What followed was a mass campaign not unlike those that Mao had unleashed on the public. All the familiar elements were there: the intense propaganda, the colorful slogans, the struggle sessions against offenders, the shock teams of party activists. By the mid-1980s, the campaign had basically succeeded in the nation’s cities. Because the state still controlled almost all urban jobs and social services, the consequences of having more than one child could be severe, and given the party’s extensive surveillance network in city neighborhoods and workplaces, unauthorized pregnancies were easily detected. As a result, few in the cities were willing to defy the authorities. In rural villages, however, the party encountered widespread resistance. Peasants depended on their children, especially sons, to help work the fields and support them in old age. But under the one-child policy, a family’s future might rest entirely on the talent and health of a single son—a risk few wanted to take. With a daughter, the situation would be even worse, because she would be married off and required by tradition to support not her own parents but her husband’s. And, of course, only a son could carry on the family line.
Despite open hostility across the countryside, the party pushed ahead with the one-child program, resorting to what became known as the “five procedures” to deter and punish violators—seizing grain, livestock, and furniture, demolishing houses, and putting people in prison. When that wasn’t enough, it launched a mass campaign of forced sterilization and abortion in 1983. By the government’s own count, birth planning officials performed nearly twenty-one million tubal ligations and vasectomies that year and more than fourteen million abortions. But the abuses strained the party’s relationship with the peasants and resulted in a backlash that sometimes turned violent. Reformers in the party leadership responded by issuing a new directive in 1984 prohibiting the use of coercion to enforce the one-child policy. By 1988, the party had scaled back the program to allow most rural couples whose first child was a girl to have a second baby—in effect, to try again for a son. But after the Tiananmen massacre, birth planning hard-liners staged a comeback and signaled again that coercive tactics would be tolerated to reach population targets. There was another crackdown, another wave of violence and abuse, another surge in abortions and sterilization. For the first time, the party made the ability to meet birth planning targets a key criterion in evaluating apparatchiks. No matter how good a job they did in other areas, no matter how well the economy performed under their watch, local officials would now be denied bonuses and promotions if they missed their birth planning goals. For the party’s rural officials, many of whom were not fans of the one-child policy, this was powerful incentive to do whatever was necessary to keep births down. By the year 2000, the total fertility rate in China had fallen to a historic low of 1.6 births per woman, well under the natural replacement rate and nearly comparable to levels in the industrialized nations of the West.
There is reason to believe, however, that a similar decline could have been achieved without the one-child policy. What neither the missile scientists who devised the program nor their critics anticipated at the time was the phenomenal performance of the economy under Deng’s market reforms. The rapid growth far exceeded expectations, rendering the limited impact of the one-child policy on population size almost irrelevant. At the same time, rising living standards caused a historic shift in childbearing preferences, with growing numbers of couples marrying later and choosing on their own to have fewer children. Fertility rates were already falling quickly in the 1970s under the more moderate program launched by Zhou Enlai, from just under 6 births per woman at the beginning of the decade to 2.7 births when the one-child program was launched—one of the fastest declines in modern history. Nearly three decades of the one-child policy reduced the rate further by only about 1 more birth per woman, and even the government attributes half of that reduction to the impact of rising living standards. The government takes credit for the other half but could that modest decline have been achieved by just enforcing a later marriage age or wider spacing of births? Could it have been achieved by following the experience of other developing countries and focusing on education and facilitating contraception? If just a fraction of the energy and money devoted over the past thirty years to enforcing the one-child policy had been invested instead in rural education, the government could have put hundreds of millions of rural women through high school—and women with high school degrees in China have fewer children than those without them. Such an investment in education would almost certainly also have led to economic gains—the reason Deng launched the one-child policy in the first place.
The true costs of the one-child program, however, go well beyond the wasted effort and money. The campaign cast a pall of violence and fear across the countryside that has not been fully appreciated even by many urban Chinese, and those who suffered most were society’s weakest—rural women and infant girls. Unborn babies, many aborted in the last months of pregnancy, could be considered victims as well. As early as 1981, the party began receiving disturbing reports of a spike in female infanticide, baby abandonment, and domestic violence against women who gave birth to daughters—all examples of what happened when the traditional demand for sons collided with the one-child policy. Even the People’s Daily reported the drowning of forty infant girls in one rural Anhui county during a two-year period in the early 1980s. The high rate of suicide among rural women, a resurgence of baby trafficking and the higher infant mortality among girls could be linked to the one-child program as well. At the same time, the state carried out more than a half billion sterilization operations, abortions, and IUD insertions in the name of the program, and the health impact is believed to be staggering, given that many birth planning personnel received limited training and worked under rushed conditions with cheap equipment. Women bore the brunt of botched operations, because the IUD was the party’s preferred choice of contraception and because husbands often volunteered their wives to be sterilized rather than submit themselves. Women made up nearly three-quarters of the 151 million people sterilized in China between 1971 and 2001, even though vasectomies are easier to perform and pose fewer complications.
During that same thirty-year period, the government conducted 264 million abortions, many of them repeat and late-term abortions, which carry greater health risks. Women often waited into the second trimester to determine the gender of their child and terminated pregnancies again and again until they were sure to have a son. These sex-selective abortions skewed the gender ratio of China’s children—about 120 males to every 100 females born in 1999—and as a result, the full impact of the one-child policy may not be known until later in the century, when these baby boys become unmarriageable young men. At about the same time, the nation may confront a serious aging crisis, with an explosion in the number of senior citizens and a much smaller working-age population left to support them.
By the late 1990s, a consensus had emerged among many demographers and birth planning officials that the human, social, and political costs of continuing to enforce the one-child program were too high, especially given the evidence it wasn’t doing much good. At the start of the next decade, the government began shifting the birth planning program toward a more voluntary system involving financial rewards and penalties, as well as improved medical services and counseling. It issued new directives prohibiting the use of coercive methods to enforce birth planning, and adopted a new law guaranteeing citizens the right to an “informed choice” in reproductive matters. Reformers drafted proposals to begin allowing all couples to have two children. But neither the party chief, Jiang Zemin, nor his successor, Hu Jintao, was willing to abandon the one-child policy. The government had insisted for nearly three decades that it was justified, necessary, and worth the sacrifice, and neither man wanted to take the political risk of overturning it. Any party leader who scrapped the one-child policy would be vulnerable to attack if birth rates then climbed. The political system rewarded caution, not risk taking, and it was al
most always safer to stick with the status quo than to try to change it.
The result has been a patchwork of policy approaches. In some areas, local officials have made “informed choice” a reality, allowing couples more freedom to plan their own families and collecting only modest fines when they choose to have more than one child. But in others, the old, violent methods still prevail. Population control targets continue to be distributed to provincial leaders, and local officials who fail to meet their targets continue to be judged harshly and denied promotions regardless of their job performance in other areas. The system has resulted in a perverse set of incentives, not unlike those that lead officials to pursue economic growth regardless of the cost to the environment. It didn’t matter what happened to the air or the water, or even what happened to people’s health: as long as an official reported solid growth numbers, he would thrive in the apparatus. In birth planning, it didn’t matter if birth rates were too low, only if they were too high, and lower population figures had the added bonus of juicing the per capita economic numbers. To make matters worse, provincial leaders often played it safe, handing down tougher goals to the city and county officials under them, just in case some failed to keep births in check. Those officials then did the same thing, issuing even more stringent birth quotas to district and village officials that could be nearly impossible to meet—impossible, that is, without the use of brute force.
The precise sequence of events that resulted in the crackdown in Linyi is unknown, but birth planning officials told me that local officials were no doubt trying to meet unreasonable targets. Shandong Province already boasted one of the lowest fertility rates in the nation, and apparently that was not enough for provincial leaders. Any slip, after all, could derail their careers. Linyi was one of several cities in the western part of the province with slightly higher fertility rates than the rest of the province, and it came under pressure to do better. The burden fell on the Linyi party chief, Li Qun, an up-and-coming politician in his early forties who was being considered for a promotion to a provincial leadership post. The party had selected Li for a special training program in 2000, and he had spent six months in the United States taking public administration classes and serving in an internship as a special assistant to the mayor of New Haven, Connecticut. When he returned to China, he was named Linyi’s mayor, and then two years later its party chief. An internal report he submitted about his U.S. experience was said to have received good reviews in the leadership, and he later published a popular book titled I Was an Assistant to an American Mayor, in which he wrote that Chinese officials could learn a lot from their American counterparts about how to improve governance. The national media presented him as a face of the future, an open-minded and savvy reformer.
But if Li were to continue his rise through party ranks, he would have to meet population targets like everyone else. In the summer of 2004, he issued a directive calling on his subordinates to “strengthen population and birth planning work in a new age.” Given the government’s softer and more voluntary approach to birth planning, he said, the task of population control faced “new situations and problems” and “severe challenges.”
The thinking, job understanding, and work methods of some comrades do not suit the demands of the new situation. They are uncertain what to do, flinch at difficulties, and handle phenomena reactively. There are also problems of complacence, blind optimism, and slackening vigilance. Population and birth planning work has reached a key moment where it must move forward or it will fall behind.
Li’s directive went on to set a goal of limiting population growth to under 6 percent and guaranteeing more than 97 percent of births satisfied the one-child policy. It reminded officials to obey the law and respect the “informed choice” of residents, but the emphasis was on getting the job done, and it outlined rewards and penalties for officials in the three urban districts and nine rural counties under Linyi’s jurisdiction. Seven months later, Li followed up with another directive on the subject. This one was not publicized, but I was told it adopted a much tougher tone. The peasants weren’t educated enough to respect the law, it said, so legal procedures would not be enough to enforce compliance with birth planning targets. Instead, “the old methods” had to be used. It was this document that resulted in the violent crackdown in Linyi during the spring of 2005. Within the first few months, one county alone reported completing seven thousand sterilization operations. Teng Biao, the legal scholar who traveled to Linyi to investigate, estimated that 130,000 people had been detained, beaten, and held hostage by officials trying to compel relatives or neighbors to abort pregnancies or submit to sterilization.
It wasn’t until a blind man forced the nation, and the world, to look at what was happening in Linyi that the crackdown was suspended. When I traveled to Linyi, Chen Guangcheng took me from village to village, introducing me to women who had been dragged away like animals to be spayed and men who still bore bruises from being beaten and whipped. Villagers described midnight raids on their homes involving as many as thirty officials and hired thugs. Others recalled being packed into small rooms with as many as seventy others and released only after paying exorbitant fees. One woman could barely walk because of a botched tubal ligation. When the doctor told her what had happened, he didn’t apologize; he just told her she needed to come back in a month so he could try again. Another woman told me she was seven months pregnant and in hiding when officials detained all her aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws, as well as her pregnant sister. Every day her family called her, begging her to turn herself in so the beatings would end. Finally, she did and gave in to the government’s demand she have an abortion. At each village we visited, the peasants crowded around and greeted Chen like a returning hero. He recorded their stories, and told them not to give up.
Local officials confined Chen to his farmhouse not long after my article and others like it were published. But within weeks, the National Population and Family Planning Commission, the government ministry that administers the birth planning program in Beijing, announced it was opening an investigation and sending officials to Linyi. By then, though, Chen had escaped and was making his way to the capital.
EVEN BEFORE CHEN’S train arrived in Beijing, the goons from Linyi were waiting for him at the station. One of his lawyer friends had gone to pick him up and noticed several men outside speaking with Shandong accents about how to spot him. The lawyer called Chen’s cell phone, then arranged to meet him on the train. Together they disembarked and doubled back through a tunnel onto another platform. Then they slipped out a cargo exit on the other side of the station. But the next day, the men from Linyi managed to track him down again. Chen and the lawyer were about to enter a subway station when someone tapped him on the shoulder.
“Let’s go home, brother. You’ve made me come so far. You’re killing me!”
Chen recognized the weary voice immediately. It was Zhu Hongguo, a portly rural official he often dealt with back home. “I’m not going home,” he told the official.
But then there was another voice: “We’re from the Linyi Public Security Bureau.”
“So what?” Chen said. “Have we broken the law?”
“No.”
“Then why are you following me? The police must conduct their business according to the law!”
“We want to have a word with you.”
At this point the men began trying to separate Chen from his companion. There were about six of them, and they kept telling the lawyer that they were old friends of Chen’s. “Who says we’re friends?” Chen shot back. Addressing Zhu, he said, “If you had come by yourself, we could talk, but you’ve brought so many police and thugs with you.” The lawyer began shouting that hoodlums from Shandong had come to Beijing to bully a blind man, and a crowd of passersby started gathering around them. Chen called a friend on his cell phone, telling him to come to the subway station with a camera and take pictures. The men from Linyi backed off a distance, apparently worried abo
ut causing a scene.
But when Chen and the lawyers entered the station, they followed. Chen knew they wouldn’t try to grab him in such a public place, but he didn’t want them following him, either. So he took the lawyer’s hand and began leading him briskly toward the subway line. He knew the station well. After all, he had sued the subway system just a few years earlier. The men from Linyi had fallen behind while paying their fares, but they caught up in time to follow Chen onto the subway. Chen moved through the car, pushing his way past the other passengers, dragging the lawyer along, and then suddenly he got off the car at the other end just as it was about to leave. The Linyi men were caught off guard and scrambled to get off, too, but only one or two of them managed to make it before the doors closed. Chen kept moving, heading through the crowd down the platform toward another line in the station, his lawyer friend trying to keep up. He boarded another train, and the remaining Linyi men followed him on. When he got off again, they got off. But then he and the lawyer jumped back on. The doors closed before the Linyi men could follow. The subway pulled out of the station.
I saw Chen that night at a restaurant on the north side of Beijing, and he was his usual charming self, regaling a roomful of friends with the story of his adventure in the subway system and his earlier escape through the cornfields of his village. More than once, a listener interrupted to express wonderment that a blind man could outmaneuver the state’s agents. “I wasn’t leading Guangcheng around. Guangcheng was leading me around!” exclaimed Jiang Tianyong, the lawyer he had dragged through the subway station, and everybody laughed. Later, I asked Chen what his plans were. “We need to prepare the case and talk about bringing it to court,” he said. “I can’t collect any more material. If I go back now, many, many people will be waiting for me…. We could get more evidence, but I want to get started on the case and collect material later. We need to file the lawsuits, go to the media.”
Out of Mao's Shadow Page 37
