What divides Chinese communism from us is more than markets. It is personal freedom and faith.
[dropcap]Deuteronomy[/dropcap] famously says: “Choose life.”
China famously says: Outlaw babies. Abort babies. Kill babies.
Outlaw babies by dictating the most private decisions couples can make — by telling them they may have only one child or, as of late, two. Abort babies even as they are about to be born. Kill babies even after they are born. China says: Choose death.
China is paying a price for this drastic violation of human values initially articulated in the Torah under the rubric, “Choose life.” In ascending order of severity, these are the prices China is paying:
• An aging population whose number of young people entering the work force is too small to support the top-heavy, upper age percentiles.
• A distorted population in which, due to the Chinese penchant to abort female fetuses or kill female newborns, there are some 25 million more males than females of marriageable age, with the expected and unexpected concomitants. Expected are the human suffering and social dislocation, including potential rebellion and revolution. Policies that close people’s future notoriously explode sooner or later.
Unexpected are the unworkable, immoral and indeed degrading suggestions such as two husbands per wife. Suggestions like these lead to the ultimate price China is paying:
• The most radical, most conceivable, most totalitarian usurpation of personal freedom, namely, the freedom to make the most intimate human choices. If refutations of the viability of communism were still needed, there could be none greater than China’s one-child policy, which, in fact, has little changed despite its recent abolition.
The policy has not changed in this critical sense: The drastic denial of personal freedom remains. It’s just that instead of being limited to one child, Chinese couples are now limited to two. The same execrably intrusive Chinese bureaucracy that butts into people’s intimate lives remains fully in place. The price in freedom that China still pays has not changed one whit from the price it paid under the one-child family.
In its largest sense, child-controlled families reflect the spiritual emptiness of Chinese communism.
The idea that humane values drive economic destiny is alien to Chinese communism. Faced with a large population, China can only resort to inhumane solutions that, precisely on that score, end up not working economically, as China’s recent cancellation of its one-child policy shows.
The idea that reproduction is an act of faith in G-d and in the future is inconceivable under Chinese communism.
The idea that solutions to large populations should not sacrifice personal freedom and the Divine mandate, “Choose life,” is simply beyond Chinese communist ken.
In other words, it is not economics, social policy and demography that fundamentally divide Chinese communism from the West. It is affirmative religious philosophy in its broadest sense. The Chinese atheist option will limit or kill babies without a philosophic quiver, and will distort society’s balance of females and males. The Deuteronomic option will say: the more people choose life, the more likely that some of these lives will meet all of humanity’s challenges, from sufficient food production to world peace to medical advances to environmental sustainability to technological delights.
We hope that China’s abolition of its one-child policy will prove to be the first step in its renunciation of “Choose death” in favor of the Divine faith in the future, Choose life.
Copyright © 2015 by the Intermountain Jewish News