Ah, mate, I think you have gone round the bend on this.

The Chinese pop growth braked rather specifically because of the draconian population controls. Yes, they had unliberal impacts, but given the prior trajectory, well, liberal solutions are not a one size fits all, eh?

As for your pro market blithering on, as strong as I am in believing in the power of markets, objectively Chinese pop growth was braked before market reform really kicked in.

Economic growth helping incentivize these habits and changing values from something police state imposed to population / market driven, well that is fine, although in the present state of China with its strange combo of free market and totalitarianism... Well I look at the enviro disasters ongoing there and I say, Free Market Liberal, be modest in claiming the successes, as the failures are also there.

Actually I am being rather moderate here except on the more moralistic point.

I have little doubt the campaign was to some degree successful in being effecitve but I am uncertain if it was necessary. And yes, I am being additionally a moralist, I dont like intrusion on such private matters by totalitarians or any government.

Nor am I being rapturous about the current state of China or its half-free market and unfree government. I am merely stating that there is nothing about China that required repressive coercive population solutions. Its population density is comparatively LOW and Chinese people in areas where it is much higher do rather well. Perhaps the more densely populated Chinese did well because those people liveed in systems that for a longer time allowed relatively free safe commerce and stuff (Taiwan and Hong Kong). And big China is doing more of that now, and doing somewhat better as a result.

I am not a utopian, just know that some things which are morally repressive like forced child control are wrong and in this case almost certainly unnecessary, and no way an automatic given as cause of China's rebound (it may not have harmed much either except for depriving people of rightful choices).

China has more people today than ever and the same resources and is nonetheless doing *better*, and no one is talking population control but baby boom.

It is not hard to figure why. A positive economic change towards commerce and economic rights led to a less bad situation economically. Almost a tautology.

Environmental issues, sure, but figure a system for cleanup. Technical regulations. But I am not claiming victory, merely that, as it turns out, and seems obvious, it was trade and some measures of private property that made the difference; not the mathematically successful one-child policy.

Also, peasants. Peasants usually have a lot of children for sound economic reasons, especially as communism's vaunted social security didnt really reach them. So it is unclear why imposing the policy is sound,and not at all clear such intrusiveness is necessary.

India has improved (not saying it's healthy) despite the resistance (it caused Indira here first job) to coerced family control. (I think she had sterilization vans picking people off the street.)

The factors in that I suspect are normal economic advancements from the old more socialist days and general advances in the human race's technology. But I think the writer inserting such a broad conclusion as one-child coercion lifted millions out of poverty is factually tenuous. Of dubious morality too that it should be roughly questioned.

Well, given obvious comparisons to uncontrolled situs such as Nigeria and India, in this instance I am willing to opine given China's trajectory before the one-child policy that this is one instance where I admit Free Market was weaker mate.

Don't be an ideologue.

Demographics follow development.
mh has a point: if China had followed Taiwan and HK, it would not have had a population problem.
India has one because it followed half-assed socialist policies post-Independence. It hasn't liberalized its economy as much as China, so now it's stuck playing, for the time being, second fiddle to China's explosive growth.
Even Marx had this one figured out: he devoted a long section of Das Kapital to the alleged overpopulation of Ireland, and pretty much demolished any idea that it was suffering from anything of the kind (that the CCP hasn't paid attention to this section is not exactly surprising. Too busy with Mao's Little Red Engine That Couldn't). It was probably the only economically literate section in that whole mess.