One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment
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Gao testified before a congressional hearing in 1989, providing a trove of documents, video, and pictures detailing the inner workings of birth planning in her district, Yonghe Town, in southern China’s Fujian Province. She laid bare a system of coercion that ranged from detaining those who resisted and their relatives, to property destruction and late-term forced abortions.
Gao described how she once turned in a woman without a birth permit who was nine months pregnant. “In the operating room, I saw how the child’s lips were moving and how its arms and legs were also moving. The doctor injected poison into its skull and the child died and it was thrown into the trash can.”
Gao now lives in a West Coast suburb. She agreed to meet me provided I did not reveal where she lives, for her neighbors don’t know her past.
After her testimony, Gao said, some colleagues and relatives were beaten and arrested. She claimed one colleague was beaten to death, and another was raped. I could not independently verify these claims. Soon after her testimony, state-run news agency Xinhua ran a report saying Gao and her husband had defaulted on loans and were wanted for suspected fraud.
Gao maintains these charges are trumped up. “If I have a lot of money, why would I live such a miserable life now? I work as a domestic helper and my hands can hardly lift heavy things anymore,” she said.
It was just after Halloween, and the woman who once described herself as a “monster” was talking about giving out candy to the neighborhood children. “They just kept ringing the doorbell all night long,” she said good-humoredly.
Gao lives in a double-story home decorated with cartoon posters and Taiwanese lucky-knot wall hangings. A massive leatherette massage chair holds pride of place, next to a Lion King poster proclaiming that immortal what-me-worry message, “Hakuna Matata.”
It’s a far cry from the stark cell where she used to lock people up. Her detainees were usually relatives of women with unapproved pregnancies, whom Gao would imprison until these women turned themselves in. Jailing elderly parents was most effective, she said. “Few people could feel good, knowing their old mother was in prison because of them,” she said. Detainees were kept in “black jails” in a building adjacent to the birth-planning office and charged a little over $1 daily for food. They were not allowed to make phone calls or mail letters and were sometimes kept for months at a time.
Gao also described a wage incentive for birth-planning officials, which was tied to how many sterilizations and abortions they were able to achieve. These bonuses could amount to as much as half their base pay, which was relatively modest. “That’s why everyone is so keen to arrest people. The more you arrest, the more bonus you earn,” she said. (Officials I interviewed in other parts of China also described similar bonus systems.) Even doctors would be incentivized to perform more abortions to increase the size of their bonus, said Gao. “Some girls were forced to get surgeries even though they weren’t pregnant at all,” she claimed.
With such a system, surely there was vast potential for bribery? Yes, said Gao, though she claimed she herself never took any bribes. A common form of bribery was to pay officials for a certificate stating that its bearer was not pregnant. This was needed by people traveling or working outside Yonghe. Since officers had discretion in determining the magnitude of fines, it was common to siphon some of this money away, or take fines without issuing receipts. Gao remembers a colleague who “lost” an entire book of receipts.
Throughout her litany of horrors, Gao reiterated that she had no choice, that she was just doing her job. At the time, she tried to compartmentalize her life. There was her job, where “I was a monster in the daytime,” and her personal life, where she was a wife and mother. Even there she could not entirely escape, for she herself was in violation of the one-child policy. After the birth of her daughter, she secretly adopted a son. For years, she hid him in relatives’ homes and never allowed him to call her “Mother” in public.
Now Gao’s family is with her in the United States. Since leaving China, she has given birth to another son, cementing her ties to America. Still, she considers herself hard done by, and her residency situation is still precarious. She was brought into the country through the help of pro-life lobbyists, her testimony part of their efforts to get the US administration to defund the United Nations Population Fund. After her testimony, Gao sought but was denied political asylum, since US law grants asylum only to victims of persecution. With the help of her sponsors, she has the right to work in the United States but does not have a green card or a US passport. Speaking little English, she can only hold menial jobs and isn’t able to travel outside the country. She cannot visit her mother, who is very old and very sick, she said.
“In the end, I tried to do the right thing. Must I always be punished?” she said, eyes swimming.
As expiation, she recounted how she stepped in to save the lives of three infants. These were babies born alive even after their mothers were injected with chemical solutions to induce late-term abortions. “I would secretly wrap them up and give them to their fathers. I told them to put the child in their bags, as if it was a thing, not a baby, and not to open the bag when they left, so they could get away,” said Gao, sobbing.
Against those few lives, Gao, by her own reckoning, was personally responsible for about 1,500 abortions, of which about a third were late-term.
IV
The coercion Gao described is wrenching, but is it just one extreme example, far from the norm? How widespread were such tactics? And how long did they persist?
Up until the early 2000s, at least, many international actors chose to believe that adherence to the one-child policy was voluntary, despite growing evidence to the contrary. In 1983, the first-ever United Nations Population Award medals, for individuals who had made “outstanding contributions” to solving population issues, were conferred on Indira Gandhi—she of the forced sterilizations—and China’s minister of population planning, Qian Xinzhong.
As awards go, it was akin to the Nobel Peace Prize committee giving Yasser Arafat the nod. It is still a source of embarrassment to the UNFPA, but it did not stop former head Nafis Sadik from accepting an award from the Chinese government in 2002. Dr. Sadik said she believed harsh enforcement of the one-child policy to be rare, thanks in large part to the UNFPA’s collaboration with Beijing. Because of the one-child policy, the US government seesawed between giving and withholding contributions to the UNFPA.
Former UN and other nongovernmental officials I spoke to privately said they worked hard behind the scenes to get China’s birth planners to move toward a more service-oriented system. When I spoke to them, Beijing appeared to be cautiously exploring these avenues, including a pilot project to turn enforcers into parenting counselors. But such efforts were still limited.
Logic dictates that as long as the one-child system endured, and quotas and targets were imposed, coercion continued. As recently as 2010, a mass sterilization campaign for close to ten thousand people was held in Puning City, Guangdong. According to Amnesty International, almost 1,400 relatives of couples targeted for sterilization were detained, to pressure these couples to consent.
I believe, however, that the nature of this abuse increasingly shifted away from forced abortions and sterilizations toward stiffer enforcement of fines. This was partly because these so-called social compensation fees (shehui fuyangfei) grew to become a major source of revenue for many counties, especially poorer ones. Over the past decade China implemented land tax reforms, requiring provinces to hand over income to the national treasury for redistribution. In practice, this meant that lower-level county and village governments lost almost all independent sources of income. The one exception was birth fines, which did not have to be handed over to the central government. “It’s a common saying, for money, ‘Big cities depend on land, small towns depend on birth planning,’” said journalist Matthew Pang, who exhaustively documented such abuses by family-planning officials in a small town in Hunan.
“The numbers are definitely fake. Few of them are real,” he said. Lending credence to his assertion is the provinces’ refusal to account for how the money was spent, information he has also repeatedly requested and no province has yet supplied.
The term social compensation fee is a relatively new one, adopted in 2000. Before that, fines were called “excess birth fines” or “unplanned birth fees,” but the new term suggests the money would be put to use to help cover the costs of extra children to society. But family-planning officials I spoke to say the money from birth fines—no matter what they are called—was spent on office maintenance, personnel, sometimes entertainment expenses, or funneled to other departments. A detailed accounting is almost impossible.
I met Lawyer Wu in his offices in a suburb of Hangzhou, the city that in Marco Polo’s time held the biggest population in the world and is now home to a variety of tech companies, including e-commerce giant Alibaba. That sheen has not rubbed off on Wu’s practice. It is a small one, located on a floor along with many small real estate businesses, some covered with Out of Business signs.
Wu, a small, erect man with a whisper of a mustache, is someone whose personal history has intersected with China’s family planning in a variety of ways. As a teenager, he remembers walking home and seeing women rounded up for a mass sterilization run. Some resisted by stripping off the local official’s pants. “They said, ‘You sterilize me, I sterilize you,’” he recalled. “But they were all sterilized in the end, forcibly.”
The youngest of eight children—three of whom died during the Great Famine years—Wu has a brother whose fourth child was forcibly aborted, as well as a sister who worked in the family-planning sector. “She helped to bury all the dead babies.”
Wu, a Christian, said he first became interested in the issue of social compensation fees during a business trip to a neighboring province. He noticed that many people there appeared to have three or four children. Locals told him that authorities actually encouraged violations so they could collect more fines.
In 2013, spurred by a belief that the family-planning commission’s power was waning following Beijing’s decision to fold the department into the Ministry of Health, Wu submitted his requests for information to each province. After that, he began doing pro bono work for clients who wanted to challenge the one-child policy.
Wu admitted his requests were by nature something of a Trojan horse maneuver, designed to challenge the issue of social compensation itself and draw focus to a wide variety of illegal practices within the family-planning policy. Wu said his actions were intended to “open up the space for discussion about family-planning policy.” “I raised questions with this application. It is a start.”
For example, it was technically illegal for the population police to use force or promote late-term abortions. Nor was it legal for authorities to deny household registration, hukou, to children born out of plan. But without such punishments it would have been impossible to enforce the one-child policy, said officials.
In the past three years, legal challenges to the one-child policy mounted, something that was previously almost unheard-of. About a third of these lawsuits protested the social compensation fee amounts incurred, while the rest involved out-of-plan children who’d been denied hukous, as well as people who’d lost their jobs over one-child policy violations.
Most cases were dismissed and never made it to court. Claimants, however, saw glimmers of hope in a 2013 ruling. Two provinces, Shandong and Jiangxi, ruled that hukous must be issued regardless of whether social compensation fees had been paid or not. (This was actually a reiteration of an existing nationwide regulation that was obviously not always followed.) It is a contentious issue for crowded cities like Beijing and Shanghai, anxious to limit the number of residents drawing on their social services and resources. (A Beijing hukou, for example, is much coveted and can be worth over $100,000 on the black market.) With an estimated 13 million people without hukous in China—most related to violations of the one-child policy—resolving this will be a major headache for authorities in years to come.
Wu said he was not worried about official repercussions. I reminded him of the fate of activist Chen Guangcheng. In 2005, Chen filed a class-action lawsuit against the city’s family-planning staff challenging coercive measures endured by pregnant women in his home province. Chen, who is blind, served jail time and was under house arrest for years before making a dramatic escape to the US embassy in 2012. He now lives in America, but his family members in China are still persecuted, he says.
Wu thought he can avoid Chen’s fate by carefully picking “safe” topics, such as social compensation, which in general was hugely unpopular and, he believed, less politically volatile than abortions. He called the one-child policy “anti-human, illegal, and unreasonable,” but added, referring to the then-powerful family-planning apparatus, “I need to come up with ideas to talk about the issue in a nonsensitive way, but still make a fuss.”
In July 2015, Beijing began a crackdown on human rights lawyers, detaining over two hundred lawyers and associates over charges that they have exploited contentious issues and destabilized society. At the time of writing this book, Wu is still at liberty but says he faces strong pressure to tone down his legal challenges. He now says, “All who pursue rule of law” are at risk. “Because from the present situation, you can never tell where is the government’s bottom line. Moreover, the line itself is ever-changing.”
V
The most memorable discussion I had on the workings of the population police came during a chance discussion with a man I’ll call Uncle Li.
Uncle Li was a relative of a friend, a businessman who’d volunteered to give us a ride to a neighboring town. He’d come to pick us up in his black Audi, a man in his late forties dressed in the uniform of moderately prosperous urban Chinese men—polo shirt, collar modishly flipped up, big clunky watch with many complicated dials, leather man-bag. I was just admiring how well kept his car was, with tiny pouches holding sunshades, tissue boxes, and mineral water, and little bow-shaped pillow headrests, when we started talking.
It turned out that in 1994, Uncle Li’s first job out of college was as a county-level administrator. He became quite chatty talking about it. Meeting population targets was part of his job, and the most important one because of yipiaofoujue, he said.
“If they couldn’t pay, then you would confiscate some things of value in the home, but they were never such expensive things because villagers were poor—just things like grain, or homespun cloth,” he remembered. “Sometimes, we would climb up the roofs and make a hole, to show we meant business, or knock down some windows,” he recounted. In his province, the one-child policy was taken very seriously, so fines were heavily punitive.
We stopped for lunch, and he continued talking, quite cheerfully, about property damage, confiscations, and pay scales. I didn’t want to interrupt the flow, but at the back of my mind I was dying to ask the big question: How could you bear to be so beastly every day?
Finally, I ventured, “Doing this job must be hard, since people don’t want to do as you say.”
He fell silent. Then he said, “There’s this one incident I’ll never forget.
“I was twenty-four, and we had heard of a woman pregnant with an out-of-plan baby who had run away to a neighboring village. So we made preparations to catch her at night. I got together a team of six or seven people. We surrounded the house. We were very quiet, but I don’t know, somehow she must have heard something—maybe voices—because she ran.”
“How many months was she?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but she looked pretty big. She ran and ran and ran until she came
to a pond. Then she ran in, until the water was at her neck”—his hand sliced his Adam’s apple. “She stood there and began to cry.”
I was transfixed by the picture he’d painted. The woman with her bellyful of child, keening in the dark, officials circling the water hole like predators.
“What happened?”
He looked away. “Please, wait a moment,” he said. The cheery insouciance was gone.
“She said a lot of things. She said she needed to have this baby. She would never have any peace, and her husband and her mother-in-law would never treat her well, until she had a son.”
He lit a cigarette, clearing his throat.
“Finally, two women officials waded in and took her away.”
We were silent.
“Why did this one incident stay with you, when you must have had so many of these encounters?” I asked.
“Maybe it was because I was young,” he said, slowly. “I felt we were doing wrong, but I had no choice. Later, I was promoted and left the area.”
That night, I was so moved by the story that I related it to a former student of mine whom I was meeting for drinks. She had grown up in the area and was now a PhD student in America. I thought the anecdote was powerful, but I figured she must have heard similar stories all her life.
She listened, her eyes widening.
“But you must have heard these stories before. What about your schoolmates? Surely some must have come from the countryside and told these stories?” I asked in surprise.
She knew, of course, the contours of the one-child policy. But the brutal vividness of this tale was something else. “You must understand,” she said. “I went to Renmin University. To get there I had to go to a top high school, and a top middle school, and those kinds of places are not easy for children from the countryside to get into. Most of my friends and classmates were like me, middle-class, children from the city.”