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

by Mei Fong

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

the time the one-child policy entered its third decade, experts estimated that only about a third of the population faced strict one-child limitations, and it had become increasingly easy for people to afford the fines for a second or third child.

Being a mother must be the saddest yet the most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end. —Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years

Their clientele were yuppies, many experiencing infertility because of delayed childbearing, like me. They had many cases of clients having difficulties conceiving, having scarred their tubes through multiple abortions. This was an unexpected byproduct of the one-child policy, because many use abortion as a form of birth control. For a nation so open about controlling one of the aftereffects of sex, the Chinese were surprisingly prudish when it came to teaching youngsters about the birds and the bees. Fewer than 1 percent of China’s schools provide sex education. The one-child policy regulated births on the assumption that all this procreation was going on between married couples. There was little leeway for underage pregnancy, or unmarried mothers, or women who’d simply gotten pregnant before the official waiting period elapsed. If it didn’t fit the rules, the policy’s answer was almost always: pay or abort.

been. Medical advances have allowed us to stretch our fertile years beyond what Mother Nature intended, but they are still finite, something the one-child policy does not take into account.

To prevent sex-selective abortions, medical staff are prohibited from revealing the gender to expectant parents. Of course, you can get around it. I might make oblique hints, give a red packet “donation,” perhaps be handed a pink sweet, or a blue. The physician might cough, signifying a girl, or nod, for a boy. That is how things work when the state regulates your womb.

Spotting his potential early on, sports officials fruitlessly lobbied for Yao’s parents to be given an exemption to the policy. They’d wanted more Yao champions. Increasingly sports recruiters complain that Chinese parents are reluctant to subject their precious one-and-only to this system, where young athletes are plucked away from their families and relentlessly drilled. Looking at the parade of athletes, I thought it was funny that the one-child policy could eventually spell the end to this sports system.

Sports insiders call this the “Big Ball, Small Ball,” theory, arguing that China can do well only in sports that emphasize precision and mechanization—“Small Ball”—but not in sports that need creativity and teamwork—“Big Ball.” Beyond sports, it’s become a metaphor for everything from China’s education system to its economic prowess.

You could see how children represented so much in rural China. Not just love, but economic security, societal acceptance, affirmation that life holds meaning.

but with no progeny, shidu parents have trouble getting accepted into nursing homes and buying burial plots. They are also more financially vulnerable than ordinary retirees, and more prone to depression, studies show. Everything in Chinese society is geared toward marriage and family. Even if the government limited you to one child, you are still a parent, like almost everyone else you know. The unmarried and the childless are very low on the societal totem pole.

Everything in Chinese society is geared toward marriage and family. Even if the government limited you to one child, you are still a parent, like almost everyone else you know. The unmarried and the childless are very low on the societal totem pole.

Today, Yicheng and its sister counties have gender ratios that are closer to global norms. Birthrates are also below the national average. The two-child allowance also made enforcement of birth quotas—always an unpopular task—easier for Yicheng’s officials.

The logic of curbing births was fairly simple: to grow its per-capita GDP quickly, China would have to raise output and slow down population growth. The latter was obviously easier to do than the former. Deng set a goal of quadrupling China’s per-capita GDP to $1,000 by the year 2000. Working backward, population planners calculated that China could not reach this goal with a two-child policy and needed to tighten restrictions to a one-child-for-all policy. That, in essence, was how the one-child policy came about: an arbitrary economic goal that altered the course of millions of lives.

Deng set a goal of quadrupling China’s per-capita GDP to $1,000 by the year 2000. Working backward, population planners calculated that China could not reach this goal with a two-child policy and needed to tighten restrictions to a one-child-for-all policy. That, in essence, was how the one-child policy came about: an arbitrary economic goal that altered the course of millions of lives.

There was also no adequate political mechanism for those affected to signal their outrage when the full brunt of the one-child campaign kicked in—unlike in India, for example. China also had no deep-seated religious beliefs on birth control or abortion to root out.

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.

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,”

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.

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.

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.

People born in the 1980s are now, at most, 28 years old, and they exercise no real power to speak of, so the damage caused by abuses of power cannot be their fault. If you haven’t wiped your ass properly, don’t try to use the younger generation’s baby hair as toilet paper. —Han Han, This Generation

What happens when the Little Emperor grows up and has to return this attention sixfold, no longer the pyramid’s apex but the base?

At its most elevated, filial piety means putting parents ahead of children; as the thinking goes, you can always have another child, not another mother.

A former student of mine said the Little Emperor generation feel kubi because, compared with cohorts born in the 1970s and 1990s, they are unable to fully reap the benefits of China’s economic growth but bear the brunt of its development.

“Most parents won’t allow their school-age children to date, and many are even opposed to their children dating when in college, but as soon as the kid graduates, the parents pray that all of a sudden, someone perfect in every respect—and if possible with an apartment of their own to boot—will drop out of heaven, and their child must marry them right away. Now, that’s well thought out, isn’t it?”

His father started crying, begging him to come home, said Hanbin. “He said, ‘Your life is too dangerous. Can you please not go on?’” Hanbin couldn’t do it. Referencing Tennessee Williams’s “A Prayer for the Wild at Heart Kept in Cages,” he said, “Everyone has cages but China in particular is a cage. Everyone follows one path, everyone measuring how expensive your apartment is, what school you went to, living up to your parental expectations. . . . I want to define my own life.” Was Hanbin selfish, or were his parents overly invested in their only child?

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

The study of dying is like gazing into a reflecting pool. The waters there reflect back to us the kinds of people we have become. More than ever before then, it is timely to ask the question: what kinds of people have we become? —Allan Kellehear, A Social History of Dying

This kind of transition—more older people, fewer young—is happening almost everywhere in the world, for we now live longer and on balance have fewer children than people did a century ago.

Of all the negative potential repercussions of the one-child policy, this is one we can see happening before our eyes. We don’t know if China’s gender imbalance could lead to a more warlike nation or greater domestic turmoil. We can’t be sure if China’s cohort of Little Emperors could make for a nation of pessimistic, solipsistic, low risk takers. We can’t even be certain of the extent to which the one-child policy will crimp China’s future economic growth.

“What do old people in China want?” The answer was surprisingly easy, and probably much the same as anywhere else. Old people in China want to live at home and maintain their lifestyle and independence as long as they can. More to the point: their children—many of whom pay the lion’s share of bills—also want this, for putting your folks in a nursing home is still stigmatized in China’s Confucian society.

Many nursing homes will not admit shidu couples because they have no progeny to authorize treatments or act as payment guarantors. This form of discrimination appears to extend beyond the grave: some shidu parents complain that cemeteries won’t sell them burial plots—not for them, not even for their deceased children—concerned there will be nobody to pay for future upkeep.

“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 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.

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.