What do you think the modern population of China would be today if Nationalists won the CCW instead of the Communists? Would Nationalists ever introduce policies like one child policy? If KMT China had better economic prosperity early on could China birth rates be lower than they were under CCP?
Population of China if Nationalists won civil war.
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I believe the Communists under Mao were actually quite hostile to population control, and it is often forgotten that the one-child thingie only dates to the beginning of the capitalist-roading Deng era, in 1979.
So, if the KMT were more open to malthusian solutions, you might actually see an EARLIER one-child policy. But I don't know what their viewpoint was on that specifically.
So, if the KMT were more open to malthusian solutions, you might actually see an EARLIER one-child policy. But I don't know what their viewpoint was on that specifically.
I don’t know if Nationalist China would ever implement a one-child policy, but if they want to curtail population growth, there are ways. Cutting benefits for children beyond one (or two) is one. Encouraging construction of homes to accommodate families of four but nothing bigger could work as well.
According to this summary Taiwan introduced population-control measures in 1964, I'm assuming under the KMT. Not sure the details of that, or how they compared to equivalent policies in China at the time, but you could possibly extrapolate a Nationalist mainland's policy from what Nationalist Taiwan did.
Interesting to speculate what would happen if a Nationalist mainland pursues a OCP, with the attendant human-rights abuses(forced abortion etc) that allegedly bedeviled China.
OTL, the PRC got a bit of a bad rep, villified by a coalition of anti-Communists, the anti-abortion lobby, and general human-rights activists, even as they were a US ally for much of the period the policy was in place. With the KMT as an even stronger US Cold War ally, will the criticism be somewhat muted?
I guess it's also a question whether or not a) the US would be so fervently enamoured of the KMT in a timeline where China doesn't go Communist, and b) whether domestic American politics would be the same with no one yelling "Who lost China?" in the 1950s? (IOW, does US conservativism develop in the same way that would give rise to a Religious Right and anti-abortionists?)
OTL, the PRC got a bit of a bad rep, villified by a coalition of anti-Communists, the anti-abortion lobby, and general human-rights activists, even as they were a US ally for much of the period the policy was in place. With the KMT as an even stronger US Cold War ally, will the criticism be somewhat muted?
I guess it's also a question whether or not a) the US would be so fervently enamoured of the KMT in a timeline where China doesn't go Communist, and b) whether domestic American politics would be the same with no one yelling "Who lost China?" in the 1950s? (IOW, does US conservativism develop in the same way that would give rise to a Religious Right and anti-abortionists?)
It all depends. The KMT would need to devote considerable resources to the and keep China together so it would be pretty bad the first several years, but how comparable to Taiwan is hard to say. One thing that I know would help would be feminists movement, especially with the rise of birth control. Around this time, the crazier of the hardliners should be dead and the leftists who did side with the KMT should push the influence for this. It would expand the workforce and push the ideals harder.
The USSR would still be around, but the Cold War may die down as China rebuilds itself and on the US’s side. Least until they form the Third World and proceed to make SEAsia their playground along with the newer nations of Africa
It would depend a lot on the ROC's speed and level of development between 1949 and 2019. More urbanization and increasing income/education/"white-collarness" dampens population growth. I don't think that specific policies, unless they are pursued with communist-level ruthlessness, can have as much of an effect as economic/social changes.
If the ROC does very well, stabilizes the country in the '50s and successfully industrializes (like a massive Japan), the population would probably continue to grow quickly into the 70s and 80s before slowing down, and we'd have as many or perhaps slightly fewer Chinese as IOTL.
If the ROC experiences more modest growth over the postwar decades, similar to South Korea with its persistent dictatorship to 1990, we could see China with a population of 1.7 billion to 2 billion or more. This is because the rural lifestyle would remain more common for longer.
I'd say the population of China (PRC) IOTL without the One Child Policy would probably be 1.5-1.7 billion, and decreasing with the onset of 1990s-2000s-era economic growth. In effect, you'd simply see the population peak later and higher, and natural trends of societal development would have taken care of the rest.
If the ROC does very well, stabilizes the country in the '50s and successfully industrializes (like a massive Japan), the population would probably continue to grow quickly into the 70s and 80s before slowing down, and we'd have as many or perhaps slightly fewer Chinese as IOTL.
If the ROC experiences more modest growth over the postwar decades, similar to South Korea with its persistent dictatorship to 1990, we could see China with a population of 1.7 billion to 2 billion or more. This is because the rural lifestyle would remain more common for longer.
I'd say the population of China (PRC) IOTL without the One Child Policy would probably be 1.5-1.7 billion, and decreasing with the onset of 1990s-2000s-era economic growth. In effect, you'd simply see the population peak later and higher, and natural trends of societal development would have taken care of the rest.
We do have to remember that a lot of the Malthusian anxieties about population control were a major trend of the 1970's. It's not to say that no nations before then attempted to limit their population growth or introduce contraception. But things like the One China Policy or Park Chung-hee's regime and its campaigns of forced contraception and sterilisation were very much a thing of the 1970's.
It's not inconceivable to imagine a China under the GMD implementing similar measures earlier too. Though the way this would be implemented might be different. Instead of the One-Child Policy, it might involve the more South Korean approach of encouraging adoption, emigration, and forced/covert sterilisation. So it won't have the kinds of results the OCP did like a gender imbalance and the like.
China would almost certainly hit its "demographic window" far earlier than IOTL and start to enter a period of either decline or stagnant population growth.
It's not inconceivable to imagine a China under the GMD implementing similar measures earlier too. Though the way this would be implemented might be different. Instead of the One-Child Policy, it might involve the more South Korean approach of encouraging adoption, emigration, and forced/covert sterilisation. So it won't have the kinds of results the OCP did like a gender imbalance and the like.
China would almost certainly hit its "demographic window" far earlier than IOTL and start to enter a period of either decline or stagnant population growth.
Granted, maybe they would promote women in the workforce as a way to boost labor and help reduce population growth.
That may well be.
At least in an ideological sense, we could say that Mao was at least theoretically far more committed to actively promoting women's empowerment and participation in the economy.
But the historical and modern PRC has a history of making fairly grand promises to women and seldom delivering fully on said promises.
I couldn't really speak to what direction women's rights and gender roles would have taken under GMD rule. There was a trend towards the emulation of Western fashions and traditions in the 1930's in China and restrictive traditional garments for women being replaced with more loose/revealing versions. But at the same time, this was a trend that was pretty confined to upper-class, educated urban women. These trends didn't really reach women in rural areas of China who actually comprised the majority of the Chinese populace.
So it's anyone's guess as to what things would have looked like given a few decades of peace and internal development where the GMD had the chance to entrench its power. Perhaps these trends would have slowly percolated into rural areas as country women went to the cities for work, or as the GMD takes up the trends and attitudes of urban, elite women as a model for women throughout the nation.
Historically, the GMD under Chiang Kai-Shek often had issues with actually building support for its ideological movements. The "New Life Movement" was a fairly ambitious campaign to impose a new set of values for modern China, but it was honestly totally ineffective.
It doesn't mean that all future campaigns would be ineffective, but it does indicate that there's probably a certain degree of disconnect between what the government and its people. Chiang wasn't the worst or least-competent Chinese leader by any means: and a lot of the misfortunes that befell his government were more the fault of bad circumstances than incompetence. But at the same time, Chiang tended to have problems with building support for his governance. We could even argue that this continued even after the flight to Taiwan because Chiang's government maintained an authoritarian regime until after his death.
Regimes which need to resort to repression to keep power usually do so because they would not be able to maintain it otherwise.
True though if the point was to try and reduce the amout of people having kids, this would be the best way to do so while also promoting morale and so on within the nation.
I agree, but authoritarian regimes tend to try to solve problems the way that they've solved other problems, in other words: if one problem can be solved with force and repression, other problems can be solved with force and repression.
Park Chung-hee's South Korea actually forcibly sterilised large numbers of women and covertly sterilised many others. So in other words it rather brutally enforced control to an extreme degree over women's bodies. It also pressured Koreans to give up their children for international adoption and to emigrate abroad so that they would not contribute to population growth. The regime achieved its goals, but it did so at a really terrible cost. Not to mention it tends to have problematic effects on demography. Because South Korea, for instance, now, is now facing the exact opposite problem of having not enough young people rather than having too many.
The example of Thailand, however, shows us that it's actually very possible and even ideal to use a less brutal approach. Thailand more than halved its population growth and rapidly increased its population's knowledge and use of contraception with an ambitious education campaign. Basically, instead of using force, they co-opted existing society and traditions as a way of encouraging people to have fewer children and educating them about the use of contraception and the deleterious consequences of having too many children. It was actually massively successful and hasn't created the kind of problems that have been created by the One Child Policy.
I am not sure if Chung-hee's approach would actually work in China gieven how massive the nation is in terms of population and whatnot. Hence, why I figure they could use the Thailand example plus also introduce more people to the workplace to get the wheels of economy going.