That’s the name of the game
And each generation
They play it the same.
– Multiplication (bit.ly/3RyNFV9), Bobby Darin
Hey, hey, set me free.Stupid Cupid, stop picking on me! – Stupid Cupid (bit.ly/3PlaxVo), Connie Francis
Has the Communist Party of China (CPC), the largest and most powerful ideological organisation in the world, personified by its Supreme Leader for Life Xi Jinping, sprouted tiny angel wings and armed itself with a toy bow-and-arrow set to play the part of Cupid, the coyly cute mascot of teenybopper romance?
It might well seem so. Last month, on Qixi, the Chinese equivalent of Valentine’s Day, the civic authorities of Xian texted residents wishing them, ‘Sweet love, marriage and childbirth’ and urged them to create ‘good fertility’ in a renewed effort to reverse the accelerating fall in the country’s birth rate, which has set off tocsins of alarm among China’s top leadership. ‘Continue the blood of China and share the important task of rejuvenation,’ the message exhorted, adding the advisory footnote that wedlock and procreation should be done at the ‘right age’.
Earlier this year, China lost its No. 1 ranking as the planet’s most populous country with 1.4 billion inhabitants to India, a reversal mirrored in the country’s economic decline with its growth reportedly dropping to a dismal 0.8% in the April-June quarter as compared with 2.2% in the previous three months, a continuous slide that has unseated the communist giant from its position as the world’s fastest-growing economy.
The drop in economic growth is being seen as, at least partly, due to a fall in the fertility rate, which is attributed to the one-child policy China assiduously pursued from 1980 till 2016, in a desperate bid to stem the Malthusian tide of overpopulation, which would irretrievably swamp the country’s natural resources and lead to a collapse of its public healthcare system.
Between 1949 and 1979, China’s population ballooned from 540 million to 969 million, perhaps partially thanks to the Great March to the North, when after a hard day’s night some much-needed R&R could have resulted in a situation exemplified by the folkloric adage, ‘Go to bed early to save candlestick and have twins.’
Initiated by the-then supremo Deng Xiaoping, who didn’t care about the colour of cats so long as they caught mice, the draconian one-child directive, enforced through crippling fines, is estimated to have led to a reduction of 400 million births, many through abortion or foeticide, particularly of females, causing a severe gender imbalance in the world of Suzie Wong.
When the penny – or yuan – dropped in 2015 that the one-child policy was economically unviable because it effectively meant that one individual of working age may end up having to support six retired people, two parents plus four grandparents, China’s population policy went into reverse gear. The state then egged people on to do things in pairs and have two offspring, which later was upped to three.
However, there was a small snag in the maternity production line. Or, rather, a large snag, namely an acute shortage of women, caused by female foeticide during the one-child regime. Moreover, as in countries as disparate as Germany, Italy, and Japan, the rising cost of living and the single-minded pursuit of careers had made matrimonial matching, and consequent hatching, a mixed blessing in the Middle Kingdom.
To resolve the demographic dilemma will CPC, like a heavy-handed paterfamilias metaphorically and literally shanghai its citizens into going forth, or even fifth, and multiplying? Like the theory of an oscillating universe, which posits a cosmos that from its Big Bang birth expands only to contract back to its singular origin and repeat the process all over again, China’s population swings backwards and forwards.
If Beijing succeeds in playing Big Matchmaker and China’s population burgeons once more, it might revive the 1970s exchange between Andy Capp of the eponymous British cartoon fame and his Missus: ‘Cor, luv, it says ‘ere in the Daily Mail that every third child in the world is Chinese.’
‘Ooh, isn’t it lucky we stopped at two, then?’
