China's Future and Its One-Child Policy
This essay is excerpted from an address by Mr. Eberstadt at the inaugural World Economic Forum in Dalian, China, on September 7, 2007.
China faces many challenges in the future, including the development of more effective financial institutions and managing growing urbanization. But its future success rests on abandoning its destructive "One-Child Policy." The coercive program has been a disastrous mistake, and its consequences are already being felt.
Surveying the policy horizon for China today, there are any number of important challenges that would deserve extensive comment: the need to build and maintain more efficient institutions and arrangements for financial intermediation, for example; or the requirements for making the transition from export-oriented growth to development focused on the domestic Chinese consumer; or the great looming question of how to manage China's prospective urbanization process over the coming generation (with almost 350 million people projected to move from countryside to city between 2005 and 2030, this promises to be the most massive relocation of human beings in just one generation that any country in history has ever experienced).
But one topic above all will have a critical impact upon China's future, and that is its population policy. China's very future hinges on this policy--although not in the way the official formulation suggests. It is hardly an exaggeration to suggest that the program may threaten China's growth and stability--possibly even China's very culture. If the Chinese government could make a single decision today to enhance the nation's long-term outlook and position, it would be to recognize that coercive population control has been a tragic and historic mistake--and it would abandon it, immediately and without reservation.
To view full article, visit: http://www.aei.org/docLib/20070919_070918_Eberstadt_g.pdf
