Sunday, December 27, 2009

one child policy

Westerners seem really care about the One Child Policy, which is an inevitable topic when talking about modern China. I’ve been asked so many times, “if you’re only allowed to have one child, what about TWINS?” I couldn’t help laughing, but you can get a sense of how awkward the policy is when facing common sense. On the one side, it sounds scary that a government has the power to control as detailed as how many children you can have in the name of for the better of the country; on the other side, it proves how powerless a policy can be when it confronts traditional values or even natural laws (like twins).

Besides explaining the policy being impossible to accomplish in the countryside, I always try to update the news that the policy is changing and has to change. Chinese scholars have been discussing since 2000, and here’s an article published on the Southern Weekly in 2008: http://www.infzm.com/content/21657. There are a lot convincing statistics and worries from Chinese scholars, while the government still doesn’t move that much. It’s a problem we cannot wait, but everything comes slowly in China.

And for the question of twins, fortunately, the Chinese government is not that brutal to kill the other, so you can have twins, triplets or even quadruplets!

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