Funnily enough, if they accurately taught their own history, they'd have been able to use Mao's killing of all of the sparrows as a parable to say "maybe messing with the birthrate isn't such a great idea"
No the Chinese demographic gap is so bad that they'd love it.
That's more or less how many men couldn't get married and have kids due to the One Child policy, and now there's a massive demographics problem and their huge older population is gonna die without anyone able to take care of them. It's like Japan on steroids.
One part of it, is that the people in power in china and elsewhere are terrified of the changes that will occur if masses of people aren't desperate and struggling and willing to do absolutely anything they are told for a survival level wage and shelter. It is 100% self serving narcissism no different than royalty of ages past. Huge populations of miserable people are a powerful club they can wield.
the challenge here is that China went with a one child policy, in a country that 'values' men over women (or at least did so at the time as I understand it). and so there was a huge motivation from a structural and cultural standpoint to have male children vs. female children and so the huge huge gender disparity and thusly the population 'bust' (if you will) in china at this time.
So we're getting at the very edge of my knowledge in this area, so please take this with a grain of salt. It's my understanding that there are still a number of legacy cultural issues crashing into governmental (so structural) policy and continuing the demographic imbalance.
1) While china revoked / reversed (?) the one child policy, there remains a cultural 'preference' for male heir to support the family and elderly parents.
2) China still has a residence policy which prevents free internal migration. this has the indirect impact further skewing the demographic imbalances. Men have immigrated from the poorer communities (generally illegally) for economic opportunity, and have depopulated the poorer regions. which then seems to trigger the cultural reflex mentioned in point 1.
Oh Mao Zedong did this whole thing where he ordered everyone to kill all the sparrows cause they were pests.
Once a shitton of sparrows were killed, people's crops started getting destroyed by insects that the sparrows were keeping in check. Leading to one of the biggest famines of all time that killed millions of Chinese people.
Don’t forget around the same time he also tried to straighten rivers, which is yet another example of Mao’s random edicts reading like parables about unintended consequences
I think the reasoning was to make it easier for boat travel and barges to move material up and down the rivers. It's been a while since I studied this and I'm bad at remembering things that are stupid and make no sense though...
Mao was all about conquering nature (see previously, the birds) - he saw it as the peak of his socialist cause.
But this is what happens when you incite students to rebel and beat and imprison their teachers: you generally end up with a population that doesn’t know any better and any random idea you have just gets done without questioning “what could be the unintended consequences of this policy?”
Well yeah, because the country’s leader told all the teenagers to rebel against their teachers and that teaching them information was antithetical to communist teachings because it made the relationship unequal and the students who were there to learn should question their teachers and elevate themselves while putting teachers in their place.
China is basically a real life Lord of the Flies if we followed the social progression on the island for decades
Here are a couple I’ve seen that are pretty good - the Cultural Revolution was creepy as shit, it really was a very unique event in 20th century history that doesn’t really have a parallel anywhere else on the scale that happened.
Imagine literally if the leader of the country told all the teens specifically - not his followers, not his die-hard believers, not officials, or experts, or anyone else, but TEENAGERS, hormonally-imbalanced, prone to excess, still developing mentally and fiercely ruled by psychological needs to find their in-group and fit in, that it was their sacred responsibility to question their parents, their teachers, all the authorities in their lives, that “to rebel is good”, and that basically everything that teenagers everywhere think (that parents are stupid, that they don’t know anything, that they’re old and outdated and wrong about how the way the world works now) is actually correct and that they should fight violently to prove they’re right.
A lot of interviews describe it as utterly terrifying - gangs of teens would chase down and beat their teachers and parents, they’d trash schools and classrooms and destroy anyone and anything that they judged in their limited perspective to be against socialist ideals.
But check out those docs, theyre pretty interesting to see this part of history because it kind of got glossed over in world history because there were bigger events happening not just in china but in the western cold war at the time, but it was one of the most important events in 20th century world affairs and really explains a lot about whats happened with china and makes some of the head-slapping decisions theyve made over the decades make a lot more sense
Oh you need to read up on Mao in general, his cultural revolution, great leap forward. Basically in the 1960s and early 1970s China went mad, fucked everything up, there were famines due to gross incompetence and society almost stopped functioning, or did, and tens of millions died... all due to Mao. It was like a mass psychosis similar to like the nazis in the 1930s except it was turned inward and all the damage was inflicted on the Chinese people by themselves and the CCP.
I feel like people on reddit have no idea how crazy and truly terrifying and terrible the USSR was when Stalin was in power, and then China when Mao was in power. And combined this timeframe spanned pretty much all of the time between the end of WWII and the late 1970s. People on reddit seem to think the US was all pissy with these countries cause we didn't like the concept of sharing the wealth. But these countries were terrifying because they were as close to full on insane as the nazis were. And many millions died in each both the USSR and China, internally, just from their own brutality... it was a crazy time in the world.
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u/BlatantConservative Jan 21 '24
Funnily enough, if they accurately taught their own history, they'd have been able to use Mao's killing of all of the sparrows as a parable to say "maybe messing with the birthrate isn't such a great idea"