Control issues

In 1980, China’s Communist Party asked its countrymen to voluntarily restrict the number of children they have to one. In reality, this was not a request, but an order. Years before this, in Shifang county, the birthplace of Deng Xiaoping, officials had been experimenting with coercive methods to control population growth. By the time the policy rolled around, 95 per cent of couples in Shifang had pledged to have only one child. This experiment gave China’s birth planners a sense of tremendous possibility that they could achieve “demographic miracles”. Nearly 30 years later, in 2008, when a deadly earthquake rocked Sichuan, Shifan was right at the epicentre. Some 8,000 families lost their only child in the disaster. In some villages an entire generation was wiped off, according to local media. Weeks after the quake, parents were rushing to doctors to reverse the sterilisation they had been forced to undergo earlier, so that they could try for a replacement child.

Former Wall Street Journal reporter Mei Fong’s book One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment is stuffed full of these stories of the human tragedy of China’s population control. Overall, Fong says, even though the policy was started, and is being credited, with China’s economic growth in the last couple of decades, not only is that an incorrect attribution, it will, actually, be responsible for dragging China down for the next 30 years. “The Chinese government’s claim that the one-child policy had averted 400 million births was an exaggeration based on faulty maths and wishful thinking.” In the final sum of things, she says, the policy was a painfully unnecessary measure, since birth rates had already fallen sharply under earlier, more humane measures.

In 2012, Feng Jianmei, a factory worker, was pregnant with her second child. She managed to avoid the authorities for much of it. But eventually she was taken in, given an injection and forced to abort her baby. Photos of her lying on a bed, beside her seven-month-old dead foetus went viral on social media and raised an outcry. Fong’s extensive research, through remote villages, sterilisation camps, doctors’ offices and interviews with government staff who were pushing to meet their targets on population control, reveals that Jianmei’s case was hardly an exception.

Under the policy, if a married couple ended up conceiving a second child, they were fined a hefty sum. If they couldn’t pay, they were forced to abort the baby. Some couples, especially in the rural parts of the country, ended up aborting because they couldn’t afford the fine. This out-of-plan second child would then be refused the hokou , or the household registration. This meant they couldn’t attend school, access medical treatment or even apply for a library card. They wouldn’t get jobs when they grew up. Despite the fact that they are citizens by birth, as far as the country is concerned, they simply don’t exist. Today, about 13 million Chinese people are undocumented under these circumstances.

Running hand-in-hand with the excesses of the government determining something as intrinsically personal as reproduction was China’s preference for males. Large numbers of girl children were either aborted or given up for adoption. Adoption itself branched into a multi-million dollar industry, as American parents came in rushing to take the Chinese babies home. This then set off another business vertical — tracing the origins of the children who had been adopted. Fong goes into these wheels within wheels and lays bare the systematic exploitation, and extortion, that a generation-and-a-half of the Chinese population has undergone.

The argument for the one-child policy was overwhelmingly an economic one. It was, in fact, a flawed analysis carried out by a rocket scientist. Accordingly, it does not take into account the human cost or impact of running such a programme. Through the stories she tells, Fong’s central argument, too, is an economic one. The policy has left China with a large number of single men. The policy will also leave China with a large number of elderly. By 2050, one out of every four people in China will be over 65. Consumption-led economic growth, which made China the biggest economy in the world, is already grinding down. Healthcare and retirement costs will soon be the country’s biggest challenges, she says. In 2015, China officially reverted to a two-child policy. However, only 10 per cent of eligible parents applied for permission. Already, it is too expensive to have more children. The economic impact of an ageing population will be acutely felt by these single children, each supporting four dependants.

Fong intersperses the book with her own challenges in getting pregnant and makes the political personal. Yet, it is, to me, in the parts that Fong confuses her own desire for a child to the nation’s that the book is flawed. If there aren’t going to be many young people, who exactly is the planet being saved for, she asks at one point. With the rapid ecological degeneration and irreversible effects of climate change that the world is currently witnessing, this seems to me to be the wrong argument to make. There might be no planet left for those we bring into the world. Yet, even so, the methods that China employed in trying to save itself seem patently wrong. It is critical to think about sustainable reproduction, and One Child is an important book in understanding how not to go about it.