June 4, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Seeing hundreds of millions of forced abortions, pandemic cultural misogyny, and high female suicide rates, NPR wonders if the one-child policy and sex-selective abortion aren't a huge step forward for feminism.
While writing this story last week, on the fact that the scarcity of women means that getting married now costs Chinese men 10 years' income, I came across a “news” article written by National Public Radio.
The author, Louisa Lim, dedicated numerous paragraphs to the argument that women – at least, the ones who survive – can now demand high “bride prices.”
“In economic terms, the relative scarcity of women is giving them bargaining power,” she wrote, at U.S. taxpayer expense.
Indeed, our National Propaganda Radio sees a panoply of economic goods stemming from the Marxists' inhuman policy of wholesale liquidation:
These women's demands are making China's economy grow even faster.
“Rising sex ratios contribute to two percentage points of GDP growth,” says Xiaobo Zhang, a professor of economics at Peking University, who also works at the International Food Policy Research Institute.
His studies have found that up to 25 percent of the growth in China's economy stems back to the effect of the rising sex ratio. Together with Shang-Jin Wei, from Columbia University, he's also found that 30 to 48 percent of the real estate appreciation in 35 major Chinese cities is directly linked to a man's need to acquire wealth — in the form of property — to attract a wife.
Zhang has found families with sons in areas with higher gender imbalances are more likely to be unhappy, and to have to work harder in order to be able to afford that all-important wedding gift — the apartment.
“In order to save more, families with sons must work harder. They are more likely to become entrepreneurs, more likely to take risky jobs — like working in the construction sector — more likely to work longer hours. All this contributes to economic growth,” Zhang says.”
In the interest of equal coverage, NPR presented a one-paragraph response that perhaps “women aren't necessarily benefiting” from seeing their sex decimated.
Click “like” if you want to end abortion!
Leta Hong Fincher, who is earning her Ph.D. in sociology from Tsinghua University, says gendercide does not economically benefit women because parents buy homes in the for their sons rather than their daughters, and “women often transfer their life savings over to the man to finance the purchase of a marital home, which is then often registered solely in the man's name.”
In fact, not just women but the entire nation of China's economic future has been called into question because of its shrinking population. After growing accustomed to double-digit economic growth, tied closely to the size of its workforce, the Chinese labor pool contracted for the first time last year by 3.45 million. An already limited population will continue to atrophy, as men are unable to marry or have children.
The Malthusian population control measure is already changing the personality of the children who survive and, with it, the nation's financial fortunes. A recent study found the generation born since the one-child policy was instituted in 1979 is less trusting and more pessimistic. (I couldn't imagine why.) The generation of only children is also considered more “spoiled.”
Professor Lisa Cameron of the Monash Centre for Development Economics said, “Our data show that people born under the One Child Policy were less likely to be in more risky occupations like self-employment. Thus, there may be implications for China in terms of a decline in entrepreneurial ability.”
The overall effect will produce the same lopsided workforce in China that other east Asian and western European nations are facing today. In 1990, there were 10 workers for each retiree. By 2030, there will be three.
Will China come up with an equally draconian solution to this “population surplus”? Will the one-child policy be followed by a period of mass euthanasia?
Despite the consequences, the Chinese Communist Party has shown no sign of abandoning the policy. Reggie Littlejohn, of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, told LifeSiteNews.com in an interview last year that the Chinese Communist Party is maintaining the policy of forced-abortion, because it “is instrumental in keeping them in power.”
Of course, NPR's utilitarian analysis would overlook the carnage of more than 300 million forced abortions and the terror of Beijing's totalitarian state that puts them into practice, an oversight that requires moral blindness and an bias toward totalitarianism that borders on sycophancy.
Such is the state of nationally funded NPR “news.” It's time to defund organs of the Left like public radio and television.
Cross-posted at Ben Johnson's website, TheRightsWriter.com.