[Music] there are approximately 7 billion humans on planet Earth today working driving laughing eating sleeping and living of those people 1 bli 300 million of them live in a single massively populated country China though China stretches across approximately 9.6 million km the ever growing population is having difficulty sustaining themselves with so many mouths to feed dwellings to hold and bodies to carry many problems are arising in the Asian country and have been for a century starvation pollution and overpopulation is driving the quality of living for the Chinese lower and [Music] lower you saw that in farming agricultural Villages you'd see two or three kids and wonder how that happened but the government wasn't out there monitoring those kids are not considered citizens by law when I was living in Hong Kong we had servants the young ladies left mainland China to have a certain amount of freedom because women were treated as second class citizens these young ladies from the Farms especially came into the city were able to find you know menial labor we had three servants in Hong Kong and all three ladies were actually from mainland China they left because of poor conditions and uh these young ladies could find work people were living in huts and Shacks out in the countryside beekeepers just right next to their beehives farmers were threshing out their crops in the middle of the road waiting for buses to drive by because they didn't have the modern technology in the city I I think the population in pollution brings their quality of life down they live in very small quarters but if you're a family of three you wouldn't need maybe a large house the pollution the people uh the the quality of life is different I I would say there's a huge pursuit of people to be in the cities uh which leads to their population issue the family that I spent some time with they took a working vacation driving the car was his job and so I think their living conditions were okay except the little boy had never been outside of Beijing ever and so when we saw blue sky he was shocked that the sky was that blue somewhere and asked if the sky look like that in other places in 1979 the Chinese government which nominally follows communist principles was aware of these issues and attempted to find a solution they were more concerned about uh getting food to the people because if you have too many people and you're not producing that much then there's going to be a lot of starvation that solution was enacted and is known globally as the one child policy this policy limits Han Chinese to only one Offspring per family by doing this the Chinese government hoped to limit the ever increasing population before apocalyptic conditions were created though it did limit the population growth the one child policy developed unintended consequences leaving the world with a substantial question was it a good decision reflecting more than 60 years ago China strived for a larger population the idea was that with more young people ready to work more progress would be achieved laborers would be more accessible and with the growing economy manufacturing and agriculture especially China would absorb the workers with ease even if China's population multiplies many times ma Tong China's leader in 1949 declared she is fully capable of finding a solution the solution is production though aong stated that China could take in the population by 1955 the country was marching to a different tune officials had already launched a birth control campaign promoting late marriages and the use of contraception cheap government manufactured birth control was dispensed but even the large quantity of birth control would only reach a minuscule percent of Chinese youth desperate for drastic Reformation officials introduced a radical policy that left a with gaping Jaws the one child policy was born in 1979 and with it a generation of problems never encountered before in [Music] history parents are going to be affected because you wanted to have a male baby the idea was that then your male would come and take care of you as you got older so you would impacted greatly if you had a female baby because she would be married off to a male and she leaves her parents what one person explained to me is that if you had money you could keep your pregnancy as much as secret as you could until you could get an ultrasound to determine the sex if you had the money to get that then you could selectively abort the child people value the male more than the female in general I mean you hear a lot of stories about different cultures whereby girls were there to you know maintain the household have children two generations before me even girls were not allowed to go to the university just males this policy is not well thought through and that now you have a huge discrepancy in the number of female versus male babies and so you have this burst in the male population uh and not enough Brides many of the Chinese people now are not just marrying Chinese women I see a lot of interracial marriages the scarce commodity they may value women more in reference to the one child policy I I was surprised in talking to people uh women were not comfortable talking about the one child policy every woman I met had a male child uh and when I asked was this their only child people got really awkward if I asked if they wish they had more kids it was a very shocked answer like well you can't be asking that if they have a third child especially if it's a girl then they give it up for adoption if it's a boy I've heard that they might give the child to another family member that are without [Music] children there's an old saying about a single child being spoiled they were very nurturing to their kids to the point of of maybe a little spoiled kids got away with a lot in China I think that's happening right now many many of the Chinese May male are spoiled because the parents seem to favor the male rather than the [Music] [Laughter] [Music] female perhaps they're currently in violation of the UN genocide policy from 1948 Article 2 Section D specifically states that if you are imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group you're committing genocide and so I don't I don't know that the world looks at it as a genocide because you might not be killing anyone but preventing the birth the UN defined it that way so it seems that the government of China is is committing genocide just simply by not allowing them free reproductive rights if you are the product of just one male then you can perhaps have two babies and they're starting to work on these uh revision I think that they're allowing the families to have at least [Music] two I feel strongly that people should have those choices themselves I don't know that we can forecast what it would have been like or what their population would have been like without this measure in 1979 Chinese social economic and Geographic civilization was altered drastically though the idea of the policy was to improve problems such as overpopulation the law generated its own issues many state that the one child policy should be adjusted severely if not abolished a world without the one child policy cannot be known but the influences of it have changed the lives of billions [Music]