Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

  There were strategic exemptions, however, and Jiang Zhenghua, working with missile systems, was among them. Only computer technology deemed vital to national defense was still intact—which was how the odd circumstance of the world’s most famous and severe birth control policy, something normally the purview of social scientists and demographers, ended up being designed by a pair of missile engineers.

  Today, non-Chinese have difficulty understanding how the world’s fastest-growing economy, whose breathtaking growth inspires awe and envy in capitalists, persists in calling itself Communist. This discrepancy traces back to the Cultural Revolution, a time when China was simultaneously expunging itself of external influence, even as it reengaged with the world. In 1971, the United Nations admitted the People’s Republic of China as the legitimate government of China. Heretofore, that designation, and a seat on the UN Security Council, had been held by the Republic of China—Taiwan, whose population was one-sixtieth of Red China’s.

  China began inserting itself noisily into the planetary dialectic, which then consisted of a so-called First World—capitalist North America, western Europe, and Japan, Australia, and New Zealand—and a Second World of communist-bloc countries. Both were trying to win—or force—the allegiance of less-developed Third World countries. China’s participation became especially pointed during the first UN World Population Conference in Bucharest in 1974. During that gathering, its representative, Huang Shu-tse, ridiculed Western fears that a population explosion would soon overwhelm world agriculture and resources:

  The claim that over-population is the reason why the have-not countries are poor is a worn-out tune of the superpowers. What a mass of figures they have calculated in order to prove that population is too large, the food supply too small and natural resources insufficient! But they never calculate the amount of natural resources they have plundered, the social wealth they have grabbed and the super-profits they have extorted from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Should an account be made of their exploitation; the truth with regard to the population problem will at once be out.

  As Harvard anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh writes in Just One Child, her sweeping twenty-year investigation of China’s reproductive policy, those acid denunciations referred especially to a 1972 study prepared by three MIT systems modelers, Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and Jørgen Randers. Their book-length report had been commissioned by an international think tank, the Club of Rome. Titled The Limits to Growth, the report to the Club of Rome echoed the warnings four years earlier of Paul Ehrlich and of “the notorious Malthus,” as the Chinese termed him. It predicted that swelling global populations and massive harvesting of resources were on a catastrophic collision course. Like Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, The Limits to Growth had sold millions of copies worldwide.

  In 1974, China was having none of it. As Huang Shu-tse told the Bucharest conference:

  Today, the world population has more than quadrupled that of Malthus’ time, but there has been much greater increase in the material wealth of society, thanks to the efforts of the broad masses of the people in surmounting numerous obstacles. In the twenty-odd years since her founding, the People’s Republic of China has increased her products many-fold. The creative power of the people is boundless, and so is man’s ability to exploit and utilize natural resources. The pessimistic views spread by the superpowers are utterly groundless and are being propagated with ulterior motives.

  What Huang didn’t know was that back in China, his few compatriots with computer access, missile and defense experts, were modeling systems themselves. Because it was a national priority for scientists to keep up with their American, European, and Soviet counterparts, they enjoyed unique privileges, such as traveling to the West. In Western technical journals they read how systems engineering could be applied to anything from electrical circuitry to traffic control to social organization. They read The Limits to Growth and came to rather different conclusions than comrade Huang Shu-tse.

  “These were very interesting ideas,” Jiang Zhenghua explains to Gretchen Daily. China’s leaders had asked him to model economic scenarios. “Economists in China were good in theory, but not mathematics. If we want faster economic development, what kind of input do we need? If we have limited resources, what is the maximum output we can get? They wanted to know the limitations of development, and how to allocate our resources. For the input-output model, we considered the balance among different economic factors, but also—I knew, because I had read the Club of Rome material—factors of the environment system.”

  “Fascinating,” says Gretchen.

  Besides Jiang Zhenghua’s systems department in Xi’an Jiaotong University, China’s other working computer complex was ensconced in Beijing’s Seventh Ministry of Machine Building, devoted to the space industry. The chief missile scientist there was a slight, mild-mannered man named Qian Xuesen. Qian graduated from Jiatong University in mechanical engineering in 1934, then earned a master’s at MIT and a doctorate at Caltech, whose faculty he was invited to join. He was a founder of Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and, during World War II, designed missiles for the United States and was commissioned as an Air Force colonel. Nevertheless, during the McCarthy era he was purged as a suspected communist over the protests of American scientists and military officials, and held under house arrest until the mid-1950s, when he returned to China.

  Driven by U.S. anti-communist zealots into the arms of the very communists they feared, with detailed knowledge of the U.S. missile technology he’d helped develop, Qian became Mao Zedong’s and Zhou Enlai’s science advisor and father of the Chinese missile program. His brightest protégé in the Seventh Ministry was a cybernetics engineer named Song Jian. Song had designed an elegant calculus theory to optimize efficiency in applications from mechanics to military strategy to social structures. In the Seventh Ministry, he worked on missile guidance systems.

  During the Cultural Revolution, he was sheltered by his mentor Qian Xuesen’s protection, and encouraged to apply his theory and the missile division’s computational muscle to develop models for China’s mounting social planning needs. Like Jiang Zhenghua, Song could travel and had access to scientific literature from the West. He recognized that quantifying fresh water, soils, and pollution as well as human demographics, and understanding how they interacted, was critical to guiding economic and social development. Both he and Jiang knew that American and European ecologists were alarmed that their populations were exceeding their carrying capacity. If so, what did that portend for high-fertility underdeveloped countries of the world, such as China?

  Regardless of China’s bluster in UN conferences about solidarity with Earth’s downtrodden, the message these scientists heard from the leadership was not about pride in belonging to the Third World. The goal was parity, both scientific and economic, with First World powers. They were charged with applying cybernetic tools to determine how to achieve it.

  Working independently in Xi’an and Beijing, Jiang Zhenghua and Song Jian focused on the ecosystem’s most easily quantifiable parameter: human population. As Susan Greenhalgh notes in Just One Child, population science is the intersection between natural and social sciences. As Jiang and Song applied their skills, models, machines, and interdisciplinary breadth to determine how many humans were the right number for their country, they were the advance guards in the latest, perhaps most decisive chapter of a saga that has engaged—and enraged—religious authorities, philosophers, and scientists throughout history. It is a saga summed up in a single question: What are we?

  Are Homo sapiens so highly evolved, or divinely imbued, that we transcend rules governing the rest of nature? Or are we simply a part—an undeniably compelling part—of the Earth’s great living pageant, whose existence conforms to the same boundaries of everything else alive here?

  Although the mandate from their leaders was economic—how many people can maximize our output, without requiring more inputs than we can provide?
—the variables they had to consider were the same ones that concerned the authors of The Limits to Growth.

  “We didn’t have a very clear idea about the relationship between population, economic growth, and the environment,” says Jiang, pouring more wine.

  “It seems that we still don’t,” says Gretchen, taking a sip.

  But they proceeded nonetheless, pooling data from ministries and feeding it to their computers, studying the works of demographers and economists back to Malthus, talking with biologists and agronomists. Depending on who is judging, humanity was either reduced to just another biological variable factored into their models, or it was precisely situated in its natural context.

  In December 1979, Song and Jiang each presented their research at a National Symposium on Population Theory, held in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. Its sponsors were the State Council on Birth Planning Office and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Both had been ravaged during the Cultural Revolution, with top scientists exiled to farms and factories. But now China was poised to make one of history’s most astonishing forward leaps. The “Great Helmsman,” Mao Zedong, was dead. In his waning years, a power struggle ignited between Mao’s fourth wife, a former movie actress named Jiang Qing, and a Zhou Enlai protégé named Deng Xiaoping, who was purged during the Cultural Revolution yet managed to resurrect himself. An advocate of market-based economic reforms, he was purged again by Madame Mao, but by 1979 her “Gang of Four” had been disgraced and deposed, and Deng was back, taking charge.

  The population symposium was a convocation of social scientists: demographers, sociologists, humanists, and ethnographers, all finally reinstated as universities and institutes reopened. Nearly a hundred fifty presented papers, but for a decade they been under severe research constraints. The State Council on Birth Planning Office, an informant told Susan Greenhalgh, was making its projections with abacuses.

  Into this gathering came Song and Jiang, the missile scientists, who had enjoyed the number crunching of cybernetic computation and access to world knowledge. “We presented two different papers. We didn’t know what the other had been doing. He used different mathematics from mine. But there wasn’t much difference in the process, or in the results.”

  That was far more mathematics than anyone else had. The charts, figures, and graphic simulations of different scenarios electrified interest well beyond the specialized audience. Calculating the carrying capacity of China involved countless variables, but they had focused on arable land, locally available raw resources, the cost of importing others, and the economic potential (and cost) of each added person. Referring to the Club of Rome report, Jiang had looked for parallels and found that, per capita, China had significantly fewer water, forest, and metals resources than much of the world. Song’s group, concentrating on food capacity and ecological balance, had calculated, like Jiang, that the optimal population for China would be somewhere between 650 and 700 million people.

  Yet China had already passed 900 million, and was growing fast. Song’s presentation included a graph showing that if the current fertility rate of three children per woman continued, by 2075, China would have more than 4 billion people.

  “Our conclusion,” says Jiang, spreading his arms, “was that we had no chance of holding population below one billion by the year 2000—even if every family immediately started having only one child.”

  The demographers and social scientists knew that Deng Xiaoping believed that population must be checked before it became an economic impediment rather than an asset—he had once famously been banished for expressing such anti-Marxist blasphemy. To that end, they had prepared gradual plans involving incentives for voluntary limits, birth spacing, and postponed childbirth. They weren’t expecting Song Jian’s mathematical recommendations of one child per couple for the next few decades until a generation died off and the graph peaked at just over a billion Chinese—and then, as population momentum reversed and shrank back toward the optimum, people could gradually return to replacement-level reproduction.

  They also weren’t prepared for his highly irregular but effective strategy following the symposium, and neither was Jiang. “Song got his findings published in People’s Daily,” he recalls, shaking his head with admiration and a hint of envy.

  Song had used his high connections to reach the most influential news medium in the country, the official paper of the Communist Party’s central committee. Suddenly, the topic of population control burst from the obscurity of an academic conference and became national news. Publication in People’s Daily was tantamount to the government’s imprimatur. Accordingly, Song’s paper was joined by a front-page editorial advocating a one-child policy to halt population growth.

  Jiang Zhenghua’s work, using different mathematics to arrive at the same conclusions, became an important corroboration of Song’s hypothesis. Rebuttals by social scientists who’d been blindsided by the statistical barrage of these defense scientists were drowned out in the Deng Xiaoping government’s clamor for a one-child policy, which, in 1980, became official.

  Several of those rebuttals proved prescient, as in the coming years social problems materialized that the mathematical models missed, problems such as: What was the value of a child on a farm compared to a city? What was the traditional value of a son compared to a daughter, and how did those values change depending on class and setting? And while the current fertility rate of 3.0 was above replacement level, it had fallen from 5.0 within a generation. Couldn’t China’s population goals be met without such drastic measures?

  Behind those questions lurked another, tricky to articulate in a country where the wrong word could get someone purged: Wasn’t drawing upon mathematical tools to engineer human behavior dehumanizing? Didn’t a policy that forbade humans to have the children they desired violate human nature?

  “I didn’t want to apply harsh rules to people,” says Jiang Zhenghua. “But we were shocked by the numbers we saw. Numbers of resources, numbers of people. We knew what suffering would come.” Removing his glasses, he rubs his eyes, a man who remembers the years of famine in his early twenties. “My hope was for a China in which everyone could prosper. Lowering fertility seemed the best way to achieve that. We’re better off now for being fewer. But we have a long way to go before we reach an optimum level, so for a while this compulsory method has been necessary.”

  The idea of nearly a half-billion more Chinese needing jobs, water, fish, grains, appliances, cars, and housing chills him. Although fertility would have likely dropped anyway with China’s astonishing modernization, as in western Europe, it is indisputable that it happened far more quickly by forced transition. But, Gretchen wonders, did the government consider the suffering that the policy would spawn? The late-term abortions dragooned by local officials obsessed with meeting quotas? The bulldozed houses and fines, the panicked hiding of children from surprise inspections by family-planning cadres, the institutionalized bribes to buy them off? And worst of all, the gendercide of infant girls drowned or left in the woods to die so that peasant parents could try for a boy to help work the farm?

  “Did any of the models predict that?”

  Jiang doesn’t answer this question. “Actually,” he says, “gender discrimination existed in China long before the one-child policy.” Although the custom of binding women’s feet had largely died out by the birth of the People’s Republic of China, which outlawed it, a purpose of hobbling women was to make it impossible for them to do men’s work, literally keeping them in their place. In the modern Chinese workplace, women’s fortunes have greatly improved. “The number of women employed, the proportion in Congress and of women officials here is better than in many developed countries. But the gender imbalance we see today is still from sex preference.”

  The imbalance he means is an annual average of 118 male babies for every 100 girls. The natural birth ratio for Homo sapiens is about 105 male children per 100 females. The reasons for China’s unnaturally lopsided ratio are
well known; what has been disputed, and possibly distorted, is the relative significance of each of them.

  Despite worldwide outrage over female infanticide in China, it is now considered rare, and may have been through most of the one-child policy, especially after the policy was relaxed to allow rural couples whose first child was a girl to try for a boy (and then further eased to simply allow two, regardless of sex). Long before China’s mandatory birth control, in much of the world infanticide was a means of keeping families to a manageable size, dating back to our prehistoric ancestors. Reports of widespread slaughter of live baby girls under China’s one-child policy may have been based on hasty assumptions derived from skewed sex ratios, due in part to archaic prejudices against what Westerners once blithely called “the heathen Chinese.”

  According to some anthropologists, two other causes may account for many, if not most, of the missing girls. The first—still repugnant—is prenatal sex screening followed by selective abortion. By coincidence, a year before its controversial birth policy, China began manufacturing ultrasound machines. Soon, in much of the country it wasn’t hard for a woman to learn the sex of her fetus. Because rural parents have been allowed to try for two since 1984, they usually don’t abort a first daughter. But the reported sex ratio for second-borns in rural regions runs as high as 160 boys to 100 girls.

  Of course, many consider abortion to be no less murder than hurling a baby into the Yangtze River. The second, less violent reason that several researchers believe may account for much of the apparent surplus of Chinese boys is that girls’ births aren’t being reported. Both UN demographers and Chinese census takers have noticed that China’s skewed sex ratios seem to narrow in primary school enrollments. Besides bribing local family-planning officials to undercount children, the surge of Chinese industrialism has made it easier to conceal extra daughters. With millions of western rural parents heading east to Chinese factories for much of the year, someone must care for their children left behind. In the fluid new social mechanics of urbanizing China, families that lived close together for thousands of years are now scattered across the map, and offspring are often sent across provincial lines to live with aunts and uncles. When these young internal migrants start school, local officials have little way of knowing whether the aunt has slipped in another girl or two of her own.