Is there a story behind China's one child policy that makes it not as horrifying as western media claims?

The defining feature of China's development for the past 70 years has been the urban-rural divide. In order to develop a semi-feudal country with a very low industrial level into an industrialised, socialist nation, it was necessary to develop industrial centres. To 'organically' develop industrial centres would have taken many decades, if not centuries of continued impoverishment and starvation, so programs were put in place to accelerate the development of industry by preferentially supporting cities.

Programs like the 'urban-rural price scissors' placed price controls on agricultural products, which made food affordable for city-dwellers, at the direct expense of reducing the income of rural, agricultural areas. This hits on the heart of the issue - to preferentially develop industrial centres in order to support the rest of the country, the rest of the country must first take up the burden of supporting those centres. Either some get out of poverty *first*, or nobody gets out of poverty at all. The result being: a divide between urban and rural areas in their quality of life and prospects. In order to keep this system from falling apart, several other policies were needed to support it, such as the Hukou system, which controlled immigration within the country. The Hukou system differentiated between rural and urban residents, and restricted immigration to urban areas - because, given the urban-rural divide, everyone would rather just try to move to the cities, leaving the agricultural industry to collapse. The Hukou system (alongside being a piece in many other problems, like the 'one country two systems', etc) prevented this, and prevented the entire thing from collapsing. The 'one child policy' was another system supporting this mode of development. It applied principally to city-dwellers, to prevent the populations of cities expanding beyond the limited size the agricultural regions could support, and generally had no 'punishments' greater than a lack of government child-support, or even a fine, for those who still wanted additional children. Ethnic minorities, and rural residents, were granted additional children, with rural ethnic minorities getting double. It wasn't something anyone would love, but it served an important purpose.

I use the past-tense, here, because these systems have either already been phased out or are in the process of being phased out. The method of urban-rural price scissors as a method of development ran its course, and, ultimately, was exhausted - the negative aspects, of its underdevelopment of rural regions, began to overwhelm its positive aspects. So, it was replaced with the paradigm of 'Reform and Opening Up' around the 1980s. Urban-rural price scissors were removed (leading to protests by urban workers and intellectuals in the late '80s), and the Hukou system, along with the 'one child policy', were and are being slowly eased out as lessening inequality between the urban and rural areas make them unnecessary. Under the new system, the driver of development was no longer at the expense of rural regions, but was carried out through the internal market and external capital. The development paradigm of Reform and Opening Up worked to resolved some contradictions, in the form of the urban-rural divide, and created some of its own, in the form of internal wealth divisions within the cities. Through it, over 800 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty - almost all of them being in rural areas - and extreme poverty was completely abolished within China. 'Extreme poverty' can be a difficult thing for westerners to grasp, wherein poverty means not paying rent on time, but to illustrate - many of the last holdout regions of extreme poverty were originally guerrilla base areas, impassable regions of mountainside which were long hikes away from schools or hospitals, wherein entire villages were living in conditions not dissimilar to their feudal state a century before. These villages were, when possible, given infrastructure and a meaningful local industry accounting their environment and tradition (like growing a certain type of mountainous fruit), or entirely relocated to free government-built housing lower down the mountain that was theirs to own. These were the people the 'one child policy' was aiding, by reducing the urban population they had to support. Again, there were exemptions for rural and ethnic minority populations to the policy.

Even now, Reform and Opening Up is running its course. Its own negative aspects, such as urban wealth inequality, are beginning to overcome its positive aspects. So, the new paradigm is 'Common Prosperity', which will work to resolve the past system's contradictions, and surely introduce its own contradictions in the form of chafing against the national bourgeoisie, as it increases state control and ownership of industry, and furthers a reintroduced collectivisation. Organising a nation of well over a billion people is not simple. It is not done based on soundbytes and on picking apart policies in the abstract for how 'dystopian' they sound. It is an exceedingly complex and interconnected process based on a dialectical, material analysis of things; not a utopian, idealist one. What matters is this: those 800,000,000 people now freed from absolute poverty. The things necessary to achieve that were, unquestionably, good things - because they achieved that. They had their negative aspects, as does everything that exists, but they were unquestionably correct and progressive things.

to add to the whole proud faggot thing: i rmbr at age 15 me and my friend (both newly out) would say faggot all the time until a teacher told us off and my friend (v cocky) said actually miss i can reclaim it to which the teacher was like ...its still a swear word ur still not allowed to use it like its not that deep. and that was a sort of revelation like 'oh yeah this word obvs holds meaning and whatever but at the end of the day us reclaiming it isnt revolutionary its just two kids who got their hands on a new curse word to use' & ever since then i try to figure out whoevers using faggot in a useful or meaningful way vs whoever is just excited to use a forbidden word. n i think for a lot of ppl its the latter

So for context, I saw a post where someone had left a comment with Israel apologia, and someone else responded by screenshotting their blog, which has a cutesy Tumblr aesthetic, and added a screenshot of another post about what it called "Smol bean Zionism." I noticed the blogger's bio also said "proud faggot," so I tagged the post:

"Are we ready to admit the 'proud faggot' is not contradictory to the smol beanification but part and parcel to it?"

I see sentiments on Tumblr that "I call myself a faggot to scare the tenderqueers," but I think the cute harmless approach and the edgy approach are two sides of the same coin. Molly Rose on substack writes about how she as a Black woman could never get away with "tenderqueer" behavior. She writes: "As far as I can tell, the hallmark of a true tenderqueer is an unwavering avoidance of responsibility or culpability at all costs, paired with the use of social justice and personal advocacy language to ensure that lack of accountability." The real problem with this type then is not that they're too sensitive, but that their sensitivity is a tool by which they act like they could never be in the wrong. So we see a soft type and an edgy type, but both wear their victimhood on their sleeve to feign superiority and avoid any kind of interpersonal conflict. The former will invoke queerness or neurodivergence to guilt trip you, and the latter will act above it all and treat you like you're stupid for even caring. It's "enough discourse, we should be making out with tongue" when trans women try to talk about transmisogyny, etc.

With all these discussions of the "tenderqueer," It's easy to forget that "queer" was that transgressive word said to connote political radicalism, or rather, speak political radicalism into existence just by uttering that very word. And while I have heard people prop up "fag" and it's equivalents as the solution when the former has been watered down, they are not getting to the root of the problem. If the problem is that some have turned the supposed magical powers of a word into a political dead end, the solution is not to go find other magical words to replace it. I am aware and respectful of the fact that to some, these words really are a political statement, or a symbolic gesture that they're not afraid or have moved beyond past wounds. Any word is what you make it. But to get back to your point, yeah, some people have that same teenager's mentality of getting their hands on a new curse word. And it does not automatically make them meaningfully transgressive or even interesting.