Could the Light of Sinai be cutting into the night of communism that befell the vastness of China in 1949? The question is prompted by the announcement from Peking that the Party is ending its “one child” policy, which has obtained for decades. The central committee, according to a communiqué, is going to allow Chinese couples to have two children. That is, it will ease, if not end entirely, one of the cruelest tyrannies of the almost 65 years of communist rule on the mainland. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

We have often felt that the horror of the Chinese communist policy has been underappreciated in the West. This sense has endured since our days as a foreign correspondent. This under-appreciation is no doubt due in part to the very nature of communism, a tyranny that can not only outlaw the having of more than one child but crush any protest from those who have suffered — parents yearning for children and children yearning for siblings — under the one-child-per-family policies.

A horrifying recap of the program, issued by the Agence France Press, is up at the Web site of the Bangkok Post. It reports that at first the rule was, as the AFP put it, “one child for all couples.” But “later on, regulations began to vary and loosen in different parts of the country.” Even so, the harvest was just ghastly. Families in rural areas were allowed two tots, AFP notes, “if the first was a girl.” It adds that “ethnic minorities were allowed an extra offspring, leading some to dub it a ‘one and a half child’ policy.”

A vast bureaucracy grew up to impose this policy on China’s suffering people. Its family planning commission, AFP notes, was merged with a health ministry “whose hundreds of thousands of personnel rely on permits, fines and, in some cases, forced sterilization and late-term abortions.” Even today, it points out, rights groups report that “forced abortions remain widespread,” especially for “unmarried women or for couples under the legal marrying age of 22 for men and 20 for women.”

And the numbers. According to the communists’ own reckoning, the policy has, as AFP puts it, “prevented about 400 million births,” or more than a quarter of the China’s current population of 1.37 billion today. It lead to “sex-selective abortions or infanticide targeting girls, because of a centuries-old social preference for boys.” It led to families becoming “lopsided, with one single child caring for four grandparents and two parents.” It was a catastrophic contempt of God’s injunction in Genesis.

What the communists said is that they are now worried about the demographical trends. The report in the New York Times noted that the communiqué came from a meeting dealing with a forthcoming five-year plan and suggested that the aim was to “improve the demographic development strategy” by “actively taking steps to counter the aging of the population.” How could they ever have missed that inevitable result of a policy designed to keep the population from growing naturally?

One of the journalists of the rising generation, William McGurn of the Wall Street Journal, has been on this story for years, starting when he was on a Hong Kong based paper called the Far Eastern Economic Review. He turned up a book called “Too Many Asians,” which was issued by Doubleday, of all people, and warned that the future was “threatened” by the “population explosion” in China, India, Japan, and other Asian countries. That was in 1959, when the population of China was about two-thirds of a billion souls.

Since then it has more than doubled, but the Chinese are richer, better fed, and in better health than they were back then, and by a significant margin. The pattern is repeated elsewhere in the emerging economies, and now the Party is starting to see the light. Let it be widely refracted and shown far and wide. No nation can endure that seeks to limit its own population. There is no benign way for a government to curb family size. An editorial is not a sermon, and we are not sages, but it looks like the Chinese communists are discovering that God knew what He was talking about.