Question Earthority!

“Behind the high gray walls of this farming village, peasant couples are conducting an experiment that suggests, its designers say, that the most unpopular and costly policy of the past quarter-century may not have been necessary. For the past 21 years, the citizens of Yicheng County, in the mining province of Shanxi, have been exempt from the ‘one-child policy’ on which the Chinese government has founded its bid to keep a lid on its vast population. They have been allowed to have two children. Yet Yicheng’s birth-rate is lower than the national average. ‘If the whole country had adopted the Yicheng policy from the start, we could have kept China’s population under 1.2 billion,’ below the official target for 2000, says Tan Kejian, of Shanxi’s provincial Academy of Social Sciences. ‘And this policy was much easier for peasants to accept.’” (02/27/07)