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

by Mei Fong

On September 25, 1980, China’s Communist Party unveiled this plan through an open letter that asked members to voluntarily limit their family size to one child. The request was, in truth, an order.

By 2050, one out of every four people in China will be over sixty-five.

After all, the United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but contributes about 15 percent of the world’s carbon emissions.

Two sorts of errors are absolutely commonplace. The first of these is the idiotic belief that seismic events are somehow “timed” to express the will of God. People will seriously attempt to guess what sin or which profanity led to the verdict of the tectonic plates. —Christopher Hitchens

China’s one-child policy so tilted gender and age imbalances that in a little under a decade there will be more Chinese bachelors than Saudi Arabians, more Chinese retirees than Europeans.

Anyone over the age of sixty in China will have a hardship tale to tell, but one that still sticks in my mind is an anecdote by Chinese journalist Xinran Xue. She once visited a family so poor, they rotated one set of clothing among four children. The rest would lie naked under a blanket, happily dreaming of their turn to “wear the clothes.”

Exam taking became so ingrained in Chinese culture that in Yunnan Province, a local dish called Crossing Bridge Noodles was said to have been developed specifically for cramming scholars. As the story goes, a wife used to walk across a bridge to deliver a nocturnal noodle snack to her husband, who was up late studying. The noodles, however, cooled before she crossed the bridge. So she devised a way of keeping the dish hot with an insulating layer of oil. True or not, the story says a lot about national obsessions. Consider, by comparison, the English, whose contribution to the culinary world—the sandwich—came about through a desire to gamble unimpeded.

While suicide rates in China among the young and college-going lag behind those of Japan, the United States, and Russia, test-taking pressure does take its toll. A 2014 Chinese government report looking at seventy-nine cases of suicide among students concluded that over 90 percent were caused by the pressures of China’s test-oriented educational system. Sixty-three percent of the suicides occurred between February and July, when the gaokao and other important exams are held.

In China, the legal age for marriage for women is twenty (twenty-two for men).

By 2020, China will have 30 to 40 million surplus men. The country’s population of single men will equal or surpass the number of Canadians or Saudi Arabians in the world. Ten years later, one in four men in China will be a low-skilled bachelor.

(The global average is 105 boys to every 100 girls, seen as Nature’s way of compensating for risky male behavior, which makes boys more likely to die earlier.)

With the current gender imbalance, women are certainly more valuable, but not necessarily more valued.

“If they were their own country, China’s senior citizens would be the third largest country in the world, behind only India and China itself.”

(Long lines at China’s big hospitals are so endemic, it’s common practice to hire people to stand in line for you.)

I came to discover that a lot of adoptions are done in the interest of the parents, not the children. Everybody has the right to want children, but you don’t have the right to children. Children have the right to parents.”

There’s nothing surer, The rich get rich and the poor get children. —Richard A. Whiting, Raymond B. Egan, and Gus Kahn, “Ain’t We Got Fun”

the United States is one of the few countries that require its citizens to pay taxes even when they’re living elsewhere.