The big difference recently from the past is instead of philosophers its scientists who are making the plans and decisions in China so are willing to course correct instead staying the course despite bad out comes.
I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was heavily influenced towards implementing the one child policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a rocketry background and presented a model whereby the population would grow to an unsustainable level unless corrective control was applied.
I think it is unlikely philosophers would have suggested to treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.
>treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.
Treating human resources like resources because 100s of millions of bodies ultimately subject to statistics. "Libtard" philosophers from small countries don't truly have to reckon with Malthusian pressure and law of large numbers.
And PRC family planning wasn't wrong, averted ~300m births, and bluntly PRC still left with ~400/1400m surplus mouths trapped in low-end farming and informal economy. Otherwise they'd have 1000m/1700m, more than 400+300 because every family with more kids is one that can't concentrate surplus/resources on tertiary/skill uplift. Now PRC left with TFR problem, but averted developmental doomsday scenario of too many subsistence peasants, aka where India trending towards.
A good read in this area is Dan Wang's book - Breakneck
One could probably summarize it as having engineering leaders solve engineering problems is good, but they can very efficiently implement very bad social policies. Likewise having non-STEM leaders in charge of things like agricultural planning is also bad.
That said modern China is less socialist/communist than a weird state capitalism machine with a dictatorship.
One big difference to modern China vs USSR for example is instead of having 1-2 car companies churning out the cars the state demands, you have more of a competitive local government subsidized market. So they have 50+ car companies all competing in the local marketplace for sales, and eventually some good car companies have surfaced. This was never going to happen with Lada.
> a weird state capitalism machine with a dictatorship.
That's not a completely new model, either - Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore all went through remarkably similar phases. Countries have tended to become freer and more democratic as they grow wealthy enough to build a sustainable middle-class and a genuine civil society that enjoys some basic independence from government.
Yes, and thats where the west ended up going wrong in our line of thinking. The assumption was if we facilitated their transition into middle class economy / rich world standards via trade deals and offshoring.. they'd follow the same path as our now allies - JP/TW/SK/SG/etc.
That is - the assumption was democracy/civil liberties would follow wealth. This has not held up. And the promotion of Xi to supreme leader probably for life has if anything pulled them further away from that path. Things like the great firewall have helped him in that effort.
China is very far from genuine rich-world standards though, especially if you look at the less developed inner provinces. The relatively tiny middle class they do have clearly lacks the incentive to demand any sudden change at present - they'd have way too much to lose. So we're still very much in the "authoritarian phase" of this whole dynamic.
That is actually bullshit fed to you all democracies that have been brought down in the last 60-70 years democracies have been brought down by the west. And most dictatorships propped up by them unless they threatened Israel or were perceived a threat to Israel. It was not civil liberties or any such reason that any moves were made it was about capitalism vs socialism or Israel. West capitalists have no interest in civil liberties or democracies hence they bring down any socialist democratic party or leader which has bring about fascists in power in the west.
> I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was heavily influenced towards implementing the one child policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a rocketry background and presented a model whereby the population would grow to an unsustainable level unless corrective control was applied.
The problem wasn't the idea of modeling itself, it was to not be aware of what we know today from Africa - with more wealth and especially less child mortality, reproduction will drop in about one generation, even without punitive governmental intervention. Even 60 years ago, people tended to have anywhere from 3 to 5 children, just because the chance was so high that at least two would simply die before reaching adulthood.
But thanks due to better maternal healthcare, vaccinations and OSHA, that mortality rate dropped significantly, and so people adapted on their own - and that's before getting into women being able to control fertility on their own or housing/cost of living exploding in the same timeframe.
>I think it is unlikely philosophers would have suggested to treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.
We are talking about Marxist philosophers. These weren't some scholars of Christianity, who would have insisted on the inherent worth of human life and the injustice of state intervention deep into personal lives, these were the same "philosophers" who justified extermination programs based on the insufficient revolutionary spirit of the exterminated.
