Photos: In the 47 countries I’ve been to, I’ve never seen condoms for sale in a hotel room. The Chinese government is trying to control the population growth but they don’t give out free condoms in hotels!

China holds 1/6 of the world’s population. That’s incredible. Maybe the country needs such a strong government that closely regulates peoples lives. I don’t like the sound of what I am thinking. But I wonder if a country the size of China could survive in a democracy? Perhaps the One Child policy is what China needs to not grow too much. It already has 1.3 billion people. How can they handle any more?

If it weren’t for the One Child Policy, people might be dying of starvation in China or going to war for land rights or food. With the One Child Policy, the country now has more young men than women because parents opted to keep male babies and abort female fetuses. With a shortage of women, the population can’t reproduce itself as much. This may be a good thing, but there could also be societal problems when many men are fighting for few women. An unbalanced ratio of men to women could cause major societal unrest. Many angry lonely men could have serious bouts of depression and anxiety. Instead of people fighting for rice, they go hungry for a spouse, partnership, family. Companionship is primordial for human beings. Could a country of many single men create a new type of society? Will co-parenting, where unmarried people raise children together, be the new family norm in China? Maybe families will consist of a married couple and a “friend/uncle” helping out to raise the child.

Having one-child families also has serious repercussions for consciousness and attitudes of the workforce. In general, only-children are more spoiled and less able to share than kids who grow up with siblings. Many generations of single children who don’t know how to cooperate well and are used to all of their family giving them lots of attention and presents can turn out to be selfish and unable to fend for themselves. When we create a “solution” for one problem, we may just be creating another problem of a different character.

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