China celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Communist Party coming to power with a grand gala. The one-child policy, which ended in 2015, was a major policy undertaken by the Chinese government. The policy was implemented to control population growth, but it had many consequences, including a significant gender imbalance. The policy was crafted by military scientists, which was not ideal, and enforcement varied depending on location. Propaganda and fines were used to discourage families from having more than one child.

- The one-child policy in China resulted in extreme measures to ensure a male child, such as sex-selective abortions and infanticide.
- The policy had long-term consequences, including a generation of only children and a gender disparity with more men than women.
- The gender imbalance has led to odd business opportunities, such as agencies teaching magic tricks to attract women and the sale of life-sized dolls as companions.
- Human trafficking has also increased as women and girls are sold as wives for Chinese men.
- The aging population and the "4-2-1 problem" (one child responsible for two parents and four grandparents) are putting pressure on the youngest generation.
- China's government ended the one-child policy but implemented a two-child policy, although many couples do not want to have more children due to rising living costs.
- The government is now promoting the appeal of having two children through propaganda.

China has implemented a two-child policy and is promoting it through stamps and PSAs. However, there are concerns about the enforcement of the policy and the consequences it has on individuals and families. Some provinces are tightening access to abortion and divorce, while others are facing consequences for exceeding the two-child limit. The Chinese government's approach to family planning is criticized for treating people as machines and not considering the impact on real lives. The video suggests that sex dolls could be a more appropriate tribute for China's Communist Party.

- China celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Communist Party with a grand gala.
- The one-child policy in China resulted in extreme measures to ensure a male child, such as sex-selective abortions and infanticide.
- The policy had long-term consequences, including a generation of only children and a gender disparity with more men than women.
- The gender imbalance has led to odd business opportunities and increased human trafficking.
- The aging population and the "4-2-1 problem" are putting pressure on the youngest generation.
- China's government ended the one-child policy but implemented a two-child policy.
- The government is now promoting the appeal of having two children through propaganda.
- Concerns exist about the enforcement and consequences of the two-child policy.
- The Chinese government's approach to family planning is criticized for not considering the impact on real lives.

John Oliver discusses China’s one-child policy, and all its consequences, intended and not.

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The country, that is, not the thing you fill a cabinet with when you've run out of human needs.

And I know there is a lot going on with China right now, from the ongoing pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong to the trade war that's been good and easy to win for the last year and a half now.

But this week, China took a moment to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Communist Party coming to power, and they did it in some style.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and other senior officials watched a grand evening gala Tuesday on Tiananmen Square.

And the number 70 was formed in the night sky.

Oh, they didn't just make a 70 out of fireworks.

People also made a 70 out of chickens and out of pandas.

Although, I will point out, that is actually just a 7 made out of pandas with a 0 made out of apples.

And honestly, if there aren't enough pandas to make a whole 70 out of pandas, maybe pandas don't deserve to be made into a 70.

Now, you might not like it when I imply pandas are shitty and worthless, but you know who agrees with me on that?

Pandas look at pandas and say, that thing sucks so much, I would not fuck it if the survival of my species depended on it, which it absolutely does.

The point is, since China's government is celebrating its last 70 years, we thought we'd help tonight by highlighting 1 of the most massively consequential policies they undertook in that time, the one-child policy.

It began in 1980, and it was basically exactly what it sounded like, a policy from the government limiting how many children families could have.

And I know it might seem like old news, But this policy actually ended far more recently than you might think.

An historic decision in China, the Communist Party is ending that country's one-child policy as a method of population control.

Meaning China made the historic decision to end its one-child policy the same year Pizza Rat made the historic decision to carry pizza downstairs while being a rat.

Now, which 1 of those decisions will prove to be more historic?

We won't know until future generations are reading about both events in their history textbook, History is Memes Now, 435 pages about Pizza Rat.

So, why talk about something that's now over?

Well, for 1 thing, the history of the one-child policy reveals a lot about how the Communist Party has used and held on to its power, and for another, the effects of it are far from over.

In fact, the one-child policy is behind a lot of challenges facing China right now.

To take just 1 major example for reasons we'll discuss later, there are currently around 34 million more males than females in China.

In some villages, the ratio of men to women can be nearly 2 to 1.

It's a situation that's made some journalists who visited noticeably sad.

Welcome to the most miserable place in China for lovers.

Here, where single men sit around all day, it seems, with nothing to do.

You come across them everywhere, listless and hopeless.

The most miserable place in China for lovers.

I presume narrowly beating out wherever they keep the pandas.

The 1 on the right is clearly thinking, ugh, I am not doing it, and the 1 on the left is completely fine with that.

So tonight, let's talk about China's one-child policy.

Why it happened, how it was carried out, and what the consequences have been.

In the 60s and 70s, overpopulation was a huge global concern, with alarmists making apocalyptic predictions.

Even Disney got in on it, producing this video for the Population Council.

Suppose that in time, more and more children are born.

The children will be sickly and unhappy, with little hope for the future.

This picture can be true for countless families, if the number of children born is left to chance.

But fortunately, this need not happen anymore.

Modern science has given us a key that makes possible a new kind of personal freedom, family planning.

So, first, I know, I know that clip seems a little racially problematic, but...

But let's remember, Disney also made Song of the South, so we're grading them on a very steep curve here.

But secondly, and I cannot stress this enough, I don't care how useful the information Donald has on family planning might be.

You never take advice on having sex from a duck.

They have corkscrew-shaped penises that they regrow every mating season.

Family planning lessons from some corkscrew-dicked pervert.

In any case, curly dick duck aside, the overpopulation hysteria was global, and China was no exception.

And The Communist Party also saw controlling their population growth as key to raising the country's economic prospects and standard of living, making it easier for them to hold on to power.

So, who did they pick to solve this issue?

Well, just take a minute and think about who would be the absolute worst choice to craft a prescriptive nationwide policy on reproduction.

And do keep in mind, Jared Kushner is not Chinese.

The policy was crafted by military scientists, which as 1 expert will tell you, was not ideal.

So, and these men were primarily missile scientists, you know, who envisioned women as, you know, in some ways like machines.

What these men thought were that women's fertility, you can push it up or push it down like a switch.

They didn't understand that that's not how things work.

Family planning isn't rocket science, and that's exactly why rocket scientists should not do it.

It's the same reason we don't let OBGYNs launch babies into space and land them on the moon.

Now, this policy was a nationwide directive in the form of an open letter to members of the Communist Party, but it was actually implemented at the lower level, meaning enforcement varied wildly depending on where you lived.

Many rural areas even allowed families a second child if their first was a girl.

But the general message was to have just 1 child.

And it was often expressed through striking propaganda like this.

A better way to dissuade parents from having more children than by showing them that particular child.

Jong, you've given birth to a real aggro little narc.

♪ -Now, there were also propaganda signs saying things like, respond actively to the call that each couple should have only 1 child and have fewer children, but raise the quality, which is just not how children work.

Children, and I say this as a loving parent, are not high-quality individuals.

Their artwork is derivative and their story's meandering.

No 1 who's ever been asked, who's your ideal dinner guest, has said, someone who insists their food be dinosaur-shaped.

But, but, broadly, the one-child policy was also enforced by an enormous bureaucracy.

At the national level alone, there were half a million employees in charge of administering it, with many, many millions more at the local level.

And their scrutiny could be pretty intense.

Workers must have their factory's permission to get married.

Each team of 16 women has its birth planning worker.

She is constantly alert for anyone who might be pregnant or even thinking of having a child.

We asked, doesn't the fact that she's always watching her workmates, always asking them about their periods and so on.

The workers are grateful for your concern?

If there is anything I know about women, and there definitely isn't.

It's that they love to be asked detailed questions about their periods at work.

Just go up to a colleague and say, how do you like that Diva Cup, girlfriend?

Do you wear it with the period thong to prevent leakage?

And how about that new extra-absorbent period toilet paper?

My female writers told me that 1 of those things I just said isn't real, but they refused to tell me which 1.

--LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE --If I'm honest, my money is on Diva Cup, because it sounds like what Mariah Carey demands all her beverages come in.

But obviously, the enforcement went much further than that.

Local officials would issue massive fines for having more children than you were allowed.

Fines that were routinely multiple times a household's annual income.

Many villages actually came to depend upon those fines for revenue.

And even if parents could afford them, some chose never to let their kids ever forget it.

One-child policy fines are now so common that they're being incorporated into children's names.

Because that's how much we were fined to have him.

They named their kid 20,000 Chen, so everyone would know what they had to go through to have him.

It's the equivalent of naming your child Jason Last-Minute Epidural and a whole lot of shitting on the table Rabinowitz.

It's a lot to make that kid carry around.

And massive fines were clearly far from the worst-case scenario here, particularly for girls.

Because in China, there's traditionally a very strong preference for boys, which is seen as, in a very real sense, an economic investment for old age, as sons are expected to support their parents.

So families would go to great lengths to make sure that their 1 child was a boy.

From abandoning girls, to having sex-selective abortions, to cases of female infanticide.

And in some areas, the government's methods of preventing more births, regardless of gender, were absolutely brutal.

Children could be taken and sold to orphanages, and there were millions of forced sterilizations and forced abortions.

This woman is still haunted by the fact that she was forced to abort her child at 9 months because her husband had a child from a previous marriage.

And I know that there are some who like to hold up China as a blanket argument against abortion in general.

It is very easy to be both pro-choice and anti-forced abortion in the same way that you can be pro-drinking fountain and anti-waterboarding.

The important thing really is, who's in control of the fucking process?

So, as you have seen, as you have seen so far, many heartbreaking decisions were forced on Chinese families by the one-child policy.

And at this point, I'm sure you'll be relieved to hear that we're gonna jump now from the past to the present.

Because there are enormous ongoing ramifications to China's policy, and much like Donald Duck's penis, there are a lot of twists and turns and an important point at the end.

Because for a government that made it a point to micromanage their citizens' lives, China did surprisingly little to prepare for the long-term consequences of this policy.

The one-child policy meant that an entire generation is filled with many, many only children.

And some theorize that that means lots of kids whose parents have overindulged them, as a newscast explained in the 90s in a not very tactful way.

A surprising byproduct of China's affluence is a young generation with growing numbers of fat children.

Little emperors, or little meatballs, as they're sometimes called in Chinese.

Calling that kid a little meatball is both mean and adorable, because...

On 1 hand, you shouldn't call a child a meatball if he doesn't want to be called a meatball.

But on the other hand, look at that little meatball!

I want to bite that little meatball's tummy.

I want to bite his tummy and I want to say, nom-nom!

And then I want to throw him up in the air and say, who's a little meatball?

That's the only proper reaction to that little meatball!

Hashtag meatball hero, hashtag that's a spicy meat-a-ball.

-♪ ♪ -♪ But the one-child policy didn't just produce lots of scrumptious little meatballs.

Remember those fines that resulted in 20,000 qian?

Obviously, there were many parents who did not have that kind of money.

But even if, for whatever reason, they were somehow able to keep their child, there was a massive catch, as this woman, born 26 years ago as a second child can attest.

Officials told her parents they would have to pay a fine the equivalent to about 4 years of their salaries.

They could never afford it, so she was never registered as a Chinese citizen.

To this day, her birth certificate has a blank instead of her name.

Without an ID card, she says, I can't have a normal life.

I could never go to school, never see a doctor.

She can't go to the doctor, find a job, or get married.

She's essentially a ghost without all the fun parts of being a ghost, like rattling chains or summoning cold winds, or making terrible ceramics while having sex with Demi Moore.

And the thing is, that woman is far from alone.

By 1 estimate, at least 6 and a half million Chinese have no official status because they were born outside the family planning rules.

But 1 of the largest and perhaps most far-reaching effects of a policy that resulted in the elimination of millions of girls is that a couple of decades later, you have a generation with a massive gender disparity and far more men than women.

And the reality is that millions of Chinese men will end up without female mates, which has created a number of odd business opportunities to give men an edge in attracting women.

This is an agency catering for China's growing population of singles.

Choosing the right clothes, choosing the right chat-up lines on the first date are all part of the plan.

For singles like Lo Gu Jiang, newfound magic skills may do the trick.

You can really impress a girl, he says, and magically, they'll become attracted without even knowing it.

Now, now, I know this might seem hard to believe, but that's actually a pretty amazing magic trick there.

At the beginning, the hoop and the chain are separate.

And by the end, any woman he's talking to has disappeared.

No matter how many cool, cool tricks they learn, the fact is, millions of men who want a wife will never have 1, which has led to a bunch of unintended consequences, including the success of this company.

There are far too many men in China compared to the number of women.

There are more and more single men who cannot find a wife and are desperate.

So we've decided to make life-sized dolls for them.

These men are happy to pay the price, because the alternative is to be alone for the rest of their lives.

Okay, just for the record, buying a life-sized sex doll does not stop you from being alone.

In fact, it makes you somehow more alone than you were when you were totally alone.

If 1 is the loneliest number, 1 and a sex doll is the even loneliest-er number.

And while buying a sex doll to replace the wife you'll never have may seem like rock bottom, it turns out it's actually somewhere around rock middle.

Because the gender imbalance created by the one-child policy has created a huge market for human trafficking, with women and girls trafficked from within China or surrounding countries to be sold as wives for Chinese men.

In fact, 1 study estimated that in just a four-year period, 21,000 women and girls just from northern Myanmar were forced into marriage in 1 Chinese province alone.

And look, maybe it isn't fair to expect the rocket scientist who designed this policy to anticipate the boom times it would create for sex, dolls, and human trafficking.

But, the irony is that 1 of the key justifications for the policy was that it would boost China's future economic prospects.

And those prospects are now under threat thanks to that very policy.

China's population is now rapidly aging, and the youngest generation is facing some crushing responsibilities.

Researchers estimate that by 2025, 1 in 5 Chinese in urban areas will be over 60.

And that by 2050, that age group will increase to 30% of the population.

The policy has led to what is called the 4-2-1 problem, where 1 child will be responsible for 2 parents and 4 grandparents.

And if you've seen Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory, you know the pressure of having 4 grandparents all relying on you.

I mean, sure, best case scenario, you win a chocolate contest, and you end up impressing a slave owner by surviving his child murder factory.

But that's only gonna happen to, what, 12, 14 of them tops?

The rest are facing a big challenge here.

From 2012 to 2017, the country's working age population decreased by 25 million people, which is the equivalent of the entire population of Australia disappearing from the workforce.

Not for the reasons Australians usually leave the workforce, like being carried off by a giant snake.

Look, Australia is a terrible island full of monsters.

I'll prove it to you, those aren't even stars on their flag, they're spiders.

And the troubling economic forecast is a big reason why China's government decided to end their one-child policy.

The government learned its lesson and stopped meddling with family size.

Because remember that clip that I showed you earlier, announcing that the policy was over?

The Communist Party is ending that country's one-child policy as a method of population control.

All Chinese couples will now be allowed to have 2 children.

The one-child policy is over, but a two-child policy has now begun.

So Chinese couples can do whatever they want, as long as what they want is having 2 children like the government wants them to want.

But the thing is, many couples don't actually want that.

China's birth rate has fallen to its lowest ever, despite the policy shifts due in part to rising living standards and the cost of having children.

And in response to that, the Chinese government is pushing the appeal of 2 children hard in ways that may, by now, seem a little familiar to you.

They've released stamps showing a happy monkey with 2 babies.

There are signs that say things like, 1 is too few, 2 is just right, the young will have siblings, the old will be cared for.

And there are government-produced PSAs like this.

To all our friends of child-bearing age, are you aware that the comprehensive two-child policy officially went into effect on January 1st, 2016.

The reform and improvement of family planning services will be a great thing for not only each individual family, but also the great family that makes up China.

Look, I'll grant that that was a very compelling argument made by a very, very sexy cartoon.

That's basically a copyright infringement.

But when you consider all the one-child propaganda that came before that, that's actually pretty jarring to watch.

I haven't seen a messaging turnaround that abrupt since Subway changed their slogan from Eat Fresh to Forget That Pedophile.

And once again, enforcement of the two-child policy is being left to local officials.

So, methods for carrying it out can still vary widely.

There are concerns that the low birth rate is behind a push in some provinces to tighten access to abortion and make it more difficult to get divorced.

And in other areas, where 2 is being treated as a hard limit, people exceeding those limits are once again frightened of the worst consequences.

Just listen to this man whose wife got pregnant with their third child.

He was so terrified, he'd only talk with his identity disguised.

♪ A third baby is not allowed, so we went into hiding.

Family planning officers conduct pregnancy tests every 3 months.

If we were not in hiding, they would have done a forced abortion.

And that right there does suggest the Chinese government still hasn't learned the fundamental lesson here.

People are not machines whose reproductive systems can be turned on or off at will.

And pretending otherwise leads to all the consequences that you've seen tonight, from the entirely foreseeable, like trauma and heartbreak, to the less anticipated ones, like delicious little meatballs, desperate magic tricks, and a factory that can't pump out sex dolls fast enough.

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