Multicultural Perspectives
Dr. Morse
Nathan Nance
6-9-13
Population Control in China In china, more than 330 million abortions and almost 200 million sterilizations have been performed in china since family-planning policies to limit the populations were introduced 40 years ago (parks). To me, this is shocking. I understand that China is a very highly populated country, but in my opinion, there is no reason that the abortion rate should be that high. There is always adoption, and there is always going be a family that takes babies. There are so many families in the world that would die for a kid, and would love to adopt, and yet the Chinese are killing off their children instead of at least giving them away and giving them a chance at life. Even though this is shocking to us, it is just culture and the way of life in China. They don’t see anything wrong with it, because its how that culture is ran. Another thing that just shocks me is that there are other countries that have been smart enough to handle situations like this by making birth control mandatory instead of abortion, but china just focuses on abortion. Data has revealed that governments have done over 403 million birth control procedures, including the mandatory insertion of millions of intri-uterine devices, which is considered a regular birth control procedure in the west (parks). China has blamed a lack of education on the high number of abortions, but to me that is not an excuse. There are so many third world countries that are much less educated than China, and they are still able to control the birth rate without having to perform so many abortions. They also blame their population of 1.3 billion on high abortion rates. To me this isn’t an excuse either. Like I said before, China may be overpopulated by a lot, but that can simply be solved by being proactive and maybe forcing families to give their babies up for adoption in other countries to even out the population and still save lives. I’m not against the culture of population control; I just think that they are doing it the wrong way. It’s just plain evil. The way China is going about this population control may be the most sensible way to them, but it creates more problems than it solves. Because of this population control, it has affected gender ratios. Most parents in China prefer males, creating and imbalance of 34 million more man than women in china (parks).To me, this is one of the biggest problems. Instead of fixing the populations, it’s making it worse, and now it creates this huge imbalance, which makes it even harder for women to survive in China. It’s just simply sad, but like I said once before, it’s just a way of life and a culture that some people, including me, will never understand. Another thing about this issue that is shocking is that, when it was originally created, it was created to be a “temporary measure,” and somehow it just never stopped. This one child policy was created by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1979, and he created it to kind of even out the population (Rosenburg). Why it became a permanent evil is beyond everyone. The Chinese decided to keep this policy because they thought it would permanently fix it, but they were wrong. It has become an uncontrollable part of the Chinese culture, and it has gotten to the point where the options to fix the evil it has caused has outweighed the situation it has become. From what I get from this, it’s not what China as a whole wanted to happen, but its unfortunately part of the culture that was forced into their other cultures, and it has become a disturbing situation. Another problem that this “culture shock” has caused is the downturn of their economic status. Overly populated regions lead to deregulation of land and resources, pollution, and detrimental living conditions (cook). This was the problem that this “temporary” addition was supposed to fix, but it completely did the opposite. Instead of decreasing the population, it made it worse because families are deliberately having kids because they don’t know if they will ever be able to. By forcing one child per household, it forced people to either kill their babies, or kick their kids out at young ages, not really fixing the problem. When this was first put into effect, people were just having kids and abandoning them, and other families were picking them up. So, instead of controlling the population, the kids were being torn from their families and bounced around the country, not helping the population issue in any measure. To put all of this into perspective, the “Plight of the Little Emperors” passage from our book gives real life examples of the affects that this cultural evil has on people on a personal level. Here in America, every person usually gets to pick what they want to do when they grow up. Parents do the best that they can do as parents, and hope that their children choose a good path of life. In China, since parents only get one shot at having a successful child, they go to great lengths to ensure that their kids are successful. They pick their children’s career, and actually go to school with them to school to ensure that they do well. They do this because the population is so huge, that job opportunities are hugely scarce and it is very hard to get a career. In this passage Dawei Liu from this passage talks about how he was basically forced to go to college, forced into a college and a major of his parents’ choice, and forced to become something that he didn’t want to be because his parents thought that that was best for him. A lot of kids growing up in china rebel from this, and they end up homeless and without a family. So basically, because of the fact that there is a limited family household, you either do what your parents tell you to do, you become homeless, escape from the country, or die (Hirschberg and Hirschberg, 42). . It’s just as messed up as it sounds. It just amazes me that, even though these things are just simply a culture for China, Someone looking at it from the outside sees this as cruel, evil, and unfathomable. According to my sources, China is taking some actions to fix these things. One thing that one of my sources talks about is how China is working on a policy that may be introduced nationwide, allowing two parents who are single children themselves, to have two kids (parks). However, this is a slow work in progress, because, sadly enough, this one child policy has been a custom in their culture for so long, that the people have been brainwashed, and three in four citizens believe that without the one child policy, the country’s population would be 30 percent higher, which would drain the natural resources (parks). They think the only alternative to this is abortion, and they think that its ok and it’s the thing to do. So now, there are actually people fighting against this new policy, not even thinking about the fact that the abortion rate will be extremely high also. It just seems kind of selfish to me. They are so worried about keeping the population down in their country that they are willing to kill their unborn child to do it. According to my sources, I am not the only one that feels this way about their culture and outlandish policies. The United states as a whole have publicly expressed their disapproval with the whole one child policy thing, and it has caused tension between us and them. They have actually retaliated with acts of violence against us and other neighboring countries strictly based off of this policy (parks). When I was growing up, my grandpa always told me, “you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to help themselves.” China, when it comes to this situation, just can’t be helped by someone else. The only way to fix this is to do it themselves, and weather they do it or not is the question to never be answered. To me, I don’t think that this issue will ever be fixed, because the Chinese don’t want to fix it, and they think that it is the only way to do things. According to my sources and in my opinion, if they did decide to fix this, there has to be serious reforms to ensure that their population will not continue to grow, without using abortion as an option at all. They need to implement better policies, more education, and urbanization (cook) with better policies, they will be able to control the population and still keep the growth down. If you have better education opportunities, People will be more knowledgeable about how serious sex really is, and that will nip the situation in the butt from the roots. Urbanization will create better structure, which will create happier families, and less remorse on having a certain gender. In closing, the Chinese culture, overall, is very messed up, in my opinion. I think that they are all blind as to the evil that they actually doing and they don’t see any other way of fixing it. But one thing that I realized from researching this is that, no matter what myself or anyone else thinks of it, it is their culture and their way of life and we just have to accept it no matter how messed up it actually Is.
Work Cited parks , peter http://rt.com/news/china-abortions-population-control. N.p., 16 march 2013. Web. 9 Jun 2013. rosenberg, matt. "Chinas One World Policy." www.about.com. N.p., 12 august 2012. Web. 9 Jun 2013.
Cook, Jamie. "Popluation Control and Consequences in China." http://maps.unomaha.edu/peterson/funda/sidebar/chinapop.html. N.p., 15 Dec 1999. Web. 9 Jun 2013.
Hirschberg, Terry, and Stuart Hirschberg. One World, Many Cultures. eighth. Pearson Education, Inc. , 2012. Print.