China is not far behind Japan on the path to the demographic cliff edge. Fertility figures are no more dependable than any other Chinese statistics, but there seems to be general agreement that the current TFR is in the 1.7 to 1.8 range, somewhere between Sweden and Belgium in the international rankings.

For China, still a poor country with a huge peasant population, this is starting to throw up problems. With the one-child policy entering its fourth decade, the typical Chinese in his prime productive years now has two elderly parents to support. Elderly, and likely penniless, since those parents left their productive years without ever having had the opportunity to accumulate much.

Things are particularly acute in urban areas, where busy young yuppies not only don’t want to be bothered with dependent geezers, they don’t want to be bothered with kids either. The one-child policy isn’t needed in urban China. (The joke going round is that the familiar one-child propaganda slogans are being amended: “Have One Child … Please! ”) The Chinese kind-of-autonomous city of Macau (It was a Portuguese colony until 1999) actually has the lowest TFR of any territory listed in the CIA World Factbook, at 0.90.

The Chinese authorities have been very quietly relaxing the one-child rule in certain areas for a decade or two. It’s been done without publicity, by a wink and a nod, awareness of the age imbalance still contending in the leaders’ minds with the belief that the country is over-populated.

Now the authorities are getting bolder. Last week the city fathers of Shanghai began openly encouraging couples to have two children. There are still conditions — both parents must be only children — and it isn’t likely to have much effect, since Shanghai yuppies still don’t want to be bothered with kids, any more than Tokyo or Seoul yuppies do.

China’s population policy tries for quality control as well as quantity control. The 1995 Eugenics Law, though since renamed to assuage Western sensibilites, is very much in force. I’ve written about this previously on NRO. Whether the idea of eugenics in a human population is sound or not — ethical issues aside — nobody knows, but the Chinese seem determined to find out.

There isn’t anything we can do about China’s population policy one way or the other. Perhaps it should, though, encourage us to reflect on our own population policy. We have one, of course. A nation can’t not have a population policy. Laws and regulations on taxes, employment, welfare, schooling, health care, and immigration all work together to nudge population growth one way or another. There might be less rancor and yelling in our public forum if we just acknowledged this simple fact. You may think China’s population policy is mistaken, or wicked, or insane, and you may be right, but at least they talk about population policy, as a matter of cold policy, with the future of their nation on their minds. If you try to talk about population policy in the West, people come and break your windows.