China's one-child policy has long been a cruel and unusual punishment of a nation, and of some families in particular. But it has achieved nothing that could not have been done without coercion and its likely abandonment in the not-too-distant future will do little or nothing to raise the nation's languishing fertility rate.
Lurid stories of forced abortions which have appalled the public and academic papers about the dangers of a too-rapidly ageing population are gradually undermining the efforts of Communist Party apparatchiks to sustain a policy which has given them outrageous power over individual choice. This gradual weakening of the policy provides a good opportunity to remember the absurdity of the claims that it was necessary to bring down population growth.
For proof, one has only to look at mainland China's neighbours, all of which saw steep falls in fertility with no compulsion and in some cases no overt government campaigns. Take Hong Kong and Singapore, which both saw steep falls in fertility even under colonial regimes loathe to take on issues like family values.
Singapore's fertility rate began its rapid decline in the late 1950s and speeded up under incentives introduced by the People's Action Party government after independence. From a fertility rate of more than six births per woman in the 1950s, it fell to 1.8 by 1980.
Colonial Hong Kong had no policy, but its rate fell from 5.3 in the early 1960s to 2.3 by the mid-1970s, to about two by 1980 and now languishes around one.
Self-contained cities may seem the exception, but compare the mainland with two other East Asian societies which have undergone similar industrialisation processes: Thailand and South Korea. They each had rates of six around 1960, falling to 4.2 a decade later. Korea reached the two mark around 1985 and Thailand a decade later. Now Thailand is similar to the mainland at 1.6 and Korea similar to Taiwan and Japan at 1.3.