China Orders Warmer Fuzzier One-Child Propaganda

Citing growing public opposition to its official one-child policy, China's National Population and Family Planning Commission has instructed its officials to replace its previous threatening propaganda slogans with more friendly choices. While retaining the policy itself, which has, by the government's own admission, resulted in the death by abortion of over 300 million people, the Commission has issued a list of slogans that it says will improve public relations.

The official Xinhua News Agency reports that the Commission said, "Simply forcing people to give up having more babies (is) causing misunderstanding (of) the policy and even tarnishing the image of the government."

The policy has been in place since 1979 and has been enforced in some areas with well-documented cases of infanticide. Involuntary abortion and sterilizations, compelled either by financial or political coercion or direct force, are hallmarks of the policy frequently cited by human rights agencies.

Under the policy, urban couples are allowed only one child and, in some cases where the first child is a girl, rural couples may have a second child to try for a boy. The cultural preference for boys has created a massive demographic imbalance in China and has even given rise to kidnappings of women for an illegal marriage market.

Under the new policy, banned are slogans that directly threaten fines or violence against parents of more than one or two children. The old slogans, painted on walls and houses, bluntly threatened, "Those who do not follow the one-child policy will see their homes collapsed and families broken."

Others read, "One more baby means one more tomb," and "Houses toppled, cows confiscated, if abortion demand rejected," and "Better to let blood turn into a river than to add a new person to our population."

The new list of 190 approved slogans are so warm and friendly, in fact, that they omit mention of the one-child police altogether. Playing on the propaganda of the environmentalist movement, one reads, "Mother Earth is exhausted, no longer able to bear with more children." The abortion mentality is in evidence still, however, with its implication that children are a form of disposable luxury product. One slogan with clear eugenic overtones reads, "High-quality babies, fewer daily troubles."

Some appear to address the so-called "one-two-four" problem created by the one-child policy of one adult child being left to support two parents and four grandparents: "Children are the flowers of the mother land; senior citizens are the wealth of our society."

Demographers estimate that the population of China has reached a median age of 33 and with fewer children being born, the population is rapidly aging. With fewer workers coming of age to replace existing workers, the ratio of workers to dependents in China will peak in 2010. The following decline will leave a dangerous shrinking number of workers to support China's vast aging population which some predict will be eliminated via widespread euthanasia.