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by roenxi 2867 days ago
A neat gender balance would be better for the people involved than an insanely skewed gender balance that favours men.

That being said, one could substitute China -> America and, gender -> wealth, unmarried -> jobless, and I think the accusation would be similar. I've had Americans seriously tell me that the country is on the brink of civil war, which seems about as bad as anything that could come from China's gender imbalance. I'd link that to economic problems, it is the explanation that makes the most sense to me.

Basically, there is a real concern; but I'm not sure it is an /unacceptable/ outcome of the One Child Policy. It might just be an outcome. The OCP can easily be cast as a policy of courage and prudence; overpopulation carries a real threat of starvation and collapse if it overshoots what the local resources can support.

2 comments

> I've had Americans seriously tell me that the country is on the brink of civil war

It's probably not a good idea to make value judgments based on the predictions of people obsessed with hysterical political news sources by companies who have make a living selling the public a worldview divided on stark black/white us vs them tribal lines. Where every minor bit of inane news coming out of Washington is blown up into big stories to fuel some grand political drama that never ends.

Meanwhile the world IRL for the vast majority has hardly changed at all in any significant way.

I don't know what America has to do with anything, but China's income inequality is also worse than America's, so there's that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

Ah, sorry, should have linked my source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_distribut...

Wealth, not income. Although I do now see the data is 2000 era, so the situation might be different now. China was a very equal country by wealth back then, though.

For China, the difference between 2000 and 2018 is huge. In everything.