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

  When the quake struck almost thirty years later, some eight thousand families lost their only child in the disaster, according to state-run news agency Xinhua. In Shifang, where over two-thirds of families are single-child families, the quake was said to have wiped out a generation in some villages, local media reported.

  This lent a bizarre dimension to the tragedy. Mere weeks after the quake, parents were rushing to reverse sterilizations they had been forced to accept long ago under family-planning rules. They were desperate to conceive a replacement.

  Soon after, they were pressured into signing documents pledging to make no trouble. Chinese media were expressly forbidden to write stories about grieving parents and the shoddy school construction that had caused many of these children’s deaths. Locals who tried to probe were jailed. Lives were lost, families ruined, and protests steamrolled as Beijing prepared to host the Olympics, just months away.

  Although Communist China is theoretically secular, many still believe in omens and portents. People interpret natural disasters as a sign of withdrawal of the mandate of heaven from China’s rulers. After all, Mao had died six weeks after the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, ushering in a new era, which eventually led to socioeconomic reforms—such as the one-child policy—that shape today’s China.

  Some wondered if the 2008 earthquake was a judgment on the one-child policy and other practices that tampered with nature. There was speculation, for example, that the building of massive dams in highly seismic areas might have triggered the quake.

  These were precisely the sorts of inferences Beijing did not want. The Communist Party had worked long and hard to ensure that the year 2008 would be associated with another set of omens, ones designed to suggest a glorious future for the Republic.

  The 2008 Beijing Olympics was to be a multibillion-dollar event that would mark China’s phoenix-like ascent from the ashes of the Opium Wars and the Cultural Revolution. It was no accident the leadership picked the year 2008 to host the Games, nor that they set the opening ceremony date for the eighth day of the eighth month, when the capital city would be at its hottest and most polluted, not at all conducive to peak athletic performance. The number 8 is auspicious, for in Chinese the word sounds the same as the word for fortune. When turned on its side, 8 represents eternity, certainly something any regime would aspire to. Eight is so popular that places with Chinese communities charge a premium for it, from phone numbers to license plates and house numbers. That year, a license plate with the number 18 fetched over $2 million in a Hong Kong auction.

  I myself was born on August 8, and Chinese friends never fail to comment on the symbolism of my birthday when they find out. “Wah, you must be so lucky.”

  All across China, clocks were set on a countdown to the day of the opening ceremony: August 8, 2008, at, of course, 8:08 p.m. May’s earthquake, and its attendant baggage, was not going to be allowed to upset this auspicious apple cart.

  It was ironic because until the earthquake, the one-child policy had been receding from the news and national discussion.

  As the descendant of southern Chinese who’d migrated to Malaysia, I was always grateful I hadn’t been born in China. I am the youngest of five daughters, all conceived in hopes of a son that never was. Malaysia was by then too modern for practices such as abandoning unwanted girls, and in any case my parents were educated urbanites, not farmers. Still, my accountant father never ceased regretting his lack of a son, nor reminding his daughters they were liabilities, not assets.

  They say huaqiao—overseas Chinese families—are more traditional than mainland Chinese, who were forced to abandon or hide the old ways during the Cultural Revolution. It was certainly true of my father’s family. “Be glad we’re not in the old country,” my relatives would say. “You’d never have been born.” That was my introduction to China’s son-loving culture and the one-child policy. As a bookish child, I would come to see the one-child policy as one of the most fascinating and bizarre things about the land of my ancestors, equal parts Aldous Huxley and King Herod.

  I certainly didn’t anticipate that I would be living and working in China one day. By the time the Wall Street Journal posted me to greater China in 2003, the policy was well over two decades old and was by no means as monolithic as outsiders envisioned. Over time, exceptions were made. You could likely have more than one child if you were a farmer, or if you were Tibetan; if you were a fisherman or a coal miner. Or if you were handicapped, or were willing to pay the fines, which ranged from nugatory to wildly exorbitant and depended on whom you knew and where you lived. Given all these exceptions, the one-child policy should more accurately be called the “1.5-child policy,” but nobody used such a clunky-sounding term. In China, the term of reference most used is the more anodyne jihua shengyu, which means “planned birth program,” instead of a more straightforward translation—yitai zhengce—of “one-child policy.”

  Negotiations and rule bending are a way of life—some say art form—in China. To xiang banfa—find a solution—is second nature in a place where people are many, resources scarce, and regulations strict but erratically applied. That’s why when you live in China you must quickly accustom yourself to full-contact bargaining, line jumping, and creative driving, all part of the xiang banfa ethos. Many Chinese xiang banfa-ed and came up with all sorts of creative ways to get around the policy—fertility treatments for twins or triplets, birth tourism, fake marriages, bribes. I had Chinese friends who had several children, though usually no more than two. I met a woman in a second-tier city who’d had six, all born during the years of the policy. (According to grisly family lore, she’d killed her first by plunging it in boiling water.)

  By 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. By 2013, China’s one-child policy was “slipping into irrelevance,” wrote my colleague Leslie Chang, a well-respected China watcher.

  It would take an earthquake, a miscarriage, and a journey of a thousand births for me to fully realize that curbing China’s masses had serious implications beyond its borders.

  III

  Far from courting irrelevance, the one-child policy had irrevocably shaped the face of modern China and set in motion a host of social and economic problems that will endure for decades.

  In fifteen years’ time, if you throw a stone anywhere outside of Beijing or Shanghai, statistically speaking, you will probably hit someone over sixty. Chances are high that person will be male, to boot. 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.

  Everything in China is about scale and speed. China doesn’t just face the prospect of being home to the world’s largest number of old people; proportionally, too, its population is aging faster than anywhere else, meaning there will be far fewer working adults to support a retiree population. The speed of this transition will strain China’s rudimentary pension and health-care systems. By 2050, pension funding shortfalls could be as much as $7.5 trillion, or equivalent to 83 percent of China’s gross domestic product in 2011, according to one estimate by Deutsche Bank.

  This is a pretty bleak outlook, and yet the policy’s future repercussions may be difficult to reverse. Over the past decade, most people in urban China have accepted the reality of smaller families and, indeed, prefer it. After all, China had leapfrogged from socialism to full-blown capitalism, so costs of services like schooling and health care are relatively high. Throw in things like melamine-tainted milk powder, lead in toys, and lung-searing pollution, and child rearing in urban China becomes quite a daunting proposition.

  Besides, authorities had done a good job with messaging: the one-child policy, they insisted, had played an integral part in China’s economic resurgence. It seemed churlish not to rej
oice in better living standards for a country that had, not too long ago, seen great famine and tremendous political turmoil. This is, after all, my ancestral homeland.

  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.”

  China was like a terrier puppy that had been brutally mistreated by history’s vicissitudes. It was hard not to cheer a little to see it lick its wounds and limp along gamely. Starting in the late 1990s, there was much to cheer. Children of peasants became the first in their families to enter college. Infant mortality rates fell. Starbucks outlets bubbled up like so many foamy lattes. A veritable fleet of Bentleys, Beemers, Hondas, and Hyundais took to the roads, and local Xinhua bookstores were crammed with travel guides for China’s first generation of group tourists.

  When my Mandarin teacher excitedly recounted her first trip to Europe, I asked her to name her favorite European country. “Germany,” she said promptly. I was surprised. Why not France, Italy? She paused a beat, then said, “It’s so orderly.”

  In 2005, I spoke to a contractor who built dormitories for factory workers. He complained of having to put in more electrical outlets, as workers now had so many gadgets to charge. In 2007, I witnessed the opening of Beijing’s first Hooters, or “American Owl” in Chinese. As I eyed waitresses with jacked-up décolletage dishing out overpriced chicken wings, it seemed, strangely, like another milestone had been reached.

  People used to joke that a year in China was like a dog year: so much changed that it would be as if seven years somewhere else had passed. In the four years I lived in Beijing, the city’s subway lines expanded fivefold. IKEA opened its largest-ever store outside of Stockholm in Beijing, with extra-wide aisles to accommodate the multitude of first-generation homeowners. The car population quadrupled. Despite the growing pollution and the corruption, it was hard not to feel the quickening excitement, echo the prevailing sentiment: Jiayou, Zhongguo, Jiayou! “Go, China, Go!”

  It took me a while to realize that, contrary to popular thinking, the one-child policy had very little to do with China’s double-digit economic growth of the past thirty years, and will actually be a drag for the next thirty. That the Chinese government’s claim that the one-child policy had averted 400 million births was an exaggeration based on faulty math and wishful thinking. Or that the one-child policy was, in the final sum of things, a painfully unnecessary measure, since birthrates had already fallen sharply under earlier, more humane measures.

  More intriguing are the future effects of the one-child policy on the economy: Could it prove detrimental, stalling future progress? The answer here is: most likely, though how much remains to be seen. Predicting long-term economic growth is a chancy business, and few economists, if any, anticipated that the country’s economic rise would be so swift, so spectacular, or so prolonged. Equally, these experts’ basis for predicting a future economic slump is the premise that what goes up must, at some point, come down, a prognosis that would perhaps be more useful if we knew when, and by how much.

  Clearly, though, a large graying population in China will likely mean a less productive China. It will also mean the China that global companies currently see—world’s largest cell phone market, world’s largest car market, soon-to-be world’s largest luxury sales, home of KFC’s biggest customer base even—will change. With the manufacturing boom in its last days, the country is now trying to move to a consumption-driven model of growth, with increased domestic spending and growth in the service sector. A large population of retirees will likely prove as helpful in this transition as the Great Wall was in repelling northern invaders.

  There is also a growing body of evidence suggesting that China’s population would have fallen significantly—exactly how much is in dispute—even without the one-child policy. A family-planning policy that predated the one-child policy, called wanxishao, or “Later, Longer, Fewer,” had already halved family sizes successfully using less coercive tactics.

  In 2009, demographers Wang Feng, Cai Yong, and Gu Baochang challenged the Communist Party’s assertion that the one-child policy averted the births of more people than the entire US population. Until then, the 300 to 400 million number had been pretty much taken as gospel truth. It was, and continues to be, a key part of the central government’s claim of the global good wrought by the one-child policy. Without the one-child policy, Chinese officials argue, the world would have reached the 7 billion population mark in 2006, instead of five years after. Wang et al. contend that the real number of births averted was probably no more than half of what the Communist Party claims.

  How did this huge gap occur? They argue that the original calculations used a simplistic extrapolation method that projected what China’s future birthrate would be in 1998, based on birth trends between 1950 and 1970. The number arrived at was 338 million, which was subsequently rounded up to 400 million. But this method was flawed. First of all, it was based on the assumption that people’s reproductive habits would roughly trend the same from the 1950s to the 1990s, a period when changes such as urbanization, feminism, and advances in infant mortality dramatically altered social behavior. This is patently as absurd as modern-day tour companies drawing up itineraries on the assumption people still travel by steamship. Second, the Communist Party’s method counted birth reductions from the 1970s. The one-child policy didn’t start until 1980. In Chinese parlance, this kind of misrepresentation is called zhiluweima—pointing at a deer and calling it a horse.

  Even as the policy loosened up, many were still adversely affected. Yang Zhizhu, a law lecturer in Beijing, lost his job because he had a second child. In 2010, the peppery Yang advertised himself as a slave for anyone who could help him pay the $36,000 fine. “Whoever decides to buy me, I will become their slave and serve them until I die. I reject donations as I don’t want to become a parasite for the sake of my child,” wrote Yang in his tongue-in-cheek ad. Yang was eventually reinstated at his university, but at a lower position. His wages were garnished, and university administrators took away his spacious university-assigned housing and made him live in a smaller flat. “The policy is just an ingenious way to tax people without giving any kind of service in return. What could be more natural than having children? Might as well tax for breathing and eating,” Yang told me.

  I met a girl, Li Xue, or “Snow,” who spends her days fruitlessly lobbying for the all-important hukou, or household registration, that authorities will not allow her because she is an out-of-plan second child. Her parents were laborers who couldn’t afford the birth fine. Without a hukou, she hasn’t been able to attend school, get proper medical treatment, or so much as apply for a library card. Without a hukou, Snow is a nonentity, without the ability to legally hold a job or get married. Any future children she might have might also be locked in this limbo. An estimated 13 million people share her predicament as an undocumented hei haizi, literally, “black child.”

  During the summer of 2008, as the country geared up for the Olympics, the fifteen-year-old Snow bravely showed up at Tiananmen Square every morning, holding a sign that said, “I want to Go to School.”

  She was never there for more than five minutes before being seized by authorities. Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, is one of the most tightly policed places in the world. In 2008’s Olympic year, security was tighter than usual. Still, she managed to doggedly show up there all summer long. Sometimes, public security officials would try to grab her just outside her house. There’d be frantic chases as Snow and her motorbike-mounted mother weaved through Beijing’s narrow warrens, all in a mad attempt to get to Tiananmen for those brief few minutes.

  Her actions filled me with both admiration and exasperation. So much risk, so little yield. It all seemed so valiant, so futile; whatever d
id she hope to accomplish?

  “I just wanted someone to notice me,” said Snow.

  Years later, I met a man who’d had an affair with his teenage coworker in the factory where they worked. She became pregnant, so he brought her to his village to have the baby. They couldn’t legally marry because she was underage, and their baby was born without a birth permit. Later, family-planning officials used this as a pretext to seize the child, who was sold into adoption. This man has now spent the last five years in search of the child, whom he believes is living in an Illinois suburb.

  Such were the costs of the one-child policy.

  IV

  I was on a flight returning from Kunming, the nearest major Chinese city bordering Myanmar. A sour taste of failure was in my mouth, for I’d failed to get a visa into the country. Myanmar was in a news blackout after a cyclone, and they weren’t letting in foreign aid workers, let alone journalists of any stripe or color. I flew back to Beijing unaware that the earth was ripping apart thousands of miles under me.

  The Sichuan quake measured a cool 8.0 on the Richter scale. This was China’s most serious quake since Tangshan, which happened thirty-two years before, measured 7.6, and is accounted one of the world’s deadliest disasters. For years, the Communist Party covered up the severity of the Tangshan quake, which happened at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution. State-run news agency Xinhua eventually put the number of fatalities at 250,000.