines its development.
Why do we need to regulate the natural order? The answer lies precisely within the question. It is only “we,” that is, the “plurality”—that require the codification of Earth into properties, properties into resources and resources into units. Primordial man had no uses for these things, because he saw the world as an uninterrupted tapestry. When one is alone in the jungle, the unit—the infinitely replicable abstraction—has no meaning.
But two is company, and three’s a crowd. When the savage relinquishes his spear and steps forth from the brush to join his neighbors, a society is formed. Accordingly, so is sociology, and it is this science that dictates that the demarcation of Mother Earth is an exceeding communitarian benefit. For example, the market is an institution that is wholly dependent on units. Prices are fixed to a set amount of a commodity, whether that be a yard of silk or a plank of wood. If unitary standards are varied among a locale (one group weighs seeds when they are dry, another when they are wet), or worse, do not exist at all, multi-agent trading becomes a communicative nightmare.
Somewhere in the evolution of statecraft, rulers realized that the concept of regulation, and by proxy the concept of state control, could be projected onto Nature herself. This involved a two-step process.
As leaders surveyed their maps, they saw in their territories only deposits of resources and not natural systems with intelligent complexities. Each earthly creation became a number, a certain profit to the state. Forests were only a gross annual yield of wood. Lakes were not habitats, but volumes of water that could be used for irrigation.
Inevitably, the consequence was that the “randomness” of nature became a hindrance to state metrics, which only cared about efficiency. How convenient would it be, governments pondered, if every tree grew to a unitary height, and if every field provided 160 bushels of wheat per year? To ruling authorities, the ideal Earth was one designed and shaped at the behest of state interests. Such would provide dominion of the state over nature, for nature’s assets would be laid bare to the ravages of bureaucracy.
With advances in mechanical power, governments were made more capable of realizing this goal. Mountains could be flattened, rivers diverted and underbrush cleared, all with the intent of turning the world into a neat checkerboard of farms and utilities. The same ethos was applied, with equal subtlety, to human environments. Scott uses Brasilia as an example, a “preplanned” city constructed by the Brazilian government during the late 1950s.
Just as a city could be designed, so could the family unit. Families were no longer estates of the wild, but farms that could be manipulated to produce a regulated yield of children. And thus, the one-child policy was born within the Communist Party. The short-term benefits of population control (if they ever existed), were always secondary to an overarching motive: to mold nature in such a way as to imprint it with state power. The resulting history remains brutally evident; any demographic record of China will show a startling dip in birth rate which coincides with the inception of the one-child policy.
What are less visible, however, are the untold cultural, sexual and social norms that were tragedized by the wanton will of the Communist Party. High-modernism—state arrogance—does not consider that there is more to nature than meets the eye. A forest is not just a series of trees, and a family is not just a child-producing factory. Forests and families are systems of biological harmony, and are themselves delicately suspended in the larger fabric of the natural world. Any policy that does not recognize this is a recipe for disaster.