China's looming crackdown

This week's top stories: There's a new investment bank coming to Wall Street. Its code-name? Salomon Sisters. Hundreds of thousands of workers left out of traditional pandemic aid are finally getting some relief.   A $60,000 pay gap.  Speaking of pay gaps, over in the U.K...  New York City has vowed to close its biggest jail, but in the meantime, legislators are pouring money into the controversial institution.

China has been trying to reverse the disastrous effects of its one-child policy for a while now, and this week it announced a new means to achieving that goal: reducing the number of "non-medical" abortions over the next decade. The government didn't set any targets, nor did it say how, specifically, it would persuade women to carry pregnancies they don't want. Beijing officially ended the one-child policy in 2015, allowing couples to have two children; earlier this year, it relaxed the per-family quota to three children. Local governments have been offering cash incentives to couples to have more children. Allowing people to have bigger families, though, doesn't mean they will. So far, they haven't.  Births dropped again last year, putting China's population on pace to peak as soon as 2025. Too few children today means too few workers tomorrow, a portent of slower economic growth. The Communist Party wants more babies, and it wants them now. So a looming crackdown on abortion services, which have long been legal and readily available in the country, seems all but inevitable. President Xi Jinping has spent the past year reshaping China's economy and societal norms in the name of "common prosperity," an effort that's come to include humbling tech giants and billionaires, limiting kids' access to video games and academic tutoring and criticizing "effeminate" men. "The party regards the increasing inequality as potentially a real source of social disturbance," Rana Mitter, a professor of Chinese politics at Oxford University, told Bloomberg News. "Part of the same mindset is the idea that any conspicuous difference in terms of society also needs to be removed, smoothed out, or covered over as much as possible." That, in China, has come to mean putting limits on all kinds of personal choices and freedoms. Ironically, those restrictions just underscore a different kind of inequality. People with money found ways around the one-child policy, and they'll get abortions too, no matter what the domestic laws are. —Janet Paskin

By the numbers

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