One Child (2 page)

It is worth noting that the system they advocate authorized forced abortions and sterilizations. It raises the question, What are we saving the planet
for?
It is possible to support population control without embracing anything so brutal as a one-child policy.

In writing this book, I have tried to examine the causes that led to this policy, and the wide spectrum of effects it has had on ordinary people’s lives. For though China made international headlines by peremptorily moving to a nationwide two-child policy, the one-child policy’s side effects will endure for several decades; many still pay a price.

In my quest to find the individual dramas behind the one-child policy, I traveled to “bachelor villages,” rural hamlets with no females of marriageable age. I tracked down a former senior family-planning official hiding in an American suburb, who by her own reckoning was responsible for authorizing over 1,500 forced abortions, about a third during late-term pregnancies. I discovered a burgeoning industry that thinks it holds an answer to China’s female shortage: custom-made, life-size sex dolls. I spoke to Americans who adopted babies from China, and Chinese who were having babies using American surrogate mothers. I underwent in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment in a
Beijing clinic and spent time in a Kunming hospice, experiences that shed light on how the one-child policy has affected the most basic of human experiences, life and death.

Against the stark chiaroscuro of China’s one-child policy, I would weigh the costs of parenthood and learn for myself the answer to the question, Why do we have children?

The ground moved. That was how it began.

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

I

The road to Huimei’s school was red.

I blinked, wondering if my mind had conjured this mirage after three hectic days on the road. But there it was: not a comforting earthen red, but a scarlet gash made up of thousands of shredded fireworks, lit to honor the recent dead.

Huimei’s mother tottered up the path. Four days before, Tang Shuxiu was working at a Beijing construction site when the building began to sway. Eight hundred miles away, a powerful earthquake was ripping through her hometown, tearing up major cities along the western Sichuan basin and unleashing as much force as the Fat
Man bomb in Nagasaki. Tremors were felt as far away as Bangkok and Bangladesh.

As news of the quake unfolded, Tang dialed home frantically, trying to reach her teenage daughter. There was no answer.

The next day, Tang and her husband, Liu, set off for home. I tagged along, a random reporter they’d met. My presence barely registered except as an extra set of hands to help with their luggage. All those weary miles home, the couple doggedly lugged bags crammed with instant noodles, charcoal cakes, gardening gloves, sanitary napkins, and floral quilts. There were shiny thermos flasks the color of Mao’s
Little Red Book
, reams of tissue-thin toilet paper, disposable chopsticks, and a giant pack of cigarettes. Tang even packed a gallon of cooking oil over her husband’s objections. Of course, the bottle leaked over everything—our clothes, bags, hands. Toward the end, we were covered with a film of grease, our faces glowing incongruously, like movie stars at a photo shoot.

Now Tang was unceremoniously dumping this precious cargo to race up that red path. Tin mugs and exercise books lay in the rubble of the school grounds, and a basketball hoop swayed at an impossible angle. A notice, written on torn-off exercise paper, said:

The government has done a lot to save the children of this school.

The government hopes parents coordinate with them to claim the bodies.

Tang and Liu made their way to the edge of the field, to a man with a plastic folder.

I remember her screams when they told her. The sound was a wound tearing open, a sound humans shy away from as instinctively as dogs from the scent of rotting meat. That sound meant,
Game over.

II

In the beginning, the Sichuan earthquake, China’s deadliest in years, was viewed as a simple tragedy. The earth moved, buildings crumbled, and about seventy thousand people died.

In time, I would see it as a devastating illustration of the tragedies of the one-child policy, writ large.

Many people had no idea Shifang, the area near the epicenter, was a test case for the one-child policy. Before the 1980 nationwide launch of the one-child policy, population planners had experimented in Sichuan, in particular Shifang County, using coercive methods to drastically lower birthrates. Scholars believed Sichuan was chosen first because it is the heartland of rural China, home to a tenth of China’s people. It was also Deng Xiaoping’s birthplace. Whatever the reasons, the methods worked astoundingly well. By 1979 Shifang County’s population growth had drastically plunged, and 95 percent of couples there had pledged to have only one child.
Sichuan gave China’s birth planners “a sense of tremendous possibility” that Beijing could “achieve demographic miracles,” wrote population scholar Susan Greenhalgh.

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 rejoice 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.