That's not what they're worried about. At all. Forget PR talking points for a minute and think about the very real relationship between macroeconomics and empires. THAT is party elite care about here.
The Party forced the population to HAVE fewer children in 1980. They did this primarily to jump start their economic modernization plans. Moreover, they figured everyone would start having kids at replacement rates second they lifted the rules. If that happened, they'd be able to consolidate their economic gains.
Economic modernization worked. The kids part...not so much. In fact, there's reason to believe (e.g., maternity store receipts) that their birth rates will look like Japan's or Korea's.
To put it another way, not only are people having fewer kids, they're having far fewer kids than Westerners with equivalent per capital wealth/income are. If that happens, China may not be able to consolidate their economic or international political gains. THAT is what Chinese elites are really worried about.
I, personally, am interested in the elephants in the room. For starters, my lesbian friends and I really wonder if the Chinese censorship machine are responsible for erasing lesbians from Western media spaces -- and especially LGBT spaces. Everyone hears plenty about bi and trans women, but lesbians? Nope. But we're still here.
While I'm not the only one who's noticed this erasure, I think I may be the only one who's also noticed how China's quietly been rolling out aspects of its online censorship system in the West over the past ten years -- and how it's REALLY intensified over the past five (i.e., doxxing, career ruining for anyone with political opinions threatening to the current leaders, sex pic leaks against political opponents, etc.). Guess too many of the Chinese kids studying abroad decided to stay abroad, so it's time to make the English internet feel exactly the Chinese one. Sadly, now the air sucks just as much here. Thanks guys.
More substantively, I find it interesting that absolutely no one will discuss how women in fully economically developed Confucian societies have FAR fewer children than equally economically developed non-Confucian societies (e.g., South Korea and Japan vs. Italy and France).
I wish we still had real investigative journalists. If you're bored sometime, go through the Deng/Murdoch divorce papers and look at how the Murdochs claim Deng altered Lachlan, Rupert and James' business practices to benefit the Chinese government.
From the outside, it sounds like certain SV companies are behaving in the exact same way. But I guess we won't know until someone leaks, huh?
No. I'm saying this is how elite Russian and Chinese party policy makers view their own demographic situation. Although they don't really talk about modern Russia or China, Helene Carre and Walter Scheidel probably have the most readable books about how demographic imbalances relate to empire collapses. And if you read them, it's very easy to see why China and Russia are far more reason to be concerned than the West does. Russia already fell off one in 1991, and both nations really are close to another.
(Also, American elites don't really see themselves as struggling demographically.)
Personally, I think they also like being able to blackmail powerful LGBT within their countries/satellites. Historically, when their targets realized that America's fairly tolerant towards foreigners, leftover women, <i>and</i> LGBT people, their targets tended to defect.
I really don't know where to start with this. The short answer is no.
The long answer is Stalin's supporters said the exact same things. And it's not a surprise -- Xi is borrowing a lot from Stalin's centralization playbook, including "restructuring" the PLA (i.e., purging generals who weren't loyal to him personally and ensuring he has a Party loyalist on every ship) and developing the rank and file (to replace the Party leaders he purged in "corruption scandals"). However, this time around, those of us outside the system smells the b.s. a mile away.
China would be wise to remember that Stalin came thisclose to losing WWII because of these changes. Purging military leaders may make them loyal to you, but it doesn't make them good at their actual jobs.
I think we must have different understandings of what causes power struggles within leadership. The comparison to the 1953-1956 period in the USSR also feels a bit misplaced to me, as although there was a minor power struggle during that period, it didn’t have broad implications the way the death of Mao did. (I also don’t agree that the structure of the CPC is all that similar to the structure of the CPSU during Stalin’s leadership, but that’s not of much relevance in my mind.)
RE: the PLA and the party membership, I was referring to changes that mostly took place during the 1990s, which had much broader implications on the locations of structural power within the PRC than anything that’s been done in the last decade.
Calling what led to tens of executions, had an amnestia releasing 1.2 million criminals amongst the public and had top brass spending days in meetings with emergency support being flown in, minor is an understatement
Because they're both threats to their power. If Ma had gone public, he could have used the foreign money in the way that Whitey Bulger used the FBI to eliminate his rivals within his own organization and then in other gangs. It's the double agent game most spooks excel at, so the CCP saw it coming nipped it in the bud. (It's also why I think Ma's been dead for quite some time. A country with billion smartphones and not one picture from some random waitress? C'mon.)
The CCP are is obsessed with the relationship between demographics and war because it always thought that their extraordinary numbers would be their saving grace in WWIII. Now, for a lot of reasons, they're really not so certain.
If you're a CCP leader, gay men aren't the problem so much as it is lesbians. (I've never seen trans people enter into the debate at the policy level, even though all three are existential threats to Confucianism.) The gender imbalance caused by the one son policy really is a problem because it means you have tens of millions of unmarriageable single young men. Historically, the more unmarriageable single young men you have as a percentage of your total population, the more violent crime your society has. If you hit a certain point, revolutions become far more likely. Lesbians -- as well as Chinese women who prefer Western men, their careers, or anything else -- have to be stomped out by any means necessary because because they feel that they are uncomfortably close to that tipping point. It's why a lot of people think the campaign to denigrate leftover women ultimately came from the CCP.
Interestingly, its this demographic imbalance that is the reason for gay porn to still be somewhat tolerated, even if forums aren't. (Lesbian porn still isn't.) Chatrooms and forums are bad because they encourage solidarity and planning; porn is okay because you're just sitting in a room staring at a screen.
Edit: Am I the only one who's a little disturbed at how closely the English language media has followed the Chinese language media on this? And people wonder why I stopped using FB/Twitter/smartphones.
The Party forced the population to HAVE fewer children in 1980. They did this primarily to jump start their economic modernization plans. Moreover, they figured everyone would start having kids at replacement rates second they lifted the rules. If that happened, they'd be able to consolidate their economic gains.
Economic modernization worked. The kids part...not so much. In fact, there's reason to believe (e.g., maternity store receipts) that their birth rates will look like Japan's or Korea's.
To put it another way, not only are people having fewer kids, they're having far fewer kids than Westerners with equivalent per capital wealth/income are. If that happens, China may not be able to consolidate their economic or international political gains. THAT is what Chinese elites are really worried about.
I, personally, am interested in the elephants in the room. For starters, my lesbian friends and I really wonder if the Chinese censorship machine are responsible for erasing lesbians from Western media spaces -- and especially LGBT spaces. Everyone hears plenty about bi and trans women, but lesbians? Nope. But we're still here.
While I'm not the only one who's noticed this erasure, I think I may be the only one who's also noticed how China's quietly been rolling out aspects of its online censorship system in the West over the past ten years -- and how it's REALLY intensified over the past five (i.e., doxxing, career ruining for anyone with political opinions threatening to the current leaders, sex pic leaks against political opponents, etc.). Guess too many of the Chinese kids studying abroad decided to stay abroad, so it's time to make the English internet feel exactly the Chinese one. Sadly, now the air sucks just as much here. Thanks guys.
More substantively, I find it interesting that absolutely no one will discuss how women in fully economically developed Confucian societies have FAR fewer children than equally economically developed non-Confucian societies (e.g., South Korea and Japan vs. Italy and France).