There is a chinese saying: a successful man must have a successful woman, but a successful woman must have many successful men. This old saw is repeated to me by 18-year-old Zhu Zhiang, giggling at her own boldness. "I do not want to get married but I want to have many lovers."
Zhiang and her fellow students, all young women, are sitting around a table in their spartan dormitory at one of Beijing's several universities, discussing their families, lives, work and boys. "If I have a boyfriend or lover, I think maybe I can't pay attention to my study or my work," says Ying, also 18. "I spend all day caring for him. I prefer to be a businesswoman, not a housewife."
"We want to have our own careers," agrees Yuan, aged 19.
In the west, such sentiments are commonplace. But this is China, where until a couple of generations ago women were utterly downtrodden. In the past 10 years China has changed. Women-or at least the university-going elite-are winning power and status. Indeed, Zhiang's generation is the first to gain an education equal to that of men.
Part of this liberation seems to be an unintended consequence of China's one-child policy. In 1970 China's population was growing at the rate of 23.83 per thousand, or about 30m births a year-half the population of Britain. In 1979, under Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese government decided to put in place a brutal policy of social engineering to stop it.
Under the one-child policy, urban couples (about 20 per cent of the population) are constrained by law from having more than one child. Rural couples are allowed a second chance to try for a boy if the first child is a girl. The law is ruthlessly enforced, with fines as high as ?4,000 (several years' salary in China), ostracism, the threat of losing your job, even forced abortions; although, as always in China, there are ample loopholes for those with the right connections.
The policy has succeeded. Population growth has halved; a mere 11.21 per thousand in 1994. But it is only now, some 20 years on, as the first children of the one-child policy reach adulthood, that the consequences are becoming apparent. One consequence, as we have seen, is a sudden increase in the status of women. Another consequence, with perhaps even more dramatic long-term effects, is the creation of generation after generation of spoilt, over-cossetted single children.
Cruelly, many of the people who have been forced to have only one child belong to the same generation as the Red Guards. Known in China as the lost generation, they grew up during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Schools and colleges were closed and students travelled around the countryside, working alongside the peasants and propagating revolution; others, denounced as bourgeois, suffered at their hands.
Cheated of their own education, even the poorest parents are prepared to make every sacrifice to ensure that their children have what they did not. But because they are allowed only one child (instead of the traditional family's six or seven), that child becomes the focus for all their thwarted hopes, ambitions and love.
Zhiang says: "My grandfather was considered a bad man in the Cultural Revolution. My father had six brothers. They led a very hard life, always hungry, sometimes without food for several days. They want their child to have a good life."
Ying says: "In the Cultural Revolution, my parents didn't have the chance to study. They had to travel by train all over the country. Now they want us to have an education."
Traditionally in China (as in many other cultures), boys have been valued above girls. A boy will carry on the family name, take over the family land and look after his parents, while a girl will leave the home and family when she marries. In rural areas this thinking persists. Since the launch of the one-child policy there has been well-documented evidence of the selective abortion of female foetuses. Many more baby girls are abandoned; China's orphanages are full of them. The growing number of male children is worrying the Chinese authorities. The current rate is 118 or 119 male births for 100 female births, which means that by the turn of the century there will be 70m or 80m Chinese men unable to find partners. (In 1995 a newspaper in Shanghai published a famous article predicting an army of hoodlums without women to tame them; there are fears that there will be an increase in prostitution to service all these men.)
In the past, the daughter of the house often had to give up school early so that she could start work to help support her brother while he completed his education. But now that urban families can only have one child, daughters receive all the opportunities and pampering which a son would have had.
Also, the preponderance of men means that the mating game works in favour of women. When it comes to marriage, women are able to pick and choose. They can afford to wait until their 30s or 40s or decide not to marry at all.
Cecilia Yu, 20, is studying international economics at Beijing Normal University. Her mother is an accountant, her father a computer engineer. University is their dream, she says. "My father went to middle school, then to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, so he didn't experience university. My parents really hope I will be a good student and I don't want to disappoint them. They work very hard to pay for my tuition, my books and my food. They insist that if I need a book, or anything else, I can buy it. I must realise their dream.
"The disadvantage is that they take too much care of me. I have to report everything I do. As for marriage, I can't imagine that there is going to be another person to share my life."
Because all the attention is focused on them, only children often find it difficult when they go to university and have their first experiences of competition. The pressure to succeed sometimes becomes intolerable. Robin Fan, a lecturer at Shanghai, gives vocational guidance to students once a week. He sees those who have fallen through the holes in the system. "Children from single-child families are used to having everything they want. The whole family is focused on keeping them happy. So when they find themselves sharing a dormitory with seven other girls-their only private space being their bunk-some get so depressed that they become suicidal."
He cites a young woman from a poor family in a remote province. At home she was always top of the class. At university not only did she have to make her own decisions about what courses to study, she also had to take time out to do her own washing. When she failed to get straight A's, she became very depressed. "Students from one-child families always have trouble getting along with other people," he says. "They have no interpersonal skills. They care only about themselves."
This also makes it difficult for them to have successful relationships. Many of the students who consult Robin Fan are couples. Both partners are only children, so they do not know how to compromise and they argue constantly. "Girls want to marry a rich husband and get a large flat and a car. They want to have sex but they are afraid of the responsibility of having children," he says.
Cecilia, Ying, Zhiang and many of their friends say that they do not want to marry or have children. They have grand ambitions. Cecilia wants to study in the US, Ying wants to be a lawyer, Zhiang wants to do an MBA.
"If these young women really do remain single," says Elisabeth Croll, author of Changing Identities of Chinese Women, "it will be a new departure for Chinese society." Marriage used to boil down to a question of housing. Until recently, all housing in China was allocated by the government, which told people where to live. A single woman would never be allocated a flat to herself. Having to choose between living with their parents or getting married, most young women used to opt for marriage. But now that private sector housing is growing, women are able to have that room of their own.
Just as the pill liberated western women in the 1960s by giving them control over their own fertility, China's state-enforced fertility controls could have the same effect on Chinese women. Women already have a much fuller working life because they spend less time on child-bearing.
Another consequence of the one-child policy is that divorce is increasing. In 1995 there were more than 1m divorces, more than twice as many as in 1985. The divorce rate rose from almost zero to 0.9 per cent in 1985 and 1.8 per cent in 1995. There are several reasons for this: men looking for ways to circumvent the one-child laws to produce the much-longed-for son (although there are stringent regulations to prevent this); the growing assertiveness of women who will not put up with bullying or violent husbands; and the fact that with such small families, couples are thrown together more than in the past.
Cecilia, Zhiang and their friends are the thin end of the wedge. Coming up behind them are the Little Emperors and Empresses, now filling China's schools. Born a few years later, when their parents had begun to realise the full consequences of the one-child policy, they are over-educated and under-socialised, hugely precocious and so spoilt that, as one Chinese newspaper put it, they can recite Tang and Sung poetry but can't tie their own shoelaces. They are also the first Chinese to be overweight, fed on a diet of Big Macs, Coca-Cola and whatever else they fancy.
When the women of this generation grow up they will expect to run the world even more than Cecilia and Zhiang do. There are already Chinese women yuppies (chuppies) managing companies and driving Porsches around the streets of Beijing. Indeed, the Shanghai operations of the three big international computer companies-Intel, Phillips, and Hewlett Packard-are all managed by women. Paradoxically, the combination of totalitarian fertility controls and a bias against daughters has been a precondition for a huge potential advance for one fifth of womankind.
