Dan Wang’s Breakneck delves into the transformation of China in recent generations. He moved to Canada when he was young and had a very different life than he would have had if he stayed in China. In a personal assessment, he gives examples good and shocking of how China changed over time. In doing so he illustrates perfectly why sustainability must be socially focused.
China’s One Child Policy
After the death of Mao, China’s policy embraced Malthusian thinking. We now think of sustainability as having three legs: environmental, social, and economic. China back in the day only cared about two the environmental and economic. Social was forgotten and sustainability must be socially focused or bad things can, and will, happen.
How do you get such a strange gender imbalance? You start by not caring about the people involved.
Straight Line Projections
China put someone with no social policy knowledge in charge. That official decided that resources would run out with high birth rates and to allow for economic development became determined to limit the population to a size he thought the environment could handle. One element of the tragedy that followed was that that his diagnosis wasn’t even right.
Only an engineer might have believed in the sort of straight-line analysis, as if the population can grow at an unvarying rate.
Wang, 2025, page 103
The population was never likely to reach the sort of astronomical levels that the Chinese government assumed. The models were wrong but because no scientist was allowed to criticize the leader, the government, or its officials truly terrible things happened.
Sustainability Must Be Socially Focused
What happened was a horror show of involuntary sterilization, late-term forced abortions, and even infanticide. China is now trying to find its way back out of the disaster.
It is worth saying that because the social dimension wasn’t considered people who thought of themselves as forward-thinking ended up encouraging this monstrosity. Qian, the official in charge, was even given an award by the UN Fund for Population.
The lesson is not really that the projections you use should be decent. (Although they should). More important is that sustainability must be socially focused. At the risk of stating the obvious, if your plan to save the world involves terrible abuse of human rights the plan is not a good one and it certainly isn’t sustainable.
For more on Malthusian thinking see Time to get past Malthus, Population as a Disaster, and https://neilbendle.com/what-if-im-wrong/
Read: Dan Wang (2025) Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, W.W. Norton
