We like to compare ourselves with others, often seeing
them as an alter ego who had gone to the right university, found the right job,
or married the right person.
The same principle applies to countries. For a long
time, many believed that if their country had done whatever the United States
had done, they too would be powerful and prosperous. Today, this role of
"Big Other" is increasingly being assigned to China.
An example is a recent article about "Chinese
eugenics":
China has been
running the world's largest and most successful eugenics program for more than
thirty years, driving China's ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I
worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization. Yet the
most likely result is that America and Europe linger around a few hundred more
years as also-rans on the world-historical stage, nursing our anti-hereditarian
political correctness to the bitter end. (Miller, 2013)
The author, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller,
sees this eugenics program in the one-child policy, which serves “partly to
curtail China’s population explosion, but also to reduce dysgenic fertility
among rural peasants,” presumably because the best and the brightest migrate to
the cities. Furthermore, to the extent that the best and the brightest are
wealthier, they’re also better able to pay the fine for having a second child.
But Miller overlooks the weaker enforcement of this
policy in rural areas. If the first-born in a farming family is a girl, they’re
allowed to have another child. This might be why the fertility rate is higher
in China’s rural areas, although it’s questionable whether the one-child policy
has much effect at all. The fertility rate is actually higher in China (1.55)
than in Taiwan (1.06) or Singapore (1.2), neither of which tries to limit
family size.
Miller is on firmer ground when discussing the 1995
“Eugenic Law”:
With the 1995
Maternal and Infant Health Law (known as the Eugenic Law until Western
opposition forced a name change), China forbade people carrying heritable
mental or physical disorders from marrying, and promoted mass prenatal
ultrasound testing for birth defects. (Miller, 2013)
As he notes further on, the word "eugenic"
corresponds here to the Chinese term yousheng, literally "good birth."
The idea here, however, is not to create a new superhuman, but rather to
maintain the current quality of the gene pool. A better English translation
would be "anti-dysgenic."
This idea is not specific to China. It was, in fact,
widespread in the Western world until a little over thirty years ago, as seen
in a widely used undergrad textbook from the 1970s:
Perhaps it is not
unreasonable to assume that a person with a good record of achievement in
certain areas of human endeavor has on the average a more desirable gene
combination than a person whose achievements are less spectacular. In our
present society, the superior person is punished by the government in numerous
ways, by taxes and otherwise, which make it more difficult for him to raise a
large family. Why, for instance, should tax exemption for children be a fixed
sum rather than a percentage of earned income? Why should tuition in school be
based, in large part, on the ability of the father to pay rather than inversely
on the achievement of the student? Innumerable administrative rules and laws of
the government discriminate inadvertently against the most gifted members of
the community. (Mayr, 1970, pp. 408-409)
An analogy can be made here with the current view that
East Asian societies are "ultranationalistic"—a view seldom expressed
a half-century ago when national sentiment was thought to be normal and even
healthy. Since then, they haven't diverged from us. We've diverged from them.
Remember, we observe other human societies from a moving frame of reference,
and this perspective creates the illusion that some societies are becoming more
extreme, more religious, or more xenophobic.
In reality, China has no eugenics program. It has a
population program that may have anti-dysgenic effects. Moreover, a truly
anti-dysgenic program would apply to everyone, yet the one-child policy is
applied only in part to peasants and not at all to non-Han Chinese.
The best and the brightest?
And then there's immigration. In official discourse,
China carefully screens its newcomers, letting in only the best and the
brightest (Pieke, 2012). In reality, most immigrants enter the country
illegally or on visitor visas to fill low-paying jobs:
In the short to
medium term, the rise of China as a major immigration country is mostly
predicated on the continued growth of its economy and its gradual transition to
an urban, service-based economy. The role, and especially the timing, of
demographic factors is less clear. In 2003, for the first time China began to
experience shortages of internal migrant labor. There are only few
people left in rural China younger than 30 years-the cohort most predisposed to
out-migration-who still work in agriculture. (Pieke, 2012, p. 41)
The looming scarcity of labor could lead to higher
wages and greater reliance on automation and robotization. Or it could lead to
a growing influx of cheaply paid immigrant labor. To date, China seems to be
moving down the second path:
In contrast to the
influx of skilled foreigners stands the recent arrival of a large number of
Southeast Asian workers, mainly Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian, who have
been "smuggled" into the Pearl River Delta to take low pay work and
this is believed helpful to alleviate the pressure of shortage of labour force
in the region. (Zhu & Price, 2012, p. 8)
As usual, the term "labor shortage" needs
qualifying. There is only a shortage of people who will work for less than the
going market rate:
"They are
hard workers and obedient employees," Zeng Xiangbiao, a shoe factory owner
in Dongguan, told a Chinese reporter in a familiar refrain on immigrant labor.
He has more than 200 workers from Cambodia and Laos, a quarter of his
workforce. "They could work 15 to 16 hours a day and work for a month
without any break. Few of the domestic workers, especially those born in the
1980s and after, could take this." (Epstein, 2010)
There has also been an influx of sub-Saharan Africans,
who number an estimated 200,000 in Guangzhou alone, in addition to a growing
presence in Hong Kong, Macao, Yiwu, Shanghai, and Beijing (Bodomo, 2012; Li etal., 2007). Most come to China as immigrants, and not as transients:
A distinctive
feature of Africans in China, which differentiates them from other foreign
nationals, is their expressed intention to settle in China for a long period
[...] Most Africans are actually seeking a life in China if the local situation
permits them to remain. Moreover, a significant part of African immigrants are
relatively poor when they arrive at China. (Zhu & Price, 2012, p. 4)
The African influx will probably continue to
"happen" through irregular means. Eventually, it will be regularized
as a fait accompli. Indeed, some are already arguing that such immigration must
be legally recognized in order to manage it better:
The failure to
manage the African immigration wave is indicated by the absence of a concerted
system of national laws and regulations on the legal protection of foreigners'
basic rights and interests, and also by the non-recognition of minimal social
rights to immigrants in China. (Zhu & Price, 2012, p. 19)
Conclusion
For Geoffrey Miller, China acts with a view to the
longer term, especially when deciding the future of its population, i.e., the
basis of its society and economy. In contrast, the West acts "stupidly and
shortsightedly."
The real picture is less flattering to the Chinese and
is, in fact, depressingly familiar. As in the West, population policy is
dominated by short and medium term needs, even though today's decisions have
long-term consequences that will be hard to reverse.
Like its Western counterparts, the Chinese business
community feels entitled to cheap labor and will lobby hard to preserve this
"right" as the pool of homegrown labor shrinks. Although the average
Chinese worker would gain from higher wages and a more capital-intensive
economy, such a change would be costly for existing businesses, many of which
would lose market share or go bankrupt. A tempting solution will be to keep
wages low by letting in people who will work at those wages.
And keeping such people out will be diplomatically
difficult. Their home countries are usually the same ones that increasingly
supply China with food and valuable raw materials. Fear of economic reprisals
will force policy-makers to treat this issue with kid gloves.
Unlike its Western counterparts, however, the Chinese
business community is less effective at lobbying the upper echelons of the
Chinese state. These two worlds are distinct with little overlap. State
officials move up through the ranks of the Communist Party, and there is none
of the to and fro of businessmen running for public office and later retiring
to the private sector as consultants. Businessmen do try to get their way
through bribery, but such behavior is punished more harshly than it is in the
West, as seen in the government's reaction to the infant formula scandal of
2008:
[...] they quickly
launched a national police investigation which led to a series of arrests and
uncovered evidence that this widespread system of food adulteration had been
protected by bribe-taking government officials. Long prison sentences were
freely handed out and a couple of the guiltiest culprits were eventually tried
and executed for their role, measures that gradually assuaged popular anger.
Indeed, the former head of the Chinese FDA had been executed for corruption in
late 2007 under similar circumstances.
(Unz, 2012)
It is thus easier in China to make population policy
with a view to long-term national goals. But will this actually be the case? Only
time will tell ...
References
Bodomo, A. (2012). Africans in China: A
Sociological Study and Its Implications on Africa-China Relations, Cambria
Press.
Epstein, G. (2010). China's immigration problem, July
19, Forbes.com
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0719/opinions-china-immigration-illegal-aliens-heads-up.html
Li, Z, D. Xue, M. Lyons, A. Brown. (2007). Ethnic
Enclave of Transnational Migrants in Guangzhou: A Case Study of Xiaobei
http://asiandrivers.open.ac.uk/lyons%20brown%20zhigang%20li%20ethnic%20enclaves%20china%20(2).pdf
Mayr, E. (1970). Populations, Species, and
Evolution, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.)
Miller, G. (2013). Chinese eugenics, 2013 : What
*should* we be worried about? Edge
http://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838
Pieke, F.N. (2012). Immigrant China, Modern China,
38, 40-77.
Unz, R. (2012). Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A
Comparison, The American Conservative, April 17
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/chinese-melamine-and-american-vioxx-a-comparison/
Zhu, G., & R. Price (2012). Chinese Immigration
Law and Policy: A Case of 'Change Your Direction or End Up Where You are
Heading'? Columbia Journal of Asian Law, forthcoming.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2088683
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