A Look At Hans von Storch’s “Most Effective Climate Change Policy” – China’s “Iron Fist Campaign”

What does Hans von Storch’s “most effective climate policy” look like?

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The 1936 German sign reads “We don’t stand alone.” Well, in 2012 add China’s flag to the poster for countries that practice forced sterilizations.

Hat tip a reader/blogger:

Breaking China’s One-Child Law

In an unprecedented crackdown, Chinese officials set out to sterilize 10,000 women — by jailing their relatives until the women submitted.

A dozen Chinese officials had beaten down the man’s door and dragged him away. “What has he done wrong?” Wei asked in alarm. “Nothing,” her husband replied. “He has been jailed because he is related to us.”

Wei, a bird-thin woman with bobbed hair, let lunch burn on the stove as she heard more. “My husband said we had broken the law by having two children. The authorities were imprisoning his brother until we were punished,” she says. “As soon as I learned it was about birth control, I began to cry and shake.” Family-planning officials in the southern county of Puning, in Guangdong province, were going to shocking new extremes to catch and punish violators of the country’s infamous one-child policy: They were seizing family members of women who had given birth illegally and were holding them hostage. The aim? To coerce the women into submitting to sterilization. Says Wei, “The officials said there was only one way to get my brother-in-law released: I had to undergo forced sterilization.”

As Wei panicked in her kitchen, the same scene was playing out in households all over Puning, a region of 2.2 million people, about six hours by bus from the provincial capital of Guangzhou. In early April, the local Family Planning Bureau, which oversees population control, launched what it termed an “Iron Fist Campaign,” targeting 10,000 women who had more than one childcontinue reading…

I’m stunned that von Storch actually published that comment. I can’t believe it. Surely he was being cynical. The world is on its head today.

 

9 responses to “A Look At Hans von Storch’s “Most Effective Climate Change Policy” – China’s “Iron Fist Campaign””

  1. Ulrich Elkmann

    I confess to being puzzled to. I had hoped that it might be an attempt at bitter, cynic satire, maybe in the mold of Swift’s “Modest Proposal”. If so, HvS has bungled it majestically.
    A concise guide to the whole sorry mess of “limiting population growth” can be found in Matthew Connelly’s “Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population” (2008). At least von Storch is in illustrious company there: from H. G. Wells, Margaret Sanger, GBS – the whole Fabian tribe, in fact, to basically every director of the UN, Indira Gandhi as well as Rajiv: vociferous Malthusians all. (Malthus himself, it should be noted, was not a Malthusian in this sense: he was basically resigned and his hope for “moral self-restraint” sound like whistling in a dark wood – but at least he did not display the viscious disgust at other people for simply existing that is typical of the modern breed).
    Let’s not forget that ALL of these were ardent eugenicists: the Elect (homo superior exceptionalis), of course, should multiply and Take Over.
    If HvS had read any history of modern China, he might have found other things to praise: the Cultural Revolution, or the Great Leap Forward (Chang & Halliday estimate the number of victims at 43 million; Frank Dikötter at the least at 55 million).
    Of course, he should offset the No Babies Triumph by all the Ungood Things the Maoists did to Mother Gaia. A look into, for instance, Judith Shapiro’s “Mao’s War against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China” (Cambridge University Press, 2001), might prove a bit sobering (by all accounts, they easily managed to put Stalinist Russia to shame in their devastation of nature).

    1. DirkH

      Isn’t von Storch’s wife Chinese?

  2. DirkH

    See also India; forced sterilization partially funded by the UK’s New Labor governments under Blair and G. Brown. Allegedly stopped after the Coalition Government came to power; but that fact is nearly completely glossed over by the Guardian article linked to by suyts.
    http://suyts.wordpress.com/2012/05/24/these-animals-are-committing-crimes-against-humanity/

  3. Casper

    The best way to limit the human population growth is a world war. Any other actions are negligible…

  4. Ed Caryl

    No, Casper, the best way to limit population growth is economic expansion. If the women have good, interesting, jobs, they don’t marry, and don’t have children. Japan is a good example.

    1. Casper

      Japan is an exception. Indeed, the population is getting older there, but the Japanese also have to work longer or pay out more money of their pockets for the retirement provisions as well as the Germans. There is also an other solution – immigration from other countries. I’m the best example. The Germans may be dying off, but not the immigrants in Germany…

      1. DirkH

        The correlation between wealth and dropping birth rates – or maybe rather urbanization and dropping birth rates – is pretty unequivocal.
        see http://www.gapminder.org

        1. Casper

          Yes, I know that. I’ve seen this presentation on YT already. But remember, the driving force in the economy is…non-equilibrium. As long as there will be counties which differ from Germany if you consider living standards, there will be immigration. They may replace the Germans in Germany. I wouldn’t worry about it.
          BTW: I have two children, my brother who is living in England has four children. We can afford it. We could hard imagine us having children in Poland, because there isn’t any pro-family policy there, and the Poles in Poland are dying off.

  5. Pointman

    Prosperity brings down birth rates, because sex is the one pleasure, that can’t be taken away from the poor.

    Pointman

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