The boy dragon

One of my favorite new shows on television is "NCIS Los Angeles." In a strange episode this week, the show's script, delved into a real life political and population issue. The show looked at one fictional family from China, who had their lives changed forever by the "one-child" policy of the People's Republic of China.

A quick overview of the show's plot goes like this. A young Chinese American, who is also a high ranking officer in the U.S. Navy, commits suicide. This young man was a natural born citizen of this country.

His parents were immigrants to America. Before they came here, the mother had given birth to a girl. During the investigation of the death by NCIS, they discover that the suicide was to avoid treason by the young man.

The parents were given permission to come to this country so they could have another child. In China, they could only have had the one girl child.

If the child born here was a boy, they were obligated to raise him to become a "sleeper spy" for the Chinese government. He was to join the Navy and find out secrets through espionage.

The television version has a good ending. The plot is thwarted, and our secrets are safe. In real life, this story is probably not very likely, but the background "one-child" policy of the Chinese government is all too real.

Beginning in 1978, the People's Republic of China instituted a policy, that allows a family to only have one child. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but the majority of Chinese families must adhere.

The long term results of this policy are yet to be determined, but here are several noticeable outcomes that are already being charted. The first and most obvious, is the drop in the birth rate. Regardless of the moral correctness of the practice, the "one-child" policy has dropped the birth rate of China, since its inception by about 250 million births as of the year 2000.

These statistics were located in the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. This source does caution the reader that the statistics come from the Chinese government, and should be viewed with that in mind.

The statistics themselves are less important than the social and moral issues that the policy raises. There was no question that China had an overpopulation problem, and for that matter, they still do. Here are some results of the current policy that need to be considered.

Abortion rates are very high in China for two policy driven reasons. First, if a couple gets pregnant with a second child, the fetus is often aborted at the government's expense. If the child is allowed to be born, the family has to pay stiff fines to the government.

The second, and more personal reason for more abortions, is sex driven. If an early ultra sound shows the fetus to be a girl, the family often opts to have an abortion. Females are not desired by Chinese families, and this is an ancient belief of the society.

Because of this terrific change in the gender birth rates in China, there are now many more young adult men in China than there are women. This imbalance will most certainly have some effect on the future of Chinese society, but no one at present knows for sure what those issues may be.

Other issues that the statistics reveal from the encyclopedias include the following. China was a society that never had a nursing home system. Now there are many young people, both male and female, that are from "one-child" families. The care of their older relatives is becoming a problem. It is not just their parents that have only one child to help them in old age, the grandparents now have a lot fewer relatives to support them.

In China the reverence for the elderly was an ancient and sacred practice. That will most certainly change in the future.

For most of human history, a high birth rate was deemed vital for a country's security. The more people you had, the more you had to use in a fight.

China is currently writing a new security policy. By reducing their birth rates, they have much more money to spend on things besides feeding a huge population.

By having more young men who have no chance of finding a mate because of the gender change in birth rates, China has many more males available for work in factories or in the military.

No one knows for sure how these population controls will affect China, or how they will affect the rest of the world. What is obvious is that there are going to be some affects for sure.

When I was a kid, China was referred to as a "sleeping giant." No one has that picture in their minds anymore. China is not only awake, they are fast becoming the next world superpower.

This has never been more evident than when one looks at the population charts for China. Even with all the rule changes of the past 30-plus years, China is still increasing in population.

They are no longer a country of farm peasants. They have developed huge areas of industry. One has only to look on the shelves in any store, to see the products of that industrial revolution.

China is buying our debt, and they are also hard at work building their military forces. While not listed as a close friend, China is rarely portrayed as an enemy.

Well, I think that is a terrible mistake in reasoning. We have everything that they want, and they have something we don't. They have a lot of frustrated, angry young single men, due to the "one-child" policy. What do you think is on their minds?