The bloody history of ‘Limits to Growth’
On May 7, South Korean customs authorities announced they had discovered 17,500 capsules made from the incinerated remains of human fetuses and infants being smuggled into the country from China for sale. Coming in the wake of the high-profile drama concerning the effort of the Chinese government to suppress the voice of the brave, blind anti-population-control activist Chen Guangcheng, this news has placed the issue of the regime’s brutal one-child law forcefully before the conscience of the world. Therefore, a look at the origin and history of this atrocity is in order.
In June 1978, Song Jian, a top-level manager in charge of developing control systems for the Chinese guided-missile program, traveled to Helsinki for an international conference on control-system theory and design. While in Finland, he picked up copies of “The Limits to Growth” and “Blueprint for Survival” – publications of the Club of Rome, a major source of Malthusian propaganda – and made the acquaintance of several Europeans who were promoting the report’s method of using computerized “systems analysis” to predict and design the human future.
Fascinated by the possibilities, Mr. Song returned to China and republished the Club’s analysis under his own name (without attribution), establishing his reputation for brilliant and original thinking. In no time at all, Mr. Song became a scientific superstar. Seizing the moment to grasp for greater power and importance, he pulled together an elite group of mathematicians from within his department and, with the help of a powerful computer to provide the necessary special effects, issued the profoundly calculated judgment that China’s “correct” population size was 650 million to 700 million people – which is to say, some 280 million to 330 million less than its actual 1978 population.
Mr. Song’s analysis quickly found favor at top levels of the Chinese Communist Party because it purported to prove that the reason for China’s continued poverty was not 30 years of disastrous misrule, but the very existence of the Chinese people. Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and his fellows in the Central Committee were very impressed by the pseudo-scientific computer babble Mr. Song used to dress up his theory and even more impressed by the possibilities that arrogating the power to permit or deny children would provide to the state.
Thomas Friedman would be proud. Does this make Kathleen Sibelius 1/32nd Chinese?
Changes in technology demand changes in behaviour. Having as many kids as possible, devaluing women and daughters, and favouring sons is the way to go if you have an infant mortality rate of 85%, a life expectancy of 35, and those same sons are your retirement plan. That same behaviour is dysfunctional in a modern technological society with, amongst other things, advanced medical care.
There is plenty of validity to the notion that poor political and economic decisions contributed to – and to a certain degree still contributes to – China’s long stretch of poverty. But, like Mexico, it’s equally clear that any and all economic gains have been offset and negated by out of control population growth. It’s technology has changed, but it’s clear that a good portion of it’s traditional culture hasn’t.
Technological gains can only accomplish so much. At some point populations do run up against the wall of carrying capacity., (And in the process of reaching that point privacy and liberties are gradually surrendered.,) At that point you either have a radical advance in technology. to negate that increase – offworld colonies anybody? – or a radical die-off and collapse.
That’s my opinion anyway.
Just a thought.
VicB3
Howdy VicB3
There may be a maximum human capacity for the Earth — presumably there is. Still, all human experience says that free people in free economies will produce what is needed for any population far larger than we have.
There’s a lot of truth in your analysis of how families operated long ago and how they can operate better now. Europe has adopted a one-child policy by popular choice, as has Japan — and both are dwindling in many ways, including population.
In all events, decent people want families to make these decisions rather than tyrants. It’s just as tyrannical to demand children as it is to destroy them.
Vic, you’re an idiot.Now, I’m certain you’re quite intelligent, but you are making a very false dichotomy here.
On one side, you have the classic, Biblical household. One man, three women, and twenty children. The other adult men were killed in war, and the children work the fields. Most of the kids will die in childhood or also be killed in war. This is not sustainable in an era where children do not produce economic value and without a massive loss of population due to war and disease
On the other hand, you have the one-child policy, which brutally enforces a population reduction method. This too is unsustainable as there is very shortly going to be a population crash as China finds that it has more retirees than workers. Another worrying factor is that you will have millions of young men who cannot get a date. Large number of men who cannot fulfil a human needs due to government policy leads to civil unrest.
A balanced approach would be just to let things happen. The world can feed twice as many people as we have now with today’s technology. That’s ignoring any possible advances. Best estimates are that we will never exceed ten billion people even without any form of population control. Earth can easily handle that many, and it is only Malthusian anti-humanists that say otherwise.
Personally, I think this is China’s business, and we should mind our own. If the Chinese people don’t like it, let them change it.
I’d be inclined to agree except that, of course, the people of China have never had any voice in their own government.
Affluent societies generally wind up curtailing family size by choice rather than by oppression. What a concept.
I’m sure there are many people who don’t like it. But we are “Pro Choice” and they have, NO choice, they often have forced late term abortions. And there is worse, the Dying Rooms in the state run orphanages. Go to Youtube and type in The Dying Rooms and watch how China’s one child policy is murdering little girls. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE-U_Pq80OA
The documentary was made in 1995…it is worse now. Don’t think this can’t happen here, it could and possibly will. The very young and the old are the useless eaters of communism, which are discarded.
Malthusian thought is bizarre. To assume that technology cannot outpace human growth is to completely ignore progress. The total population that the earth can support is dependant upon our ability to harvest and best utilize the resources at our disposal. When you set an artificial limit, and claim that as a political aim, is to invite tyranny.
My wife, who is from the PRC indicated when I showed her this story weeks ago, that the pills were actually made from the placenta. True or not I do not know.
A few points.
Heartland should feature Song Jian on its next billboard, no matter what he thinks about climatology. He’s clearly a CO2 hero.
Wealth reduces procreation. Ethnic Germans will be nearly extinct in 30 years. If there’s ‘too many’ Mexicans, technology isn’t the problem, lack of wealth is.
Malthusians and their detractors both have problems. Malthus actually speculated that people would *voluntarily decrease* baby-making when food was scarce. The opposite is true. The notion that starvation was a central population control mechanism was added by neo-Malthusians, who have not been able to prove their hypothesis even with 50,000 years of human history at their disposal.
China and its excess males: Too often, cultures divert such males into the military, with ‘adventurism’ following thereafter. It’s not yet time to worry, but keep an eye out.
@Mark D Sweet How can you tell if the dried tissue is placenta? The DNA is the same in the placenta as the childs. It is an interesting hypothesis, but when we find folks with suitcases filled with roasted fetuses due to a bizarre health myth – I suspect the actual use of babies is happening. And why wouldn’t this myth exist. We have been told for years, despite evidence to the contrary that Fetal stem cells can and will cure anything. Why not consume them.
Sorry Eric but it is time to worry. China is making extravagant territorial claims to the Scarborough Shoals and the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea. Both the Phillipines and the Vietnamese have been threatened if they don’t relinquish their claims to these islands. The theory is there is oil to be found.
Obama is of the same mold as the Chinese. He wants to kill fetuses as often as he can and he wants to eliminate any chance that a woman can get pregnant by shoving birth control pills down their throats. Controlling women’s bodies seems to be the objective of Liberal Democrats! I guess they think they can have more fun that way.
I just put out there what my wife researched in China. I do not know if it is correct or not. It would seem the Chinese think consuming fetuses is unacceptable, but the placenta is good for the health. With the pathetic state of investigative journalism in the world I can not say if the pills were dead fetuses or placenta, only what my wife read in the Chinese media after I showed her the story.
The Chinese will consume anything at all with any notional relationship to any imaginable physical or mental disorder. If this has anything to do with placentas vs. fetuses, it is that different beneficial claims are made for the two different items. I am not in the least surprised at this. Most likely this trade has been going on for years and only now comes to light because someone wasn’t quite generous enough in paying baksheesh to a customs inspector.