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

by Mei Fong

  As a result, the zuoyuezi business will likely go underground or be stamped out. Next on the list may be fertility services that cater to the China market, where, at the high end, consumers spend between $120,000 and $150,000. Some using fertility services may not have infertility issues but use reproductive technologies to have the kind of children they want. This usually means choosing the sex and the number—twins are favored—and screening out genetic diseases. In cases where an egg donor is desired—and where genetic material is passed on—Chinese parents are also trying to select traits like intelligence, height, looks, blood type, even double eyelids.

  “Everybody comes in wanting bright, but every culture will choose pretty over bright no matter what they say,” said Wilson-Miller. “But the Chinese almost always want taller, at least five foot five. And they have questions about eyelids; they want to see baby pictures to see if the donor’s had eyelid surgery.”

  Since there aren’t many egg donors of East Asian descent, they usually command a premium, but the incursion of Chinese parents over the past years has driven demand through the roof, say providers. Typically, egg donors get about $6,000 in compensation, but East Asian donors can get twice or even triple that amount. “Every single Chinese donor I get, I could match her for ten cycles,” said Wilson-Miller. (To avoid health risks, donors should not donate more than six cycles, say experts.)

  Almost all of Wilson-Miller’s East Asian egg donors are college students in the United States on student visas. There still aren’t enough to meet demand, which is increasingly leading to a bizarre circularity: egg donors from Taiwan and China are flown to America to help make babies that will be brought back to China.

  When I spoke to Jiang, he was on the verge of arranging for just such a transaction with a Taiwanese donor. Taiwanese donors are favored because they have visa-free entrée into the United States, although recently loosened US visa requirements for Chinese nationals are changing this scenario. “We have to figure out ways to meet demand,” said Wilson-Miller. “We’re not getting enough Chinese donors.”

  Chinese nationals are not the only folks availing themselves of these so-called designer baby techniques. But of all nationalities they are probably the most enthusiastic, and their numbers and economic clout will significantly shape this developing market.

  Due to the one-child policy, Chinese nationals have already been conditioned to think of reproduction as a tool for bettering society and spurring social mobility. The habit of making hard choices in childbearing has become ingrained, and they are already accustomed to controlling for the number and gender of their offspring, while some are even selecting for intelligence, height, and looks via egg donors. From there to “designer babies” is not such a great leap. In a 2012 survey conducted in Changsha City, southwest China, almost four hundred respondents were asked what kind of genetic screening they would prefer. Over 50 percent of respondents said they would be interested in health-related genetic screening; 23 percent chose “eugenics,” meaning screening for brighter kids.

  What happens if genetic screening for intelligence really becomes available? Research in this area is already happening. In 2013, researchers at BGI Shenzhen, the largest gene-sequencing facility in the world, began a project to explore the genetic basis for human intelligence. It’s far from clear if such a thing is possible. Many scientists argue that intelligence is too complex to be isolated to a pure genetic component. BGI Shenzhen certainly has put huge resources and brought together bright minds on this project, including behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin and University of Michigan physicist Steve Hsu. Perhaps the most intriguing member of the group is project head Zhao Bowen, a prodigy who dropped out of high school and coauthored a research paper on the genetic sequencing of cucumbers at the tender age of fifteen. Zhao believes, “People ought to be free to manipulate their children’s IQ. It’s their own choice.”

  The BGI team predicts it will be possible in their lifetimes for people using IVF to select embryos that have better genetic markers for intelligence, thus enabling parents to boost their offspring’s IQs prenatally by up to twenty points.

  Although this scenario is still in the realm of speculation, it makes me uneasy. The one-child policy already widened inequalities in China. If you’re rich, you’re likely to have had more children, with less impunity. What if those children can be smarter, less disease prone, and taller? Then China will draw even closer to the dystopian society envisioned by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where the population is created in the lab and classified. Alphas are rulers, and worker bees like the Epsilons are cognitively stunted and programmed never to aspire above their station.

  In 1995, China passed the National Maternal and Infant Health Law, forbidding couples who had “genetic diseases of a serious nature” to procreate. The conditions listed include mental retardation, mental illness, and seizures. These couples were required to undergo a mandatory premarital medical exam. It was hugely controversial, reviving international criticism that China practices eugenics.

  Actually, the wording of the national law was considered mild. Some provinces had more explicit regulations. In 1988, Gansu Province passed local regulations prohibiting “reproduction of the dull-witted, idiots, or blockheads.” Gansu abolished that law in 2002. Similarly, the National Maternal and Infant Health Law was defanged when requirements for the premarital medical examination were quietly dropped in 2003.

  V

  What happens when the world’s most populous nation has a baby shortage?

  For the past twenty years, China has seen below-replacement birthrates. In the meantime, the problems of a huge elderly population, a labor shortage, and a shortage of women would best be ameliorated by an uptick in births, which isn’t happening and may never happen.

  After over three decades of the one-child policy, the Communist Party has finally taken steps to end it, only to find to its dismay that many middle-class Chinese don’t want more than one child.

  As we saw, in 2013, China allowed more couples to have second children through the dandu exclusion—where at least one half of the couple is a single child—but the take-up has been far below even the most pessimistic projections. Only a tenth of eligible couples applied for permission to have a second child. Even though polls show many couples would like to have two children, many say in practice it’s unaffordable, too stressful, and will impinge on their personal goals too much. Many also view fertility as a strategy for social mobility: by having one child, they can better concentrate their resources and have a more successful child. “It’s actually seen as selfish and bad parenting to have another child,” demographer Ma Xiaohong told the Washington Post.

  In that sense, the one-child policy can be judged a huge success, for it changed the mindset of Chinese people. A young friend said, “For years, the government has been educating its people that birth planning is the best family style. It means wealth, happiness, and a less crowded society. I think such propaganda is very successful. And this one-child policy does improve a lot of families’ life standards. For me, brought up in a one-child family, it seems natural to bear only one child.”

  Perhaps proof of the one-child policy’s effectiveness is obsolescence: in demographer Ma’s survey on why Chinese parents have just one child, 60 percent said the one-child policy had nothing to do with their decision.

  Harvard University professor Susan Greenhalgh has argued that China’s rapid fertility decline has less to do with the physical coercive tactics employed by officials, and more to do with Chinese society’s view that controlling fertility could lead to upward mobility. In terms of reproduction, “the Chinese represent a case of extreme economic rationalism,” wrote Greenhalgh.

  In Huxley’s Brave New World, the dictator Mustapha Mond argues that the world is better run when children are hatched in labs. “The world’s stable now. People are happy, they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never
ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers.”

  In a paean to human irrationality, the hero, the Savage, defiantly replies, “But I don’t want comfort. I want God. I want poetry. I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.”

  In time, China’s problem will become that of every other major East Asian economy: a dwindling population. It’s a problem almost all developed countries are facing. Countries that switched from anti-natalist to pro-natalist policies have so far found that turning on the baby tap is far more difficult than turning it off.

  By 2025, India will overtake China as the world’s most populous nation, a crown China is only too happy to relinquish. Somewhere in the decade between 2020 and 2030 China’s absolute population will hit its peak and start to decline. By 2100, China’s population could have declined back to 1950 levels of about 500 million, according to academic Chen Youhua’s projections.

  Perhaps the Communist Party can turn the tide. It did, after all, launch the most successful campaign against childbearing in modern history. But I suspect it will be hard, if not impossible. The idea of approaching childbearing with a mindset that is three parts calculation has become ingrained in China’s psyche. In the end, perhaps the greatest damage inflicted by the one-child policy is how it forced people to think rationally—perhaps too rationally—about parenthood, a great leap into the unknown with an infinite capacity to stretch our understanding of what it means to live and love.

  Epilogue

  The IVF treatment in China didn’t work. I didn’t get pregnant.

  In essence, IVF boils down to putting the best egg and the best sperm together in a lab. Theoretically, this makes conception a bit of a slam dunk, like giving a footrace competitor a bicycle. However, the next stage, implanting the embryo and waiting to see if a healthy pregnancy results, is something science still cannot control.

  Sometimes it takes, sometimes it doesn’t. I wasn’t “taking,” or catching fire, or sparking, and the reason why I couldn’t was as much a mystery to my doctors as it was to me.

  So I made the radical decision to leave my job and leave China. I had hoped I could continue my work and still be a mother, but it wasn’t happening. Deep down, I had half-acknowledged fears that a deadline-driven lifestyle and life in polluted Beijing were to blame. I had to stop, learn how to stand still.

  In late 2009, we traded China’s landlocked capital for Venice Beach. There couldn’t be a more stark contrast. Instead of Beijing smog, we had fog rolling off the Pacific coast. Instead of a sea of commuting brunets, I saw blonds and Rastafarians ambling in the California sunshine, smelling of weed.

  I missed Beijing, which, for all its inconveniences, was enormously exciting, with surprising pockets of tranquillity. I yearned to ride my bike around the moat surrounding the Forbidden City, watching open-air barbers plying their trade under the shadow of weeping willows. Living in Beijing, you could never take things for granted. Every blue-sky day was a benediction. It tightened the sinews but also sharpened the senses. Now I was cocooned in cotton wool.

  Echoes from my old life lingered. I would freeze at crosswalks, surprised that cars actually stopped for pedestrians. At a checkup, my doctor detected a rattle in my lungs and told me to stop smoking. (I don’t, never have.) I could drink tap water again, and the fluoride helped my teeth shed the yellow sheen they had acquired after years of drinking bottled water.

  I started prenatal yoga classes with women who wanted at-home water births and didn’t believe in the measles vaccine. When I told my Mommy N’ Me group that my birth plan involved drugs, “and lots of them,” the women looked at me pityingly as they composed themselves in graceful asanas.

  I stopped reflexively checking the news and tried to will myself into a state of Buddha-like calm. I started IVF again.

  I like to think I nobly refrained from making the sort of cool, calculated choices that made me so uneasy: prescreening for genetic diseases, choosing for gender, choosing multiples. Truth is, it didn’t occur to me. I had such a hard time getting pregnant, it never entered my mind to pick at the salad bar of reproductive choices. So I didn’t go in saying I wanted twins, or boys, but that’s what I ended up with.

  In 2010, my twin boys were born. First came little Eternal Virtue, followed one minute later by Steadfast Virtue.

  Ever dramatic, Steadfast lifted his little arms high, a graceful pirouette as the surgeon lifted him out of me. It was a perfect photo op. They looked like plucked chickens, and they were beautiful.

  I observed the confinement month, with baths and outdoor walks, reveling in an orgy of baby worship. I watched Steadfast and Eternal plump up, developing chunky thighs I loved to squeeze. Those long summer afternoons under the ceiling fan, two drowsy babies at my side, will live on in my mind as one of the most peaceful periods of my life.

  When I look at the turn my life has taken, I hardly recognize who I’ve become. There are no more sudden jaunts to trouble spots, no quickening of the pulse for a fast-breaking story. I must stay rooted, I must give of myself, I must lose myself.

  As the youngest in my family, I had nieces and nephews long before I had children of my own. To my family, I was the exciting aunt, the one who went to exotic places and brought them unusual souvenirs, the one who scuba-dived in oil spills and talked her way into places she wasn’t supposed to go. A nephew once told me, “Don’t have children, Auntie Mei. Then you’ll be boring.” Well, I have children now, and I am boring. What was it that P. J. O’Rourke said? “Don’t try and come on like Jean-Paul Belmondo/Aspire instead to two kids and a condo.”

  At bedtime, I tell my children stories. Some are Chinese folktales, like the tale of the archer who shoots nine suns from the sky, or Chang-O, the lady on the moon. There are the old chestnuts from Grimm or Andersen. For Eternal and Steadfast, the most successful tales are frequently the most bloodthirsty. There is something that seizes their imagination when I say, “And then, he slew him,” even though they have yet to understand what this means. In this magic landscape, mothers exit, stepmothers appear, children are cast out, eternally hungry wolves prowl.

  One day, I will tell them about a country once so poor, an emperor ruled that each family could have only one child. Of how a great sadness came over the land, and how people gave away their children, or stole other people’s, or sought the help of magicians to make their single precious child the strongest and brightest they could. And how it came to pass that there were fewer and fewer babies born to the land, and it became a country of the old.

  I don’t know the ending to this story.

  And then I lie awake as they sleep, the steady rhythm of their breathing the most peaceful and frightening sound in the world.

  Acknowledgments

  This book is the culmination of two decades of reporting in Asia and a lifetime as a Chinese daughter.

  When I started off as a reporter in tiny Singapore, I found to my dismay that people were invariably afraid to be quoted. In an island with a population of 5 million and tough libel laws, there was justifiable fear of giving offense. So first and foremost I give thanks to the many who shared their stories with me. This book could not have been written without their candor and generosity.

  In writing this book I had to learn about topics as diverse as dem-ographics and hospice care, and I am extremely grateful to the folks who shared their expertise: Wang Feng, Cao Yu, Dan Goodkind, Nicholas Eberstadt, Bill Lavely, Wu Youshui, Liang Zhongtang, Zhang Erli, Joshua Kurtzig, Zhao Yaohui, Lena Edlund, Lisa Cameron, Vanessa Fong, Arthur Kroeber, Joan Kaufman, Matthew Connelly, Chen Hong, Jennifer Lee, Changfu Chang, Jamie Metzl, Tex Cox, Harry Wu, Steve Mosher, and Clayton Dube. I am also much indebted to the works of Susan Greenhalgh and Thomas Scharping in researching the history of China’s population policies.

  I owe much gratitude as well to friends and fellow writers and reporters who offered valuable critiques of early drafts: E
velyn Iritani, Andrew Batson, Matt Richards, Sebastian Tong, Peter Herford, Liu Shuang, Ron Orol, Kathleen McLaughlin, Lucy Hornby, Kathy Chen, Geoff Fowler, Kevin Voigt, Doug Young, Amanda Whitfort, Alison DeSouza, Carla Sapsford, Ian Johnson, Scott Tong, Rob Schmitz, Eva Woo, Joy Chen, Isaac Stone Fish, Gary Okihiro, Marina Henriquez, Carol Quinn, Hessie Nguyen, and Barry Newman. Many thanks as well to various friends for their warm hospitality on reporting trips, including Marsha Cooke, Gu Qiao, Robin and Jasmine Lewis, and Sue Ward.

  Thank you as well to Will Schwalbe, Matthew Pang, Peter Ford, Evan Osnos, Martin Roessingh, Tiff Roberts, Deb and Jim Fallows, Jes Randrup Nielsen, Mara Hvistandahl, Ching-Ching Ni, Leta Hong Fincher, Anthony Kuhn, Peh Shing Huei, Li Yuan, Jonathan Kaufman, Hao Wu, Emily Rauhala, Duncan Clark, Richard Burger, Jerome Cohen, Patrick Radden Keefe, Peter Cohn, Sara Dorow, Patty Meier, Patti Smith, Jena Martinberg, Didi Kirsten Tatlow, Mitchell Zuckoff, and FB groups APA Media Mavens and Asian/Pacific Islander Women Writers for valuable advice, contacts, and insight.

  To my former boss, Rebecca Blumenstein, heartfelt thanks for guiding a Malaysian to an unhoped-for prize, the Pulitzer; huzzahs to all my Hong Kong and China bureau colleagues, a dream team so fantastic they basically ruined me for any other journalism gig. And to the foreign press corps in China, my fervent hope that Beijing will loosen visa restrictions so you can continue your valuable work.

  This book could not have been written without the company of and valuable input from researchers: Kersten Zhang, Ellen Zhu, Sue Feng, Gao Sen, Helena Yu, Yan Shuang, Hu Pan, Violet Tian, Echo Xie, Brandon Yu, Janet Lundblad, Fu Tao, Shako Liu, and Cecilia Xie; special thanks to those of you who uncomplainingly accompanied me on travel that was frequently uncomfortable, and sometimes hazardous.

  I would probably have languished as an indifferent piano instructor in Kuala Lumpur without crucial early encouragement from teachers, editors, and mentors such as Constance Singam, Yeap Gaik Koon, Laura Abraham, Junie Simon, Lee Ching Pei, Charlie Letts, Gopal Baratham, Tan Wang Joo, 8 Days’ Michael Chiang, Rahul Pathak, NUS’s Robbie Goh and Susan Ang, and Bill Berkeley and Dave Fondiller at Columbia, as well as the aid of scholarships from Singapore Press Holdings and the Lee Foundation.