Necessary Sacrifices: China’s One Child Policy



Introduction

On October 14, 2009, the New York Times online edition featured a report on its “Lens Blog” about Lu Guang, a Chinese freelance photographer, who was the recipient of this year’s $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his project, “Pollution in China”1. The pictures he presents are plainly horrific. The skies are a sickening, sulfuric, suffocating yellow; the people grimy and sooty, the whites of their eyes a striking contrast to their blackened faces. Rivers flow in unnatural colors– orange, white, yellow, brown– and an astonishingly varied amount of garbage and debris float in blue-green ponds.

These images are the images of the costs of China’s rapid transformation and breakneck growth, economically, socially, militarily, in recent years, something that has not been and will not be without grim consequences. The country faces a host of problems ranging from a growing gap between the wealthy and poor, to corruption at all levels, overpopulation, uncontrollable mass migration, gang resurgence, and a loss of culture and morality. These are not problems only specific to China; they are present today in all materialistic societies. However, China’s incredibly rapid economic growth these past few decades has only served to exacerbate such problems though as little restrictions or regulations have been put into place to try and alleviate them. Certainly, one problem that worries many domestically and internationally alike is China’s enormous population. Being the most populous nation in the world, with about 22 percent of the world’s population, its population is a potent force in the global community, affecting immigration, innovation in business, technology, and science, and remains the largest market in the world that has corporations virtually salivating with eagerness at the prospect of tapping. Thus it is curious that China’s most broad-scoped and impacting attempt at population control– the “one child” policy– has been met with considerable criticism, even vilification from Western nations.


Background

The one-child policy was introduced in 1979 as a measure to curb China’s explosive population growth, which was causing social, economic, and environmental problems2. Its basic principle is to encourage couples to only have one child; couples with multiple births often do not receive the same benefits and are subject to fines for permission to have additional children, up to one-fourth the family’s annual income3. Certain exceptions apply: all non-Han ethnicities are subject to different rules, being allowed at least two children in urban areas and three or four in rural areas4. Since as early as 1987, official policy has allowed local officials flexibility to make exceptions in the case of “practical difficulties”, such as cases in which the father is a disabled serviceman or parents with severely disabled or deceased children4. As of 2007, all provinces except for Henan allow couples who are both only children to have two children, though the specifics of the policy vary from place to place. The municipal government of Beijing, for instance, has nine conditions under which a couple can have two children5. The one-child Policy does not apply to children born overseas to Chinese nationals nor to the Special Administrative Regions (SARs) of Hong Kong and Macau; Chinese nationals returning from abroad are also exempt from the policy6.

The actual enforcement of the policy varies in different regions. In general, rural areas are laxer than urban areas and western China is more lenient than eastern and central parts of the country. In most rural communities, families are allowed to have two children, especially if the first is a girl or has a physical or mental disability. Although admittedly sexist, this is due to the need for labor in rural economies, which typically falls on a son to provide, as well as parents’ considerations of their care after retirement, which is also traditionally provided by a son, as a daughter is primarily considered part of her in-laws’ family after marriage (though it is often the opposite now among urban families). Currently, the policy looks set to continue for another decade. Zhang Weiqing, minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, the top population official in China, refuted speculation about officials contemplating adjustment of the policy to counteract mounting demographic pressures, stating, “it has to be kept unchanged at this time to ensure stable and balanced population growth”, adding that to abandon it now would “cause serious problems and add extra pressure on social and economic development.”7 However, many city governments, like Shanghai, are now actively promoting eligible couples to have two children, lifting previous restrictions, in order to try and rebalance a rapidly aging population; over 22 percent of Shanghai’s residents are over the age of 60, a trend that is growing more widespread across the nation, especially in urban areas, which are most affected by the policy8.

The one-child policy has been highly controversial. Criticisms have been mostly centered on human rights violations accusations. The policy has been implicated in the increase in numbers of forced abortions, sterilizations, and female infanticides. Gao Xiao Duan, a former cadre in a planned-birth office in Yonghe Town in Fujian Province, testified before the United States House of Representatives Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights on June 10, 19989. She spoke about her daily activities, which included issuing different notices– for example “birth allowance” notices to those women who met the policy’s regulations and were thus allowed to have children– imposing fines on violators of the policy, apprehending violators, and compiling planned-birth reports to submit to the planned-birth committee9. When met with violation, the officials used different methods of coercion like house dismantling, arrest and detention, sterilization, and abortion10. She recalls watching a doctor abort a nine-month pregnant woman who did not have a birth-allowed certificate. The doctor injected poison into the child’s skull, killing it, and then threw it into the trashcan. Gao stated that she did not want “to help a tyrant do evils.”11 The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) funding for this policy has come under heavy criticism by the United States. Congress pulled out of the UNFPA during the Reagan years and former President George W. Bush has referred to the human rights abuses of the policy as the reason for stopping a US$40 million payment to the UNFPA in early 200212. Other critics contend that there were other alternative, less intrusive policies, like ones that emphasized delay and spacing between births, that could have achieved the same results; still others criticize what they believe to be the exaggerated claimed benefits of the policy.

With the intense controversy over this policy, there must be a logical reason for the Chinese government to continue it for at least another decade, discounting all the clearly biased opinions that it is because the government is simply authoritarian, with no attempts to consider the Chinese public’s opinion or even reflect that they actually have a opinion on this issue. The reason can be postulated: it is simply due to the tremendous success of the policy in achieving its goal of curbing China’s exploding population. This essay will attempt to analyze the one-child policy in detail, taking into consideration the conditions of the time when it was implemented, public opinion, and a comparison between the most populous nations in the world– China and India– in terms of their success with population control. It will arrive at the conclusion that taken in context, the one-child policy is neither good nor bad, to put it simplistically. It was merely a necessary measure undertaken by officials at the time in light of the economic, social, and environmental problems they faced then and still face now and one that proved to be enormously successful at achieving its goals.


One-child Policy

The post-1949 Communist leaders of China did not at first realize the liabilities of having a large, rapidly growing population. A few attempts were made to curb expansion but the upheavals of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution prevented any lasting impact. Only until the 1970’s did the government begin to mobilize for mass, nationwide birth control campaigns, even personally linking Mao Zedong to the family planning movement, which belied its increasing significance; they were still however, reluctant to directly link population control to economic growth and improved living standards until several years after Mao’s death. But by 1979, the policy that would be dubbed the “one child” policy was firmly in place and the economic boom that resulted directly from Deng Xiaoping’s capitalistic reforms and partly from the success of the policy would help to cement its place in Chinese society. This link between lower fertility rates and higher income per capita is clearly illustrated if you plot these respective trends for China over time, as demonstrated on Gapminder.org13. As China’s fertility rate decreased, its income per capita skyrocketed, especially after 1979– the year the one child policy was truly entrenched into Chinese society. In 1979, China had a total fertility rate of 2.74 births per woman; the average income per capita was about $855. By 2007, China’s total fertility rate had dropped to around 1.76 births per woman while its average income per capita had skyrocketed to $4,95914.

Thus, the Chinese public’s opinion on the policy has generally been positive. In 2008, the Pew Research Center, a non-partisan think tank based in Washington D.C. that provides information on issues, trends, and attitudes affecting the United States and the world, conducted a survey which showed that over 76 percent of the Chinese population supports the one-child policy15. Such numbers may be shockingly high to some readers, who are probably baffled due to their objections to the same policy on grounds of human rights abuses. This view neglects the mentality and values of Asians, and the Chinese, haunted by experiences of turbulent socialist revolution, have an even more different mentality on certain issues than other Asian cultures. The pervading view in the Western media that the quarrel over human rights is only with Beijing and that the people themselves are opposed to the government and would welcome outside intervention is, in many circumstances, simply not true16. Though it is not to say that the Chinese public is not concerned with human rights abuses with respect to the one child policy, on the issue of human rights, they are generally more concerned with the rights of freedom of speech and press and the lack of non-governmental media outlets. This is especially true of the younger, more vocal generation. Furthermore, many of the older generations who were the ones most affected by the policy– then still enforced rather rigorously– do not view the limitation on their number of children as a human rights abuse. Some recount that they felt it to be a justified sacrifice that their generation had to endure, in order to contribute to economic prosperity for their children. Even among that generation, rural families generally had more than one child; few of my cousins in the countryside are only children like me and my friends from the cities. This mindset that places more value on the economic prosperity and social order above personal concerns is perhaps best explained by the violent turmoil that modern China went through in the post-1949 period. An estimated 20 million died as a result of the three years of famine caused by the Great Leap Forward and the radical fervor of the Cultural Revolution ultimately resulted in nationwide chaos and disaster. With such memories haunting the Chinese people, perhaps it is understandable that economic prosperity– which has only really come about after Deng’s Four Modernizations reforms– and social order– comforting after years of revolution and struggle– are the concerns which weigh most heavily in the Chinese mind. The one abuse that the Chinese public does protest or at least test the boundaries of, often on the internet and blogosphere, is the rigid censorship imposed by the state; in the almost singular emphasis and frustration with this restriction, one can see the shadows of the hypocritical “Hundred Blooming Flowers” campaign under Mao, in which intellectuals, encouraged by the party itself to criticize the government, were persecuted, jailed, and executed for that very criticism. It is further reminiscent of the repression of the student protestors at Tiananmen Square, who advocated freedom of speech and press. But regarding the perception of the one child policy as a violation of people’s rights, many simply do not see it as an overly invasive restriction. For an increasing number of couples– made wealthier through China’s economic reforms and the most likely violators of the policy in urban areas– the fines are no longer much of a deterrent17. While in the countryside, the “one child” policy has really become more of a “two child policy”. “Because of the traditional views on labor supply, the traditional bias toward the male child, it's been impossible for them to enforce a one-child policy outside the cities. In the countryside, they're really trying to stop that third child,” said a Western diplomat to the Los Angeles Times18.

The one child policy has been a resounding success in terms of checking China’s population. The fertility rate is as of 2008, about 1.8 births per woman, a huge decline from the over 5 births per woman in the 1970s and over 3 births per woman in the 1980s19. The figures refer to the Total Fertility Rate (TFR), a demographic analysis technical term that refers to the number of children that would be born to a woman in her lifetime if she experienced the exact current age-specific fertility rates. The Chinese government estimates that it has three to four hundred million fewer people in 2008 with the implementation of the policy than it would have had without it20. This directly reduces the strain that a burgeoning population places both on infrastructure like education, health care, and law enforcement as well as natural resources and ecosystems. Indirectly, the state’s focus on population control has led to better health services for women and a reduction in the risks of death and injury associated with pregnancy. At family planning offices, women receive free contraception and pre-natal classes and help is provided for pregnant women to closely monitor their health21. In some places, the government has rolled out a “Caring for Girls” program, which aims at eliminating cultural discrimination against girls in rural and underdeveloped areas through subsidies and education in order to combat female infanticide22.

Also an indirect result is the increase in saving rates in China since the introduction of the policy. The reason here is probably twofold: one, the average Chinese family has more money now with which to invest due to the decrease in expenses on children and two, as parents now cannot always rely on the traditional retirement care by their children, they are liable to save more in order to provide for themselves in their old age. Indeed, Chinese household savings reached almost 25 percent of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in 2008, helping to finance investment of an unprecedented 40 percent of GDP23. This in turn accounted for practically all the increase in Chinese GDP in the first half of 2009, remarkable considering the global financial recession24. China’s government seems to have decided on a stimulus package of heavy investment in infrastructure to boost spending and a shift to focus more on the domestic market instead of international, in order to weather the economic downturn. It seems to have worked; such widespread domestic spending has propelled China’s GDP growth for the third quarter of 2009 to 8.9 percent25.

However successful the policy has been though, there are evidently many negative side effects. China, like many other Asian countries, has a long tradition of preferring sons, out of traditional economic and cultural incentives, influenced by the remnants of widespread Confucianism. This has resulted in a skewed sex ratio at birth of 1.1 male(s)/female according to the CIA World Factbook 200926. Conversely, the current world wide ratio is estimated to be 1.0727. The skewed sex ratio is most likely due to sex-selective abortions, female infanticide, and abandonment. All are illegal under Chinese law but these can be easily overlooked with the aid of a hongbao– “red packet”– or two. There are other possible reasons as well. A 1990 study concluded that the higher preponderance of reported male births in China is probably due to four main causes: diseases which affect females more severely than males; the result of widespread under-reporting of female births; the illegal practice of sex-selective abortion made possible by the widespread availability of ultrasound; and finally, acts of child abandonment and infanticide27. A report by the State Population and Family Planning Commission estimates that there will be about 30 million more men than women in 2020, a potential recipe for social instability28. The skewed sex ratios have made it increasingly difficult for Chinese men to find partners as the girls that should have grown up to be their wives never got the opportunity29. These men are called guang gun-er– “bare branches”– because they are branches of the family tree that will never produce fruit30. This social trend worries many officials, analysts, and sociologists because there is a marked disparity between different socioeconomic classes. The scarcity of women leads to a situation where men with advantages– money, education, skills– will be more successful in finding partners, whether domestically or abroad, while the disadvantaged men– poor, illiterate, unskilled– will not31. Sociologists state that historically, such bare branches with no stake in society– of the lowest socioeconomic class and with little chances of starting their own family– are generally volatile and aggressive, more prone to attempt to better their situations through violent and criminal behavior, usually against other similarly frustrated bare branches32. Conservative estimates place the number of bare branches in China in 2020 at about 30 million, about 12 to 15 percent of the young adult male population33. With such a staggeringly large portion of the population unstable and possibly hostile, China’s government will need to, and indeed is attempting to, find some way to preserve social stability and diffuse (or export) the problem. The recent rise in gang violence is indeed largely due to the cumbersome local government apparatus and widespread corruption, but the abundant pool of volatile and disgruntled young men probably also fuels this growing comeback of ‘gangsterism.’ Some even attribute China’s recent antagonism with rival neighbor India over border disputes to a sinister agenda to provoke a war to which they can funnel their restless bare branches, an exportation of their domestic problem if you will. (India itself could very well be considering the same thing, with its own estimated 28 million bare branches by 2020)34.

The one child policy has also had the side effect of what is known as the “4-2-1 ratio,” which describes the generations of a ‘typical’ Chinese family now– four grandparents, two parents, and one child35. This has raised concerns about the future demographics of the country as this unique ratio would result in a shift from a younger population to an aging one in a short span of time. The only child would have to shoulder the burden of caring for not only both of his parents, but his four grandparents as well, putting an extraordinary amount of economic pressure on them. The older generations would become increasingly dependent on charities or government pensions, and if those ever failed, and the younger generation was unable to support them, thousands, no, millions of elderly would be left destitute36. To try and combat this, the government has started relaxing its policies, allowing couples who are only children to have one more child, and sometimes even actively encouraging them, like the Shanghai municipal government37.

Others have worried that the sometimes over-indulged only children– “little emperors” as the media dubs them– may grow up to have poorer social and communication skills38. Many parents do over-indulge their children, catering to their every whim– perhaps either living vicariously through them or spurred on by their memories of lost chances during their youth under the Cultural Revolution– and thus, some children do not possess any independent living skills39. These “little emperors” also face extreme amounts of pressure to succeed both academically and in extracurricular activities because of the intensely unforgiving university exam system (a product of China’s enormous population) that filters through millions of prospective applicants a year, admitting only the most stellar applicants. Some buckle under the pressure; there are stories of suicides and homicides due to rejections from universities each year (thought that is something that seems endemic in Eastern Asia). However, worries are somewhat reduced as the first group of “little emperors” are now coming of age40.


A Comparison of China and India

China is not the only country plagued by overpopulation nor is it the only country to employ coercive population control tactics. India, another Asian country plagued by a rapidly growing population, has its own sordid history of coercive population control tactics. In the 1970s, the son of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, during a declared “national emergency” by his mother, began a series of campaigns advocating forced tubal litigation and vasectomy camps as a means to curb the rapidly expanding population. Some 7 million men and women were forcibly sterilized over a span of 18 months41. Many had not violated regulations at all, but were poor or single and easy targets for government officials desperate to meet their set sterilization quotas42. The backlash against this coercive form of control was enormous; it helped to topple Gandhi’s Congress Party in 1977 and restored democratic rule43. And the memory of those camps itself has had long-reaching effects. When the new Janata government took control after Gandhi, they had to rename the Family Planning Ministry to a more euphemistic “Health and Family Welfare,” fearing public opinion44. Even now, Indian legislators and officials are wary of pursuing any openly stated method of population control. A coalition party led by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee back in 2000 announced a new, nobly ambitious (but lacking in concreteness) population policy, which controversially proposed that any state not reducing their birthrates would have their representation frozen in the Lok Sabha or Indian Lower House of Parliament. This proposed legislation underlines the conflicts between India’s more prosperous South– which would not have been punished by the legislation at all– and the more populous Hindi-speaking hinterland of the North, derisively known as the "cow belt”, – which would have been the region penalized45. The alarmism that came in wake of the one-billionth birth on May 11, 2000 did nothing to help matters. Unnerved state officials announced that “…Yes, it is coercion. But with a billion-plus people, family size is no longer a personal matter”46; officials of the Ministry of Health and Welfare began to describe population issues as an area where the states now mandated without government regulation. The “two-child policy” was given the national rubber stamp of approval in July 2003 by the Indian Supreme Court when they ruled that Haryana state had the right to disqualify electorates for having a third child47. This has lead to startling population campaigns, like a guns-for-sterilization scheme implemented in three districts of Uttar Pradesh: bringing in two people for sterilization gets you a single-barrel shotgun; five people gets a revolver license63. Other states have stuck with time-tested scheme of bribery, sometimes offering women gold chains in exchange for their sterilization48.

The methods that have been implemented though are effective, but not highly so. Although India was the first in the world to establish a family planning program over 50 years ago, it looks set to overtake China as the world’s most populous nation by 2050, with a growth rate of 1.548% (as compared to China’s own growth rate of 0.655%)49. Certain states like Madhya Pradesh have a TFR growth rate of more than 40 percent the national average50. A comparison of statistical data yields more intriguing conclusions. In 1979, the year China really began the one-child policy, India had a TFR of 4.77 births per woman, almost two higher than China’s 2.76 births per woman. Its average income per capita was about $777, around $100 less than China’s51. By 2007, India’s TFR had only dropped to 2.8 births per woman– higher than what China began with nearly 20 years ago– and its average income per capita was about $2,452 compared to China’s own figure of $4,95952. Once again, the link between lower total fertility rate and higher GDP per capita is clearly illustrated. Also, the strain that a larger population places on a country’s infrastructure and services is easily foreseeable particularly in healthcare and education. One measure of the quality of healthcare is infant mortality rate. India’s is 30.15 deaths per 1000 live births, much higher than China’s infant mortality rate of 20.25 deaths per live births53. The literacy rate is also much lower in India. 90.9 percent of China’s total population over age fifteen can read and write while only 61 percent of India’s equivalent age bloc can54. Girls compare especially poorly; only 47.8 percent are literate while the figure is much higher– 86.5 percent– in China55. The rather ineffectual attempts at positive population control in India have done nothing to combat its problem: 16 million people– slightly less than the population of Australia–are added to its ranks each year56. The burgeoning population has acted as a drag on development and kept one in every three Indians below the poverty line, compromising the much-vaunted recent economic liberalization57.


Conclusion

The one child policy has its inherent flaws. Demographically, it is contributing to the rapid aging of China’s population, on a scope the government is ill-equipped to handle. Even worse, it has led to a skewed sex ratio in favor of boys – and millions of single men and abandoned female infants. The methods by which the policy was implemented and enforced also were overly coercive and authoritarian. Forced abortions and sterilizations, destruction of property and goods, arbitrary arrest and detention – all clear human rights violations perpetrated by the government and local officials due to the one child policy. However, the Chinese government has finally realized this; as the country’s economy continues to grow, it is slowly moving away from such iron-fisted tactics. Several Chinese health workers in the town of Linyi, Shandong were arrested or dismissed in September 2005 over claims that they were forcing abortion and sterilization – illegal under Chinese law58. The state government has come to the realization, perhaps too slowly, that the most effective and humane way to reduce birth rates and total fertility rates is not through draconian mandates– although these are effective – but through education and empowerment of women, which the government has been actively trying to promote through its “Caring for Girls” campaigns and crack-downs on female infant trafficking. Couples that fall under the exceptions to the policy are being actively encouraged, through offers of emotion counseling and financial incentives, to have a second child, especially in rapidly aging urban areas like Shanghai59. On the other hand, couples who violate the policy, most often in rural areas, continue to be punished mainly with high fines– capped at one-fourth the family’s annual income. In recent years, the government has begun rolling out more and more exclusively financial incentives to follow the one child policy in recent years. Couples who follow the policy are often rewarded with preferential access to housing, healthcare, and government jobs; other perks include bonuses, increased old-age benefits and retirement funds, and a stronger social security system60. Yet with the shift in governmental approach – from coercive tactics to financial incentives – the prospect does not seem quite as frightening as it did for the older generations who were most affected. The policy had to be a necessary sacrifice. Yes, it was not fair to subject those generations to such human rights abuses and heavy-handed enforcement but in the end, China has prevented 400 million more births, many who would’ve lived lives of misery and poverty61, for all the economic hype around the nation, more than 600 million people still live under two dollars a day62. The older generations’ sacrifices may not be the sole reason, but they certainly contributed significantly to the economic miracle happening in China today. Pragmatic– Machiavellian even –, if not popular, for now, the one child policy seems set to remain for at least another 20 years.








* All numbers inserted at ends of sentences are footnotes - the formatting got lost in transition between Word and here. *


Link to related Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1w1Qh02-z8