by Roseann Lake
12
THE WAY FORWARD
When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills.
—CHINESE PROVERB
On January 1, 2016, China ended its one-child policy. After thirty-six years of what is widely considered the most radical human experiment of the last century, parents in China are now allowed the slightly greater reproductive freedom of having two children.
When the one-child policy was conceived in the 1970s, few people could foresee the full magnitude of its human consequences. This includes one of the policy’s lead architects, a rocket scientist named Song Jian, who at the time was one of China’s top cyberballistics and missiles specialists. Although he may sound like a peculiar choice to help engineer the nation’s most aggressive population-control effort, it turns out that at least from a military perspective, missiles and mating patterns have more in common than meets the eye.
Song Jian studied mathematics and systems analysis in the Soviet Union. He earned a PhD from Moscow University and published seven papers (in Russian) on the theory of optimal control, a mathematical optimization often used to predict and calculate the path to a desired outcome, in very simple terms.
Following the Sino-Soviet split in 1960, Song returned to China and quickly rose in the ranks of the Ministry of National Defense to become the country’s foremost authority on missile guidance and control systems. Although the Red Guards ransacked his home during the Cultural Revolution—a common story for all members of the Chinese academic elite at the time—he was promptly put on a select list of scientists who enjoyed special state protection. Because Mao feared attacks from the United States and the Soviet Union, he treated military scientists—especially strategic-weapons scientists like Song, who could build atomic bombs—as a privileged coterie. They worked in modern facilities and had rare access to foreign materials, data, and powerful computers, according to Susan Greenhalgh, a professor of anthropology at Harvard and the author of Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China.
Perhaps most important (and dangerous), they had a direct line of communication with the highest levels of government and were involved in important national political decisions, the most significant of which would eventually become the one-child policy.
I must stress that Chinese social scientists and even some politicians had considered the need for population control long before Song’s time. As far back as the 1930s, they had identified China’s population as a burden, but since China’s wartime Guomindang government cherished military might and high population numbers, there wasn’t much they could do. Once the Chinese Communist Party took power, they followed the lead of the Soviet Union, where Stalin had reinstated pre-revolutionary family norms. In contrast to the birth-control initiatives of imperialist, capitalist states, these norms included the promotion of childbearing, which was also enforced in Communist-controlled areas of China. This was true to the extent that between 1931 and 1948, abortion was penalized, and only allowed in the case of danger to a mother’s life, writes German demographer Thomas Scharping, in his seminal book, Birth Control in China, 1949–2000: Population Policy and Demographic Development. By September 1949, on the eve of the founding of the People’s Republic, Mao declared: “It’s a very good thing that China has a big population. Even if China’s population multiplies many times, she is fully capable of finding a solution; the solution is production.”
By the 1950s, Mao’s hard stance against population control began to erode. China was facing food shortages and difficulty providing education for a growing number of children, as well as employment and health care challenges. Still, his revolutionary zeal led him to execute the Great Leap Forward—a campaign to quickly transform China from an agrarian economy to a Socialist one, through industrialization and collectivization. The strains of the transition contributed to the Great Chinese Famine, which, through the tens of millions of lives it tragically claimed as a result of malnutrition, underscored the need for population control and helped put it back on the political agenda.
Zhou Enlai, who served under Mao as first premier, became the government’s main promoter of population control policies. “A large population is a good thing, but as we are already the most populous country in the world, we already have plenty of this good thing, and if we still let the population grow rapidly in an unplanned manner, it won’t be a good thing anymore,” he said in a 1963 speech cited by Scharping.
By 1970, the Chinese politburo, including Mao, agreed that population control needed to be revisited in the context of economic development and food security. However, by this point, the social scientists who had originally lobbied for population control had already been banished to reeducation in remote areas of the country. As the only remaining scientists in China who were allowed to work in their chosen field, Greenhalgh notes in Just One Child, military scientists like Song—who had spent most of the Cultural Revolution in the Gobi Desert, where he studied nuclear physics, astronomy, and other areas of science that he would later channel into his defense work upon returning to Beijing—took on new importance.
During this time in China, but also globally, there was a general nervousness about the size of the global population, which had grown at the fastest rate in human history during the second half of the twentieth century, as reported by Chinese demographers Wang Feng, Yong Cai, and Baochang Gu in their paper, “Population, Policy, and Politics: How Will History Judge China’s One-Child Policy?” Organizations around the world were just starting to see a more crowded planet as a threat to economic prosperity, and in some cases, political stability. This uncertainty was further fueled by The Limits to Growth, a report commissioned by the Club of Rome, a global think tank that counts David Rockefeller among its founders. Published in 1972, it sold 30 million copies and was translated into thirty languages, making it the best-selling environmental book in world history.
Even today the book’s message is a valid one. Based on the work of an international team of researchers at MIT in the 1970s, it is essentially a study of the implications of continued worldwide population growth. It examines how agricultural production, nonrenewable resource depletion, industrial output, and pollution relate to population increases and concludes that “man can create a society in which he can live indefinitely on earth if he imposes limits on himself and his production of material goods to achieve a state of global equilibrium with population and production in carefully selected balance.”
In the spirit of the times, Song emphatically made the case that China needed to implement drastic measures to limit its population growth in order to thrive as a nation. “He gave the idea scientific credibility and urgency,” explains Susan Greenhalgh. “He made the case that without a radical, scientific plan, China would collapse under the weight of overpopulation.”
Communist Party leaders responded to Song’s calls for alarm because they aligned well with their new objectives. As part of his plan to modernize China very quickly, Deng Xiaoping, who was on his way to becoming paramount leader of the Communist Party, believed that the country needed to rely on science instead of Marxist and Leninist ideologies, as Mao had. Greenhalgh explains that because Song’s branch of science was very complex and highly quantitative in nature—and few people actually understood it or could do it themselves—it had a certain prestige attached to it, which Song deftly parlayed into power.
It should be noted that by the 1970s, Chinese social scientists were allowed to practice in their respective fields again and were also working to find a solution to China’s population problem. The difference was Song had access to a cutting-edge computer, which had been developed for military applications. The most sophisticated instruments the social scientists had were calculators. In addition to this material disadvantage, Greenhalgh argues in her book that China’s social scientists were still shell-shocked from their recent persecution. The military scientists, in contrast, “possessed the self-assurance to enter an entirely new
field, borrow a set of foreign techniques they had encountered only briefly, modify them in significant ways, and then employ those techniques to quickly develop and press for a radically new solution to social problems.”
And so they did. On a visit to the Netherlands in 1975, Song visited a Dutch mathematician named Geert Jan Olsder. A professor at the University of Twente, Olsder was co-writing a paper called “Population Planning: A Distributed Time-Optimal Control Problem,” in which he attempted to calculate the optimal birthrate for an imaginary island with no emigration or immigration; just births and deaths. This paper is believed to have inspired Song to use his knowledge of missile-control techniques to develop an optimization problem for the best fertility trajectory that would produce a future ideal population target for China. Although different parameters were involved (missile velocity, position, and thrust were swapped out for population density, death rate, and migration), Greenhalgh reports that the mathematics of partial differential equations used in the two cases was virtually identical.
Outside of academic circles, what often gets overlooked in the sequence of events leading up to the one-child policy is that it may not have been necessary. The Chinese government has been in the business of seriously trying to curtail its population growth since as early as 1964, or nearly fifteen years before the one-child policy was put into force.
Starting in 1973, the government experimented with the wan, xi, shao, or “later, longer, fewer” policy. Considered a more benign precursor to the one-child policy, it encouraged couples to marry later; to leave a three-to-four-year gap between children so as to ensure that each child received proper health care, education, and parental attention; and to have fewer children altogether, so that each of their offspring could enjoy a more comfortable life. It was followed by a slightly more explicit “One Is Best, Two at Most” campaign in 1978, which was easy to enforce because at the time in China, most people belonged to work units, which also provided them with food and housing. Officials or work unit leaders could easily revoke the food rations or housing privileges of couples who didn’t obey the rules, explains Greenhalgh. And overall, the modest population policy proved very effective. Between 1970 and 1980, China’s total fertility rate per woman fell from 5.8 to 2.7. In other words, it more than halved itself before the one-child policy even began.
Still, the Chinese government pressed on with more severe measures because demographic data indicated that a population increase was to be expected in the ’80s, as the result of the baby boom that had taken place in the ’60s. Adding to the urgency for control was the fact that Deng Xiaoping had just replaced Mao as the leader of the Communist Party. Deng inherited a difficult job; the country had just been devastated by the Cultural Revolution and the mandate of the Chinese Communist Party was in peril. In an attempt to set the nation on a healthier path to the future, Deng made economic development the cornerstone of his tenure. Because GDP growth was considered the best way to measure a country’s economic success, he favored strategies and policies that would help increase it.
Song’s ideas on population control were well aligned with Deng’s objectives. In addition to creating optimal conditions for economic growth—reducing the population would make it easier to increase per-capita GDP—Song reinforced the need for population control with a mix of coveted foreign science and the Malthusian fear that was rising in the West, where it was believed that the population was going to devour the environment, leading to famine and disaster. On the heels of the devastating food shortages that China had just been through, Song’s ideas had almost automatic appeal, and so along with China’s remaining scientists—again, mainly weaponeers—he was tasked with finding a strategy to ensure China’s healthy transition into a new era.
As a result of their work and of the Chinese government’s continued desire to limit population growth, on September 25, 1980, the universal one-child policy was put into force and positioned as a solution that would help ensure that the Chinese population would remain under 1.2 billion by the year 2000, the number that was deemed optimal for China to quadruple its GDP to $1,000 per capita between 1980 and 2000.
As early as 1982, the Chinese authorities started adding exemption clauses to the one-child policy in an attempt to alleviate some of its restrictions. I mention this not to make excuses for them, but to illustrate that contrary to popular belief, the one-child policy has not been strictly universal. In fact, by the year 2000, as reported by Chinese demographers Gu Baochang, Wang Feng, Guo Zhiguang, and Zhang Erli in the Population and Development Review, there were seventeen exemption clauses and only 35 percent of the population (namely, urban residents) were still required to respect the policy in its original form. Fifty-four percent of Chinese people (primarily non-urban residents) were required to respect a 1.5-child policy, which meant that if a couple’s first child was a girl, they’d be allowed a second child, while 10 percent of the population—residents of remote areas—could have two children, even if the first was a boy. It should also be noted that 1 percent of the population—mainly ethnic minorities—was even allowed to have up to three children.
In line with these exemptions, a friend whose grandmother was in charge of enforcing the one-child policy in the city of Wuhan told me that the team of nurses that her grandmother oversaw would toss aborted but not-yet-dead babies born to urban parents in a designated place, where rural families would pick through the babies and could then take the live ones home with them. This should not have been allowed, but according to my friend’s grandmother, as long as it was done discreetly—the babies were carried away in trash bags—she and many of the nurses turned a blind eye.
Beyond the countless and often heartrending stories associated with population control in China, the reality is that today, 150 million households there have only one child. Like its fellow East Asian tiger economies, the country faces the threat of a rapidly aging population, with the added complication of a severe gender imbalance. As a result of the policy and the draconian methods used to enforce it, China has earned a top billing on the list of the world’s most egregious human rights offenders, and even still, by the year 2000, the population had grown by 60 million more people than desired. Despite this growth—and perhaps even because of it—the GDP goal of $1,000 per capita was reached within half the time, putting China on track to becoming an economic powerhouse.
Regardless of the economic gains, the human and emotional sacrifices caused by the one-child policy must not be underestimated. As was true during the Cultural Revolution, individual rights and welfare were sacrificed in the name of short-term gains, with little regard for long-term consequences. Although the policy has contributed to an increase (completely unintentional) in the status of urban girls born in China since the 1980s, it’s important to understand how it has also made things worse for other women, especially the ones who had to endure forced abortions or sterilizations, or the ones who will be trafficked from places like Vietnam, Cambodia, and North Korea, in order to serve as wives for China’s rural bachelors. China will continue to pay the consequences of the one-child policy for decades, both in demographic terms, but also social terms. The inhumanity of being treated as reproductive units, rather than as people, will not easily be forgotten. Now that the policy has been amended, the government is also discovering that getting every fertile woman in China to give birth to two children is much more difficult in practice than in theory.
On the same day that the policy was lifted, Chinese authorities strategically repealed a “marriage leave” that gave twenty days of paid holiday to any couple marrying after the age of twenty-five. The original idea behind this leave was to discourage couples from getting married and having children in their early twenties, and to instead entice them to wait until they were older before starting families. In a country where the average annual leave rarely exceeds five days of paid personal leave, it was a very generous incentive that was met with considerable backlash as soon as it was repealed.
In another sign that the Chinese government is (quite literally) pulling out all the stops in order to increase the birthrate, it has also started offering free removal of the intrauterine contraceptive devices—IUDs—with which it had forcibly outfitted women after giving birth to one child. According to official statistics, over 320 million Chinese women were fitted with IUDs between 1980 and 2014. As reported in the New York Times, unlike the devices used in most parts of the developed world—which often have strings attached to them and are made to be rather painlessly taken out by a gynecologist after a period of five to ten years—the Chinese shang huan, or “loop installation” process is more invasive. Until the mid-’90s, a low-cost stainless-steel IUD ring was installed by state gynecologists. It was meant to be worn indefinitely and was designed to be so hard to extract, surgery would be required to take it out. Now, the Chinese government is offering free surgery to remove the devices, but so far, there have been few takers. The ones in line for operations are often women who have suffered complications resulting from their IUDs, which can embed in the uterine wall and require a hysterectomy.
In an unprecedented legal maneuver and in the hope that older couples might also want to have a second child, the Chinese government also reversed a draft law banning surrogacy that had already been widely publicized and was about to take effect. Despite now being legal in China, it is still common for Chinese to seek out surrogate moms in the United States, as a baby born there comes with the added advantage of US citizenship. The government is also expanding sperm banks and has begun to publish “guidelines” for potential donors, in which it is rather comically stipulated that men “know how to masturbate.” Absurdly, unmarried women are still not legally eligible to freeze their eggs, although those who can afford to simply travel to the States for the procedure—a move that was popularized by the Chinese actress Xu Jinglei. Like double-eyelid surgery (a procedure that many Asian women have done in their late teens or before entering the workforce in order to make their eyes look bigger), egg freezing is becoming part of the package of goods and services that young Chinese women seek out. I’ve read accounts of Chinese women still completing university degrees in the United States who are freezing their eggs for peace of mind. Friends will sometimes go through the process together, as if getting a manicure.