Even when the government eases rules about procreation, it is only confirming that such rules exist — and that they are the party’s to dictate. This, too, is population control, and population control is a foundation of any surveillance state. The Chinese Communist Party simply cannot give that up. Family planning has been an essential state policy for decades, a pillar of the Chinese Communist Party’s monumental social engineering project. By loosening caps on births today, the party may be acknowledging that China is facing a demographic crisis. But it still can’t allow the very notion of population control to be called into question — no more than it can tolerate, say, any admission or any open discussion about the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 or the atrocities committed during the Cultural Revolution. And so the Chinese government isn’t just encouraging women to have more children — and hoping to coax them with maternity leave and other benefits, as well as promises to mobilize resources at all levels of the state. It has vowed to “guide young people to have the correct perspectives on dating, marriage and family.”