Group items tagged

with the majority of the population centered in an urban belt that runs through the cluster of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya,

bullet train.

n 1950, 53 percent of Japan’s population lived in urban regions; by 2014, 93 percent did.

It is mostly young people who move to the cities

Bear attacks near settlements in Japan’s north are increasing as humans stop pruning back trees and maintaining their land. Wild boars have been ravaging farmland across the island of Honshu.

predicted that 896 cities, towns, and villages would be extinct by 2040. Dozens of towns will see the number of young people drop significantly, as the share of elderly people grows, he predicted. Overall, Japan’s population is expected to shrink from a peak of 128 million in 2010 to 97 million by 2050.

apanese towns are wrestling with dilemmas like how to run their governments with fewer tax dollars, and how to provide services for an increasingly needy population with fewer workers. To make this all the more challenging, governance is strained by the population decline as well: In Yamagata Prefecture, 45 percent of seats in the local assembly race in 2015 were uncontested because of a lack of candidates.

Other regions of the world will soon have to face these challenges, too. Just about every developed country is aging and urbanizing, though Japan is doing so the fastest

The reasons that Japan’s rural population is shrinking

Jobs are increasingly clustered in cities, and the jobs that remain in the countryside require fewer workers than they did half a century ago. “There are very few economic opportunities outside major cities,

Japan has few major learning centers located outside major cities, Mock said. That means as young people increasingly pursue college educations, they leave for the cities, and often don’t return.

“They graduate high school, they go to university in Tokyo, they start working in Tokyo, and they set up their lives in Tokyo and never come back,

Of the 500 or so teenagers who graduate high school in Minamiuonuma every year, only about 100 remain in the city after graduating. Everybody else goes off to college, and only 40 come back after graduating from college on average, the mayor, Shigeo Hayashi, told me.

the country’s falling fertility rate. Japan's fertility rate fell by a third between 1972 and 2015;

When a population is shrinking and most of that population lives in urban centers, that spells problems for rural areas like Tochikubo and Minamiuonuma, unless there is a lot of immigration.

The problem is not necessarily that Japan will run out of money t

someone needs to be around to provide these services.

Right now, the decline of these places is happening fast, within a generation or two. If it can be a more gradual process, perhaps then basic social services can at least survive for long enough to provide for the remaining residents.

One obvious solution to reversing, or at least slowing, rural Japan’s decline would be to open up the country to immigration

Just 1.8 percent of the country’s population is foreign-born, compared to 13 percent of the population in the United States.

But Japan is a country whose national identity is, in some ways, based upon racial homogeneity. Proposals to significantly increase immigration have gone nowhere, and polls consistently find that two-thirds of Japanese are against large-scale immigration.

And it’s unlikely that immigrants, even if they were allowed in, would move to rural areas where there are few jobs even for the people who want to stay.

In Minamiuonuma, for instance, city leaders talk about their newly-built global IT park, where start-ups can set up offices for low rent, and a business academy for people interested in creating their own business. They built a brand-new hospital and medical college to attract doctors and nurses, and are in the process of building a series of homes for active retired people in the hope that retirees will want to relocate to the city. Like almost every other shrinking city, Minamiuonuma sends brochures to young people from the region to try to get them to come home. But still, the population continues to shrink

Other areas are trying to grow the population they have by increasing the birth rate.

Niigata Prefecture, which is expected to be among the regions hardest-hit by population decline.

Niigata will lose 40 percent of its women aged 20 to 40 by 2040

Declining Birthrate Countermeasures Division

Niigata sponsors matchmaking events for its young people, and even invited a matchmaking company to come in and pair rural men with women living in cities like Tokyo. “For our division, one of the most important things is making couples,”

The fertility rate of women in Niigata has fallen from nearly four babies per woman in 1950 to 1.43 babies per woman in more recent years.

Niigata is focusing on making it easier for women to have babies and still work. The prefecture is giving certifications to companies that have good parental leave policies in the hope that doing so will motivate companies to be more flexible, but it has no real sway over what companies decide

reducing interest payments for families who borrow money to pay for their children’s education

But the prefecture hasn’t seen a significant uptick in marriages,

or in births.

When I asked them about supporting births outside of marriage, officials told me such a thing wouldn’t be acceptable in Japan. Even telling couples to get married doesn’t necessarily go over well. “We are the public sector. It’s difficult for us to say, ‘You should marry as soon as possible, you’re mature enough to have babies,’” she said.

Yubari, for instance, a town on the northern island of Hokkaido, which lost 90 percent of its population between 1960 and 2014, declared bankruptcy in 2007

Since then, it has drastically cut back on services such as public buses and snow removal, merged schools, laid off government employees, and cut funds for public parks. It relocated residents from public housing on the outskirts of town to apartments close to the city center.

In some places, adapting has meant that elderly people are working for longer

people who might have wanted to retire at 65 are still tilling the fields at 75.

“Sixty is the new 40. The question is, will 80 be the new 60?”

They’re most concerned about the disappearance of a way of life—that no young people will come to the village and learn how to farm rice without machines or how to weave cloth or make sake. “It’s difficult for us to give knowledge to the younger generation,” F

The result is that, since 2012, Spain’s population has been shrinking.

The paradox is that as police and security forces battle to keep them at bay

Record numbers of economic migrants and asylum-seekers are seeking to enter the European Union this summer and are risking their lives in the attempt

In Portugal, the population has been shrinking since 2010.

Portugal’s population could drop from 10.5 million to 6.3 million by 2060.

In Italy the retired population is soaring, with the proportion of over-65s set to rise from 2.7% last year to 18.8% in 2050.

Germany has the lowest birthrate in the world: 8.2 per 1,000 population between 2008 and 2013,

On average, Britain’s population grew at a faster rate over the last decade than it has done over the last 50 years.

a direct threat to economic growth as well as pensions, healthcare and social services.

the grey vote.

“During the same time frame, expenditures on pensions rose by more than 40%. We’re moving closer to being a gerontocratic society – it’s a government of the old.”

In 2012, the regional government launched a multi-pronged initiative to address the falling fertility rate, with plans to roll out measures such as home and transport subsidies for families and radio advertisements urging women to have more children.

The region of Galicia is one of the few in Spain that has addressed the issue.

“these issues will only be solved by a miracle.”

ack of financial security that prompts many Italians to live with their parents well into their 30s. The difficulty for mothers to return to the workplace also means women must make considerable sacrifices if they decide to have children.

give low-income couples a monthly “baby bonus” of €80

The youth jobless rate hit 44.2% in June, while overall it stood at 12.3%.

By 2060 the government expects the population to plunge from 81 million to 67 million,

In order to offset this shortage, Germany needs to welcome an average of 533,000 immigrants every year, which perhaps gives context to the estimate that 800,000 refugees are due to come to Germany this year.

Only Scandinavia appears to be weathering the demographic storm with any success, partly thanks to generous parental leave systems, stable economies, and, in the cases of Sweden and Norway, high net immigration.

n Sweden it is possible to combine motherhood with a working life,”

The maternal mortality ratio has declined by 45 percent worldwide, and the proportion of the global population using an improved drinking water source rose from 76 percent to 91 percent

Those still left out, however, are increasingly concentrated in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and all across the globe, women and young people face the highest odds of living in poverty

While hunger has fallen in most areas, projections indicate that the prevalence of undernourishment in the Middle East will rise by 32 percent between 2014 and 2016 due to war, civil unrest, and increasing numbers of refugees.

Progress in maternal health is sharply divided along rural-urban lines

marginalized and easily forgotten amidst promising overall trends. “Millions of people are being left behind, especially the poorest and those disadvantaged because of their sex, age, disability, ethnicity, or geographic location,”

We need to tackle root causes and do more to integrate the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development,

“employment opportunities have diminished in both developing and developed regions

he employment-to-population ratio, which measures what percentage of the working population is employed, has declined around the world since 1990 with the biggest drops in East and South Asia.

rapid urbanization is taxing already-inadequate infrastructure. The proportion of the urban population living in slums in developing regions fell from 39 percent in 2000 to 30 percent in 2014, surpassing the MDG target. However, the total number of urban residents living in slums continues to grow as a result of accelerating urbanization and population growth

Population growth and increased consumption have also stressed the environment, presenting challenges that overshadow progress on the seventh MDG

While ozone-depleting substances have nearly been eliminated since 1990 and the ozone layer is expected to recover by midcentury, carbon dioxide emissions have risen by more than 50 percent in the past 25 years

Between 1998 and 2011, the number of countries experiencing water stress increased from 36 to 41. Water scarcity currently affects more than 40 percent of the world population, a statistic that is only projected to increase.

For the global poor whose livelihoods are directly tied to natural resources and suffer the most from environmental degradation, climate change hinders development in other sectors. That’s why environmental change is a much bigger focus in the Sustainable Development Goals, set to be adopted later this year.

hospital's long-term-care ward

Japanese leaders have made radical changes to the way health care is delivered in recent decades, most notably with the introduction of long-term-care insurance in 2000. The system is far from perfect, but Japan has been unafraid to improve the system as they learned its faults, and as an economic boom gave way to zero growth.

ut Japan's government, businesses and society are facing these challenges earlier than others, allowing the world to learn and benefit from their stumbles, innovations and experiments.

5 per cent of Japan's population is currently over the age of 65,

where the hospital says there are no trainee nurses.

this demographic is forecast to make up a full 40 per cent of the country's population by 2060

2010 and 2060, the percentage of Japanese citizens over the age of 75 will more than double from 11 per cent to 27 per cent

he absolute number of old people will soon level off in Japan, but the proportion of the population who are young is declining rapidly: The percentage of Japanese younger than 19 years old, who constituted 40 per cent of the population in 1960, will decline to just 13 per cent in 2060.

apan's total population peaked in 2010 at around 127 million people and has already begun to decline. In 2014, the country lost a record 268,000 people, as deaths continued to outstrip births.

ging society is a reality, as well as a business opportunity.

Lawson Inc.,

"seniors' salon" with a blood pressure monitor, pamphlets on municipal health care services and nursing homes, and on-staff social workers.

he store also has a special section featuring adult diapers, special wipes for bathing the elderly, straw cups, a gargling basin and detergent that is tough on urine and perfect for bed mats and wheelchair coverings. Staff will also deliver heavier items, such as bags of rice or water, to local residents.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's administration is concerned about how Japan's aging and shrinking work force will slow down the national economy. One piece of Mr. Abe's so-called Abenomics revival program – which also includes getting more women in the workplace – is an emphasis on new medical technologies, including experimental regenerative medicine and cell therapy. The hope is that with two new acts governing regenerative medicine to help commercialize technologies more quickly, the Japanese government can save money on future health care costs while spurring the creation of a valuable new industry – particularly in bio-medical hubs such as the one in Kobe, which features a gleaming new mini-city of medical buildings, research centres and hospitals on a man-made island near the port city's airport.

macro level, Japan's predicament is prosperity, which is always followed by lower fertility rates and higher life expectancy. At 83.4 years, Japan has the longest life expectancy at birth in the world, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Many Japanese people are also fearful of the type of immigration that has sustained slow population growth in the industrialized West.

The elderly in Japan, similar to seniors across Asia, are less likely to live with their children

women, after decades of opting out of a career after giving birth, are also being encouraged by the government to re-enter the work force, something that may eventually help boost Japan's declining labour numbers, as the government hopes, but also prevents women from acting as caregivers.

small baby boom "echo" took place between 1971 and 1974

Liberal Democratic Party to expand the country's health care system as Japan aged, but by the 1990s, the enormous price tag raised the spectre of tax hikes.

Japan chose to supplement its national pension plan with long-term-care insurance (LTCI), which was implemented in 2000.

one of the most generous long-term-care systems in the world in terms of coverage and benefits."

People pay into the system starting in their 40s and are eligible to receive benefits starting at 65, or earlier in the case of illness.

assigns the person a care level.

allowing the patient to choose between competing institutions and service providers offering everything from home visits, bathing and help getting groceries to paying for short stays in hospitals or long-term residence in nursing homes and specialized group homes for dementia patients.

The LTCI system covers up to $2,900 a month in services, as opposed to cash payment, and does require "co-payments" from patients. LTCI co-payments are capped or waived for low-income individuals, and the system saves money by providing options other than full-on institutionalization.

has demonstrated to other governments around the world that it pays to adjust programs before problems become systemic.

The LTCI system was originally designed to alleviate the strain on family caregivers, but that hasn't entirely happened. Research shows that LTCI, in terms of freeing up family carers to work and have more free time for themselves, has only marginally benefited caregivers, and only then from wealthier families.

One in four women in developing countries wants to avoid becoming pregnant or delay or space their births but is not using a modern family planning method.

sub-Saharan Africa, women in the region today have on average 5.1 children

Investment in voluntary family planning helped Thailand accelerate economic growth and provides a model for sub-Saharan African countries.

his shifted the age structure of Thailand's population, providing a critical first step toward achieving the economic benefits of a demographic dividend.

Rwanda is one of several countries in eastern and southern Africa where investments in voluntary family planning and child survival have led to significantly lower fertility.

If the impressive progress continues, Rwanda will, by 2030, have achieved the demographic conditions necessary for accelerated economic growth.

While family planning is necessary for establishing the conditions for a demographic dividend, investments in child health, education, and gender equality are critical additional steps that contribute to family planning use and economic growth.

The Communist Party began formally relaxing national rules two years ago, allowing couples in which at least one of the pair is an only child to have a second child.

Critics say that even a two-child policy will not boost the birth rate enough, the BBC's John Sudworth reports.

that despite the relaxation of the rules, many couples may opt to only have one child, as one-child families have become the social norm.

And for those women who want more than two children, nor will it end the state's insistence on the right to control their fertility, he adds.

"As long as the quotas and system of surveillance remains, women still do not enjoy reproductive rights,"

Xingu,

itself a major tributary of the Amazon.

shorts

kids wearing only

ears of the youngest among them were pierced with conical wooden plugs

Kayapo pierce their infants’ earlobes

ifts for our hosts: fishhooks, tobacco, 22 pounds of high-quality beads made in the Czech Republic.

Barbara Zimmerman, the director of the Kayapo Project for the International Conservation Fund of Canada and the United States–based Environmental Defense Fund,

chief, Pukatire,

wearing glasses, shorts, and flip-flops.

English he’d picked up on a trip to North America

dispute about logging.

Fissioning,” as anthropologists call it, is often the way Kayapo resolve disagreements or relieve the strain on resources in a particular area.

a generator in a government-built nurses’ station; a solar panel array enclosed in a barbed wire fence; satellite dishes mounted on truncated palm trees. A few families have TVs in their thatch houses and enjoy watching videos of their own ceremonies, along with Brazilian soap operas. Pukatire showed us to a two-room schoolhouse built a few years ago by the Brazilian government—a pistachio-colored concrete structure with a tile roof and shutters and the luxe marvel of a flush toilet fed by well water.

ngobe, or men’s house

shelling nuts and cooking fish wrapped in leaves and buried in coals.

crops of manioc, bananas, and sweet potatoes. A tortoise hunter

loudly singing in the Kayapo custom to announce his successful quest for the land turtles that are a vital part of the village diet.

soccer ball

swallows; o

kingbird

evening baths,

caimans

persecution and disease that have ravaged nearly every indigenous tribe in North and South America.

In 1900, 11 years after the founding of the Brazilian Republic, the Kayapo population was about 4,000. As miners, loggers, rubber tappers, and ranchers poured into the Brazilian frontier, missionary organizations and government agencies launched efforts to “pacify” aboriginal tribes, wooing them with trade goods such as cloth, metal pots, machetes, and axes. Contact often had the unintended effect of introducing measles and other diseases to people who had no natural immunity. By the late 1970s, following the construction of the Trans-Amazon Highway, the population had dwindled to about 1,300.

1980s and ’90s the Kayapo rallied, led by a legendary generation of chiefs

Ropni and Mekaron-Ti

organized protests with military precision, began to apply pressure

even kill people caught trespassing on their land.

ar parties evicted illegal ranchers and gold miners, sometimes offering them the choice of leaving Indian land in two hours or being killed on the spot. Warriors took control of strategic river crossings and patrolled borders; they seized hostages; they sent captured trespassers back to town without their clothes.

the chiefs of that era learned Portuguese

enlist the help of conservation organizations and celebrities such as the rock star Sting,

1988 the Kayapo helped get indigenous rights written into the new Brazilian Constitution, and eventually they secured legal recognition of their territory.

Kararaô Dam

Xingu River, which would have flooded parts of their land.

the Altamira Gathering.

Kayapo leaders made a brilliant translation of the Kayapo warrior tradition to the tradition of the 20th-century media spectacle,”

e Kayapo population is now rapidly growing.

shotguns and motorized aluminum boats to Facebook pages, they have shown a canny ability to adopt technologies and practices of the cash-based society at their borders without compromising the essence of their culture.

hey have embraced video cameras to record their ceremonies and dances and to log interactions with government officials.

based on the logo of the Bank of Brazil.

1980s and in the 1990s sold mahogany logging concessions—alliances they came to regret and now have largely ended.

Kayapo learned to organize and to put aside their sometimes fractious relations to cultivate unity of purpose among themselves

the richest and most powerful of around 240 indigenous tribes remaining in Brazil. Their ceremonies, their kinship systems, their Gê language, and their knowledge of the forest and conception of the continuum between humans and the natural world are intact. What may be the most crucial of all, they have their land. “The Kayapo aren’t entering the 21st century as a defeated people. They aren’t degrading themselves,” Zimmerman told me. “They haven’t lost a sense of who they are.”

400 Kayapo chiefs avowed their opposition to a raft of decrees, ordinances, and proposed laws and constitutional amendments that would gut their ability to control their land and prevent them, and any other indigenous group, from adding to their territory.

a campaign to enable mining, logging, and agricultural interests to circumvent indigenous rights, now inconveniently guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution. A

. The Kararaô project is back under a new name: the Belo Monte hydroelectric complex.

n Kayapo villages the division of labor falls along traditional lines. The men hunt and fish; the women cook, garden, and gather fruits and nuts.)

two aluminum skiffs powered by Rabeta motors

a bow and arrows over his shoulder

Okêt a shotgun.

It was as obvious to Meikâre as the meat department of a Stop & Shop would be to me. He and Okêt darted ahead. Fifteen minutes later a shot rang out, then two more.

plugged the escape holes of a mole cricket nest in a sandbank and then had dug up and captured a batch of mole crickets, which they used to bait fishhooks and catch piranha.

peacock bass and piabanha.

Bic lighters a

freshly whittled skewers.

flashlight.

he only things we need from the white culture are flip-flops, flashlights, and glasses,”

his children had died of malaria not long after the founding of Kendjam.

Portuguese from missionaries

the program of pacification by the Indian Protection Service, a forerunner of the National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI,

“Before contact we were clubbing each other to death, and everybody lived in fear,” he said. “Without a doubt things are much better today because people aren’t hitting each other over the head with war clubs.”

construction finally began in 2011 on the $14 billion Belo Monte.

he complex of canals, reservoirs, dikes, and two dams is located some 300 miles north of Kendjam

on the Xingu

Its supporters defend it as a way of delivering needed electricity, while environmentalists have condemned it as a social, environmental, and financial disaster.

the region’s indigenous people were not adequately consulted, Brazil’s federal Public Prosecutor’s Office filed a series of lawsuits to stop the complex, essentially pitting one branch of the government against another. The cases went to the country’s Supreme Court, but judgments have been deferred, and construction of Belo Monte has been allowed to proceed.

nflux of an estimated 100,000 workers and migrants. The dams will flood an area the size of Chicago. Official estimates project that 20,000 people will be displaced; independent estimates suggest the number may be twice as high. The dams will generate methane from inundated vegetation in quantities that rival the greenhouse gas emissions of coal-fired power plants. The diversion of some 80 percent of the water along a 62-mile stretch of the Xingu will dry up areas that depend on seasonal floodwaters and are home to endangered species.

ho still wear the lip disk

carried a wooden war club,

woman approached, held his hand, and began to sob. In a different culture bodyguards might have hustled her away, but Ropni seemed unfazed and in fact began sobbing as well. The anguished weeping was not the result of some fresh catastrophe but a form of ritual Kayapo mourning for departed mutual friends.

“I don’t like Kayapo imitating white culture. I don’t like gold miners. I don’t like loggers. I don’t like the dam!”

the chiefs of the eastern part of the territory had been accepting money from Eletrobras. Boxes of brand-new 25-horsepower boat motors were stacked on the porch of the Protected Forest Association headquarters.

money that activists said was an attempt to dampen indigenous opposition to Belo Monte.

he consortium building the dam was investing in wells, clinics, and roads in the area and was paying a dozen villages nearby an allowance of 30,000 reais a month (roughly $15,000) for food and supplies, which Schwartzman describes as “hush money.”

specially in villages close to towns on the Brazilian frontier.

pollution from clear-cutting and cattle ranching had wrecked the fishing grounds, and it was not uncommon to see Kayapo shopping in supermarkets for soap and frozen chicken.

In the old days men were men,” Ropni said. “They were raised to be warriors; they weren’t afraid to die. They weren’t afraid to back up their words with action. They met guns with bows and arrows. A lot of Indians died, but a lot of whites died too. That’s what formed me: the warrior tradition. I have never been afraid to say what I believed. I have never felt humiliated in front of the whites. They need to respect us, but we need to respect them too. I still think that warrior tradition survives. The Kayapo will fight again if threatened, but I have counseled my people not to go looking for fights.”

FUNAI paperwork authorizing various matters they had discussed. Mekaron-Ti, who was fluent in the Western world as well as the forest world, signed his name quickly like someone who had written a thousand letters. But Ropni held the pen awkwardly. It was striking to see him struggle with the letters of his name, knowing what esoteric expertise was otherwise in his hands, how deftly he could fasten a palm nut belt, or insert a lip plate, or whittle a stingray tail into an arrowhead, or underscore the oratory that had helped secure a future for his people. In the Xingu Valley there had hardly ever been a more able pair of hands. But in the realm that required penmanship, the great chief was like a child.

painted faces carrying water in old soda bottles,

chopped off seedpods of the wild inga fruit.

In the past some anthropologists have fetishized cultural purity, fretting over the introduction of modern technology. But cultures evolve opportunistically like species—the Plains Indians of North America picked up their iconic horses from the Spanish—and strong traditional cultures will privilege themselves, making the accommodations they think will ensure their futures. We can question whether a man dressed in a parrot feather headdress and penis sheath is more valuable than one in a Batman T-shirt and gym shorts. But who can be blind to their knowledge of forest plants and animals or to the preeminent values of clean water, untainted air, and the genetic and cultural treasure of diversity itself?

now turning to those first inhabitants to save ecosystems recognized as critical to the health of the planet—to defend essential tracts of undeveloped land from the developed world’s insatiable appetites.

"Politicians will not do anything for us. They're just interested in their own interests. They don't care about the people - especially the old people in the villages. They don't even care about the young people because the young people are abroad.

In 1989, almost nine million people lived in Bulgaria. Now, it is a little over seven million. By 2050, that number is projected to be less than 5.5 million. By the end of the century, it could be close to half what it is now.

disapproval of children born to unmarried mothers

the decline in the number of young Japanese people has implications for high schools and universities as well as for industry and commerce. It also means that it will become more and more difficult to fund pensions for old people and to find carers for them.

One way of coping with the declining number of young workers is to increase imports of finished goods from countries where wages are relatively low. Japan’s balance of payments is likely to allow this for some time to come.Another way to deal with the likely shortage of labor is by increased use of robots. This is already happening and will certainly lead to a phasing out of certain white- and blue-collar jobs although the prognostications of SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son on this score seem overblown.

Ultimately, Japan will only survive and prosper if it alters its deep-seated prejudice against immigration

he Korean and Chinese minorities have been painted over, as have regional cultures such as those of the Ryukyu Islands and Hokkaido. It also ignores the existence of the Japanese diaspora in North and South America.

Does any Japanese leader have the courage to start arguing publicly and loudly for a relaxation of Japan’s at best illiberal immigration policies that are damaging to the nation’s economic and ultimately national interests? Some nurses have been admitted from the Philippines, but the stringent language tests have been a deterrent and Japan’s welcome mat for such necessary workers is restricted.

Japan has shamefully taken very few refugees despite the huge numbers living on a pittance in refugee camps throughout the world.

For Japan the immediate requirement is to confront vigorously Japanese male and ethnic chauvinism and traditional prejudices.

The local official in charge of family planning promised a $380 reward, presented anonymously, to anyone who informed on an unauthorized baby. Someone reported on Victory,

The one-child policy, unlike many Chinese missteps, was not a product of Chairman Mao’s zeal or ideology; in fact, China was extricating itself from Maoism when it adopted the one-child policy.

“One child isn’t too few, two are just fine, three are too many.” And within about a decade it managed without coercion to reduce the average number of births per woman from six to three, a remarkable achievement. It’s rarely acknowledged that the biggest drop in Chinese fertility came not from the one-child policy, but earlier during this voluntary birth control campaign.

If it had continued, China’s birth rates would have continued to drop, as they have for the rest of the region (Malaysia today averages just under two births per woman; Bangladesh averages 2.2).

In retrospect, Western sympathizers were right about the need to curb population growth in China—and blind to the brutality of China’s policy. Partly that’s because China covered up the abuses and pretended that the policy was essentially voluntary, backed by fines but not by force.

Internationally, the most visible legacy of the one-child policy is the large number of Chinese-born children who have been adopted in the West

because an unauthorized birth would lead her husband to be fired from his job as well as to a large fine and her forced sterilization.