by Mei Fong
For over a quarter of a century, Yicheng and several other rural counties were part of a secret experiment. They were zones where, with remarkably few conditions, residents could have two children. For example, while many rural parts of China allowed couples a second child if their first was a girl, only in Yicheng and a few other places could residents have two children regardless of gender.
Overall, these secret two-child zones affected roughly 8 million people in the time since their creation in 1985—a drop in the bucket for China. Nonetheless, they offer a tantalizing glimpse of the road not taken by family planners. With fewer restrictions, people in these counties were not driven to resort as much to infanticide or sex-selective abortions for unwanted daughters. Today, Yicheng and its sister counties have gender ratios that are closer to global norms. Birthrates are also below the national average. The two-child allowance also made enforcement of birth quotas—always an unpopular task—easier for Yicheng’s officials. “We didn’t have to use force. We could hold our heads high and live in peace with our neighbors,” said village chief Huang Denggao.
Years later in their fight to overturn the one-child policy, a group of demographers would hold up Yicheng as an example of a future China. In doing so, they would also throw into prominence the man behind the Yicheng experiment, Liang Zhongtang. Liang, a little-known economics instructor, holds the distinction of being publicly the only vocal critic of the one-child policy at its inception over three decades ago.
In a seminal population conference in Chengdu, held just a few months before the one-child policy’s 1980 nationwide launch, Liang warned that the policy would be a “terrible tragedy,” leading to a “breathless, lifeless society without a future.”
He foresaw an aging population with little familial support and coined the phrase “4:2:1”—now commonly used—to refer to the situation where two adults would have to support four elderly parents and one child. “Simple though it was, this numerical figure served as a powerful rhetorical device,” wrote scholar Susan Greenhalgh.
I met the Cassandra of China’s one-child policy one blustery autumn day at his apartment in Shanghai’s Hongkou university district. The wind was whistling mournfully around his top-floor, book-lined eyrie, an appropriate setting for the unsung hero of China’s population movement. Liang was now a retiree, an erect, silver-haired figure with a distinctly tart edge to his tongue.
Some of China’s current crop of demographers eventually came around to Liang’s way of thinking, calling him “hero” and “national treasure” for his prescience. Liang, however, sees his role as small, his resistance nothing compared to the force of the one-child policy. “I don’t think I meant anything,” said Liang, who, in all our conversations, would frequently describe his efforts as “useless” and “a waste of time.”
Year after year, Liang was unable to persuade Beijing to adopt his two-child proposal nationwide. Nonetheless, he was able to interest reform-minded party elders like Hu Yaobang and Zhao Zhiyang to allow the series of experimental two-child zones. As a result, thousands born in these places owe their existence in some part to Liang.
Liang said wryly, “It’s much more helpful than just sitting here doing nothing,” adding, “It’s better doing it as a demographer than a peasant.” He was both.
One of six children born to peasant farmers, Liang finished high school in 1966, intent on studying philosophy at Beida, or Peking University, China’s premier higher-education institute. The year 1966 was a bad time to hold such ambitions, for that was of course the year Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. The Great Helmsman closed all schools and launched his Red Guards on a decade-long war against intellectuals.
Liang lost his chance for higher education and never regained it—a factor that would count against him when he tried to get China’s family planners to take his proposals seriously. He became a soldier, whiling away his years in the People’s Liberation Army, teaching himself political theory and devouring Marx and Engels. Eventually, he ended up as an instructor at a local party cadre school in Taiyuan, Shanxi’s provincial capital. In the late 1970s, he was asked to teach demography, a subject he initially knew little about and initially had no interest in.
The study of demography—and, indeed, of all social sciences—had been viewed with suspicion and removed from university curriculums after the Cultural Revolution. Demography as a subject was revived only after China was restored as a permanent member of the United Nations General Committee, and the Chinese Association for Population Studies was founded only in 1981—a year after the launch of the one-child policy.
In the early days, said Liang, China employed a system learned from the Soviet Union, which focused on productivity and economic statistics, without (as Western countries did) incorporating social and economic elements. China’s demographers did not even know how to construct life tables—projections of life expectancy, considered essential to the field—until the early 1980s.
In 1980, when Beijing decided to impose drastic population curbs, leaders still weren’t sure how many people there were in China. The country’s last population count had been fifteen years before and had provided “only rather crude numbers,” according to population scholar Thomas Scharping. It seemed incredible to me that China launched the world’s most ambitious demographic experiment on such a shaky foundation. In retrospect, I asked Liang, was this not a little like a definition I’d once read of a critic: “a legless man teaching running”?
True, Liang said. “But you have to remember, at that time there was a sense we were drowning in people, and we would never stop being poor unless we did something. Ren tai duo.” Too many people.
Ancient civilizations like China and India have long been populous. In the 1200s, the prosperous lakeside city of Hangzhou was the world’s largest, with 1.5 million inhabitants. It dazzled the Italian traveler Marco Polo, who came from that relative backwater known as Venice.
But population growth in the latter half of the twentieth century was unprecedented, thanks to medical advances that pruned infant mortality rates and lengthened life spans. In China, population growth took a great leap forward from 540 million in 1949 to over 800 million twenty years later. Another ten years and Monty Python was singing, “There’s nine hundred million of them in the world today / You’d better learn to like them, that’s what I say.”
China had been practicing population curbs in fits and starts since the 1950s, mainly through legislating early marriage, as well as distributing condoms and IUDs. In the 1970s, it ramped this up in earnest with the “Later, Longer, Fewer” (wanxishao) campaign which encouraged couples to marry later, space out their childbearing, and have fewer children altogether. The propaganda slogan of the time was “One child isn’t too few, two are just fine, three are too much.”
Almost all population scholars agree that “Later, Longer, Fewer” was a huge success in curbing China’s soaring numbers. In that decade, the average woman in China went from having six children to three. Such stunning results could not have been achieved without some level of coercion, of course, but nothing near the kind inflicted during the one-child policy years. So why didn’t authorities stick to “Later, Longer, Fewer” instead of ramping up?
Politics was key to this decision. Mao’s death in 1976 led to a power struggle. The country struggled to get back on its feet after disastrous policies like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. New leaders like Hua Guofeng, Hu Yaobang, and Deng Xiaoping needed to shore up their legitimacy and steer the demoralized population onward and upward. They staked their legitimacy on providing economic revitalization, and the decade-long wanxishao was felt to be too slow for turbocharged growth.
The logic of curbing births was fairly simple: to grow its per-capita GDP quickly, China would have to raise output and slow down population growth. The latter was obviously easier to do than the former.
Deng set a goal of quadrupling China’s per-capita GDP to $1,000 by the year 2000. Workin
g backward, population planners calculated that China could not reach this goal with a two-child policy and needed to tighten restrictions to a one-child-for-all policy. That, in essence, was how the one-child policy came about: an arbitrary economic goal that altered the course of millions of lives.
By the time the year 2000 rolled around, China’s population had edged past the 1.2 billion goal by only 60 million. Not too bad, considering per-capita GDP had more than tripled past Deng’s original $1,000 mark. Even so, authorities continued to stress the need for maintaining population controls. “Economic development is like a cake,” said the head of the National Population and Family Planning Commission. “We need to slow down the growth of the number of people eating the cake.”
Liang was not the only one to foresee the kinds of problems the one-child policy would lead to: aging, son preference, a vastly diminished work force over time. But those bent on pushing the policy brushed these issues off as things that could be easily fixed. Song Jian, a scientist whose calculations were instrumental in the one-child policy’s implementation, publicly dismissed these concerns. In a 1980 article he made vague reference to scientific developments that could easily avert the aging issue before it became a serious problem “in the distant future” and suggested authorities could “adjust women’s average fertility rate in advance” to keep population growth stable.
If Song’s prognostications on the human condition seem incredible—aging and fertility dialed up or down, like levers on a machine—perhaps it is because his area of expertise was machines. Specifically, rockets.
How did a rocketman become involved in determining how many babies women in China could have? To answer that, we have to look at the peculiar set of circumstances that birthed the policy, both within and without the Middle Kingdom.
II
Born in haste, dragging on past its sell-by date, China’s one-child policy was never meant to last forever. When it was launched in 1980, China’s leaders promised these painful family restrictions would be temporary. “In thirty years, when our current extreme population growth eases, we can then adopt a different population policy,” read the announcement from the Communist Party Central Committee.
In fairness, Chinese leaders were not alone in their fears of a population time bomb. It was an idea du jour of the 1960s and 1970s, like bell-bottoms and est therapy. After World War II, population numbers had crept up everywhere, not just in China. People made love, not war, and babies, predictably enough, followed. Conservationists and ecologists began sounding the famine alarm.
In 1968, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich’s unlikely bestseller, The Population Bomb, dramatically proclaimed that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over,” and “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” No preventive measures would avert “a substantial increase in the world death rate,” wrote Ehrlich.
In 1969, the United Nations launched the UNFPA, or Fund for Population Activities (renamed the United Nations Population Fund in 1987), with the objective of curbing population growth in third-world countries.
In 1972, the Club of Rome, an organization of prominent academics and politicians, published The Limits to Growth, which, like The Population Bomb, argued that economic growth was ecologically unsustainable. Using Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer simulations, the Club of Rome came up with several scenarios gaming out the distribution of global resources among the world’s hypothetical population. Most predictions were gloomy, and some expected global collapse around the mid- to end of the twenty-first century.
The battle to control global population—particularly those darker-skinned bits of it—kicked into high gear, with a significant amount of Western aid funneled to population control activities.
For a brief period, India had a forced sterilization program, an unpopular move that led to Indira Gandhi’s ouster (though she later regained power); South Korea had a “Two’s Too Much” campaign, and near me, even the tiny island nation of Singapore—whose population today is smaller than New York City’s—had a “Stop at Two” campaign. As a child, I grew up with stories of those propaganda drives. One poster, I remember, featured many hands reaching for one loaf of bread.
This was the world into which China emerged after a decade of isolation following the Cultural Revolution. It was in a unique position. While places like India and Indonesia also imposed population curbs, only China had both the authoritarian political structure and the social and cultural readiness to push through these ideas on a grand scale. While Western scientists like the Club of Rome were expounding theories of population control as intellectual exercises, Chinese scientists were prepared to put these ideas into practice on a real population, with few to no fail-safe mechanisms.
The country had been so beaten and demoralized, its intellectual capital so sapped by the Cultural Revolution, the idea of rationing children, in the same way coal and grain were rationed, made sense.
There was also no adequate political mechanism for those affected to signal their outrage when the full brunt of the one-child campaign kicked in—unlike in India, for example. China also had no deep-seated religious beliefs on birth control or abortion to root out.
In retrospect, the country was fertile ground for reducing fertility.
There is evidence that some Western ideas on population reduction found root in Chinese soil. In 1975, Song Jian joined a Chinese delegation to the Netherlands, where he met a young Dutch mathematician called Geert Jan Olsder. “He seemed like a regular guy, very friendly,” recalled Olsder, who is still bemused, years later, by his inadvertent role in China’s population movement. Over beers that day, Olsder told Song about a paper he’d cowritten. It laid out a problem: how to prevent overpopulation on a fictional island. Olsder and his colleagues had come up with “an elegant mathematical solution,” which he recounted to Song.
“In hindsight, he seemed to perk up at this point,” said Olsder. “His eyes lit up.”
Olsder thought he was talking to a fellow academic. He had no idea Song was one of China’s super-scientists, an elite band whose military work had protected them during the Cultural Revolution, when all other intellectuals had suffered greatly. After the Revolution, they were virtually the only technocrats who emerged with their intellectual and social capital intact.
The Russian-trained Song was a ballistics missile specialist and a special protégé of Qian Xuesen, the brilliant cofounder of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, who had quit the United States in disgust after several humiliations during the McCarthyite Communist witch-hunts. Qian, of course, was welcomed by China with open arms. He went on to lead China’s rocket program and mentor acolytes like Song, who would play a major role in the one-child policy rollout.
Through Qian’s patronage, Song was given access to top-level political-military leaders. Over the next few years, he and colleagues Li Guangyuan, Yu Jingyuan, and Tian Xueyuan would use Olsder’s and other European scholars’ research as a basis for creating a formula for controlling China’s birthrate. Unlike Olsder, they did not view this merely as an intellectual problem. They sought real-world application.
Song and company’s mathematical formulas would clash with Liang’s human-centric proposals at the 1979 population control symposium in Chengdu.
III
The Chengdu conference was a milestone, for this was when various academics unveiled their proposals for how to curb China’s masses. It’s unclear at this point how it shaped the events that followed. While some historians believe the conference marked a turning point that weighed decisively in favor of the missile scientists’ radical one-child proposal, others believe Communist leaders had already locked in their decision at this point, and Chengdu was just so much scholastic sound and fury. But the discussions at Chengdu showed that alternative points of view existed. The one-child policy was not the only solution on the table, though it was the most extreme.
A team of mathematicians from Xian Jiao Tong University presented a paper
demonstrating that the government’s goal of zero population growth by 2000 could not be reached. It was not what authorities wanted to hear, and the paper disappeared from view. Liang got worse treatment when he voiced concerns over the one-child proposal. Li Xiuzhen, director of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, dismissed his viewpoint, saying, “It’s unlikely that problems are really that serious.
“Chinese people have long been used to listening to one voice at one time,” said Liang. “When they suddenly hear something different and critical, it’s like oil blasts in the pot.”
Liang was unusually courageous in his candor, for there were many China scholars who suffered adverse consequences for voicing opinions contrary to the Communist Party’s. Two decades before, Peking University president Ma Yinchu had killed his career that way. Ironically, Ma, who argued for population curbs in 1959, is now credited as the father of the one-child policy. Unfortunately, Ma’s ideas were contrary to those of Chairman Mao. His erratic stance on population control would vacillate between “More is merrier” and “Less is more.” Ma had the bad luck of pushing for curbs at a time when the Great Helmsman was in the “More is merrier” camp. Ma was summarily removed from his position as head of one of China’s top universities. It would be twenty long years before he was politically rehabilitated, around the time Liang unveiled his objections to population curbs.
At Chengdu, Liang would clash with the rocketmen, who impressed the crowd with their complex calculations, making Liang’s projections seem like caveman scribbles in contrast.
Li Guangyuan represented Song’s team at the conference. He was in his mid-thirties, a talented speaker and a graduate of the well-regarded Chinese University of Science and Technology. Li spoke of his team’s use of cybernetics—the science of control and communications in complex machine systems—to make calculations of China’s future population. For the scholars—many of whom didn’t even have access to personal computers at the time—this was “something so mysterious and unheard-of to most people,” remembered Liang, “the atmosphere at the whole conference was kindled.”