One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment

by Mei Fong

  At first, I was afraid to let myself feel anything but cautious joy. I have polycystic ovarian syndrome, a common but little-understood hormonal disorder that is one of the leading causes of infertility. I’d been diagnosed in my early thirties, and I remember reading about the symptoms with wry disbelief. If you had PCOS bad, you could be both hairy and bald, or develop severe acne and yo-yo weight gains.

  Until recently I’d been ambivalent about children, uncertain how they’d fit in my peripatetic life. The transition from reporter at a Singapore tabloid to journalist for one of the world’s largest newspapers hadn’t been easy. To climb the ladder, I’d lived in four cities and three countries within six years. As an ethnic Chinese woman in Beijing, I was constantly mistaken for the secretary, interpreter, or girlfriend of some white foreign correspondent. I remember during an interview with Politburo member Wang Qishan—then mayor of Beijing—he’d shaken hands with my white colleagues, then turned away from my outstretched hand. Doubtless, he thought I was their assistant.

  I loved my job, but it was a demanding one, with bosses who woke up in a different time zone just as I was longing for bed. Being a parent requires time, attention, energy. Could I juggle? Yet, at thirty-six, my age and my condition made it imperative I make a decision soon.

  Then came the bombshell. Without much engineering, my biological defect appeared to have been overcome. I would finally be having a child, even as I was chronicling the deaths of many. This much unexpected happiness amid misery—it felt obscene.

  About a month after the quake, a phosphate miner called Zhu Jianming had his vasectomy reversed. His teenage daughter had been killed in the quake, along with two-thirds of her classmates. Strictly speaking, Xinyue—her name means “New Moon”—was not an only child. She had an older brother who had been born mentally handicapped. Because of this, her parents were given permission to have a second child, on the condition that Zhu be sterilized after the second birth. Their son drowned a few years before the quake, leaving New Moon the sum of her parents’ hopes and dreams.

  New Moon was killed by falling masonry when her school collapsed. Ten days after her death, her grieving parents started thinking of trying for another child. Zhu was fifty, his wife forty-five. They worried it was already too late, but the thought of a childless old age was unbearable. Three weeks later Zhu, having scraped together enough money for the procedure, went under the knife. There wasn’t enough money left for Mrs. Zhu to consult a doctor about her fertility chances.

  Sichuan is one of the few places in China where sterilizations were largely done on men. In most other parts, chauvinism prevails, so it’s mostly women who are sterilized, even though doing it on men is easier, faster, and less likely to result in complications. (A village head in Shanxi told me, rather grandly, that he was the first to be sterilized in his village. “I did it to set a good example,” he said. Further questioning revealed it was actually his wife who’d had the procedure. “It was me! He’d never have a knife near his male parts,” she sniffed.) Why was Sichuan an outlier? Largely because of the efforts of a Chongqing doctor called Li Shunqiang. In 1974, Dr. Li pioneered a surgical technique for vasectomies that is still widely used in many countries. Called the No-Scalpel Vasectomy, it involves using a clamp to puncture the scrotum, instead of the traditional method of making an incision. An American anthropologist who’d seen it done in 1981 in Chongqing described it to me thus: “You take a crochet hook, stick it into the scrotal sack, wiggle it about. It’s very quick, about five minutes.”

  So swift and easy was the procedure, it was sometimes performed in Sichuan’s public spaces as an advertisement for family planning. The wide use of this sterilization technique played a major role in making Sichuan the model province for family planning. The talented Dr. Li went on to head Chongqing’s Family Planning Research Institute and later retired as a senior family-planning official.

  Zhu, who’d had this procedure done years before, was fortunate because doctors were able to successfully reverse the effects. The fertility clinic that had performed the procedure put me in touch with him. I asked a staff member there if they specialized in doing vasectomy reversals. Her answer was a swift and emphatic no. There was no money in it. Their clientele were yuppies, many experiencing infertility because of delayed childbearing, like me. They had many cases of clients having difficulties conceiving, having scarred their tubes through multiple abortions. This was an unexpected byproduct of the one-child policy, because many use abortion as a form of birth control. For a nation so open about controlling one of the aftereffects of sex, the Chinese were surprisingly prudish when it came to teaching youngsters about the birds and the bees. Fewer than 1 percent of China’s schools provide sex education.

  The one-child policy regulated births on the assumption that all this procreation was going on between married couples. There was little leeway for underage pregnancy, or unmarried mothers, or women who’d simply gotten pregnant before the official waiting period elapsed. If it didn’t fit the rules, the policy’s answer was almost always: pay or abort.

  I remember once consoling a friend who’d discovered that her husband, who had been her college sweetheart, was cheating on her. They hadn’t been married long. “To think I had three abortions because of him,” she wailed.

  So much of childbearing is a question of timing. With rising infertility, timing became even more crucial. You had to be rich or lucky to battle the forces of time. Zhu certainly wasn’t rich. Would he be lucky? I went to meet him in his hometown of Shuanglin, a remote village in an area famed for the towering Leshan Buddha, the world’s largest Buddha face. It is carved into a stone cliff overlooking the churning Dadu River.

  Built in the eighth century, the serene-looking deity had been miraculously undamaged by the quake, although pollution caused by rapid economic growth had blackened his nose. It also caused the stone curls of his hair to droop.

  Driving to Zhu’s home, I saw plenty of examples of one-child propaganda. One mural showed a launching rocket and a handsome family trio—father, mother, and child of indeterminate gender—with the slogan, “Late marriage, late childbirth benefit both country and people.” Another read, “Fewer births, swifter prosperity.”

  I met Zhu and Mrs. Zhu at a friend’s place. Their dwelling was even more remote and involved a boat crossing, so Zhu picked a friend’s more luxurious and accessible home. Unfortunately, there was a power cut, so we spoke in the growing darkness.

  Zhu was a small man who swam in his coat, cheekbones sharp as a knife. Mrs. Zhu had a face as sweet and rosy as a persimmon, but her eyes were stricken.

  Life in the village was painful. Neighbors and friends avoided them. Mrs. Zhu thought it was because the neighbors feared the now-childless couple would be increasingly dependent, borrowing money, asking for help, and generally being pathetic hangers-on, since “we can never depend on our children now.”

  Zhu had initially supported the one-child policy. The idea of having fewer mouths to feed was attractive to a man who grew up with memories of hunger. “We ate grass, worms. There was never enough,” he said.

  There were also other deterrents. In his area, those who violated the policy had to pay almost $150, an unimaginable sum for a newlywed Zhu, who at that time made only a few cents a day as a porter. In Sichuan, porters are called bangbang jun—literally, “stick stick army”—for the sticks they sling across their shoulders to balance heavy loads. This job is one of the hardest and poorest paid in the district. As a lowly bangbang jun, Zhu could not afford harassment from family-planning officials, who frequently came to the homes of people who broke family-planning rules, smashing things “just to teach them a lesson,” he said.

  Now they were filled with regret for following the rules, even though they could not imagine how they could have done things any differently.

  “When we see some of my former classmates have become grandparents,” said Zhu, voice trembling, “it’s really hard for us to get through.”
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  The Zhus weren’t just emotionally bereft and worried about their future financial security. The loss of New Moon also created a sense of social failure and insecurity. I could easily imagine how they spent their days, sitting in their darkened home, surrounded by increasingly hostile neighbors, feeling vulnerable.

  As I was leaving, I kicked myself for not having brought along some small gift. I wanted to give them a small token, some kind of good-luck talisman. I rummaged around in the car, finally coming up with a small packet of biscuits, which I pressed on a bemused Mrs. Zhu. I saw her clutching it in her hand as I waved goodbye. They waved back, two gallant figures.

  A few days after the story ran, I received an e-mail from a doctor in America. This woman had undergone fertility treatments and had several fertilized embryos in storage. She offered to give the Zhus one, or several, of her embryos. She didn’t know how they would deal with raising a white child in a small Chinese village, she wrote, but would they be interested?

  There were too many complications for this strange, generous offer to work, but I, too, wonder what could have been. Medical advances have allowed us to stretch our fertile years beyond what Mother Nature intended, but they are still finite, something the one-child policy does not take into account.

  Soon after the following Spring Festival, the Zhus, still childless, left their village in search of work. They changed phone numbers, and we lost touch.

  II

  All this is very unfortunate, one might say, but how is it the Communist Party’s responsibility? It’s very sad that so many people died, and so many of them the only children, too—but why should we see this as anything more than a senseless accident?

  Which brings me to the Olympics. I see the two events, earthquake and Olympics, as two sides of the same coin. Sichuan and all its connotations—the one-child policy, the ruthless cover-up of the schoolhouse collapses—represent the dark side of China’s nationalism. On the other side was the Beijing Olympics, fruit of the country’s growth-at-all-costs model, of rebirth after more than a century of humiliation following the Opium Wars.

  As a sporting contest, the Olympics were another area where authorities exercised a form of population control designed to bring glory to the country. Indeed, selective breeding to raise more talented humans—a mindset that verges on eugenics—is at the heart of both the one-child policy and China’s elite sports program.

  Chinese authorities were never shy about stating this aim of the one-child policy: fewer births, higher-quality births. In the same vein, leaders of China’s Soviet-style sports program informally arranged marriages between athletes, partly to foster the genetic transfer of talent. The success of this would be tested in the crucible of the 2008 Games.

  The whole nation was ticking toward August 8, 2008, until, with the flip of a coin, the earthquake reminded us of the dark side of Chinese nationalism and threatened to overwhelm Beijing’s carefully orchestrated narrative. China’s official machinery swung into action.

  Three days after the quake, seventeen bloggers were arrested for circulating “malicious” rumors. Grieving parents were given hush money. Public security officials followed me when I was covering a schoolhouse demonstration, chasing my car and pulling me over. They claimed they were worried about my safety and offered to escort me to a “safer place.” I fobbed them off.

  Other journalists I knew were detained, harassed, or had their cameras smashed. Huang Qi, a Chinese cyber-dissident who criticized quake relief efforts, was jailed. Liu Shaokun, a schoolteacher, was sentenced to labor camp for a year. Liu had been taking pictures of collapsed schools and questioning the shoddy construction online. Environmentalist Tan Zuoren, who coined the phrase “tofu dreg project” to describe the collapse of the schools in the earthquake, was detained. He served five years in a labor camp.

  I began to get phone calls from bereaved parents, telling me they were being threatened and roughed up. I longed to investigate, but I was hamstrung by my pregnancy. Once I knew, I cut back on travel, hoping to wait until I was safely past the first trimester.

  I spent those few months in a strange hormonal cocktail of emotions: sadness for all that I had seen, an itch to get back to the stories, joy for the growing child that I hadn’t known I could have, and, despite myself, rising excitement as the Olympic machinery swung into gear.

  In contrast to Sichuan’s chaos, the Olympic show was all about control. Even the skies had to submit to Beijing. To cut down the pollution, the Orwellian-sounding Weather Modification Bureau peppered the sky with rockets laced with silver iodide, making short bursts of rain to wash away the city’s ever-present smoky pall.

  A forest of fancy buildings, designed by grand architects, few of them Chinese, sprang up. In the years before the Games, all of Beijing was a massive construction site. Thousands of migrant workers like Huimei’s parents lived in primitive squalor on work sites, safely hidden from the public by giant billboards saying things like “Olympics for a harmonious society.”

  Thereafter, the scent of concrete dust would always evoke this city, this period, for me.

  Now these billboards were coming down, unveiling elaborate structures like the National Stadium’s tangled steel carapace, the opera house’s dome, and state broadcaster CCTV’s square doughnut of a tower. Locals irreverently dubbed them Bird’s Nest, Egg, and Underpants, but for all that, they were awe-inspiring monuments, built with great ingenuity and human cost.

  Underpants Tower, for example. It didn’t look like any other building I had ever seen and was an architectural contradiction: a square building that somehow looked aggressively phallic. Perhaps it was because one of its sections—basically, the Underpants’s crotch—jutted 250 feet into nothingness.

  It was an engineering marvel. They built the two gargantuan legs first, then, like some mythic love story, united the towers at dawn. (Engineers prosaically explained this prevented the sun’s heat from distorting the steel and creating structural instabilities.) Underpants’s design had been a prizewinning entry in a competition, praised by one of the judges for its “fearless, can-do spirit” that appeared to represent the New China.

  Yet it was impossible to escape the fact that Underpants was also the grandest propaganda office in the world. Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Inga Saffron blasted architect Rem Koolhaas for giving China’s TV monopoly “the architectural equivalent of a bomb.” The tower’s size and structure, she wrote, would “always remind you of how small you are, and how big the state.”

  I remember interviewing those who’d been evicted for Underpants’s erection. They had lived in low-rise redbrick buildings, mostly empty by the time I visited. All the windows had been smashed, some etched with messages like “Want human rights.” Many apartment dwellers complained they were given inadequate compensation and forced to move. One woman recounted how she’d returned from a trip to find her apartment padlocked, her belongings cast to the ground four stories below. She was so distraught she tried to jump down herself, only to be saved—and subsequently jailed—by local police.

  A multitude of mistranslated English signs that had been part of the city’s crooked charm disappeared, replaced by irreproachably boring and correct translations. “Dongda Anus and Intestine Hospital” became the uninspiring “Hospital of Proctology.” “Racist Park” transformed into “Park of Racial Minorities.” No longer would the handicapped be forced to seek “Deformed Man” toilet cubicles. Millions of cars were kept off the roads, factories ordered to stop production. Even the city’s arid beige grass was spray-painted emerald green.

  While this was going on, I went for my first pregnancy checkup. The technician bustled in and rubbed lotion over my still-flat stomach.

  “What’s that—oh!” said my husband, gazing at the heartbeat, pulsing so strongly. It was impossible not to feel excited. We clutched hands, as excited as little children at the beach. Despite myself I started running through possible names, picking out books I would read, stories I would tell,
to that pulsing peanut. Seeing the heartbeat made it real.

  “Soon you will know the sex,” she said cheerfully.

  I knew she wouldn’t be telling me this if I were a Chinese national. To prevent sex-selective abortions, medical staff are prohibited from revealing the gender to expectant parents. Of course, you can get around it. I might make oblique hints, give a red packet “donation,” perhaps be handed a pink sweet, or a blue. The physician might cough, signifying a girl, or nod, for a boy. That is how things work when the state regulates your womb.

  III

  The narrative that China’s leaders wanted—China’s coming-out party, China’s global ascendance—was taking over.

  Beijing city was setting up invisible cordons to prevent troublemakers from ruining the party. That included bereaved quake parents who tried to make it to the capital to petition authorities for justice, a time-honored tradition. Unfortunately, most were detained long before they made it to the city. They were escorted off trains or banged up in detention cells. Some were even billed for the cost of their meals and lodging while locked up.

  Some parents who’d tried to take a tour to nearby Kunming ended up being shadowed the whole time by public security officials. “They can’t even let us take a holiday in peace,” said one father, bitterly. Another said, “My child is dead. Heaven agrees I have a right to scream and shout, but this government, it thinks it is bigger than heaven!”

  The count ran down. Thirty days. Twenty-one days.

  Online rumors began floating about the Beijing Olympic mascots—Teletubby-like creatures—hinting they represented coming disasters for China. Jingjing, the panda, stood for the Sichuan earthquake. Huanhuan, the flame, and Yingying, the Tibetan antelope, symbolized the Olympic global torch relay, which had been beset by protests over China’s crackdown in Tibet. Nini, the swallow, was linked to a plague of locusts from Inner Mongolia.