Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (45 page)

Launched in 1979, the program was breathtaking in its audacity. With few exceptions, all couples were told they could have just one child, while local officials were given the power to decide when women could conceive and what kind of contraception they should use after giving birth. In effect, the state claimed the authority to regulate the most personal and private behavior of its citizens. Given the scale of the project, the confidence with which the party embraced it is remarkable. Party leaders were convinced not only that the one-child policy was justified, but also that it was enforceable in a nation of nearly one billion people, the vast majority of them peasants who could be expected to resist for cultural and economic reasons. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the program is its longevity. The communes of the Great Leap Forward lasted only a few years and the Cultural Revolution a decade, but nearly thirty years after it was first adopted, the one-child policy—or at least its most basic components—remains an enduring fixture in Chinese life.

It is easy to forget that this program was launched not by Mao but by his successors, at a time when the party was generally withdrawing from people’s lives. Mao himself had been ambivalent about population control. At first, he stood by Marxist and Soviet orthodoxy against limiting population growth, but he later changed his mind and endorsed birth control and “birth planning.” During the Hundred Flowers Movement, the president of Peking University, an economist named Ma Yinchu, won Mao’s praise by arguing that strong measures were needed to prevent the nation’s fast-growing population from slowing economic development. But the economist came under withering attack in the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and on the eve of the Great Leap Forward, Mao suggested that a larger population was good for China because it meant more workers. His flip-flops resulted in a pair of baby booms in the 1950s and ’60s that swelled the Chinese population. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Premier Zhou Enlai managed to outmaneuver the leftists who opposed population control and launch a national “birth planning” program rooted in the socialist planned economy. For the first time, the production of children, like the production of grain or steel, was subject to the targets and quotas of the government’s Five-Year Plan. Couples were told to marry later, limited to two or three children, and required to wait three to four years between births.

After Mao’s death, this relatively moderate approach to slowing population growth was ditched in favor of the far more radical one-child policy. The sudden shift came as Deng Xiaoping was rolling out his market economic reforms, and it seemed to run counter to his effort to lead the party away from disruptive mass campaigns and toward more pragmatic policy making. But if Deng was abandoning doctrinaire socialism, he was replacing it with a new ruling ideology, a belief in the power of “science” and “scientific decision making” to solve the nation’s problems.

For more than a century, the Chinese have used the word “science” to refer not just to the study of the natural world but also to a way of thinking that is supposed to be rational, objective, and modern. In a nation disillusioned by Mao’s utopian fantasies, Deng’s emphasis on science as the party’s new touchstone was a political masterstroke. But as the anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh has shown, the leadership’s blind faith in science led it to adopt an extreme solution to a problem that, while serious, could have been managed in other ways. At the center of the process was a group of eminent rocket scientists, men who had been sheltered from Mao’s campaigns, who had access to computers and international journals, and who were supremely confident in their own abilities. Chief among them was the cyberneticist Song Jian, who later served as minister of science and technology. These men viewed the population as a machine to be fine-tuned by engineers like themselves, not a society of humans with rights, values, and preferences. In 1979, they made the mistake of accepting as mainstream science the most alarmist theories of overpopulation and ecological crisis then circulating in the West. They used weak data, plugged them into formulas adapted from their missile optimization work, and created population models and forecasts that gave the illusion of fact. Then, over the objections of other scholars, they used these “scientific” results to persuade the leadership that China faced a grave crisis and that immediate implementation of a one-child program was the “only way” to avoid environmental disaster and meet Deng’s economic goals.

What followed was a mass campaign not unlike those that Mao had unleashed on the public. All the familiar elements were there: the intense propaganda, the colorful slogans, the struggle sessions against offenders, the shock teams of party activists. By the mid-1980s, the campaign had basically succeeded in the nation’s cities. Because the state still controlled almost all urban jobs and social services, the consequences of having more than one child could be severe, and given the party’s extensive surveillance network in city neighborhoods and workplaces, unauthorized pregnancies were easily detected. As a result, few in the cities were willing to defy the authorities. In rural villages, however, the party encountered widespread resistance. Peasants depended on their children, especially sons, to help work the fields and support them in old age. But under the one-child policy, a family’s future might rest entirely on the talent and health of a single son—a risk few wanted to take. With a daughter, the situation would be even worse, because she would be married off and required by tradition to support not her own parents but her husband’s. And, of course, only a son could carry on the family line.

Despite open hostility across the countryside, the party pushed ahead with the one-child program, resorting to what became known as the “five procedures” to deter and punish violators—seizing grain, livestock, and furniture, demolishing houses, and putting people in prison. When that wasn’t enough, it launched a mass campaign of forced sterilization and abortion in 1983. By the government’s own count, birth planning officials performed nearly twenty-one million tubal ligations and vasectomies that year and more than fourteen million abortions. But the abuses strained the party’s relationship with the peasants and resulted in a backlash that sometimes turned violent. Reformers in the party leadership responded by issuing a new directive in 1984 prohibiting the use of coercion to enforce the one-child policy. By 1988, the party had scaled back the program to allow most rural couples whose first child was a girl to have a second baby—in effect, to try again for a son. But after the Tiananmen massacre, birth planning hard-liners staged a comeback and signaled again that coercive tactics would be tolerated to reach population targets. There was another crackdown, another wave of violence and abuse, another surge in abortions and sterilization. For the first time, the party made the ability to meet birth planning targets a key criterion in evaluating apparatchiks. No matter how good a job they did in other areas, no matter how well the economy performed under their watch, local officials would now be denied bonuses and promotions if they missed their birth planning goals. For the party’s rural officials, many of whom were not fans of the one-child policy, this was powerful incentive to do whatever was necessary to keep births down. By the year 2000, the total fertility rate in China had fallen to a historic low of 1.6 births per woman, well under the natural replacement rate and nearly comparable to levels in the industrialized nations of the West.

There is reason to believe, however, that a similar decline could have been achieved without the one-child policy. What neither the missile scientists who devised the program nor their critics anticipated at the time was the phenomenal performance of the economy under Deng’s market reforms. The rapid growth far exceeded expectations, rendering the limited impact of the one-child policy on population size almost irrelevant. At the same time, rising living standards caused a historic shift in childbearing preferences, with growing numbers of couples marrying later and choosing on their own to have fewer children. Fertility rates were already falling quickly in the 1970s under the more moderate program launched by Zhou Enlai, from just under 6 births per woman at the beginning of the decade to 2.7 births when the one-child program was launched—one of the fastest declines in modern history. Nearly three decades of the one-child policy reduced the rate further by only about 1 more birth per woman, and even the government attributes half of that reduction to the impact of rising living standards. The government takes credit for the other half but could that modest decline have been achieved by just enforcing a later marriage age or wider spacing of births? Could it have been achieved by following the experience of other developing countries and focusing on education and facilitating contraception? If just a fraction of the energy and money devoted over the past thirty years to enforcing the one-child policy had been invested instead in rural education, the government could have put hundreds of millions of rural women through high school—and women with high school degrees in China have fewer children than those without them. Such an investment in education would almost certainly also have led to economic gains—the reason Deng launched the one-child policy in the first place.

The true costs of the one-child program, however, go well beyond the wasted effort and money. The campaign cast a pall of violence and fear across the countryside that has not been fully appreciated even by many urban Chinese, and those who suffered most were society’s weakest—rural women and infant girls. Unborn babies, many aborted in the last months of pregnancy, could be considered victims as well. As early as 1981, the party began receiving disturbing reports of a spike in female infanticide, baby abandonment, and domestic violence against women who gave birth to daughters—all examples of what happened when the traditional demand for sons collided with the one-child policy. Even the
People’s Daily
reported the drowning of forty infant girls in one rural Anhui county during a two-year period in the early 1980s. The high rate of suicide among rural women, a resurgence of baby trafficking and the higher infant mortality among girls could be linked to the one-child program as well. At the same time, the state carried out more than a half billion sterilization operations, abortions, and IUD insertions in the name of the program, and the health impact is believed to be staggering, given that many birth planning personnel received limited training and worked under rushed conditions with cheap equipment. Women bore the brunt of botched operations, because the IUD was the party’s preferred choice of contraception and because husbands often volunteered their wives to be sterilized rather than submit themselves. Women made up nearly three-quarters of the 151 million people sterilized in China between 1971 and 2001, even though vasectomies are easier to perform and pose fewer complications.

During that same thirty-year period, the government conducted 264 million abortions, many of them repeat and late-term abortions, which carry greater health risks. Women often waited into the second trimester to determine the gender of their child and terminated pregnancies again and again until they were sure to have a son. These sex-selective abortions skewed the gender ratio of China’s children—about 120 males to every 100 females born in 1999—and as a result, the full impact of the one-child policy may not be known until later in the century, when these baby boys become unmarriageable young men. At about the same time, the nation may confront a serious aging crisis, with an explosion in the number of senior citizens and a much smaller working-age population left to support them.

By the late 1990s, a consensus had emerged among many demographers and birth planning officials that the human, social, and political costs of continuing to enforce the one-child program were too high, especially given the evidence it wasn’t doing much good. At the start of the next decade, the government began shifting the birth planning program toward a more voluntary system involving financial rewards and penalties, as well as improved medical services and counseling. It issued new directives prohibiting the use of coercive methods to enforce birth planning, and adopted a new law guaranteeing citizens the right to an “informed choice” in reproductive matters. Reformers drafted proposals to begin allowing all couples to have two children. But neither the party chief, Jiang Zemin, nor his successor, Hu Jintao, was willing to abandon the one-child policy. The government had insisted for nearly three decades that it was justified, necessary, and worth the sacrifice, and neither man wanted to take the political risk of overturning it. Any party leader who scrapped the one-child policy would be vulnerable to attack if birth rates then climbed. The political system rewarded caution, not risk taking, and it was almost always safer to stick with the status quo than to try to change it.

The result has been a patchwork of policy approaches. In some areas, local officials have made “informed choice” a reality, allowing couples more freedom to plan their own families and collecting only modest fines when they choose to have more than one child. But in others, the old, violent methods still prevail. Population control targets continue to be distributed to provincial leaders, and local officials who fail to meet their targets continue to be judged harshly and denied promotions regardless of their job performance in other areas. The system has resulted in a perverse set of incentives, not unlike those that lead officials to pursue economic growth regardless of the cost to the environment. It didn’t matter what happened to the air or the water, or even what happened to people’s health: as long as an official reported solid growth numbers, he would thrive in the apparatus. In birth planning, it didn’t matter if birth rates were too low, only if they were too high, and lower population figures had the added bonus of juicing the per capita economic numbers. To make matters worse, provincial leaders often played it safe, handing down tougher goals to the city and county officials under them, just in case some failed to keep births in check. Those officials then did the same thing, issuing even more stringent birth quotas to district and village officials that could be nearly impossible to meet—impossible, that is, without the use of brute force.