The problems China faces in its course of development are historically unique. If you assume that China needed to curb its population growth, there aren’t any historical precedents of family planning at such a massive scale to take cues from. I don’t know the details of the one child policy and it’s like that some suffered under it, but it has been a success. An initiative like this will have some degree of “authoritarianism” in it but there hasn’t been a more successful campaign of this sort in the history of humankind.

There was a time when India tried to do something like this but worse. Around the 1980s, the Congress government during the period of national emergency tried to do forced sterilisation of poor men in poor areas:

The Uttawar forced sterilisations were mass vasectomy drives on November 6, 1976, imposed on the male population of Uttawar, a Meo Muslim-majority village in Palwal district (then part of Gurgaon district), Haryana, during India’s Emergency (1975–1977) imposed by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Villagers woke up to the sound of police loudspeakers at 03:00. The police gathered 400 men at the bus stop. In the process of finding more villagers, police broke into homes and looted. This event made international news and is today remembered as one of the most coercive and controversial episodes of Sanjay Gandhi’s programme of compulsory sterilisation, which resulted in over 800 sterilisation cases.

Obviously they had to stop doing this because it was highly unpopular. Since then family planning initiatives involve mostly playing PSAs on public radio about condoms and other such less effective measures.

Here’s a previous discussion on Lemmygrad on the topic: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/230769

Here’s a great article on the topic: https://goodsforthepeople.substack.com/p/the-great-chinese-famine-one-child

TLDR: Historically, China, like India, had constant famines due to having way too many people, such that any small natural disaster that wiped out a few rice fields would kill a couple hundred million. China implemented the One-Child Policy in order to prevent these India-style issues of having too many people fighting over too few resources, which could have destabilized development. In a way, young people are liabilities because they must be given jobs (ideally better jobs than those of their parents). If the country’s economy is not adapting fast enough to give them those jobs, then they become a source of instability.

From the perspective of the Mao era, there was no guarantee that China’s economy would rise as quickly as it did, so from their perspective, this was a very logical choice. The demographic transition model (that birth rates naturally fall as industrial development increases) that Westoids use to denigrate China’s One-Child Policy did not exist as a cohesive theory back then, so there were no examples to show that the problem could fix itself and did not require an enforced One-Child Policy.

When I talk to my relatives in China, they still think that the Chinese population is a little too high. They would actually prefer for it to fall by ~200 million so that competition is less intense and there is more to go around for everyone.

Also remember the Parenti quote about western media’s constant negativity. If China did not implement the One-Child Policy, western media would be constantly complaining about Asiatic hordes and India-like deprivation in China due to too many people fighting over too few resources. In the past, Western media straight-up did this, creating tons of Asiatic horde propaganda cartoons in the U.S.

Since China has implemented the One-Child Policy, they instead complain about the historical cruelty of the policy.