China has a seriously low birth rate. What do you all think of this idea?

[MissMillie]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/two-husband-strategy-may-be-a-remedy-for-chinas-one-child-policy-professor-posits/ar-BB15hK13?ocid=spartanntp


Chinese authorities have been trying for three years to reverse the devastating imbalances of their one-child policy and coax couples to have more children.

They’ve told couples that it’s their patriotic duty to have two babies. They’ve dangled tax breaks and housing subsidies. They’ve offered to make education cheaper and parental leave longer. They’ve tried to make it more difficult to get an abortion or a divorce.

None of this has worked. China’s birthrate remains stubbornly low, creating a demographic crisis that could hinder economic growth for decades to come.

But now, an economics professor at Fudan University in Shanghai has come up with another — and, unsurprisingly, controversial — solution: allow women to have multiple husbands, and they’ll have multiple babies.

“I wouldn’t suggest polyandry if the gender ratio was not so severely imbalanced,” Yew-Kwang Ng, who is Malaysian, wrote in his regular column on a Chinese business website this month. The headline asked: “Is polyandry really a ridiculous idea?”


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Definitely some serious down-sides to this, but I thought it was interesting that anyone would even publicly suggest it.

[Zoonart]

1. Oh brother....

that's all women need... another husband. Brood mare much?

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

3. And it's especially dumb because no matter how many husbands a woman has,

she can have only one baby every nine months (with the remote possibility of twins or triplets). Women aren't like cats who can have litters with more than one father. The only way to get more babies is for there to be more women having them, but China messed that up years ago with the one-child policy. Many couples wanted only boys, and so aborted or gave away girl babies. And now there aren't enough women.

[Zoonart]

4. Spectacularly offensive.

and...stupid.

[Cirque du So-What]

2. The negative results are exacerbated

by an extraordinarily high number of female babies being aborted. When told they could have only one child, many couples wanted to ensure that one child was male.

[CanonRay]

5. We need to start hindering growth

There's already too many people.

[roamer65]

20. THIS.

[Blue_true]

29. As long as nationalism exists, that won't happen.

There are many people in this country saying that our low birthrate is a problem. Those same people are against immigration here by our southern neighbors.

[Me.]

6. How Many Pregnancies Is He Willing To Carry?

[TreasonousBastard]

7. I am not sure how an extra man in her life will make her more fertile...

Is he thinking more sex will do it? Then why not just encourage screwing around?

I could see how more wives could increase the birth rate (that was one reason for harems) but neither seems workable these days.

I do seem to remember the Brits having this problem and paying couples to have kids, but don't know how that turned out.

Maybe we just need another world war-- another WWII baby boom.

[SharonAnn]

26. He just wants all the incels to be able to get sex.

[3catwoman3]

8. One husband is quite enough, thank you very much.

I’d rather have a maid and a cook.

[mainer]

25. Maybe if they turned the men into the maid and cook

then the idea might have some appeal

[uponit7771]

9. K&R, consumption based economies means less sex cause more working and rat racing

[Igel]

10. Profs float all kinds of ideas.

I read recently about an ethnic group that was touted as sort of the individualistic ideal.

No marriage. Women would choose or work out who'd be the father, so multiple kids by multiple fathers was fairly standard. Might live together for a while, might just hook up a few times for the sperm donation.

The anthropologists said that the fathers all contributed to the maintenance of their kids and helped raise them. It was a hyper-individualist but still collectivist vision of beauty.

Follow up work pointed out flaws. Not all fathers helped out, and the kids of deadbeat fathers were worse off, and this showed in terms psychological and material well-being of the kids. Those worst off were the kids of dead fathers, who had nobody looking out for them. From time to time they'd die of malnutrition.


This prof's idea isn't actually terribly new.

The idea of government raising kids isn't a new one. I've heard the idea resurrected, but early in Soviet times there were creches. The mother would give birth and a week later go back to full time work. Might or might not pick up the kid on the way home, but the kid would be in a creche during work time and might be taken care of 24/7. Father's weren't much involved, under this scheme, and women could have more kids to be workers and good Soviet citizens without having to fill the role of mother. This was at the same time that commissaries were opened for workers, so that the women could put in more time at work and not have to prepare food--many jury-rigged apts. lacked actual kitchens, and there were often communal kitchens. The best path out was to collectivize meals so that you'd eat with workers, work with workers, have your kids raised by workers, and retire at night to your squalid 6 square meters or whatever it was. The "family" was billed as a bourgeois holdover which, under communism, would wither just like the state would. (And while the family did do a fair amount of withering, the state grew and grew.)

Note that Hitler also had his breeding program to provide more of the desired kind of kid, also raised in creches.

And not long back I read this: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/want-to-dismantle-capitalism-abolish-the-family/
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/coronavirus-crisis-shows-its-time-abolish-family/

[Buckeye_Democrat]

11. Maybe just value the females more? Asia is one of...

... the few places in the world where female suicide is higher than for men.

[Crunchy Frog]

12. Basically a way to allow a group of men to keep a single woman as a sex slave.

I think thats what it would amount to.

They've kind of made their own bed with this. They've kept swinging wildly back and forth with their birth policies, starting with an extreme pronatalist policy under Mao, which kicked off a population explosion which they then overcompensated for by going to the other extreme.

And the gender imbalance is because of a huge cultural preference for male offspring, and the killing of female infants is a practice that goes way back in Chinese history, far predating the one child policy. Now they're experiencing the natural consequences.

Their population is too big as it is. Maybe it would be best for them to just leave people alone.

[LizBeth]

14. +1

[LizBeth]

13. Yes! Then she can clean up after, cook for, take care of multiple men. If that is not the winner. !!

[SharonAnn]

27. Exactly. One husband is more than enough maintenance work.

[LizBeth]

28. +1

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

15. Oh, dear lord.

Only an idiot man could come up with an idea like that.

And this planet is seriously overpopulated already, and even though Chinese women, along with a lot of women around the world, are having far fewer children than they used to, more than twice as many babies are born each day (about 360,00) than die (about 150,00). Even Covid-19, at it's anticipated worst, will not make a dent in population growth.

[Hekate]

16. That's a recipe for slavery & abuse. Take a minority (women, in this case) & tie them legally ...

...(marriage, in this case) to several members of a frustrated and angry majority (men). What the hell could possibly go wrong?

[smirkymonkey]

23. Nightmare scenario!

Asian women are still treated like doormats compared to their western counterparts. But they are waking up to that fact. I can't imagine they would want to have more than one man keeping them in domestic servitude.

[alwaysinasnit]

17. There might be something worse. The Chinese authorities could ban contraceptives, except

for compelling medical cases.

[GulfCoast66]

18. Let me run that by the wife!

Even after 33 years together I’m suspicious that she is still ambivalent about having one!

[Major Nikon]

19. Sometimes even one spouse is one too many

[Marrah_Goodman]

21. Oh yeah... multiple husbands...no thanks

[Wounded Bear]

22. Culturally, Chinese have traditionally valued male children over females...

to the extent that they now have more men than women. They've even gone so far as to abort female fetuses because with their one child policy a girl child precludes the couple from having the son they so highly prize.

So not only do they have a low birth rate, they have a country full of incels.

So proposing polyandry isn't that far of a stretch.

[Blue_true]

30. One way to solve that problem is to give couples a big bonus for having a girl,

and give them tax breaks althrough the raising of that girl to a woman.

[unitedwethrive]

24. Maybe if they could make it into a Reality Show...have the husbands compete to see who

helps more. Then the woman can chose which one she wants to live with at the end.