In the late 1970s, China launched a feeble attempt to reduce its population growth and resource consumption at the expense of its citizens’ autonomy and safety. This attempt, the one-child policy, used the threat of fines to limit about a third of China’s citizens to one child, according to an Oct. 29 BBC article.The policy stood for more than three decades — but last Thursday, the Chinese government ended it in favor of a two-child policy.

At first glance, this seems “a positive step,” as White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest remarked, but in reality, it is just a cousin to the horrendous one-child policy that preceded it.

The one-child policy violated human rights, wounded China’s economy and had minimal positive environmental impact; the two-child policy still violates human rights, won’t improve the economy for decades and has even less of a positive environmental impact.

First, let’s take a look at the original policy.

The list of human rights abuses directly caused by China’s one-child policy encompasses forced abortions, forced sterilizations and problems for girls born under the oppressive thumb of the policy. According to a May 2012 CNN article, 13 million abortions were performed each year in China under the one-child policy, and while the exact number of coerced abortions is not known, numerous cases have reached the news: BBC News Hong Kong correspondent Juliana Liu, for example, shared the story of her own mother, who “had to endure two abortions.” About her mother, Liu writes, “Even today, she talks about ‘Number Two’ and ‘Number Three’ and what they might have been like.” Tragically, innumerable women suffered similar injustices under the one-child policy, and many more suffered forced sterilization. In 2010 alone, “Chinese health officials planned to [forcibly] sterilize 10,000 people,” according to a Sept. 2011 report by the Advocates for Human Rights. 

Beyond that, many girls not forcibly aborted undergo other problems ranging from infanticide and abandonment to the kidnapping of girls for wives. After several years of the one-child policy, an unexpected issue arose: a disproportionate sex ratio due to the abortion, murder or displacement of unwanted girls. In 2014, the gender ratio at birth was 115.88 boys to every 100 girls, according to a Jan. 2015 article in Radio Free Asia — and that’s not even factoring in the subsequent disproportion caused by sending unwanted girls out of the country. As a result of this gender imbalance, Chinese men — as many as 24 million, according to an April 2013 NPR article — began to struggle to find wives. As a result, some men resorted to kidnapping girls or women for marriage, and a human trafficking ring has developed, according to a Dec. 2011 article in the China Daily, which reported that China has witnessed “an increasing number of foreign women who have been cheated, kidnapped and smuggled into the country.”

These human rights violations posed enough  justification for abolishing the one-child policy, but it was the policy’s negative impact on the economy which the Chinese government began to notice. Like Japan before it, China has begun to experience an aging population, and according to an Oct. 29 BBC article, “currently about 30 percent of China’s population is over the age of 50.” This poses an economic and social problem for the younger generations as they struggle to support their the ever-growing elderly population, and the situation will only worsen as the last generations born before the one-child policy age into dependency. 

Ironically, China claims its one-child policy “lifted millions out of poverty because of the lighter demand on resources,” according to an Oct. 29 USA Today article, but the policy has also crippled the workforce, which will in turn cripple the economy and impoverish more people. Comparing China’s low birthrates to Japan’s in the past, Frida Ghitis of CNN remarked in an Oct. 29 article that such a demographic phenomenon “can be disastrous for the economy.” In this way, one of China’s chief goals of the one-child policy — to improve the economy by decreasing the scarcity of resources — failed.

Further, the other goal to help the environment by reducing population growth is null mainly due to the principle of population momentum: even once birth rates decrease, a population continues to grow for a number of years as its youngest (and largest) generation reaches reproductive age. Consequently, even under the one-child policy, China’s population continued to grow, according to World Bank, and although the growth was only half of one percent in 2014, any growth after decades of the policy shows the general ineffectiveness of a retroactive policy like the one-child policy.

As such, the proposed benefits of China’s one-child policy are null and do not even come close to outweighing the grotesque abuse of Chinese citizens and women in surrounding regions. Now, how does the two-child policy improve the situation?

Trick question — it doesn’t.

According to William Nee of Amnesty International, “The move to change China’s one-child policy is not enough. Couples that have two children could still be subjected to coercive and intrusive forms of contraception and even forced abortions — which amount to torture.” 

In the realm of human rights, China continues to commit the same violations, and according to Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch, “As long as the quotas and system of surveillance remains, women still do not enjoy reproductive rights.” Even if the Chinese government announced that couples could have as many as 10 children, the mere existence of such a policy would be a violation of citizens’ autonomy in principle. “The state has no business regulation how many children people have,” Nee remarked.

As for the environment, the reform will only have a negative effect as the population begins to grow more rapidly again. This increased population growth will lead to a more rapid depletion of resources and thus exacerbate the issue that inspired birth quotas in the first place, so while the one-child policy was ineffective in solving the problem of population growth, the two-child policy will reverse any success the one-child policy had in slowing population growth.

Even worse, the reform of the one-child policy proves that the Chinese government can recognize problems with its laws but chooses which problems to recognize, only acting when such action would further its own agenda. In the case of the one-child policy, the country  has done little in response to humanitarian concerns, but when its economy begins to suffer, the Chinese government takes notice and acts. 

In fact, the official reasoning for this particular policy change, according to an Oct. 29 article by the Xinhua News Agency — China’s state-run news source — is “to promote a balanced growth of population.” Notice the focus is on “balanced growth” rather than increasing citizens’ freedom and autonomy.

In the long run, the two-child policy may help to even out the gender imbalance, but even if it does, the effects won’t be felt for decades. In the meantime, China’s system of birth quotas will still threaten its citizens’ rights, adult workers will still struggle to support an aging population and population growth will still deplete resources. 

As the one-child policy came too late to prevent or reverse overpopulation, so too does the two-child policy come too late to save the workforce and reverse the gender imbalance.

Enacted retroactively by the Chinese government in a feeble, reactionary attempt to solve greater issues, both policies reveal that China’s meddling in citizens’ private lives only hurts individuals and society. The two-child policy, in particular, is too little to end human rights abuses and too late to solve the problems caused by its horrendous cousin.