Biden Says China’s One-Child Policy is “God-Awful”
Posted on | February 7, 2012 by Lisa Correnti |
Yesterday speaking at Florida State University promoting Obama’s college tuition program, Vice President Joe Biden criticized China’s one-child policy calling it “God-awful.” The context of his comments were in speaking about China’s inability to maintain current economic growth. From the reuters article:
“Because of that God-awful one-child policy they have, what happens now is in the next 20 years they’re going to have such an inverse proportion of the number of people working to the number of people retired that there is no way they can sustain that growth,” he said.
Biden’s premise is that with the one-child policy, in future generations, China is likely to have a shrinking labor force that will have to financially support a massive pool of aging and retired Chinese. Consequently, China’s economic growth would begin to slow because there will not be enough people to sustain the production of goods and services and concurrently support an large, retired workforce.
Biden was heavily criticized in August when he traveled to China and made the comment that he did not want to second-guess China’s restrictive population control program stating, “Your policy has been one which I fully understand—I’m not second guessing—of one child per family.”
Biden should clarify if its “God-awful” on a purely economic basis or because of the human rights abuses suffered by thousands of Chinese families.
