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‘We need a planetary one-child policy’
In the run-up to the summit, leading Western greens gave thanks for China’s stringent population policies. ‘Had there been no “one child family” policy in China there would now have been 400million additional Chinese citizens’, said Jonathon Porritt, former chair of the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission (2). An eco-feminist writing in the UK Guardian said, with an almost audible sigh of relief, that there are ‘300 to 400million fewer people on the planet’ as a result of China’s one-child policy (3). (A feminist praising authoritarian control over women’s reproductive lives? You couldn’t make it up.)...

...Western Malthusians have long had a soft spot for China’s barbaric one-child policy, seeing it as a useful tool for keeping down the number of yellow people on the planet; they even helped to fund and mould China’s population-control programmes and provided ‘acceptable discourse’ to make the one-child policy look like a reproductive health initiative rather than an alarmingly illiberal method of control over women’s choices and bodies (5). Yet at the same time they recognised that they could not openly praise China’s methods for fear of exposing their own authoritarian instincts. That they now feel free to do so shows how worryingly ascendant is the misanthropic creed of Malthusianism....

...In fact, the love-in between Western greens and Chinese authoritarians at Copenhagen should remind us of a far-too-little-discussed fact: that elements in the West have for a long time supported, both financially and morally, China’s enforcement of its one-child policy. There has been a great deal of interplay between Western Malthusianism and Eastern authoritarianism.

It is striking that at Copenhagen, Zhao Baige cited the authority of Britain’s Optimum Population Trust (OPT) to re-justify her country’s approach to population as a ‘climate-friendly initiative’. She cited research carried out by Thomas Wire of the London School of Economics, which apparently found that ‘each $7 spent on basic family planning would reduce CO2 emissions by more than one tonne’ (8). This research was commissioned by the OPT and was used by them, on the eve of Copenhagen, to launch PopOffsets, a grotesque initiative that invites well-off Westerners to offset their CO2 emissions by funding family-planning charities in the Third World and thus preventing the creation of more carbon-emitting life (9). The Chinese authorities have long looked to the West, to groups similar to the OPT, for up-to-date moral justifications for their Malthusian authoritarianism.

From 1979 through to today, China’s one-child policy has been part-funded by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), a wing of the UN frequently applauded for ‘raising awareness’ about overpopulation. The UNFPA trained China’s demographers. In 1983, at a time when China’s one-child policy was even more unforgiving than it is today, the UNFPA gave Qian Xinzhong, China’s then Minister for Birth, the first-ever UNFPA award for ‘tackling the problem of rapid population growth’ (9). Following claims that some women in China were being forced to have abortions, the UNFPA called on China to ‘reduce the coerciveness’ – that is, to enforce its population authoritarianism in a more palatable way (10). Presumably the UNFPA prefers it when women are pressured (under the threat of a fine) rather than actually forced to have abortions....