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

by Mei Fong

  China’s rocket scientists argued that even with a two- or three-children-per-family quota the population would continue to balloon. According to their projections, even with “the most drastic policy measure, one child per couple, the population would keep expanding for a full quarter century,” wrote Susan Greenhalgh.

  Soon after the conference, Liang remembers Li Guangyun asking him, “How did you calculate the population numbers in the next twenty years?”

  “With my pen,” said Liang.

  “That’s so slow! It’s much easier if you use the computer. For example, it takes less than an hour to calculate the population statistics in the next century, and it’s absolutely correct!” cried Li, according to Liang.

  A few months later, Song’s group’s findings began to make their way into mainstream media. At the same time, in many internal conferences the one-child policy was interpreted as the only solution to China’s population problems.

  On September 25 that year, the Communist Party published an open letter to its members asking them to voluntarily limit their family size to one child. Thus began China’s most radical and longest-running social experiment.

  Liang returned from Chengdu disappointed and depressed. He bitterly resented what he saw as the arrogance of these scientists, “asking more than 700 million people of China to use their lives to practice their inadequate calculations, in a condescending gesture.” He raged at how scholars, “using science as a disguise to stoke the fire,” became cheerleaders for the central government’s plan.

  It would be twenty more years before a group of reformers would emerge, academics who would try to use the tools of logic and research to undo the one-child policy’s Gordian knot.

  IV

  Looking back, it seems amazing how confident China’s rocketmen were in their projections of population growth, refusing to factor in how human behavior or technology might change their projections. They appeared utterly sure of the correctness of their solution.

  This Masters of the Universe mindset is clear in a 1988 book Song and Yu published explaining their theories. Wrote the authors:

  Since human beings appeared in the world millions of years ago, they have been battling with Nature. Now they have finally conquered it by their wisdom and social strength, and won brilliant victories.

  We have placed the whole vegetable kingdom under our control. . . . We have become the rulers of the entire animal kingdom and conquered all kinds of ferocious beasts that once killed or injured large numbers of our ancestors. . . . Now we have got our revenge on them, using their lives to repay the blood debts they owe us from history. . . .

  We have tamed the rivers and controlled lightning . . . roam in outer space, land on the Moon, and send messengers to Venus, Mars and other planets. . . .

  In short, we have been the victors, we have mastered the world, we have conquered outer space and we have won freedom.

  The rocketmen calculated that China’s optimal population a century hence would be about 700 million people, but they based their calculations on a variety of questionable assumptions. For example, they presupposed that the ideal Chinese diet would involve Western-style protein consumption. There was no way China’s agricultural production could ramp up to allow for this sudden change, so, to meet this goal, the population would have to be drastically reduced. The whole project entailed making “countless heroic assumptions” on the basis of “little more than educated guesswork,” said Greenhalgh.

  The rocketmen’s calculations did not factor in how quickly fertility would decrease as modern educated Chinese women opted for fewer children. By 2010, census results showed that average annual population growth had been at half the rate of the previous decade.

  In the course of many conversations with demographers, I learned that predicting population growth is a tricky business. Forecasts are reasonably accurate only up to a twenty- to thirty-year time frame. Demographers base their predictions on three factors: how many people are born, how long people live, and how they move around.

  Out of these three, only one—mortality rates—can be predicted fairly accurately today. Migration and fertility patterns have been much harder to foresee, because they are deeply intertwined with individual decision making and agency. “There is no good theory to explain, much less predict, why fertility rates change over time,” said population scholar Matthew Connelly. By the end of this century, the world’s population could be anywhere between 8 billion and 13 billion, depending on which demographic projections you choose to believe. The difference between the two numbers is as many people as there were on Earth in the 1950s. Demographers know the world’s population in 2030, but for 2050, “we are in uncharted waters,” and for 2100—“well, science fiction,” said demographer Nicholas Eberstadt.

  Olsder, now a retired professor, says his original problem was just a “wonderful kind of mathematical exercise. The social, economic aspects were not factored in.

  “I don’t know, we lived in a university, in a tenured position, and I was trying to keep myself fresh in a math way. It was a competition with colleagues to show off, to show you were active. I never anticipated this long chain of events,” he said.

  The Club of Rome’s doomsday predictions did not come to pass, but “for many people it was an awakening, to be careful with Earth and our resources,” he said. Olsder believes that “all things equal, we should do the same and have a one-child policy.”

  Out of curiosity, I asked him how many children he has. I was not surprised to learn he has three daughters and five grandchildren, for I had begun to notice, over the course of many interviews, that those who do support the one-child policy tend, if they live outside China, to have more than one offspring.

  By contrast, people like academic Wang Feng, who has called the one-child policy the worst policy mistake China made—more terrible than the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, even—well, Wang has just one child, even though he lives in America. Absent government restrictions, the one-child policy seems for many to be an issue of “Do as I say, not as I do.”

  Olsder would see Song a few more times in conferences. In 2004, Song would visit him in Delft again, this time accompanied by a private secretary, a chauffeur, and two bodyguards.

  By this time, Song had risen to be a member of the State Council, China’s highest state administrative body. As vice chairman of the Three Gorges Project Construction Committee, he was also involved in another controversial major project, only instead of erecting a dam against human fertility, the Three Gorges sought to dam the massive Yangtze River and create a major hydropower source.

  Like the one-child policy, the Three Gorges project was also dogged by criticism for causing unintended side effects. In the case of Three Gorges, it was flooding, landslides, increased seismic activity, and the acceleration of the extinction of a rare dolphin species locals called “the Goddess of the Yangtze.” Ironically, Song also headed the State Council’s Environmental Protection Committee at that time.

  Song presented Olsder with a copy of his 1988 English-language book, Population System Control. In one section, Song elaborates on his thoughts about conservation, describing how the banks of the Three Gorges used to be a “paradise for monkeys” over a thousand years ago, before population increases led to deforestation. “Dear animals, you should understand that the kindness of humanity is limited, and we can provide a corner in the zoo or the reservation to prevent your species from extinction. You should thank human beings for such generosity and kindness.”

  V

  In understanding the origins of the one-child policy, it is important not only to ask how it came about, but also why it lasted so long.

  In 2000, an ad hoc group of China’s top demographers, as well as some former officials, got together to seek changes in the one-child policy. Prime movers included people like Gu Baochang, head of Renmin University’s demographics unit. As a former senior adviser to the National Population and Family Planning Comm
ission, Gu was a major player in family-planning circles, with strong ties to the Communist Party leadership.

  Another well-connected member was Zhang Erli, currently a retired top official from the National Population and Family Planning Commission. Some reformers were also China’s first generation of Western-trained demographers, like University of California–Irvine professor Wang Feng. The goal: to collect and collate compelling evidence to show that the one-child policy no longer served China’s purposes economically or socially. It was a brain trust of some of China’s best and brightest social scientists.

  The group felt the time was ripe, as the one-child policy was approaching its third decade, supposedly the end of its life span.

  The reformers hoped to convincingly answer questions that had been floating around China’s population circles for years, questions such as: What was China’s real fertility rate? Was population growth in China still strong, or was it falling, and if so, how much? And, most provocatively, what if authorities loosened or even lifted the one-child policy? Would this lead to a baby boom, undoing all the policy’s effects?

  For answers, they turned to the secret two-child experiments advocated by Liang some fifteen years before. These communities provided evidence that loosened restrictions did not lead to a baby boom. Yicheng and its sisters all had below-average birthrates, as well as less marked gender imbalances and fewer cases of infanticide and gendercide, compared to the rest of China.

  In 2004, the reform group distributed a report on its findings to the National Population and Family Planning Commission and other government agencies. It declared it was time to loosen the one-child policy. Aside from the social costs of a lopsided gender balance and an aging population, they presented evidence indicating that China’s fertility had plunged to below-replacement rates. They lobbied Beijing to expand the number of experimental two-child zones, allowing more of China greater freedom in deciding the size and makeup of their families.

  But authorities weren’t convinced. Many still believed China’s population could rebound with another baby boom. Critics of the reform group argued that Yicheng and the rest of the two-child experimental clusters weren’t really representative of China. There was some truth in this. Jiuquan, one of the zones, is located in an area between Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, with nomadic traditions and without deep-rooted clan ideology. Enshi is mountainous, with a strong local tradition of equality between the sexes.

  So it was back to the drawing board. In 2006, reformers went to Jiangsu, north of Shanghai, to an area that permitted couples to have two children under the dandu policy. (The term dandu refers to couples in which one spouse is an only child.) Only about a tenth took advantage of this freedom to have a second child.

  In 2008, reformers once again submitted a proposal to China’s government agencies with these updated findings. The tone was more urgent: aging was moved higher up the agenda. Cross-country comparisons were included. But “it was still the same reaction,” said Cai Yong, a professor at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.

  After that, the reformers decided to take the debate public and no longer rely on internal lobbying. They started publishing their findings and commentary in the nation’s top news media.

  Liang, who had been serving as a sort of emeritus professor for the reformers, started stepping out more into the limelight. When the reform group started trumpeting Yicheng’s demographic success, Liang would escort scholars and journalists there, using his connections to arrange interviews with officials. Christian Science Monitor correspondent Peter Ford remembers accompanying Liang. “He was treated like a god,” says Ford. “It was clear I would not have had the access I had if he had not gone with me,” he said.

  The reformers also decided to enlist the support of economists, many of whom had been debating the effect of the one-child policy on China’s labor markets. One boldface name that joined the cause was billionaire Internet entrepreneur James Liang, founder and chief executive at Ctrip, one of China’s biggest online travel sites. Liang, who holds a PhD in economics from Stanford, had written a book called Too Many People in China? arguing that the policy would quench entrepreneurism and innovation.

  Still, the group kept hitting a brick wall. Authorities reiterated time and again that there would be no major changes to the policy. Liang Zhongtang, furious, said China had become “like an armored car,” with the driver proceeding “without paying attention to what is happening outside.”

  In 2012, the debate heated up. Feng Jianmei was a twenty-two-year-old factory worker who was pregnant with her second child. Feng, who already had a four-year-old daughter, believed she qualified for a second-child exemption. Local officials deemed otherwise and demanded that Feng and her husband pay about $6,000 in fines.

  Quite possibly, Feng hoped that even if the legalities weren’t clear, she could carry the child to term. But until the child was born, Feng risked being forced into an abortion. So she played an obstetrical game of hide-and-seek, hiding out in relatives’ homes.

  Once, she spent several hours on a dark rainy hillside in an attempt to evade authorities. To no avail. When she was seven months along, officials caught her and dragged her to the hospital with a pillowcase over her head. They demanded that her husband, Deng, pay about $16,000. Deng managed to negotiate the payment down to about a third of this. He rushed to the hospital after borrowing a portion of the money from his work mates. He hoped officials would accept an IOU for the rest. But he received a text message from them demanding payment in full, “and not a penny less.”

  Feng, meanwhile, was made to sign an agreement saying she voluntarily consented to the abortion. On June 2, she was injected with a substance to kill the fetus. She later said, “I could feel the baby jumping around inside me all the time, but then she went still.”

  What happened to Feng was outrageous but not unheard-of. Horrific stories of forced late-term abortions had been making the rounds since the early 1980s, when Stanford anthropology student Steve Mosher personally witnessed several while doing fieldwork in southern China. Mosher published his findings in his book and was kicked out of Stanford’s program. Stanford said it was because Mosher violated anthropological tenets by publishing pictures and names of abortion victims. (A reporter friend of mine said caustically, “Those women’s rights were being violated in a much bigger way.”) Many believed Stanford had caved to pressure from the Chinese government to expel Mosher.

  Such stories receded in the late 1990s as China’s rapid economic rise made it possible for more to afford these fines. But Feng’s case reignited the question and exploded in social media. Her sister-in-law used her cell phone to snap a picture of a dejected Feng lying next to the seven-month-old fetus’s almost perfectly formed body. The graphic image went viral and took the one-child policy debate nationwide. Hundreds of thousands posted online comments calling the family-planning officials barbarous, thuggish, and murderous, although censors quickly deleted most postings. Even many urban Chinese who supported the one-child policy were appalled.

  The reform group seized this opportunity to send an open letter to the National People’s Congress arguing that urgent changes needed to be made to the policy. It came on the heels of a similar appeal sent by a think tank affiliated with China’s Politburo.

  Zhang Erli, the retired family-planning official from the group of reformers, was particularly affected by Feng’s case. He went on television and tearfully apologized to women who’d had to end their pregnancies because of the policy. He said, “I feel quite guilty. Chinese women have made huge sacrifices. A responsible government should repay them.” It was an extraordinary public admission from a former senior government official, especially one who’d worked in the very agency responsible for causing those abortions.

  I met Zhang in Beijing. He had just undergone a course of chemotherapy but looked alert and vigorous. Before joining the National Population and Family Planning Commission, he had been an electronics engineering
professor at Tsinghua University, dubbed “China’s MIT.”

  “It could have been a better policy,” Zhang said. “I could say this now, but it is already useless.”

  After more than a decade of behind-the-scenes lobbying, Beijing announced in 2013 it would fold the Population and Family Planning Commission into the Ministry of Health. This move cut the institutional legs out from under the commission and was widely interpreted as a prelude to the slow phasing out of the one-child policy.

  Later that year, the government announced it would further loosen nationwide one-child restrictions by allowing all dandu couples to have a second child.

  It was the first major change made to the policy in well over a decade. Business analysts confidently predicted a new baby boom and a corresponding rise in sales of diapers, milk powder, cars, and even pianos, as if two children couldn’t share a musical instrument.

  Shares at Japanese diaper maker Unicharm shot up 4.2 percent on the first trading day after the dandu announcement and went on to gain 44 percent over the year. (Those analysts turned out to be massively wrong. The number of people who applied for the dandu exclusion was far below official projections.)

  I visited Liang again soon after the dandu announcement. He was peppery.

  “When the policy was published the other day, I received a lot of phone calls. Some are from foreign media. They all sound cheerful. But I asked, ‘What if this policy exists in your country? Will you be cheerful because it’s loosening up a little bit?’” he said. “It’s one step forward, two steps backward.”