by Evans, Karin
According to Jasper Becker, author of Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine, the disaster amounted to the least recognized and most severe famine in recorded human history—as if every single man, woman, and child in the entire state of California had perished from hunger and no one outside the California border had taken any notice.2 Half the casualties were children under ten. Untold numbers of children were left crying beside the bodies of their dead parents. Along roadsides in northwest China, desperate people scooped out holes in the soft yellow clay and left their children, hoping more fortunate travelers would come upon them and have mercy. American parents talking about “the starving children in China” at the dinner table in attempts to get their own children to eat didn’t know the half of it.
Even foreign correspondents stationed in China at the time managed to remain unaware of the devastation. Mao himself tried to hide the disaster from the world until it was too late for help. So distanced were some of the later discussions of this tragedy that American academics managed to quibble among themselves about whether it was appropriate for a writer like Becker to use emotionally charged phrases such as “starved to death” as opposed to the more acceptable “excess mortality” when talking about the loss of tens of millions of human beings.3
It was against this bleak scenario—though not necessarily because of it—that China’s so-called one-child policy came to be. At the end of the Mao era, with the specter of the famine still lingering and with a growing impulse toward economic development, population control became a priority for the People’s Republic of China.
Mao, however, had spurned the idea of slowing the nation’s birthrate, viewing it as a Western strategy to reduce China’s influence. He had, in fact, celebrated the idea of “glorious mothers having more babies,” and the voices of those who expressed doubts were brutally stilled.4 When the Cultural Revolution came along, it managed to postpone any further discussion for at least another five years. It was not until well afterward that the climate changed sufficiently that discussions could resume. By 1972, with China’s population swelling toward one billion people, a state council announced that population control was essential to the socialist revolution. When China’s new leaders such as Deng Xiaoping looked forward, the emphasis was on chasing the booming “tiger” economies of China’s prosperous Asian neighbors.
Although the threat of another famine might seem reason enough to most untutored observers to keep numbers down, the People’s Republic viewed population control as a way to boost economic development and growth. The leadership believed that fewer mouths to feed meant a better chance at prosperity for more people. A rising standard of living meant better odds for political stability and a place for China in the world hierarchy of emerging nations. Yet by this point, it was probably already too late. As writer Hong Ying points out, “The disaster would take at least half a century of draconian policy and human tragedy to correct.”
In 1980 came the official government announcement that set the ground rules for what came to be known, rather inaccurately, as the one-birth-per-couple, or one-child, policy.5 With that decree, which became national law, the government wedged a foot into the bedroom door of every household in China. “Use whatever means you must to reduce the population, but do it,” came the edict.
The government placed its hopes for prosperity in a mathematical vision of diminishing numbers. “Eight-four-two-one,” went one saying, meant to describe the shrinking family—eight great-grandparents, four grandparents, two parents, one child. The target figure worked out to 1.6 children per couple, which built in the government’s realistic assumption that a lot of people—some with the government’s permission—would have more than one child. At the time a substantial number of Chinese families were routinely having five or six children.
As if the heavy burden of tradition hadn’t landed heavily enough on China’s females already, the government’s population policy ushered in a whole new set of troubles for girls and women both, particularly in the countryside. Had a more moderate course been taken, and taken far, far earlier, there are some arguments that economic development and education might have naturally, over time, reduced the tendency to have large families and might have slowed the booming birthrate. But China put into place the most drastic birth control policies in the world and enforced them, in certain areas, with brutal zeal.
At first, a birth control “high tide” was launched. Early on, the suggestions were relatively gentle. Such slogans as “One is best, don’t exceed two” went round, but the state’s grip soon tightened, as China forecast an economic crisis and began a huge push toward development and modernization. The general policy called for later marriages (age twenty-two for men, at least twenty for women, though twenty-four for women was considered ideal), fewer children, and a longer space (about four years) between children. In theory, each family would be allowed just one child—sometimes under special circumstances a second, providing that the children were sufficiently spaced, and the officials could be persuaded of a pressing need. Ethnic minorities within China—there are numerous strains, particularly in the borderlands, but they add up to less than 10 percent of the population as a whole—were routinely allowed two children, because their numbers were in some cases diminishing.
A certain piece of paper became immensely important in China. Shengyu zheng, it was called—“birth permission paper”—the state’s version of blessings for mothers. It gave a woman official sanction to conceive and bear a child, a right she no longer had without it. She was required to have a permit when she became pregnant and to take the paperwork to the hospital with her at the time of delivery.
With marriage came the state’s requirement that people sign an agreement to comply with the birth quotas. Those who cooperated could receive a Birth Planning Honor Card and preferential treatment for food, housing, health care, and education. Those who didn’t agree could be hounded until they did. If they still held out, they were subject to punishment—fines, loss of benefits and jobs, even jail.
Once the new rules had been set, the very nature of the Communist Party state gave the government the right and the power to interfere in the most personal realm of people’s lives. And interfere it did. From the beginning, the government’s approach set it at odds with contemporary world guidelines on family planning, which emphasize not forced compliance but the empowerment of women to make informed, responsible choices.
The long arm of the Chinese state had the ability to reach into every household. Women who became pregnant without permission were confronted and, if officials decided it was necessary, marched to abortion clinics. Once a child was born, a woman was required to have an IUD inserted and periodically checked. After the birth of a second child, either husband or wife was to be sterilized. Forced sterilizations, mandatory insertions of metal IUDs—which could be monitored by X-ray to make sure they remained in place—became commonplace assaults on the women of China, as did forced abortions, even at full term.6
Party workers and local officials were rewarded or punished, depending on how well they met the quotas set for their areas. Some population control offices had special boxes where anonymous informants could tell officials which women in the community might be attempting to hide a pregnancy. Posters went up, labeling those who opposed the state’s birth control policies as class enemies. Officials of the Women’s Federation of the Communist Party kept track of women’s monthly cycles and their pregnancies, and listed those to be sterilized and those required to have IUDs inserted.7
Employers, too, began to supervise their female employees, watching them for signs of pregnancy, sometimes posting their menstrual cycles publicly, pressuring them into abortions if the timing of the pregnancy didn’t adhere to the rules or suit the work schedule. Writes Bill McKibben in Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Argument for Single-Child Families: “No parent, for any reason, should ever have to make a choice to abandon a child. But in China, it’s hard to avoid. In factories
family planning workers monitor women to make sure they do not become pregnant. ‘We watch for women who start to eat less or who get morning sickness,’ explained one functionary from . . . Changzhou [the home of our second daughter, Franny]. ‘. . . No one has ever become pregnant without one of us finding out.’”8
In 1997, a maid named Sun Lili, employed by a government-owned hotel in Beijing, became pregnant, only to be told by her employer that her condition was “inconvenient.” She was ordered to take “remedial measures,” meaning an abortion. She refused when a doctor said another abortion (she’d already had two in the past two years when she’d become pregnant without official sanction) would forever end her chances to bear a child. Sun Lili was fined five months’ salary, stripped of her medical coverage, and eventually lost her job.
She went on to have her baby, a little girl, and in a rare instance of anyone, much less a woman, fighting the Chinese system, she brought a lawsuit—although the Chinese courts were not known for supporting the rights of individuals against the power of the state.9 Sun’s case was heard at both the district and a higher level of the People’s Court. In both cases, the courts ruled against her. With the assistance of the Center for Women’s Law Studies and Legal Services at Beijing University, Sun planned to appeal.10
China’s women, whether they lived in an area where the quotas and enforcement were relatively lax or where the rules were rigidly defined and adhered to, were the focus of enforcement, oversight, and punishment. If sterilization was ordered, it was most often the wife who was sterilized, despite government pronouncements that both men and women shared the responsibility for family planning. In China, as elsewhere in the world, the burden of contraception, state-dictated contraception especially, fell on women.11
Birth control workers sometimes referred to women who begged to keep their children, born or unborn, as “pleaders.” Since control was exerted over people at the local level, some couples managed to outrun the policies by moving away and having their children elsewhere, going through considerable hardship in the process, and coming to be known as birth guerrillas. They, too, paid a price. The women often gave birth in primitive conditions, with little or no help, and wound up with children ineligible for a residence registration card, or hukou, the ticket to state benefits. The relatives left behind were often harassed. And if a woman who fled was caught, she could be forcibly taken in for an abortion, no matter how far her pregnancy had progressed.
Pregnant women would sometimes hide in relatives’ homes until they were ready to deliver, hoping to escape the authorities. “But they could be discovered and dragged back to the house. It happened to my sister,” said a woman who grew up in the north. “They dragged her to the hospital for an abortion, and it was a late abortion, the kind a baby could have survived.
“And not so long ago,” she added, “I heard about a woman who got pregnant without permission, but no one raised a question until she was almost due. Then they said, ‘Hey, you violated the policy,’ and dragged her to the hospital. The husband panicked and said, ‘We’re going to lose the baby,’ and he called a friend who was a doctor to try to get him to help. But it was too late. They’d already injected the drug and the baby was dead. The couple was very sad.”
Another woman, one who fled China, reported that in Fujian, a province known particularly for its harsh enforcement of the government rules, she’d seen pregnant women hiding anywhere they could. “Some of them were nine months pregnant, but were forced to undergo abortion procedures just the same—simply because they had no birth-allowed certificates. The government dismantled the houses of some of them and made them homeless. In my native village, I saw how many women were looking for places to hide at night.”
Early reports of excessive force used against women in China were recounted by Steven Mosher in Broken Earth, and by John S. Aird in Slaughter of the Innocents: Coercive Birth Control in China. In a second book, Mosher told the story of a woman who worked in China as a population control officer and then moved to America, only to have the Chinese authorities attempt to deny her the right to bear a second child—while she was in the United States. Chi An, the narrator of One Mother’s Ordeal—Mosher disguised her name—now lives in this country and speaks out against the one-child policy, which she blames for the abandonment and killing of baby girls in China.
Other horror stories were documented by various international organizations, including Human Rights in China, which quoted a Beijing gynecologist who told of women seven, eight, nine months pregnant with a second or third baby taken to hospitals by population officials for “induced abortions.” Another former population control official who worked in a northwestern province told of noncooperative women pulled out of their homes and forcibly sterilized “in the middle of the night by half-asleep nurses and doctors. The woman usually screams and kicks, and our men hold her down for anesthesia.”12
Such stories made dramatic headlines in the West whenever they appeared, yet the overall picture of what went on in China was far more complex. From the beginning, the so-called one-child policy wasn’t always, in all places, a one-child policy. And over time, it evolved and changed, with different applications in different areas. Since the birth limits were enforced through local districts, procedures varied, with relatively lax rules in some provinces and urban areas, and draconian measures in others. Different rules were applied in different terrains. In some regions, rural peoples who needed more hands to work the land were allowed to have more than one child without penalty. In sparsely populated rural areas the policy was a two-child policy, even a three-child policy, if a family could show sufficient economic need for another child, or if the area wasn’t closely monitored. In the most remote areas of China where enforcement was just too difficult, the policies were pretty much ignored by populace and officials alike. In some areas, officials looked the other way or simply imposed fines on people who exceeded the limits. Eventually, in some instances and locales, it became common for people who could afford it to just pay the fine, usually a substantial amount, and have an extra child.
If terror was applied in some areas, gentler inducements succeeded in others. The promise of state benefits persuaded many women to comply with the government’s pressures, particularly in the cities where women and families had achieved a greater measure of financial independence, which they could too easily lose. A study at Beijing University found that three-quarters of urban women said they’d like to have two children, but settled for one because they’d otherwise lose valuable subsidies, including housing and medical care.
There were places, too, where the policy experienced breakdowns, particularly in rural areas and among parents on the loose, unattached to any particular jurisdiction. A skit on Chinese television once featured a family who outran the population control officials from city to city, producing a child in each place and naming the youngster after the city of birth.
Nevertheless, by 1987, American anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh, a professor at the University of California Irvine and an expert on Chinese population policy, reported that one out of every eight Chinese women married in the 1970s had suffered the trauma of a second- or third-trimester abortion. In some provinces, such as Fujian in the south, the enforcement was particularly zealous.
“I was a monster in the daytime,” said a former birth control official from Fujian, who appeared on U.S. television, on Ted Koppel’s Nightline.13 Gao Xiao Duan told American viewers particularly horrifying tales of what she herself had done in the service of the government’s policy. But such discussions of conditions in China sometimes made for strange bedfellows. This particular official, for instance, was also invited to appear before a U.S. congressional subcommittee to testify about the terror experienced by Chinese women at the hands of the authorities. 14 The committee was chaired by Republican Christopher Smith, an opponent of birth control anywhere, who used the woman’s testimony to bolster his cause—denying China support for voluntary birth control prog
rams because of the purported horrors of the existing policy and the widespread abortions. At the time, Smith noted that these “shocking revelations” had come only a few months after the United Nations Population Fund had resumed cooperation with China’s population program.15
During this time China was often caught in this sort of double bind—applauded by the outside world for attempting quickly and drastically to reduce its growth rate, then taken to task for its methods, but ultimately denied the assistance for women that might in some ways have helped relax the stringent enforcement.
Although the Chinese government has insisted that it never coerced or used physical force on women (blaming “overzealous fieldworkers” for excesses), the reports of extreme measures, including full-term “abortion,” involuntary sterilization, forcible insertion of IUDs, and killing of newborns, persisted. While some physicians, forced to do late-term abortions, resisted, others were pressured to keep up the practice. During campaigns in 1983 and 1991, more than thirty million women were forcibly sterilized.16 Such surgery, often carried out at inappropriate times, in unsanitary conditions, or without proper rest afterward, took its toll on women’s health.
Both the mothers of China and their daughters were caught in an age-old struggle with a contemporary twist. With the efforts of the People’s Republic of China to curb population solidly under way, in many families, whether through sheer economic need for a male offspring to provide old-age security or through the timeworn sense of needing a son to hold one’s head up in the community, daughters were once again made to suffer.
Whenever the pressures of the government’s edict to have just one child (or even two) met the pressures of the husband’s family to produce that coveted son, desperate women were forced into desperate acts. With pregnancies so closely scrutinized, the only chance to have a son often depended on hiding—or giving up—a daughter. Untold numbers of Chinese mothers, particularly rural women, who gave birth to girls faced an excruciating decision: Keep the daughter and lose the chance to have a son or sacrifice her and try again.