China Ends Its One Child Policy

                                                  Comments due by Nov. 6, 2015

( What are the implications of ending the one child policy in China? Is the global population to see a big rise? Is it possible to talk about sustainability and population growth? Time will tell.) GK

 Over the years, so many exceptions and amendments were made to China’s one-child policy that it was hard to pinpoint a moment to pronounce it dead. But Thursday’s announcement that all Chinese couples will be allowed two children is as good a moment as any to write the obituary for this controversial and gratuitously cruel policy: China’s one-child policy died on Thursday, after a long illness.It was thirty-five years old. The long-anticipated announcement came at the end of a Communist Party plenum on the economy. Xinhua, the official news agency, reported that China will “fully implement a policy of allowing each couple to have two children as an active response to an aging population,” but said the implementation and timing would be up to the provinces. Demographers have long warned that, because of the one-child policy, the Chinese economy will be hobbled by a shortage of workers. China’s fertility rate, estimated by the World Bank in 2013 to be 1.7 births per woman, is below the replacement rate of 2.1. One in ten Chinese is now over the age of sixty-five, and that number is likely to double by mid-century. By 2022, China is expected to cede the dubious distinction of being the world’s most populous nation to India, according to the population division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Baby-related stocks reacted Thursday with the giddiness of, well, toddlers. Chinese companies that make strollers, car seats, baby formula, and baby food all advanced , according to the Wall Street Journal. Beyond that, though, the near-term impact might be mainly symbolic. By switching to a “two-child policy,”the Chinese government has signalled that it does not intend to dismantle its family-planning infrastructure. Restrictions will still apply, especially to unmarried couples and single mothers; families that want more than one child will still need to go through an application procedure, although it will be simplified. The English-language China Daily reported on Friday that ninety million Chinese C The English-language China Daily reported on Friday that ninety million Chinese couples will be eligible to have a second child, but it appears likely that only a fraction will choose to do so.In late 2013, the government announced that adults who had grown up without siblings would be permitted to have two children, but, of the eleven million eligible citizens, only 1.5 million have applied.In an online survey conducted by Sina News on Thursday, which received a hundred and seventy-four thousand responses, only twentynine per cent of couples said they would like to have a second child.“Only if the government raises my salary’’was a typical response of those who said they would not. hina’s one-child policy was born in 1980, after years of less severe measures to discourage births.The Communist Party promised that the policy would be temporary.“In thirty years, when our current extreme population growth eases, we can then adopt a different policy,’’the communiqué from the Central Committee of the Communist Party said, according to Mei Fong, a former China correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, whose book,“One Child: The Past and Future of China’s Most Radical Experiment,”will be published in February. Fong describes the policy as “born in haste, dragging on past its sell-by date.”But it won some praise at the time from conservationists and ecologists, who were swayed by books like Paul Ehrlich’s apocalyptic best-seller,“The Population Bomb,”which predicted that hundreds of millions would die of starvation. But all too soon family planning became a powerful bureaucracy, with officials who terrorized parents.They beat and burned down the houses of people who violated the family-planning limits.They snatched over-quota baby girls from the arms of their mothers and gave them to orphanages, which in turn put them up for adoption, earning a three-thousand-dollar “donation”for each baby.“They grabbed the baby and dragged me out of the house,’’ a grandmother in Hunan province, whose four-month-old granddaughter was taken for adoption, told me in 2009. Despite the eventual relaxation of the rules, women with nearly full-term pregnancies were hunted down and forced to abort in poorly equipped clinics.In 2012, a five-year-old girl in Shandong province described to me  how ten officials had chased her six-months-pregnant mother through the fields to prevent the birth of the family’s second child, a boy. She died during the procedure.The family lived in the countryside and should have been entitled to a second child, but couldn’t find the right paperwork. Some of the most tragic consequences of the one-child policy involved parents who lost Some of the most tragic consequences of the one-child policy involved parents who lost their only children.Without a social-security system, children take the place of insurance, pension, and retirement plans—a family’s future often rests on the shoulders of one small child. After the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province, in which a disproportionate number of the seventy thousand dead were children whose schools collapsed, thousands of nearly menopausal mothers rushed to fertility clinics to try to give birth again. For years, the rules about family size were enforced unevenly and unfairly, with many variations from province to province. (Ethnic minorities were allowed more than one child.) For the past decade, only about a third of the population has been strictly limited to one child, according to Fong. Not surprisingly, the rich have been able to buy their way out of limitations.The filmmaker Zhang Yimou paid $1.23 million in fines last year for siring excessive children. (He has two sons and one daughter with his wife, and another daughter with a previous partner.) The National Health and Family Planning Commission has long claimed that the onechild policy prevented the births of four hundred million people. But the Chinese demographers Wang Feng, Cai Yong, and Gu Baochang argue that the number is no more than half that, and that urbanization and rising living costs would have reduced the birth rates without coercive measures, as they have in South Korea and Japan.In a paper published in 2013, prophetically entitled “How Will History Judge China’s One-Child Policy?,”the demographers rank the one-child policy among the Chinese Communist Party’s top blunders—right up there with the Cultural Revolution, which wiped out the intelligentsia for a decade, and the Great Leap Forward, which is blamed for an estimated forty-five million famine deaths. “While those grave mistakes both cost tens of millions of lives, the harms done were relatively short-lived and were corrected quickly afterward,”the demographers write. 

“The one-child policy, in contrast, will surpass them in impact by its role in creating a society with a seriously undermined family and kin structure, and a whole generation of future elderly and their children whose well-being will be seriously jeopardized.” The “most extreme example of state intervention in human reproduction in the modern era,” as the demographers call it, the one-child policy intruded on every aspect of life in China.In the nineteen-eighties, female factory workers were forced to show their stained menstrual napkins to prove they weren’t pregnant.The policy exacerbated a gender imbalance in the population—roughly a hundred and sixteen boys are born for every hundred girls today—leaving million of men, now and in years to come, with little hope of finding a wife. Driving through rural China, it is hard to find a town that doesn’t have family-planning propaganda prominently on display. The policy’s effects were pronounced in New York, too. On Thursday morning, when the The policy’s effects were pronounced in New York, too. On Thursday morning, when the news of the policy change broke,I was riding a New York City bus up Allen Street, at the edge of Chinatown, in which I was almost the only non-Chinese person. Sitting across from me was a Chinese woman with two girls, about six years old, in matching pink parkas. Although I couldn’t talk to them to ask their story (the woman spoke only the Fuzhou dialect of Chinese),I was reminded that many immigrants are here thanks to a U.S. policy that gave political asylum to people fleeing forced sterilization and abortion.I had lunch later with a friend who has two nieces and a goddaughter adopted from China; they are girls who, no doubt, were given up because of the quota. You don’t have to look far to see how China’s one-child policy has shaped the world we live in. (New Yorker Oct. 2015)