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

by Mei Fong

  The dandu exclusion would affect only a small group of people, he said, and would do little to solve the problems caused by the one-child policy. Many of China’s urban couples are both singleton children, making them already eligible to have two children under then-existing rules.

  “The only time when China talked about how family decides your future was during the Cultural Revolution. After thirty years, we don’t talk about this anymore. Instead, we seek equality and free will. That’s progress. But with this dandu policy, we fall back to the ages when parents’ decisions decide everything. You cannot have a second child because your parents made the decision decades ago to have more than one. It’s not your choice.”

  We sat in silence.

  I glanced at his bookshelves, where there were several pictures of his grandchildren. Both his daughter in England and son in Shanghai opted to have one child each. He had nothing to do with their decisions, he said. I pointed to a picture of Liang in the park with his young grandson. Liang is in a white singlet, looking relaxed. It’s a far cry from the bitter, angry person I saw before me. How would he explain the one-child policy and his legacy to them? I asked.

  He responded promptly, “I will tell them the truth, if they are interested. From how this policy was established, and how it has been applied. I will also tell them the existence of it indicates our country is still at a very low status. That’s why ridiculous policies like the one-child policy exist.”

  The man who once advocated a two-child plan no longer believes there should be any restrictions at all. “I gradually realized it is not about giving birth to one or two children. It is about people making their own decisions.”

  A year later, official numbers showed that only 35 percent of eligible couples had applied for a second child under the dandu exclusion, far fewer than official estimates. So far, the baby boom’s been a bust. Many couples cited the high costs of child rearing as a reason.

  Once again, Cassandra was right. He also had another prediction: the one-child policy would end in less than ten years.

  The Population Police

  Birth planning in China is practiced on a voluntary basis.

  —Zhao Zhiyang

  Civilization is sterilization.

  —Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

  I

  Ma Qingju, or “Green Chrysanthemum,” used to have a board on her wall telling her which of her friends were pregnant. It showed what kind of contraceptives they used; whether they had one or two children; if they were sterilized, pregnant, married, or single. This took the saying “Know thy neighbor” to a new level.

  Green Chrysanthemum was a cheery forty-five-year-old woman who ran the snack shop in a tiny village called Huangjiapu, Yicheng County. Until recently, she also earned an extra $60 a year as a “cluster leader,” keeping track of ten households’ reproductive habits and reporting these details to the village’s family-planning commission.

  “It’s not a difficult job, everybody knows each other so well,” she said. Not one person in her group exceeded the two-child limit, she proudly told me.

  In addition to cluster leaders like Green Chrysanthemum, Huangjiapu, population five hundred, had fifteen full-timers tasked with family-planning matters.

  These village-level offices are the most basic building blocks of China’s birth-planning machinery, a bloated behemoth that goes from some 85 million part-time employees at the grass-roots level all the way up to half a million full-time employees at the National Population and Family Planning Commission. The commission also has its own archives and statistics and propaganda departments; affiliate centers for pharmacological research, film production, and publishing; and a consulting company that handles exhibitions and conferences. Other state organizations such as the military and police have their own internal family-planning units, as do state-owned companies.

  The complexity of this machinery and its reach are partly why Beijing took its time winding down the one-child policy, say analysts. Birth planning had been so baked into the business of ordinary governance, its revenue contributions so necessary, that unwinding all this posed a challenge.

  I went to Yicheng to understand how such a vast machine worked at the basic level. Given the county’s more liberal birth quotas, I was able to get some retired family-planning officials to speak on the record. Many officials had been doing the work since before the onset of the one-child policy in 1980, continuing through the introduction of Yicheng’s special two-child status in 1985. They were able to explain to me the vacillations of the policy, which they themselves found dizzying.

  Green Chrysanthemum, for example, explained that family-planning work was practically unnecessary nowadays, since younger members in her group didn’t even want a second child because of the expense.

  “Everybody wants just one,” she said. Since 1985, only one family in Huangjiapu has had a third child, she said, a relatively wealthy couple with an auto parts business.

  But even with a looser two-child limit there were still rules people found onerous, such as a requirement throughout the 1990s that women be sterilized after the birth of a second child, or a requirement that births must be spaced at least five years apart.

  What if a woman didn’t want more children but would prefer not to be sterilized? What if a couple got pregnant with their second child, say, three years after the first, instead of five? That was when even Yicheng’s benign machinery would show its ugly side, according to Huangjiapu’s former village head Huang Denggao.

  The usual mode of punishment was fines: parents of children born out of plan would be hit with fines between five and ten times their annual disposable income. “If the couple is too poor to pay, we’ll take things from their house, but only in a few cases,” said Huang. TVs were a favorite, he said—worth a villager’s whole annual income—as were tables, bicycles, and washing machines. These items were usually collected by a team of ten part-time enforcers (usually “strong healthy young men”) and sold off, and the proceeds were kept by the township. To Huang, these actions did not count as coercion. Rather, he called such tactics “persuasion.”

  One of the most difficult tasks Huang had to do was persuade women to be sterilized, he said. Many women feared the procedure. Side effects such as excessive bleeding were not uncommon, especially given the conveyor-belt manner in which some of these procedures were done. The village women tried to bargain, said Huang. Some asked to use barrier contraceptives instead, or promised not to have more than two children. “But it was my job to get people to do the operation, or else I would not be able to accomplish my target,” said Huang. “I can’t possibly guarantee they won’t have another baby with just a promise.”

  China in particular favored sterilization because it was a virtually foolproof way of lowering fertility. Nonpermanent barrier methods like condoms, the Pill, and IUDs, which gave individuals more choice and control, were not so trustworthy, even though the IUD used—a stainless steel ring with no string—was specially modified so women could not remove it themselves. In one year alone, 1983, China sterilized over 20 million people, more than the combined population of the three largest US cities, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

  Nowadays, sterilizations are no longer mandatory in Huangjiapu. Such methods are unnecessary, for the little village’s population has fallen from its peak in 1983, when there were almost six hundred inhabitants. In 2008, Huangjiapu’s elementary school was forced to merge with another because there were just seven students, down from fifty in the 1980s. Some of this is due to migration of workers to cities, but most of it is due to dwindling family size, said Huang.

  Throughout my interviews with Yicheng’s family-planning officials, many said they consoled themselves with the thought that they were doing their duty and carrying out an important national directive. Some of this, I felt, was lip service, justification for doing what had to be the most unpopular job in China. There appeared to be few true believers. I felt this strongly talking to
Che Yuelian, the local village medic and family-planning officer in Xiheshui, another small village in Yicheng.

  Che, whose Chinese name means “Moon Lotus,” had been in family-planning work since the 1970s. In those early days, her job consisted of teaching birth control techniques and encouraging people to have smaller families. Many families took exception to a pert twenty-three-year-old giving them advice on sterilization and abortion. “They said, ‘We’ll be grateful to have you help deliver babies, but it is unacceptable for a young woman like you to tell people not to have babies. Mind your own business,’” she said.

  Now in her late sixties, Moon Lotus continues to work in the village clinic, a small courtyard building with maize spread out on the rafters to dry. After administering an intravenous drip to an elderly patient, Moon Lotus, a rotund, deeply tanned woman with piercing eyes, settled down to a cigarette. It was the first of many during a difficult conversation. She was evasive and made it clear she didn’t enjoy my questions.

  Like Huang, she constantly referred to her task as one of “persuasion.” I asked her if she ever persuaded any women with late-term pregnancies to abort. Moon Lotus first replied by saying this was illegal. Later, she said no, she hadn’t. Then she recalled persuading a woman six months along to have an abortion. “She didn’t even know she was six months pregnant, but I could tell just by looking,” she said triumphantly.

  Her first successful case of persuasion was a twenty-seven-year-old mother of two daughters. The woman wanted the operation but feared her in-laws’ disapproval. Moon Lotus secretly escorted her to the operation and gave her a ride back on her bicycle. For her pains, she was verbally abused by the woman’s relatives. “Her mother-in-law cursed me, ‘It’s your own business that your family does not have a son. But I want a grandson to pass down our family name.’” Even Moon Lotus’s parents yelled at her. “But I said, although this job is troublesome, somebody’s got to do it. At that time, people held the old concept of preferring boys to girls and said nobody is going to bury you if you don’t have a son.”

  Even family ties gave way to family-planning imperatives. Moon Lotus’s nephew’s wife became pregnant at twenty-two, two years before the permitted age for a first pregnancy. Get an abortion, said Moon Lotus. “I told her you should set an example for other women, people are watching us.”

  While talking, I learned to my surprise that Moon Lotus herself had four daughters and a son. To be sure, her son, her youngest, was born in 1978, before the one-child policy. But Moon Lotus’s job all these years has been to encourage smaller families and discourage son preference. How did she explain the discrepancy between what she preached and what she practiced?

  At first, she ignored my question. “My circumstances were special,” she finally said, stubbing out her fifth cigarette. “My adoptive parents weren’t in good health. Me neither. They don’t have any children, so I wanted to have a boy so he can take care of me and my parents. I tried to wear an IUD but that made me bleed badly.”

  After the birth of her son, Moon Lotus finally did what she spent years convincing others to do. She had her tubes tied.

  II

  The closer I looked at the workings of the population police, the messier they seemed.

  When the one-child policy was launched in the 1980s, it was clear that enforcement of such a hugely unpopular policy would be difficult. In the beginning, execution of the one-child policy ranged from lax to excessive across China. In some parts of the country, pregnant women without birth permits were marched off in handcuffs to undergo forced abortions. In others, officials ignored or paid mere lip service to these strictures from the central government.

  It didn’t help that other national regulations undercut the one-child policy’s intentions. A new marriage law, also launched in 1980, lowered the legal age of marriage to twenty for women and twenty-two for men. This was done to combat illegal marriage and sex crimes, but of course it also encouraged more unions and, by extension, babies. The move toward agricultural decollectivization also undermined official efforts to enforce the one-child policy. Under collectivism, pay, rations, and other benefits were meted out by village leaders, and bad behavior (having an out-of-plan child, for instance) could be punished directly; new reforms loosened official control over peasants’ livelihoods.

  By 1984, the nationwide one-size-fits-all measure proved so unpopular that the central government was forced to decentralize a large portion of the one-child policy. It circulated new provisions enshrined in what population scholars call Document 7. Document 7 gave each province more power to adapt the one-child policy to local circumstances.

  This was the beginning of a raft of exclusions that made it hard for people within China—never mind outside China—to understand the policy in anything but the broadest strokes, because conditions really were different from place to place. For example, residents in many rural areas were allowed to have a second child, provided their first was not a son—a tacit acknowledgment of the son hunger that was rampant in the countryside. Places like Tibet and Yunnan, with large ethnic minorities, had vastly more liberal policies than more populous provinces like Sichuan and Henan.

  Document 7 was a nod toward making enforcement easier for local authorities. It was not intended to make things easier for the general populace. Authorities called this tactic “opening a small hole to close a big gap,” making small concessions to ensure overall compliance.

  Document 7 did not remedy the lack of transparency and accountability within the system. Local officials had wide discretion in determining how much to fine violators. Sums could range from a multiple of two to ten times annual household income. People had no way of figuring out ahead of time what they were liable for, and two sets of violators, under similar circumstances, might pay vastly different penalties. In 2010, a family-planning official apparently imposed a fine of 5 million RMB, or over $800,000, on a violator. When that person protested, the official allegedly increased the fine, saying, “You are just a piece of meat on the chopping block,” according to local media reports.

  In essence, the central government gave local provinces the message, “Meet your birth quotas; we don’t really care to know how.” They also expected provinces to fund the bulk of population planning on their own. This created a system ripe for corruption.

  Even though Feng Jianmei’s explosive forced abortion story rocked the nation in 2012, no birth-planning official involved actually served a criminal sentence, though several laws were broken. I asked Zhang Erli, who had been a high-ranking, national-level family-planning official, why this was so. He explained the national-level family-planning commission lacked the right to punish local-level family-planning officials. “We can only investigate them and report to the provincial leaders. They have the power to punish or even fire the officer involved, not us.”

  Most on-the-ground family-planning officials told me there was a tacit understanding that they would never face criminal charges for their actions, because maintaining birth control targets was considered a top priority.

  “As long as we kept the quotas, we could do anything: destroy homes, property, jail people, even threaten to confiscate people’s children, and no one would say anything,” one former Sichuan County official told me. (As it turned out, officials in another province did actually confiscate children, which I’ll elaborate on in chapter 8.)

  Adding to the chaos was an internal battle that raged throughout most of the 1980s within China’s leadership. Liberal-minded leaders, who leaned toward a more humane two-child approach, argued with hard-liners, who urged the need to stay the course.

  In 1988, a circular from the National Population and Family Planning Commission spoke of a “crisis in birth planning,” outlining problems such as increasing attacks on overworked birth-planning personnel. Corruption was also a huge issue, with many provinces falsifying reports. There was a growing realization that the 1.2 billion target simply could not be reached, for in 1988, 80 percent of China�
��s provinces had already breached population targets.

  The 1989 student protests at Tiananmen, and the subsequent harsh crackdown, marked the triumph of the hard-liners. Leaders like Zhao Zhiyang, who had championed the two-child experiment at Yicheng, were purged. There would be no softening on birth quotas.

  In 1990, the central government instituted a nationwide accountability system. Called yipiaofoujue (loosely translated as “one-vote veto”), it made birth-planning targets a major objective for all provincial authorities. Officials—not just family-planning specialists but also garden-variety administrators—who did not meet their area’s birth quotas would face sanctions in the form of wage deductions, demotions, or even dismissal. It didn’t matter, for example, if officials met other performance targets. That one black mark from not meeting birth quotas would blot out everything else they’d accomplished.

  Yipiaofoujue became the stick the central government held over provincial officials, and this in turn incited them to harsher acts. Some provinces would impose even tighter quotas, just to be on the safe side. One official told me there were times they would get decrees that made no sense, like “no births within the next hundred days,” which they were obliged to enforce.

  Fines intensified, and not just for unauthorized childbirth. Women were fined for living with a man out of wedlock; for not using contraception, even if it didn’t lead to pregnancy; or simply for not attending regular pregnancy checkups. In Jiangsu, women had to line up twice monthly for pregnancy tests and publicly pee in cups. The birth police weren’t squeamish about how they got the job done, and their methods produced results.

  III

  The woman who really explained the workings of the population police to me was a midlevel family-planning official who fled to the United States over fifteen years ago.