Chinese Politics...do we really get it?

When I first choose to blog about this week’s assignment, focused on China’s one-child policy, I was under the impression that I would be reading an entirely different article. My understanding of China’s population control stance was most definitely from a Western perspective. I figured it was a harsh public policy enforced by a evil communist regime as a way to possess further control on its citizens. Greenhalgh and Winkler also eluded to some of these Western perspectives when trying to summarize some of the misconceptions mainly associated with this policy; “…in the mid-1980’s, the dominant news story in the West was of a coercive totalitarian regime, cases of journalistic interests those of individuals suffering from brutal enforcement of the one-child-policy”(Greenhalg and Winkler 12). While the authors of this piece do not completely deny these statements, they do mention that the severity of these statements are not necessarily true for all of China. While these harsher laws and restrictions, regarding the one-policy, may exist in some remote villages in the outskirts of China, there are other examples of this policy that shed another, more positive, light. I was very much intrigued by the dichotomy of perspectives that existed regarding this issue. It is interesting how information can become skewed based on the geopolitical regions from which the news is coming from. There was an entirely different side elucidated by the Chinese government that is worth analyzing. This brings into question a couple of things. How has the West used censorship as a tool when promoting their international political agenda? To what extent has the west used their own biases in their educational system, as a way to infiltrate western society? While there are MAJOR differences between the East and the West, are their certain similarities, regarding this topic, which are worth looking into?
According to one view, controlling the population has produced some positive results that have recently been acknowledge, but not stressed, by the global community. From what I understood, the one-child policy has been able to stress quality over quantity as their main promotional tool; “…by focusing solely on the state’s repressive project of drastically limiting population numbers, it has overlooked the second, more seductive project of enhancing the quality of the Chinese people….the standard account has also missed the important transformations that have taken place, especially since the early 1990’s, as marketization has accelerated and quality has overtaken quantity as the major domain of population politics” (Greenhalgh and Winkler 213). The single child policy, especially when applied to the Urban regions of China, were able to cultivate a quality single child; this accumulatively, was able to create a quality population that affected progress in education, the economy, science, technology, and much more. One reason this was made possible was because families were able to concentrate their care and resources onto their single child. I found it interesting that this other side existed and that the authors of this piece were able to find statistical information to help support some of their claims. I wonder how much of what we have been told by the Chinese government is true. It could be likely that the Chinese government intended for these positive outcomes but, in face, was not able to carry out these policies as they have claimed. I would also be interested to find out, if these positive notions of the one-child policy exist, some other tangible evidence or documentation that would further support some of these claims.