China's Crazy New Five-Year Plan

Earlier this week, the Chinese Communist Party rolled back one of the most egregiously illiberal vestiges of its bloody recent past by replacing the one-child policy with a new and improved limit of two children. Going forward, urban Chinese are permitted legally to grow their families slightly larger than before, even if their first child is a boy. (Rural Chinese were previously allowed to “try again” if their first child was a girl.)

The one-child policy was implemented in 1979, nominally, to allay social and environmental concerns that would supposedly be caused by “overpopulation.” China’s population had reached a level just shy of...