The following article references another opinion piece, titled “Is Forced Procreation Coming To China?”
The problems facing China are manyfold, and they spring from the problems with human-generated central policies. Humans can’t be trusted to generated centralized policies for a large population and country. Humans tyrants tend to be too stupid to be depended upon for solutions, and many humans are simply too corrupt (or ruthless). The world is an inherently chaotic as well as mostly unknowable reality, and the knowledge you need to have, plus the cognitive ability required to take all aspects of material reality and human psychology into account isn’t there yet. Unless we generate massively more capable Artificial Intelligence systems to come up with adequate policy and societal management, any attempt by elected or appointed bureaucrats to impose adequate centrally generated decissions and policies has historically proven certain to fail.
This is why democracy, transparancy and capitalism functions marginally better – it is because of the ability of said alternatives to generate better solutions to complex problems. I am by no means suggesting that capitalism is much better in managing complexity – it is only marginally better than autocratic systems. Problem is why don’t have much alternative to society building, so we collectively gravitate towards the proven best paradigm we have available, if given the freedom to do so.
China is still caught in a societal paradigm that’s effectively dead and buried decades ago. This paradig is delegating usolvable problems to someone arrogant and stupid enough to take responsibility for making complex decissions. That’s why in autocratic society (be it fascism, communism, right wing dictatorships or feudal society) the leaders are always engaging in building a personality cult to absolve themselves from mistakes, and that’s why such societies also victimize minorities or externalities, because these leaders need someone to blame in case things go wrong.
China has, by any measure, inflicted massive societal damage by imposing a one child policy. They didn’t have much alternative solutions at the time, since Maoist China had the actual goals for some time to literally have China outbreed the rest of the planet. The one child policy was a frantic and nigh hysterical act of tyrannical overreach to make certain China could escape nascent and catastrophic overpopulation. Several decades later we now get to witness the auguably likelyhood of the pendulum clumsily dangling into the other direction, with CCP state officials spasmodically becoming afraid of a society overrun by starving geriatric people without children to care for them. Because everyone realizes that it’s next to impossible for China to generate “civilized” elderly care anytime soon.
Forcing Chinese people to have more kids, when most can scarcely afford just the one, would be a new catastrophe in the making. Imagine several hundred million men and women, scared witless by the arguably incompetent CCP enacting rules and punishments left and right to make them have children. If you want a few hundred million chinese to haphazzardly scramble to self-sterilize and self-vasectomize in back-alley clinics this is the way to go.
There is however a solution to all this, and let me emphasize, I am not making recommendations. I am squarely against forcing people to do or don’t do stuff, unless in when lots of lives are at stake. I am squarely against killing or tormenting people because they don’t fit the ideals of society (Be they Uygurs, Roma, Jews, Muslims or members Falun Gong). I am viciously against centralized state (or neoliberal free market) fascism, cruelty and compulsion. I am against historical forms of eugenics, whether done by the CCP, the british, australians, israeli, germans or americans.
The solution I envision doesn’t yet exist technologically, but we are very close to it.
We can sustain the development of sheep embryo in artificial wombs. Sheep are mammals, as are human beings. We can genetically screen mammalian lifestock as to weed out proven genetic flaws, and experiments to this effect are already widely acknowledged scandals. It stands to reasn to conclude we are relatively close (I don’t know if it’s years, but it certainly isn’t decades) from having at least the tacit capability of a relatively ruthless government to massproduce humans in a mix of fertillity clincs, synthetic wombs and state orphanages. I am pretty certain the current CCP is ruthless enough to do this, even if such projects would have a relatively high failure rate.
What would this look like in practice? Well, it would have to be “sustainably” scaled up, in relative silence. I would be barely surprised this is already being done on a small scale (with available slave labour) but I would not be surprised AT ALL if the current chinese authorities weren’t already looking at the logistics. Let’s speculate this become fiscally and medically doable (with an acceptable failure rate) around 2025, and let’s assume the first children girls of this product range would attain procreative age around 2039 then I can see the first populations of tens of thousands remarkably fit, attractive, healthy, intelligent, tall, well-mannered, state loyal, girls giving birth by 2040, give or take. That’s pretty much in time to stave off catastrophic democraphic problems in china.
How should the developed, free world respond to this? Well, sadly, this would be a very popular market service for prospective affluent parents in the western world. I can easily see entitled american couples flock to select clinics in mainland china or any of its numerous satelite states to partake of these services, including the key aspect of these women becoming liberated from the pregnancy aspect. So Neoliberalism (if it still exists as such by 2040) will publicly condemn, but behind the scenes these medical advancements will become growth industries and prized services in no time.
(And while I am it, I might as well throw the Middle East under the bus. Imagine a genetically sanitized clone of a wellknown celebrity, specifically raised for this purpose, and ask yourself – what such a specimen would be worth on the free market?)
Let me repeat, I do not advocate this. The amount of suffering will no doubt be horrendous. Many such babies will end up literally terminated when there’s errors or bugs in the ‘production process’. We may see black smoke billow from chimneys here and there in China as they deal with any inconvenient factory errors in the new monthly crop of state infants. Given the current demand for eagerly socialist women of procreative age to be brainwashed into complacent motherhood, even a small percentage of such defective products could rival the killing rates of nazi germany, but no doubt I’ll be accused of getting ahead of myself in this article.
Or am I?