Pixie Dust and Overpopulation: What are the Origins of the "One Child" China's Population Policy?

After I published a post on the demonization of Malthus on the basis of completely invented data, I thought I could republish a post that appeared in 2022 on the old version of “The Seneca Effect” blog. (slightly edited).

Often, I have the sensation that we live in a world of pure magic. Everything we think we know results from a fairy who spreads some pixie dust on the real world, transforming it into an alternate reality. Yet, it is so incredibly easy to convince people of more or less anything without bothering to bring any proof. A good example is the story of the Chinese government's development of its "one-child" population policy as a result of the influence of the Club of Rome and its evil book, "The Limits to Growth." It is so common on the Web that it seems to be an ascertained fact. But, is it? Or is it just a legend? For more details on the influence of the "Limits to Growth" report on world policies, you can read the recent review of the whole story titled "Limits and Beyond"

When it comes to the Chinese "One-Child" policy, two statements seem to be commonly repeated on the Web. One is that it was an abject failure, and the other is that it was inspired—or even driven—by the evil think tank called "The Club of Rome" and by their even more evil book, "The Limits to Growth" (1972). They are followers of the arch-evil enemy of the people, Thomas Malthus, the first would-be exterminator of humankind. 

If nothing else, this story shows how easy it is to use a sprinkle of pixie dust to transform everything into the archetypal fight between good and evil, which seems to be the current way of seeing the world in the West (everything that is not the West, is evil almost by definition.) It would be a long story to examine this attitude of Westerners (Simon Sheridan has some good hints, I think).

In any case, the legend of an evil cabal that led the Chinese government to adopt the one-child policy  -- and that it failed -- is appealing because it provides us with a comfortable image of the Chinese as bad guys who are both evil and hapless. Besides being Communists, to boot!

It is easy to find various versions of this story on the Web. A recent one was written in 2021 by Dominic Pino for the "National Review." It shows how easy it is to spin a nearly fact-free story. So, according to Pino, 

China’s population policy is one of the best examples of the weakness and failure of central planning. Based on the best information available at the time and the opinions of experts around the world, China instituted strict population-control measures to limit most families to have only one child. The policy then stuck around for much too long and now presents a serious threat to Chinese society.

Then, 

Naturally, there were unintended consequences. Now that China needs to increase its birthrate, the Chinese government is having a hard time persuading its people to have more children. The government lifted the one-child policy in 2015, allowing any married couple to have up to two children. Despite raising the limit, the 2020 census showed that the number of births fell again — for the fourth straight year.

And therefore: 

The failure of the one-child policy has been conclusively demonstrated.

There is so much that's wrong with these statements that you don't know where to start criticizing them. But, basically, if the objective of the one-child policy was to reduce the birth rate to stop population growth, then it worked: the Chinese population did stop growing and is now declining- so much so that China now needs to increase its birth rate. So, the one-child policy was NOT a failure, at least at first glance.

Then, how can a policy that was lifted in 2015 still be "a threat to Chinese society"? Do the Chinese tend to follow non-existing laws? That is, do they still bind the feet of their young girls to make them smaller? (the feet, not the girls). Do they still beat drums on solar eclipses to chase away the invisible dragon eating the sun? These contradictions are just buried by the pixie dust liberally sprinkled on the story. 

Is there any truth in the idea that the policy was based on "the opinions of experts around the world"? Did the Chinese really seek advice from Western scientists? Pino refers to the work of "The Club of Rome" and its "The Limits to Growth" report, published in 1972, saying that, 

In 1978, Song Jian, a missile scientist who had gained the trust of the governing elites, went to Helsinki for the Seventh Triennial World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control. That completely normal-sounding group was composed of Western scientists who had bought the Club of Rome’s arguments about the need for population control.

This sentence is lifted almost verbatim from an article written earlier on by Susan Grenhalgh (2005), who also stated that: "....the Congress was infused with the spirit of scientific certainty, progress and messianic fervour about the potential of control science to solve the world’s problems,” and that it was "tied to the well-known work of the Club of Rome," including "a global systems model in which population growth was destroying the environment and required strong, even drastic, control."

There is a lot of pixie dust here. The term “messianic fervor” comes out of the blue and should have no place in an article that claims to be at least moderately serious. But that’s just one of the problems. The whole story is simply false.

Let’s see to set things straight. There was indeed a scientific congress in Helsinki in 1978. It was a normal congress that lasted for 4 days, and you can still peruse its proceedings. You'll see that 294 papers were presented and discussed. Only a few of these papers are available online, so it is not impossible that some of them mentioned or discussed "The Limits to Growth" study. However, there was no presentation dedicated to population growth, nor were there members of the Club of Rome among the listed speakers or participants. I checked with the original authors of "The Limits to Growth," and they didn't even know that such a meeting had taken place. So, there is no support at all for Pino having transformed the congress into a "group" of "Western scientists who had bought the Club of Rome’s arguments about the need for population control." And the "messianic fervour" that Susan Greenhalgh mentions exists only in her mind. There is no trace of anything like that in the proceedings.

But, as usual, shreds of truth start appearing once you blow off the pixie dust.  In an earlier paper, Susan Greenhalgh describes how a top-level Chinese scientist named Song Jian traveled to Europe in the late 1970s. Did he attend the 1978 Helsinki congress? His name does not appear in the proceedings, but he could have been there as an auditor. However, it may well be another invention created using pixie dust. Then, the work of the Club of Rome’s work was public and accessible to anyone (it still is), so Song may well have read something from them. In any case, Greenhalgh can only report that Jian cited the book titled "Blueprint for Survival," (1972). But that study didn't use world models and had nothing to do with the Club of Rome.

Greenhalgh proposes that, after returning to China, Song Jian developed a model of the Chinese economy equivalent to "The Limits to Growth." There is no evidence whatsoever that such a thing ever happened. From what she writes, it is clear that Greenhalgh doesn’t understand world modeling. All she shows as a proof is this diagram from a 1981 paper by Song. 

This is not the output of a world model. It is just an extrapolation of population trends. Correctly, the diagram shows that the population tends to decline for birth rates lower than about 2. The reverse occurs for higher birth rates. For birthrates remaining at around 3 per woman, theoretically, the Chinese population could have reached 3 billion before the end of the 21st century. But to arrive at these conclusions, paper and pencil calculations were sufficient. 

In practice, it is likely that, during his trip to Europe, Song had been exposed to a general view of the Western way of thinking in the 1970s and 1980s that saw overpopulation as a major problem. The Chinese may have been sensitive to the issue: they still remember how the famines of 1951 and 1961 are reported to have killed tens of millions of people in China (note: the commonly reported number of deaths may have been greatly exaggerated as a result of Western propaganda. Nevertheless, famines were endemic in agrarian China). When Song developed some simple models to extrapolate population trends in China, the government decided that they had to do something to prevent the Chinese population from reaching levels that would have been impossible to feed. So, they decided to push Chinese families toward lower birth rates. And that's what they did. 

The Chinese took a radical approach to curb population growth, but other countries reacted to the problem, too. In South America, the Mexican President, Luis Echeverría (1970-1976), implemented some policies to reduce the number of children, at the time of the order of 8/10 per woman. Apparently, that was done as a direct result of the work by Victor Urquidi, a member of the Club of Rome. So, in this case (and probably only in this case), the Club of Rome directly influenced a major country's population policies. 

Other countries, instead, ignored the problem. In the Soviet Union, scientists knew about the "Limits to Growth" study and created their own versions. But the Soviet Union was a vast and scarcely populated country so, not surprisingly, the Soviet government didn't see an overpopulation problem. In the West, instead, governments preferred to react in the way they knew best: they buried "The Limits to Growth" under a thick layer of pixie dust (aka "propaganda"), and then they ignored it. 

The interesting part of the story is that no matter what governments did or didn't do, the results were the same. You can see in the graph (data from the World Bank) how countries close to China had lower birth rates despite not implementing birth control policies (Taiwan is not listed in the World Bank data, but it shows the same behavior). 

During the past 50 years or so, the birth rate has declined rapidly all over the areas that were called the "First World" (the West) and the "Second World" (The Soviet bloc and China). This trend was called the "demographic transition" and didn't need draconian government measures to occur. All the countries of the world are facing the same transition. Third-world countries are just arriving a little later. 

So, you see? The story is rather simple: things went how they had to. No need for evil guys plotting to destroy humankind. That's just pixie dust liberally spread over everything, as usual. 

h/t Susana Chacón, Li X, Dennis Meadows, and Jorgen Randers

To know more about the origins of world models, and their relevance for us, nowadays, you can read the recent report to the Club of Rome titled "Limits and Beyond"