One Child [electronic resource] : The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment

Title:

Author:

Fong, Mei.

Description:

-- One Child The Guardian, UK).

Publisher:

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,

Date:

2015

Digital Format:

CLOUDLIBRARY EPUB

Language:

English

Summary

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist offers an intimate investigation of China's one-child policy and its consequences for families and the nation at large.

For over three decades, China exercised unprecedented control over the reproductive habits of its billion citizens. Now, with its economy faltering just as it seemed poised to become the largest in the world, the Chinese government has brought an end to its one-child policy. It may once have seemed a shortcut to riches, but it has had a profound effect on society in modern China.

Combining personal portraits of families affected by the policy with a nuanced account of China's descent towards economic and societal turmoil, Mei Fong reveals the true cost of this controversial policy. Drawing on eight years of research, Fong reveals a dystopian legacy of second children refused documentation by the state; only children supporting their parents and grandparents; and villages filled with ineligible bachelors.

A "vivid and thoroughly researched" piece of on-the-ground journalism, One Child humanizes the policy that defined China and warns that the ill-effects of its legacy will be felt across the globe ( The Guardian , UK).

Reviews (3)

Kirkus Review

Widespread female infanticide and officials jailing pregnant women's families to induce them to surrender to abortionsthese are scenes not from a dystopian novel but from China's family planning bureaucracy. The country's one-child policy, to be officially phased out in 2016, created more far-reaching social distortions than even its most vociferous critics realized, argues Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Fong in this timely expos of a reproductive regime whose inner workings Chinese officials have tried hard to keep under wraps. The author, a longtime China correspondent, crisscrossed the country talking with peasants, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and dissidents, and she narrates her travels in a conversational, convivial tone, also discussing her own struggles to conceive. Given the degree to which family planning is embedded in the fabric of the country, it is difficult to predict how the abrupt reversal will play out. Fong describes "China's birth-planning machinery" as "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 author uncovers vast regional differences in how the law has been enforced: while some provinces saw huge numbers of women forcibly sterilized, in others, "authorities actually encouraged" large families "so they could collect more fines." Contemporary China's gender imbalance is approaching unprecedented levels, and the massive surplus of boys presages problems for both men and women. Although they contribute financially nearly as much as their husbands, women are not traditionally named on house titles, and "given that much of the recent wealth creation in China has come from appreciating values in soaring property markets, Chinese women have therefore been left out of what is arguably the biggest accumulation of residential real estate wealth in history: some $27 trillion worth" by some estimates. Finished just before the announcement of the policy's demise, One Child is a touching and captivating anthropological investigation of one of the most invasive laws ever devised. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

New York Review of Books Review

READERS WOULD BE forgiven for thinking that the announcement, on Oct. 29, 2015, that China was changing its one-child policy would have turned this book from an account of the daily lives of Chinese people into a work of history. Not so. The event itself came rather late for Mei Fong's "One Child." But she makes disconcertingly clear that the repercussions of population control will continue to reverberate throughout China. The policy itself remains a monument to official callousness, and Fong's book pays moving testimony to the suffering and forbearance of its victims. It is often assumed that the limitation to a single child was an act of Maoist despotism. In fact, as Fong shows, it was associated with the post-Mao opening. Deng Xiaoping, China's leader after 1978, had set a target of quadrupling the country's per capita national income by 2000. China's planners decided that they could achieve this goal only if, in addition to increasing the size of the pie, there were fewer people to share it. So they determined, in their words, to "adjust women's average fertility rate in advance." The man who ran the program that treated women as if they were production functions was a rocket scientist, Song Jian, who had worked on ballistic missiles. Song went on to help manage the giant Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. His was a world in which unintended consequences were not important. Population control was not unusual in the 1980s. India also had a fertility-control program. The United Nations gave its first-ever population award to the Chinese minister for population planning in 1983 (along with Indira Gandhi). But China's application of population control was particularly ruthless. In 2012, Feng Jianmei, a factory worker pregnant with her second child, was taken to a clinic, forced to sign a document consenting to an abortion and injected with an abortifacient. She was in her seventh month. Pictures of her lying next to her perfectly formed seven-month dead fetus went viral. But hers was hardly an unusual case. In the 1990s, population targets became a major criterion for judging the performance of officials. It is no surprise that they carried out the one-child policy ruthlessly. Reading this account, one wonders why rape as a weapon of war is (rightly) seen as a war crime, whereas the forcible violation of women's bodies in pursuit of government policy wins United Nations awards. As Fong makes clear, the one-child policy was not just a crime. It was a blunder. Fertility would have fallen anyway, as happened in other Asian countries, albeit not quite so far and fast. But the policy further distorted sex ratios, resulting in more boys than girls. And it changed expectations: Most people now want only one child. That is why the policy may prove to be hard to reverse. The greatest strength of Fong's book is her reporting (she was a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal in China). Fong meets Liang Zhongtang, who fruitlessly attempted to dissuade China's leaders from adopting the policy in the 1980s. She interviews people at adoption agencies that are suspected of seizing second children and selling them to Westerners. She sees Tough Pig, a boar that survived for 36 days without food or water under the rubble of a vast earthquake in Sichuan Province. The earthquake highlights how unexpected are the tragedies of China's population policy: Thousands of only children were killed when shoddily built schools collapsed, leaving their stricken parents childless - a disaster in a country where the importance of family has survived even the one-child restrictions. Unlike the earthquake, that policy was - and remains - an unnatural disaster. JOHN PARKER is the Beijing bureau chief for The Economist.

Library Journal Review

China's infamous one-child policy lasted just 35 years. Forced sterilizations, gruesome late-term abortions, an overseas adoption boom, and baby trafficking emerged as by-products of the draconian law. What was touted as a "necessary step in [China's] Herculean efforts to lift the population...from abject poverty" resulted in repercussions that "continue to shape how one in six people in the world are born, live, and die." The consequences were dire: the policy "rapidly created a population that is too old, too male, and quite possibly, too few." Generations of singletons are caught in a preposterous bind: overcoddled and over-indulged, while facing impossible expectations by desperate parents. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Fong, whose Malaysian Chinese background provided insider access, blends policy and the personal experiences of those affected for a staggering first title; alas, it's better read on the page. Narrator Janet Song sounds as if she's too often on the verge of tears, which might be appropriate for the most inhumane tragedies, but the less wrenching sections hardly warrant such overwrought pitch. VERDICT The disappointing presentation pales in comparison to the significance of the contents, making Child an important acquisition for all libraries intending to enhance their international collections. ["Fong's human-scale portrayal of individual stories, weaving in her own fraught journey toward motherhood as well, makes for an approachable and edifying treatment": LJ 1/16 starred review of the Houghton Harcourt hc.]-Terry Hong, -Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Excerpts

Prologue In the midst of the Cold War, China's rocket scientists came up with an ambitious plan that had nothing to do with missiles, or space exploration, or weaponry of any kind. It concerned babies. On September 25, 1980, China's Communist Party unveiled this plan through an open letter that asked members to voluntarily limit their family size to one child. The request was, in truth, an order. Thus began the one-child policy, the world's most radical social experiment, which continues to irrevocably shape how one in six people in this world are born, live, and die. Like crash dieting, the one-child policy was begun for reasons that had merit. China's leadership argued the policy was a necessary step in its Herculean efforts to lift a population the size of the United States' from abject poverty. But like crash dieting, the one-child policy employed radical means and aimed for quick results, causing a rash of negative side effects. The excesses of the one-child policy, such as forced sterilizations and abortions, would eventually meet with global opprobrium. Balanced against this, however, is the world's grudging admiration for China's soaring economic growth, a success partially credited to the one-child policy. What we fail to understand is that China's rapid economic growth has had little to do with its population-planning curbs. Indeed, the policy is imperiling future growth because it is rapidly creating a population that is too old, too male, and, quite possibly, too few. More people, not less, was one of the reasons for China's boom. The country's rise as a manufacturing powerhouse could not have happened without abundant cheap labor from workers born during the 1960s-70s baby boom, before the one-child policy was conceived. To be sure, fewer births made investments in human capital more efficient -- less spreading out of educational resources, for example. Many economists, however, agree that China's rapid economic rise had more to do with Beijing's moves to encourage foreign investment and private entrepreneurship than a quota on babies. Privatizing China's lumbering state-owned enterprises, for example, spurred private-sector growth until it accounted for as much as 70 percent of China's gross domestic product (GDP) by 2005. Arthur Kroeber, one of the most prolific and respected economists who specializes in China, said, "Let's say China grew 10%; I would be surprised if more than 0.1% of this is due to the one-child policy." China's vast cohort of workers is growing old. By 2050, one out of every four people in China will be over sixty-five. And the one-child policy has vastly shrunk the working population that must support and succor this aging army. In recent years China has made great strides in rolling out nationwide pension and health-care schemes, but the social safety net is far from adequate, and the leadership will have to do much more with much less time. I started reporting on China's economic miracle in 2003 as a Wall Street Journal correspondent. I was on the factory beat, covering the workshop of the world. Every little city in southern China's Pearl River Delta defined itself by what it made: I made regular stops at Jeans City, Bra Town, and Dollar Store center, wrote stories about the world's largest Christmas tree factory, and about a brassiere laboratory that birthed the Wonderbra. Few envisioned a worker shortage then. But I was starting to hear stories about factory owners being forced to hike wages. Some resorted to offering previously unheard-of perks like TVs, badminton courts, and free condoms. Most economists at the time saw it as a short-term labor supply issue that would soon sort itself out. For how could you run out of workers in China? As it turned out, the work force shrinkage happened faster than anticipated. The one-child policy sharply accelerated a drop in fertility. China's massive 800-million-person work force -- larger than Europe's population -- started to contract in 2012 and will continue doing so for years to come, driving up wages and contributing to global inflationary pressures. After twenty years of below-replacement rates, China is taking baby steps to encourage more couples to have two children to ease demographic pressures. So far, it doesn't appear to be working. Only about a tenth of eligible couples applied for permission to have a second child one year after Beijing introduced its most recent nationwide round of changes, a take-up below even the most pessimistic projections. Many say it's simply too costly and stressful to raise multiple offspring in modern-day China. In that sense, the one-child policy can be judged a success, for many Chinese have thoroughly internalized the mindset that the one-child household is the ideal. If Beijing is unable to reverse this thinking, then somewhere in the decade between 2020 and 2030, China's population will peak and decline. By 2100, China's population may have declined to 1950 levels, about 500 million, a startling reversal for the world's most populous nation. No other country has ever shed this much of its population without the aid of warfare or pestilence. And at the same time, the policy's enforcement has occasionally been vicious, bordering on inhumane in certain cases, and it has encouraged a number of baleful side effects, from a potentially explosive gender imbalance to what is essentially a black market for adoptable infants. China's one-child policy was crafted by military scientists, who believed any regrettable side effects could be swiftly mitigated and women's fertility rates easily adjusted. China's economists, sociologists, and demographers, who might have injected more wisdom and balance, were largely left out of the decision making, as the Cultural Revolution had starved social scientists of resources and prestige. Only the nation's defense scientists were untouched by the purges, and they proved not the best judges of human behavior. The sad truth is, the harsh strictures put in place by the one-child policy were unnecessary for economic prosperity. By the 1970s, a full decade before the policy, China already had in place a highly effective and less coercive family-planning policy, called the "Later, Longer, Fewer" campaign. In the ten years the Later, Longer, Fewer campaign was in place, women in China went from having six children on average to three. Many demographers believed this pattern of falling fertility would have continued without the imposition of the one-child policy, a reasonable assumption considering similar fertility trajectories among neighboring Asian nations. After all, China's neighbors also managed to slow population growth -- and turbocharge their economies in the bargain -- without resorting to such traumatic measures. In roughly the same period of time China's one-child policy was in place, birthrates in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Thailand also plummeted, from six births per woman to two or fewer. It is possible that if China had followed the path of these countries, investing in normal family-planning activities, fertility would be almost as low as current levels. Certainly its people would be happier. "Even an extra 50 to 100 million people wouldn't have made a huge difference," suggested University of Washington professor William Lavely, an expert on China's fertility transition. "It wouldn't have greatly reduced overall welfare, and in fact it may well have increased it, as many families would have been able to have the second child they need. Higher GDP per capita can't substitute for the security and psychic benefits that some families gain from an extra child." Will China be able to flip the baby switch on as successfully as it turned it off? Recent history suggests not. Excerpted from One Child: The Past and Future of China's Most Radical Experiment by Mei Fong All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.