One Child - A Review

China’s one child policy offered promise of economic blessing, but has resulted in sociological disruption leading to economic problems, leaving trauma and tragedy in its wake. This is an example of a government trying to plan its way to prosperity.

In a 2012 book, One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment, journalist Mei Fong explores the impacts of the technocratically-driven population policy instituted by China several decades ago.

One Child is an engaging book. Fong writes clearly, tells captivating stories, and systematically arranges the book in a way that makes it an enjoyable and informative read.

One of Fong’s main goals in writing One Child is to demonstrate that the infamous policy of Communist China is not the blessing that some have argued it to be. She writes,

“It took me a while to realize that, contrary to popular thinking, the one-child policy had very little to do with China’s double-digit economic growth of the past thirty years, and will actually be a drag for the next thirty.” (9)

Fong came to realize that people are both consumers and producers. Although she does not articulate the idea clearly in her book, it seems that she also recognizes that the economy is not a pie of a fixed size. That is, having more productive citizens does not mean that the same wealth must be distributed to more people more thinly. It means that more people will produce more wealth, which can be available to many people. The economy is not a zero-sum game.

The tragedy of the one-child policy is manifold. Fong notes that the policy has created a class of non-citizens in China who, because they were the extra child born over the limit, cannot be registered and cannot get health care, an education, or jobs. They are the hei haizi, “black children,” undocumented and ignored.

One of the more frightening aspects of the one-child policy has been the eugenic emphasis. Fong argues, “Chinese authorities were never shy about stating this aim of the one-child policy: fewer births, higher-quality births.” (28) The right people should be able to procreate to create the right sort of citizen. The result of such policies is always horrific abuse of human rights.

Fong tells the story of one factory worker pregnant with her second child. She believed she was qualified for an exemption, but the local officials disagreed. They demanded an exorbitant fine, which her family could not pay, and was subsequently forced to have an abortion. Fong writes,

“Feng, meanwhile, was made to sign an agreement she voluntarily consented to the abortion. On June 2, she was injected with a substance to kill the fetus. She later said, ‘I could feel the baby jumping around inside me all the time, but then she went still.’” (61)

Furthermore, “In some parts of the country, pregnant women without birth permits were marched off in handcuffs to undergo forced abortions.” (70) In the 1990’s, the policy expanded to punish behaviors that could be more or less linked to unsanctioned births, “Women were fined for living with a man out of wedlock; for not using contraception, even if it didn’t lead to pregnancy; or simply for not attending regular pregnancy checkups. In Jiangsu, women had to line up twice monthly for pregnancy tests and publicly pee in cups.” (73)

Contributing to this, there was “a wage incentive for birth-planning officials, which was tied to how many sterilizations and abortions they were able to achieve. . . . [According to one former official,] ‘Some girls were forced to get surgeries even though they weren’t pregnant at all.’” (75]

The enforced abortion regime is one of the most horrific aspects of the policy that Fong records. Interestingly, she herself is a proponent of abortion and considered terminating her first pregnancy, which later ended in miscarriage, which only makes the horror of her stories more apparent.

The sociological impacts of the one-child are also striking. Fong details how combining one-child policies with a culture that expects children to take care of their parents puts extreme pressure on children to get into lucrative careers so they and their spouse can support their own child plus up to four parents and, potentially, grandparents as well. The emotional burden on the child who fears failing a test and being forced into factory work is obvious.

China has also instituted minimum ages for marriage. A man cannot get married before he is 22 and a woman before 20. But if school is not complete and a career not established, then marriage will logically be delayed. Subsequently, the age of marriage goes up and the window of fertility shrinks. The result is increasing infertility, which is making it more difficult for some workers to conceive and bear even the quota of children they are allowed.

Fong’s book is a helpful exposé of the regime in China. It is a reminder that government tinkering in families and biology are often ill-fated, even when they have positive motives. It is also a reminder of the horror of abortion that underlies many zero population growth or other population control movements. These are consistently pitched as “voluntary,” but once the government steps in “volunteerism” often shifts to coercion. People should be careful what they wish for.

One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment

By Fong, Mei

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Socialism Sucks - A Review

I requested a review copy of Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World on a whim. The title is provocative and the subtitle sounds intriguing (if not a model of virtue). Given the title, I expected the book to be somewhere beyond polemical into the range of bellicose. Thankfully, the coauthors, Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell, are not mean drunks.

Lawson is a professor at SMU and, perhaps more significantly, is one of the co-creators of the Economic Freedom of the World index. Powell is executive director of the Free Market Institute and a professor at Texas Tech. There are men who are convinced that a free market it the best economic system. They are libertarians. And, apparently, they enjoy good beer.

The premise of the book, which was proposed via a slightly tipsy text, is that these two economists would travel to various countries impacted by socialism and sample the local beverages while they examine the health of the economy. Their journey takes them from Sweden through China and all the way back to the United States. The chapters are a mix of reporting from ground level and discussion of economic principles. Who would have expected that when going on a pub crawl with these men, readers would learn something about economics?

After an introduction that begins with salty language and breezy prose, the authors go to Sweden. The beer in Sweden is good, though expensive. Of course, Sweden is not a socialist country, so the quality of the beer is not surprising, given Lawson and Powell’s thesis of the deficiencies of socialism. However, the beer is also notably expensive because of the high taxes needed to support Sweden’s bulky welfare system. Sweden is, in fact, able to support their generous welfare system because they have one of the freest economies in the world.

Next stop on the journey is Venezuela. The authors actually spend more time in Colombia along the Venezuelan border, because it isn’t safe to enter Venezuela. But what they see is tragic. The once-prosperous nation of Venezuela has residents streaming across the border to Colombia on a regular basis to get goods (like diapers and sugar) that are simply unavailable in their home country. Inflation is so bad that the authors exchanged a US $20 for a foot-high stack of large denomination Venezuelan currency (and they likely got the short end of the stick). The collapse of the economy in Venezuela is, as Powell and Lawson explain, largely due to attempts at price control, seizure of private property by the government, and strict controls on imports and exports. Oh, and beer is generally unavailable in Venezuela because the government won’t allow them to import hops.

After that dreary visit, they go to Cuba. It is, according to some, a paradise of free medical care. What tourists find when they venture off the beaten path is a dreary socialism that is barely making ends meet. There are some restaurants, but their menus are nearly identical and bland. The hotels run by the government are mediocre at best. The beer is bland and low quality. Cars are exorbitantly expensive, even for moderately functional units.

The third stop on the journey is North Korea. This time the authors do not actually go into the country because they have a friend who spent over a year in a labor camp for his visit. What they see from a neighboring Chinese city is a radical difference between the extreme poverty of North Korea’s socialist economy and the pseudo-capitalism of China. These libertarian professors even choose to forgo a strip club with North Korean girls, not because of any sexual virtue, but because they realize that many of the staff at the club are trafficking victims who were merely looking for a way out of North Korea. The misery of North Korea is even more striking when the prosperity in South Korea is considered in comparison. In this chapter, Powell and Lawson drink Swedish beer again, because there is no North Korean beer. In China, however, the beer is cheaper than in Sweden because the taxes are lower.

Although China is governed by the Communist party, there have been significant market reforms in the past few decades. Thus, the authors call it “fake socialism.” There are, to be sure, still significant aspects of the Chinese economy that are not free. What China has is crony capitalism, which is an advance on socialism, but still effective in keeping many Chinese people from prospering.

In Chapter Five, Lawson and Powell’s excellent adventure takes them to Russia and Ukraine, which are hungover from the socialism of the Soviet empire. Their visit to the epicenter of communism serves as a reminder of the millions of people enslaved and slaughtered to make socialism work. One of the most striking vignettes in this chapter is the prevalence of abortion, particularly when the Soviets were in power. It was not something that was particularly good for women, contrary to recent attempts to whitewash abortion and the Soviet regime. According to an estimate by Soviet gynecologist Archil Khomassuridze, “women in the Soviet Union had between five and eight abortions for each birth.” (pg 97) It was done in an assembly line manner, as this quote from a feminist magazine outlines:

“You go into a hall splattered with blood where to doctors are aborting seven or eight women at the same time; they’re usually very rough and rude, shouting at you about keeping your legs wide open et cetera….if you’re lucky they give you a little sedative, mostly Valium. Then it’s your turn to stagger out to the resting room, where you’re not allowed to spend more than two hours because the production line, you see, is always very busy.”

The libertarian authors are not opposed to abortion, but they still find this outcome of socialism horrid. The prevalence of abortion was largely driven by the unavailability of birth control and resistance to large families due to economic difficulties. The medical conditions were representative of the socialist approach.

On a more positive note, the next destination is the Balkan nation of Georgia. Since they have become free from Soviet rule, markets have begun to flourish thanks to the work of several of their leaders and laws intentionally written to encourage development. The result is an economy that is beginning to grow and recovery from the misery of socialism. It takes times to recover and the ugly Soviet-era buildings remind visitors of the joylessness of socialism. Since the fall of the Soviets the local wine industry has flourished. It was an age-old craft that the Soviets sought to eliminate, but local grapes fermented by local methods have made Georgia a stop for wine tasters in Europe as the country opens up to free markets.

In Chapter Seven the authors return to the United States to visit a conference of American socialists in Chicago. They attended multiple sessions to hear about socialism from those who are advocating for it. Then, they proceeded to the privately owned bar down from the convention to casually interview conference attendees over glasses of beers with socialist brands. What Lawson and Powell discover is that there was almost no discussion of actual socialism at the convention and, when asked, conference goers thought that socialism was about support for abortion, queer ideologies, and freeing the oppressed, immigrant rights, and Black Lives Matter. The two economists were politely confused by the failure of the supposed socialists to understand the ideology they were advocating for. Their theory is that, like many cults, the real economic socialists are allowing the conversation to stay on the popular topics instead of revealing the black center of the ideology.

Each of the chapters is a mix of stories about their travels, with a heavy emphasis on the quality of the booze, the food, and the hotels, and economic principles written at an accessible level. Though its title is splashy and some of the language salty, this is an ingenious way to get some people to understand why socialism really isn’t a good thing for anyone except those at the center of power. This is an example of winsomely explaining a topic so that an unusual audience might listen. This might be the only way to get some college sophomores to actually move beyond the memes into some meaningful economic theory.

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

By Robert Lawson, Benjamin Powell

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NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.

We Have Been Harmonised - A Review

Our capacity to forget is pretty astounding, when you think about it. A few months ago the internet was blazing over the violence against freedom protesters in Hong Kong. National attention was drawn to the issue, in part, because of backlash against the general manager of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morely. The NBA quickly came down on Morely and dozens of significant figures within the NBA (including Lebron James) stepped forward to call Morely ignorant and essentially denounce his assertion that the Chinese government might not be entirely fair to Hong Kong.

A few things were revelatory in that event: (1) The NBA, which is focused on “social justice” when convenient, completely backed down in the face of Chines pressure and silenced their players and employees of franchises. (2) Many of the players with sponsorships in China were quick to denounce as “ignorant” the comments, despite basic facts to the contrary. (3) People upset at the NBA have already forgotten (for the most part) and are back to watching the NBA, posting about it on social media, and pretending nothing ever happened.

All of this was orchestrated through financial coercion and propaganda by the Chinese government, which is really just a puppet of the Communist Party.

A recent book by German journalist, Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonised: Life in China’s Surveillance State, pulls back the curtain on the oppressive regime in China, how it has taken hold of many Chinese hearts and minds, and how China is working to expand its power throughout the world.

Summary

Strittmatter’s volume is particularly interesting because he spent roughly three decades as a correspondent in and about China. He has, therefore, seen many of the changes occur that have turned China into a house of technological horrors. Since the advent of the internet, smartphones, and face recognition technology in China, the state has begun to develop the ability to manage every aspect of the peoples’ lives.

At one level, this is a primary source on China’s shifting controls. On another level, it is a treatise that helps explain how totalitarian regimes rise, get control, and use their people to “voluntarily” enforce the will of the rulers.

Much of what Strittmatter writes marries up with dystopian fiction. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Orwell’s Animal Farm are all mashed together in the horror that is contemporary China. The frightening thing is that, because of our willingness to adopt new technologies, many aspects of it may be coming to the global West, too.

China uses a mixture of old-fashioned control techniques and modern technology to anesthetize some of their population, terrorize some of the people, and extinguish the remainder. The state invests heavily in propaganda, papering cities with pro-Party references. Even though the messages are often implausible, the message is clear that the Part controls the bandwidth.

Although there are still privately held corporations in China, despite the rise of President Xi’s new authoritarianism, but because of the power of the Communist Party, companies self-censor. Social media apps (like TikTok) have teams of censors, thousands of company employees, who read and delete posts. They also write algorithms to automatically delete phrases that might be sensitive. Even Western corporations (like the NBA) will self-censor to appease the Chinese leaders and so retain access to the lucrative markets.

The internet in China functions more like an intranet. This means that the Communist Party has installed firewalls to prevent the people from getting to Western websites. Facebook is off-limits. Even Wikipedia is forbidden. The Chinese replace these sites with their own, but always under the government’s control. For example, the Chinese equivalent of Wikipedia has removed reference to the massacre in Tiananmen Square and has even removed the historical summary of the news in 1989 to erase that event from common memory.

Much of this is boiler plate totalitarianism, which is bad enough. However, the rise of AI, prevalence of closed-circuit cameras and other technologies like smart phones turns horror into hell.

Imagine a society where cash was being slowly restricted and all purchases were now being made by credit cards or apps on the smart phone. Every purchase would then be traceable and it would be impossible to step out of the system. Imagine that the government had access to the location on your phone at all times, could turn on the microphone or camera, and could study your behaviors. Imagine that your credit history was tied into the larger pool of information about you. Imagine if crosswalks had cameras with facial recognition software, which would document if you ever crossed on the wrong light.

All of this is occurring in China. And, people are cooperating, for the most part. There are obvious benefits to this. For example, it makes it easy to screen potential suitors. No need to even date a man who will not pay his debts. No need to check the credit on a person, because you can see their behavior is consistently responsible.

But all of the convenience has a dark side, too. Those that are deemed risky citizens can be monitored even more closely. They can be prevented from travelling or making purchases. Their family can be harassed when they do something that is considered untoward. In other words, the state gains the ability to coerce any behavior it deems appropriate.

That would be wonderful if the rulers were entirely benevolent. However, as the saying goes, power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That is the growing legacy of China.

Analysis

Little of what Strittmatter reports has not been published before. Reports of the social credit system and state surveillance structures have made their way into Western media before this. However, We Have Been Harmonised puts the information together in one coherent volume.

This is not the easiest volume to read. At time the prose is a bit heavy, likely due to the fact it has been translated into English from the German. However, the work of reading the volume should not dissuade people from reading it.

We Have Been Harmonised is a critically important book. It is informative about the nature of the Communist regime in China. Many of these stories are not adequately discussed in Western culture. They should give us pause in what we purchase from China and how corporations deal with China.

More significantly, this book raises questions about the nature of community, the place of individuals within the community, the authority of the state, and the dangers of technology. Anyone thinking seriously about politics and technology in the contemporary age should read this volume. What China is doing by fiat, many of us are enabling voluntarily in the United States. This is a cautionary tale.

We have been harmonised

By Kai Strittmatter

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Note: I received a gratis copy of this volume from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.

Shantung Compound - A Review

One of the biggest problems with political thought is that everyone is trying to argue for a solution to a given problem, but few of those speaking have truly taken time to understand the nature and complexity of the problem. They may have compiled statistics, done interviews, or taken pictures to represent the symptoms of the problem, but rarely have they taken the time to look beyond the symptoms to the source.

In general, those who have the most confidence in their solutions being the panacea for whatever ails society, whether in politics or in economics, have done the least consideration of what it is to be human. Drugs, violent crime, sexual perversions, racial hatred, and systemic inequity are all symptoms. The heart of the problem is humanity and the sin nature we all were born with.

Langdon Gilkey’s book, Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure, is both a memoir and a well-considered assessment of humanity. Though Gilkey was a theologian, this book is much more interesting for its discussions of human nature regarding political and economic order.

The book contains fourteen chapters. There is a rough chronology to it, but its core is presented thematically. Gilkey covers adaptation to deprivation in an internment camp, establishment of political order, the rise and fall of the black market, the significance of the human desire for space, and the search for meaning in the narrowed confines of a prison camp.

Shantung Compound is, in part, an explanation of why Gilkey came to reject the anthropology of his liberal Protestant upbringing and take a much less idealistic view of what is politically possible. Gilkey is neither socialist nor capitalist. In fact, he offers significant questions for rigid adherents to both poles of economic order.

Throughout the book, Gilkey is exceedingly critical (and likely somewhat dishonest toward) religious adherents, particularly the Protestant missionaries that were incarcerated alongside him. However, he also raises significant questions about the way so many of the Protestant missionaries failed to live out their ideals of selflessness and sacrifice when their basic needs were encroached upon. Gilkey is adamantly non-exclusive in his understanding of salvation and morality, but at the same time he affirms the necessity of the existence of a god as the best explanation for the order that exists.

Those interested in accounts of World War II will find this another interesting perspective. It shares with Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning multiple significant traits: it deals with prisoners in an enemy camp, faced with physically trying conditions, and, more significantly, the strong potential for despair. Both the agnostic Frankl and Gilkey arrive at similar conclusions that humans must find meaning outside of themselves if they are to keep from despair and social anarchy when everything is stripped away. Intriguingly, both men argue there must be meaning behind work besides mere survival and economic reward.

Frankl’s classic book provides a deeper look at the individual human condition, because it was written based on his time in a Nazi concentration camp. Gilkey’s experience, though harsh, was much less horrid because he spent the war in a civilian run prison camp. Neither experience was pleasant, but Gilkey’s allowed him to observe the construction of a new, basically independent society within the prison camp.

The international collection of prisoners in the Shantung Compound had autonomy to set up their own councils, manage their own cooking, and distribute those resources provided according to whatever rules they could establish. This self-contained society, who resources were limited and provided by their captors (with the exception of limited black-market goods), had to establish order without recourse to force, encourage each other through entertainments, and maintain satisfaction with relatively equitable distribution of very limited goods. The accounts of how that was accomplished reveal a great deal about political theory.

At the same time, the artificial circumstances limit the applicability of some of its lessons. At the end, Gilkey attempts to argue for greater international aid as a way to establish lasting peace. Setting aside the rafts of evidence that have been published since 1966 by people from both sides of the political spectrum, which shows the dangers of long-term aid, his case is not proved by this account because of the involuntary isolation of this community. In other words, some of the lessons are very helpful, but it is dangerous to draw too many firm conclusions because the same fences and guards that created the experiment also create the artificiality that keeps the lessons of Shantung Compound from being universally applicable. We cannot check our reason on the basic even of a well-considered anecdote.

Gilkey’s Shantung Compound is an important book, I think, for those considering the nature of humanity. It is the record of an experiment that ran for quite long enough to draw some conclusions. There is some helpful reasoning in the volume about ethics, politics, and human nature. It is the sort of book that those thinking about political theory and economics would do well to consider, especially as Western societies wrestle with the excesses of affluence and the cultural rot that has resulted.

Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure

By Langdon Gilkey

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