Jan. 1 marked a significant cultural shift in China — starting this year, families will be able to have two children. This alters the one-child policy that was introduced in 1978 to control the country’s population. In this excerpt from her new book, “One Child: One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment,” journalist Mei Fong explains the horrors behind the enforcement of that mandate.
Ma Qingju, or “Green Chrysanthemum,” used to have a board on her wall telling her which of her friends were pregnant. It showed what kind of contraceptives they used; whether they had one or two children; if they were sterilized, pregnant, married or single.
This took the saying, “Know thy neighbor,” to a new level.
Green Chrysanthemum was a cheery 45-year-old woman who ran the snack shop in a tiny village called Huangjiapu, Yicheng County. Until recently, she also earned an extra $60 a year as a “cluster leader,” keeping track of 10 households’ reproductive habits and reporting these details to the village’s family-planning commission.
“It’s not a difficult job. Everybody knows each other so well,” she said. Not one person in her group exceeded the two-child limit, she proudly told me.
In addition to cluster leaders like Green Chrysanthemum, Huangjiapu, population 500, had 15 full-timers tasked with family-planning matters.
These village-level offices are the most basic building blocks of China’s birth-planning machinery, a bloated behemoth that goes from some 85 million part-time employees at the grass-roots level all the way up to half a million full-time employees at the National Population and Family Planning Commission.
The commission also has its own archives and statistics and propaganda departments; affiliate centers for pharmacological research, film production and publishing; and a consulting company that handles exhibitions and conferences.
Other state organizations such as the military and police have their own internal family-planning units, as do state-owned companies.
The complexity of this machinery and its reach are partly why Beijing took its time winding down the one-child policy, say analysts.
Birth planning had been so baked into the business of ordinary governance, its revenue contributions so necessary, that unwinding all this posed a challenge.
Complete child control
I went to Yicheng to understand how such a vast machine worked at the basic level. Given the county’s more liberal birth quotas, I was able to get some retired family-planning officials to speak on the record.
Many officials had been doing the work since before the onset of the one-child policy in 1980, continuing through the introduction of Yicheng’s special two-child status in 1985. They were able to explain to me the vacillations of the policy, which they themselves found dizzying.
Green Chrysanthemum, for example, explained that family planning work was practically unnecessary nowadays, since younger members in her group didn’t even want a second child because of the expense.
“Everybody wants just one,” she said. Since 1985, only one family in Huangjiapu has had a third child, she said, a relatively wealthy couple with an auto parts business.
In one year alone, 1983, China sterilized over 20 million people, more than the combined population of the three largest US cities, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
But even with a looser two-child limit there were still rules people found onerous, such as a requirement throughout the 1990s that women be sterilized after the birth of a second child, or a requirement that births must be spaced at least five years apart.
What if a woman didn’t want more children but would prefer not to be sterilized? What if a couple got pregnant with their second child, say, three years after the first, instead of five? That was when even Yicheng’s benign machinery would show its ugly side, according to Huangjiapu’s former village head Huang Denggao.
The usual mode of punishment was fines: Parents of children born out of plan would be hit with fines between five and 10 times their annual disposable income. “If the couple is too poor to pay, we’ll take things from their house, but only in a few cases,” said Huang.
TVs were a favorite, he said — worth a villager’s whole annual income — as were tables, bicycles and washing machines. These items were usually collected by a team of 10 part-time enforcers (usually “strong healthy young men”) and sold off, and the proceeds were kept by the township.
To Huang, these actions did not count as coercion. Rather, he called such tactics “persuasion.”
One of the most difficult tasks Huang had to do was persuade women to be sterilized, he said. Many women feared the procedure. Side effects such as excessive bleeding were not uncommon, especially given the conveyor-belt manner in which some of these procedures were done. The village women tried to bargain, said Huang. Some asked to use barrier contraceptives instead, or promised not to have more than two children.
“But it was my job to get people to do the operation, or else I would not be able to accomplish my target,” said Huang. “I can’t possibly guarantee they won’t have another baby with just a promise.”
In one year alone, 1983, China sterilized over 20 million people, more than the combined population of the three largest US cities, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Just a piece of meat
When the one-child policy was launched in the 1980s, it was clear that enforcement of such a hugely unpopular policy would be difficult.
In the beginning, execution of the one-child policy ranged from lax to excessive across China. In some parts of the country, pregnant women without birth permits were marched off in handcuffs to undergo forced abortions. In others, officials ignored or paid mere lip service to these strictures from the central government.
It didn’t help that other national regulations undercut the one-child policy’s intentions. A new marriage law, also launched in 1980, lowered the legal age of marriage to 20 for women and 22 for men. This was done to combat illegal marriage and sex crimes, but of course it also encouraged more unions and, by extension, babies.
The move toward agricultural decollectivization also undermined official efforts to enforce the one-child policy. Under collectivism, pay, rations and other benefits were meted out by village leaders, and bad behavior (having an out-of-plan child, for instance) could be punished directly; new reforms loosened official control over peasants’ livelihoods.
By 1984, the nationwide one-size-fits-all measure proved so unpopular that the central government was forced to decentralize a large portion of the one-child policy. It circulated new provisions enshrined in what population scholars call Document 7.
Document 7 gave each province more power to adapt the one-child policy to local circumstances. This was the beginning of a raft of exclusions that made it hard for people within China — never mind outside China — to understand the policy in anything but the broadest strokes, because conditions really were different from place to place.
For example, residents in many rural areas were allowed to have a second child, provided their first was not a son — a tacit acknowledgment of the son hunger that was rampant in the countryside. Places like Tibet and Yunnan, with large ethnic minorities, had vastly more liberal policies than more populous provinces like Sichuan and Henan.
Document 7 did not remedy the lack of transparency and accountability within the system. Local officials had wide discretion in determining how much to fine violators. Sums could range from a multiple of two to 10 times annual household income. People had no way of figuring out ahead of time what they were liable for, and two sets of violators, under similar circumstances, might pay vastly different penalties. In 2010, a family-planning official apparently imposed a fine of 5 million yuan, or over $800,000, on a violator.
When that person protested, the official allegedly increased the fine, saying, “You are just a piece of meat on the chopping block,” according to local media reports.
In essence, the central government gave local provinces the message, “Meet your birth quotas; we don’t really care to know how.”
They also expected provinces to fund the bulk of population planning on their own. This created a system ripe for corruption.
Birth fine bonanza
Up until the early 2000s, at least, many international actors chose to believe that adherence to the one-child policy was voluntary, despite growing evidence to the contrary. In 1983, the first-ever United Nations Population Award medals, for individuals who had made “outstanding contributions” to solving population issues, were conferred on Indira Gandhi — she of the forced sterilizations — and China’s minister of population planning, Qian Xinzhong.
As awards go, it was akin to the Nobel Peace Prize committee giving Yasser Arafat the nod. It is still a source of embarrassment to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), but it did not stop former head Nafis Sadik from accepting an award from the Chinese government in 2002. Dr. Sadik said she believed harsh enforcement of the one-child policy to be rare, thanks in large part to the UNFPA’s collaboration with Beijing. Because of the one-child policy, the US government seesawed between giving and withholding contributions to the UNFPA.
Former UN and other nongovernmental officials I spoke to privately said they worked hard behind the scenes to get China’s birth planners to move toward a more service-oriented system. When I spoke to them, Beijing appeared to be cautiously exploring these avenues, including a pilot project to turn enforcers into parenting counselors.
But such efforts were still limited.
I believe, however, that the nature of this abuse increasingly shifted away from forced abortions and sterilizations toward stiffer enforcement of fines. This was partly because these so-called social compensation fees ( shehui fuyangfei ) grew to become a major source of revenue for many counties, especially poorer ones. Over the past decade China implemented land tax reforms, requiring provinces to hand over income to the national treasury for redistribution. In practice, this meant that lower-level county and village governments lost almost all independent sources of income.
The one exception was birth fines, which did not have to be handed over to the central government. “It’s a common saying, for money, ‘Big cities depend on land, small towns depend on birth planning,’ ” said journalist Matthew Pang, who exhaustively documented such abuses by family-planning officials in a small town in Hunan.
In 2013, lawyer Wu Youshui took advantage of a provision in Chinese law, similar to the US Freedom of Information Act, to request that each province account for how much it collected in social compensation fees. The total came to $2.7 billion, an amount that is almost certainly an underestimation, says Wu.
Hunting the pregnant
The most memorable discussion I had on the workings of the population police came during a chance discussion with a man whom I’ll call Uncle Li.
Uncle Li was a relative of a friend, a businessman who’d volunteered to give us a ride to a neighboring town. He’d come to pick us up in his black Audi, a man in his late forties dressed in the uniform of moderately prosperous urban Chinese men — polo shirt, collar modishly flipped up, big clunky watch with many complicated dials, leather man-bag. I was just admiring how well kept his car was, with tiny pouches holding sunshades, tissue boxes, and mineral water, and little bow-shaped pillow headrests, when we started talking.
It turned out that in 1994, Uncle Li’s first job out of college was as a county-level administrator. He became quite chatty talking about it. Meeting population targets was part of his job, and the most important one because of yipiaofoujue, he said. “If they couldn’t pay, then you would confiscate some things of value in the home, but they were never such expensive things because villagers were poor — just things like grain, or homespun cloth,” he remembered. “Sometimes, we would climb up the roofs and make a hole, to show we meant business, or knock down some windows,” he recounted. In his province, the one-child policy was taken very seriously, so fines were heavily punitive.
We stopped for lunch, and he continued talking, quite cheerfully, about property damage, confiscations, and pay scales. I didn’t want to interrupt the flow, but at the back of my mind I was dying to ask the big question: How could you bear to be so beastly every day?
Finally, I ventured, “Doing this job must be hard, since people don’t want to do as you say.”
He fell silent. Then he said, “There’s this one incident I’ll never forget.
“I was 24, and we had heard of a woman pregnant with an out-of-plan baby who had run away to a neighboring village. So we made preparations to catch her at night. I got together a team of six or seven people. We surrounded the house. We were very quiet, but I don’t know, somehow she must have heard something — maybe voices — because she ran.”
“How many months was she?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but she looked pretty big. She ran and ran and ran until she came to a pond. Then she ran in, until the water was at her neck” — his hand sliced his Adam’s apple. “She stood there and began to cry.”
I was transfixed by the picture he’d painted. The woman with her bellyful of child, keening in the dark, officials circling the water hole like predators.
“What happened?”
He looked away. “Please, wait a moment,” he said. The cheery insouciance was gone.
“She said a lot of things. She said she needed to have this baby. She would never have any peace, and her husband and her mother-in-law would never treat her well, until she had a son.”
I felt we were doing wrong, but I had no choice.
He lit a cigarette, clearing his throat.
“Finally, two women officials waded in and took her away.”
We were silent.
“Why did this one incident stay with you, when you must have had so many of these encounters?” I asked.
“Maybe it was because I was young,” he said, slowly. “I felt we were doing wrong, but I had no choice.”
Secrets they kept
That night, I was so moved by the story that I related it to a former student of mine whom I was meeting for drinks. She had grown up in the area and was now a PhD student in America. I thought the anecdote was powerful, but I figured she must have heard similar stories all her life.
She listened, her eyes widening.
“But you must have heard these stories before. What about your schoolmates? Surely some must have come from the countryside and told these stories?” I asked in surprise.
She knew, of course, the contours of the one-child policy. But the brutal vividness of this tale was something else. “You must understand,” she said.
“I went to Renmin University. To get there I had to go to a top high school, and a top middle school, and those kinds of places are not easy for children from the countryside to get into. Most of my friends and classmates were like me, middle-class, children from the city.”
I was reminded yet again that despite the Internet and an increasingly globalized world, many Chinese people’s perceptions of recent historical events can be sketchy.
While writing her book on the 1989 student protests at Tiananmen, National Public Radio correspondent Louisa Lim visited four top Chinese universities and showed students a picture of “Tank Man,” the iconic picture of a single person stopping an oncoming line of tanks. To the Western world, it is one of the most recognizable images of the event. Lim found that only 15 out of a 100 students recognized the photo.
It struck me as ironic that people of my former student’s generation would know so little about a policy that birthed them and will continue to shape their reality. Yet to my student, such a story was a tale from another country.
Excerpted with permission from “One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment by Mei Fong.” Out now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.