Ma Yinchu was born in 1882 in Zhejiang, China. The son of a small business owner, he was scholarly inclined. After earning an undergraduate degree from Tianjin University, he studied at Yale, then earned a doctorate in economics and philosophy from Columbia University. He returned to China and helped found the Shanghai College of Commerce and the Chinese Economics Society.
Although politically astute, Dr. Ma’s mistimed criticism of the Kuomintang government led to house arrest. However, when Mao’s People’s Liberation Army won in 1949, his career was revived. For the next decade, fortune smiled on Dr. Ma through the sponsorship of his friend Zhou Enlai, Chairman Mao’s right-hand man. The communist government appointed him president of Zhejiang University, and soon after, he was appointed president of the prestigious Peking University.
As the People’s Republic’s leading scholar, Dr. Ma was feted by Party officials and touted as a scholar-statesman who would help China regain its pre-Industrial Revolution status as a world power. to be reckoned with – this time under the leadership of the Communist Party.
In 1957, Dr. Ma was invited to address the Fourth Session of the First National People’s Congress of China. On this occasion, he presented his new population theory, explaining to the gathering of Party luminaries that the rapid increase in the Chinese population would hinder the economic development of the People’s Republic and urging the government to control fertility to reduce growth. demographic. Dr Ma told Congress “The state should have the power to intervene in reproduction and control the population”.
Dr. Ma’s idea of public family planning was welcomed by the People’s Congress. But it soon became clear that not everyone was on board. While many Party members welcomed the government’s new intrusion into family life, others were wary of anything that would limit the future number of Party loyalists. In a centrally planned economy steeped in Marxist ideology, more workers were essential to achieving a “dictatorship of the proletariat”.
Moreover, although he was deeply communist, there was a strong undercurrent of Chinese nationalism in the ruling elite, with which plans to limit the number of Chinese did not sit well.
In 1960, the Party decided that Ma’s ideas on population were subversive, based on Western “Malthusian” thought, and incompatible with Chinese socialism. He was removed as president of Peking University and “disappeared” from public discourse.
In 1966, China’s drastic cultural revolution began. Millions of people perished in the massacres and purges of anyone suspected of capitalist or “traditionalist” leanings. Even Confucius was repudiated. Meanwhile, the infamous “Gang of Four” came to power, led by fanatical Jiang Qing, wife of Chairman Mao.
Needless to say, amidst this murderous ideological fervor, there were many permutations of the Party line. By 1973, as the gruesome toll of the Cultural Revolution mounted, impatience had grown as China’s economy collapsed. Elements of the Chinese leadership again rallied to Dr Ma’s way of thinking, and the government launched the pale, xi, shao campaign (later marriage, longer spacing and fewer children). This birth control initiative aimed to to encourage families to limit offspring to two children. As is the case with totalitarian systems, government encouragement inevitably became state coercion.
In 1979, three years after Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, China’s infamous one-child policy was instituted. Dr. Ma, then 97 years old, was rehabilitated. The Communist Party of China Central Committee issued an official apology to him and he was made honorary president of Peking University. He has been hailed as the “father” of the one-child policy, which was officially incorporated into China’s constitution in 1982, the year Ma Yinchu died aged 99.
The success of the most massive and coercive social engineering experiment in history cannot be disputed. By the 1990s, China’s fertility rate had fallen to 1.2. Millions have suffered untold grief as government-mandated contraception and abortion were used as weapons to enforce the one-child law. A sad side effect of this has been sex-selective abortion (since banned).
Traditionally, Chinese sons are believed to support their parents in old age, which makes male babies more desirable. Thus, in 2001, 117 boys were born for every 100 girls. In 2010, the BBC reported a ratio of 119:100. In some rural provinces, ratios have been reported at or near 130:100.
In 1997, 40 years after presenting his new population theory to the People’s Congress, Chinese television aired a nine-part documentary on the life of Dr Ma.
Eventually, however, the government realized the error of its ways. In 2016, the Party line officially shifted to a two-child policy. Many families able to have a second child did so, bringing the national fertility rate to 1.58 in 2017. That was only a temporary boost. China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported a rate of 1.49 for 2018 and 1.47 for 2019.
China is now an aging society, as the percentage of elderly people (60 and over) has exceeded the percentage of children (15 and under). The percentage of elderly people rose from 10.45% in 2005 to 18.1% in 2019. The government projects that by 2050, one-third of China’s population will be 60 years of age or older.
In 2019, 14.65 million births were registered in China. They were 10.03 million in 2020, a 15% drop attributed to the Covid pandemic. China’s working-age population has shrunk by more than 3 million every year for the past decade.
In April 2021, the People’s Bank of China (PBC) published a working paper calling on China to increase fertility in order to remain competitive with the United States: “To [China] to close the gap with the United States over the past four decades, it has relied on cheap labor and large numbers of people… What are we going to rely on in the next 30 years? It is worth our thoughts.
The document continues: “We should not hesitate and wait for the effects of existing birth policies… The liberalization of births should take place now, when some residents still want to have children but cannot.
According to Cai Fang of the PBC, “when the total population enters negative growth (after 2025), there will be a shortage of demand.”
Citing UN data, the PBC predicts a population decline of 32 million over the next 30 years and suggests allowing “three and more births” per family, and a “good reproductive environment”. Given China’s recent history in “family planning”, it is extremely ironic that the report ends with “Our country must clearly recognize the changing circumstances…”
When central banks speak, politics follows. Beijing leaders know that the one-child policy was a colossal mistake.
Today, Dr. Ma is revered in China as an economist, philosopher, demographer, and scholarly influence in the communist revolution. His former residence in Hangzhou is the Ma Yinchu Museum. There are Ma Yinchu Fellowships for Population Studies. He is respectfully referred to as “Uncle Ma” in children’s textbooks.
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