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Re:Baidu now accepts Bitcoin by mikeash on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @08:43PM (#6557337)
My experience is the exact opposite. My wife and her brother are the only set of siblings among their cousins (of which there are money, because their grandparents had a massive quantity of children). The financial repercussions of disobeying the law are fairly severe, so people don't generally bypass it.

I wonder what the explanation could be for our radically different experiences. Mine is all around Beijing, is yours perhaps out somewhere less urbanized?

Re:Baidu now accepts Bitcoin by thaumasiotes on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @10:40PM (#6557718)
I wouldn't say that. My experience is all Shanghai.

Potentially it's an SES thing, but note that the fertility statistics show very low fertility for China, so a lot of only children isn't unusual overall. The conclusion that the one-child policy isn't having any effect comes from the fact that Japan and Korea have the same ultra-low fertility rate, but no one-child policy.

Re:Baidu now accepts Bitcoin by mikeash on Wednesday October 16, 2013 @10:50AM (#6559954)
Japan and Korea seem like bad comparisons, since they're relatively rich. It's fairly well known (read: I don't feel like looking it up right now) that there's a strong negative correlation between wealth and birth rates. But I don't know what the right comparison would be (China is kind of incomparable) nor what the answer would be.

Perhaps the best comparison would be India, and the disparity in birth rates there is stark, but there are massive other differences as well.