On a cold night in October last year, the leaders of China announced the end of the one-child policy in Beijing, one of the most profound and large-scale experiments that a government has imposed on its people.
My generation is not the only product of the one-child policy. For many, the policy, which came into effect in China in 1980, has already dictated their family structure. People don’t just start reproducing when the state says they can. Some of my older friends wanted more children, but now they mostly say they’ve long given up on the idea.
Mei Fong’s new book One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment gives a worthy overview of the policy. Fong, a former Wall Street Journal China correspondent, ranges widely across modern Chinese society, from the Sichuan earthquake to the foreign adoption of baby girls.
Yet the author’s ambition for scope is partly to blame for the book’s downfall. One Child is at points insightful, particularly with first-hand interviews, such as in the story of Yicheng, a city where a two-child policy was “secretly” trialled for decades. But the narrative fails to deliver the same momentum in other areas, parroting widely used arguments from the western media in a way that lacks intellectual curiosity. Oversimplified assertions are made and at times, the book wanders off into loosely associated topics (for example, the far-fetched attempt to link the growing sex doll industry to the lack of real women).
What is missing is a fresh perspective on how facts and figures could be interpreted given China’s rapid evolution and complex social reality. The book also failsto delve into the cultural mindsets and attitudes, particularly of those hardest hit by the policy: China’s women.
Read more on China:
Will China's currency crash the global economy?
Will China drag down the world economy?
Fong pitches the one-child policy as a cold-hearted calculation by leaders thought up with little reference to reality, or regard for side effects. The latter may have been true. Yet it is also worth considering the predicament that the country faced in the 1970s.
As the author acknowledges, the nation had been flung from one disastrous policy to another in the preceding decades. Each policy experiment was the brainchild of Chairman Mao—and each had gone terribly wrong. The Great Leap Forward (1958-60), an attempt to modernise the economy by industrialisation and collective agriculture, resulted in famine and a death toll estimated at up to 45m people. Its devastation was so inconceivable that my grandfather refused to believe the stories from his home province of Henan, the worst affected region.
A few years later, in the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), Mao attacked traditional and bourgeois elements of Chinese society and urged its youth to impose ideological purity. Thus a beleaguered people shattered its own social order—students beat up teachers, children were pitted against their parents, and spouses turned on each other.
And on population, Mao’s policy was “the more people, the stronger we are.” The population doubled in size between 1949 and 1978 to nearly 1bn people. The import of contraceptives was banned and the fertility rate peaked at six children per woman.
By the time of Mao’s death in 1976, the country was mired in poverty. A ballooning population was threatening—in the eyes of both China’s new leaders and foreign scholars, who predicted a demographic time bomb—to plunge China back into darkness.
The precursor to the one child policy, “Late, Long and Few” (wan, xi, shao) halved population growth in the seven years from 1969. This campaign encouraged people to marry later and space out births. It is often championed as a less brutal alternative that would have worked given enough time.
Yet in reality, force and coercive tactics were already at play. Women with two children were pressurised to abort pregnancies, even late in term. And despite such measures, the impact of the campaign petered off at around three children per woman in a case of diminishing returns.
In 1979, the population was still growing at 1.2 per cent annually. Still reeling from Mao’s upheavals, China’s leaders didn’t have the patience—or perhaps the guts—to wait it out. The country shifted first towards a voluntary one-child model. There were initial signs of success, but in China, offspring are considered a security net, meant to support their parents in old age, and society refused to bend further. So the draconian one-child policy was imposed (rural families could often have two children) for the 35 years.
Today, one of the biggest problems stemming from the one-child policy is China’s gender imbalance—there are around 119 boys born to every 100 girls, the result of gender selection. These figures are alarming and demographers have long predicted that the surplus of men will lead to increasing violence and instability. Yet so far, there is little evidence of increased crime.
In One Child, Fong looks at the phenomenon of “bachelor villages,” in which men struggle to find wives. These are a favourite journalistic case study—but a flawed one. There are gender gaps in villages because many young women leave to work in the city. The empowerment of women is the real culprit, as it is behind much of the narrative on gender imbalance. Highly educated women in cities actually struggle to find husbands.
Attributing a rapidly ageing population and diminishing workforce to the one-child policy is also unfair. The goal of birth control policies was to reduce population growth—drastically and quickly. Success of any kind would inevitably come at the cost of a balanced demographic. Many observers, however, fault the policy for making decline happen too fast, while simultaneously claiming that alternative policies would have cut population growth more effectively.
The more relevant question is why the policy persisted for so long, given the foreseeable issues. Clearly the leadership was not willing to tweak anything that would jeopardise China’s “miraculous growth” until recently. In a farcical attempt to loosen control in 2013, the government allowed couples to have a second child if either one of them was an only child. This was not only arbitrary, but it effectively punished rural couples for decisions their parents made, which, ironically, were likely made with state approval.
Restrictions on family size remain. But so far, a tenth of the predicted numbers of families have applied for a second child. Ultimately, restrictions should be removed entirely.
In the future, if I have only one child, my child will have no cousins or siblings. China not only needs more children for the next generation’s wellbeing, but women need to be given back the reins on reproduction. Only then will the modern Chinese family begin to reinvent itself.
