One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment

by Mei Fong

  In any culture, the search for love involves work and, by extension, some hardship. But it seems like dating in China is particularly difficult because of the additional built-in pressures of heavy parental expectations and lopsided gender ratios. Not so long ago, most people in China resorted to matchmakers or moved in such narrow circles that a potential mate was relatively easy to find. Now there are more dating choices, but at the same time greater anxiety.

  Although the one-child policy shrank family sizes and drastically reduced the extended family network, the basic contour of the nuclear family still holds true. Other definitions of family evolving in the West—gay families, multiethnic families, childless families, single-parent families, and unmarried and stepfamilies—are still rarities in China, partly because family-planning rules prevent some of these formations. There are few unmarried mothers in China, for example, since they would find it extremely difficult to get birth certificates and hukous for any offspring without a marriage certificate.

  Of course, some of this marriage anxiety is amplified and deliberately hyped up. Retailers, spotting a moneymaking opportunity, turned singlehood into a shopping event with Guanggun Jie, or “Singles’ Day,” each November 11. Started in the 1990s by a group of students at Nanjing University, who bought themselves small presents to console themselves for their single status, the event has now become the biggest online shopping event in the world, netting billions in sales and surpassing events like the US Cyber Monday. In 2012, online giant Alibaba went as far as trademarking the term Double 11 in China, threatening legal action against media outlets that took ads from competitors using the term. It was as if Amazon had trademarked “Valentine’s Day.”

  The Communist Party also has a hand in ratcheting up marriage anxiety, especially among females. Given the male-female imbalance, you’d think women would feel more empowered and valued as a relatively scarce commodity. Not so. Marriage anxiety begins early for women in China because of the perception that their prospects fizzle when they are in their late twenties, a time when their counterparts in the West still consider themselves eligible.

  Some of this was fostered by a 2007 government-backed campaign by the All-China Women’s Federation, the Communist Party organ ironically tasked with promoting women’s rights. Called the “Leftover Women” campaign, it coined the insulting term leftover women, or sheng nü, to describe over-twenty-five females as the stuff of kitchen scrapings and doggy bags. There was no such campaign to help single men, who are, after all, the group most in need of help.

  Hong Fincher believes the “Leftover Women” campaign is designed to discourage educated women, specifically, from holding off marriage and childbirth as this is precisely the group the Communist Party wants breeding “quality” children.

  One of the stated objectives of the one-child policy was reducing quantity in order to increase the quality of the population. A common slogan used by birth planners has been “Raise the Quality, Control the Size” (Tigao renkou suzhi. Kongzhi renkou shuliang). Evidently, authorities were not satisfied with the pace of this. In 2007 China’s State Council announced that the country had a severe problem with the so-called low quality of the population that would render China uncompetitive in the global marketplace. Upgrading population quality became, once again, a high priority. Shortly after this the All-China Women’s Federation launched the Leftover Women campaign.

  China is not alone in its push to get educated women to marry and have children. Many Asian countries, faced with declining birthrates, have also struggled with a similar backlash against women’s rights. In Japan, terms like parasite and Christmas cake (“goes bad after twenty-five”) echo China’s “Leftover Women.”

  In 1994, Lee Kuan Yew, founding prime minister of the tiny island nation of Singapore, lamented giving equal rights to women there because it made them less eligible in the hypergamous marriage system. “We thought we would open up the whole system, give equal opportunities for education and jobs, like the West,” he said, “but we forgot that culture does not change rapidly. So you want to be the boss in your family. You don’t want a wife who is smarter than you, and earning more than you.”

  This backlash has sparked a nostalgia for pre-liberation, pre-feminist times in China. About a year after the launch of the “Leftover Women” campaign, a number of adult education workshops promoting deference to men sprang up across the country. Known as “woman morality courses,” or Confucius workshops, many are linked to local governments, schools, and educational foundations, with the express aim of teaching people in China “traditional values,” as espoused by the philosopher Confucius. (These Confucius workshops are not to be mistaken for the Confucius Institute, the arm of the Ministry of Education tasked with promoting Chinese culture overseas.)

  A researcher of mine attended one of these workshops and recorded the proceedings. The event was a once-monthly, one-day affair costing a little over $30 and organized by the Hebei Province Traditional Culture Research Association, which is linked to the province’s literature federation. (Many of the association’s leaders are senior government officials.)

  Standing beside pictures of Confucius and Xi Jinping, teacher Ding Xuan told a packed classroom, “A husband is a wife’s heaven. A wife should learn how to show respect to the heaven.” Throughout the three-hour class, Ding constantly emphasized the need for women to take a back seat, with statements such as “Strong women will have different problems. They’ll have cancer in the breast and other parts of the body. The gods are helping you, as you do not want to be a woman anymore.”

  Ding urged women to emulate President Xi Jinping’s wife, Peng Liyuan, arguably China’s most glamorous First Lady since Soong May-ling. Peng is a folksinger who was for many years more famous than her politician husband. For decades, the couple led separate lives as they pursued their careers in different parts of the country. But that, according to Ding, is not what made Peng a paragon of Chinese womanhood. “She can do noodles, bing, she can ride a bicycle and buy vegetables by herself,” leaving Xi Jinping free to focus on his career and “be the world-famous sage-king.”

  It seems incredible that such throwback messages exist in modern China, yet these workshops appeal to a segment of society who feel alienated in a fast-changing world. Women drawn to these workshops typically have family problems, such as cheating spouses. Men—and these workshops appear to appeal to both sexes—are drawn by messages that bolster their flagging egos at a time of crushing societal and demographic pressures. In a September 2014 online poll with over thirty thousand respondents, 51 percent said these courses had value.

  There are Confucius workshops across the country in Shandong, Hebei, Shanxi, Guangdong, and Henan. Some are free or subsidized; others can be weeklong affairs costing a few hundred dollars. It’s possible that some of the workshops have less inflammatory, less discriminatory content. I heard, for example, of women’s workshops that focus on family counseling and teaching women domestic skills like needlework.

  At least one other Confucius workshop took a similar tone to the one in Hebei. In Dongguan, a major manufacturing center with a large young female population of factory workers, there was a women’s workshop that upheld precepts such as “Don’t fight back when being beaten by your husband” and “Never divorce.” In September 2014, authorities closed it down for operating without a license and “violating social morality.”

  III

  The one group that has substantially benefited from the one-child policy is urban Chinese females. If you are a female born after 1980 in a major Chinese city, your chances of surviving past childhood, getting enough nutrition, and attaining higher education are significantly better than those of a Chinese daughter born in any earlier period this century or last.

  Only-child females, especially, who didn’t have brothers to compete with for parental resources, were the beneficiaries of the very pragmatic Chinese strategy of “raising a daughter as a son” (guniang dang erzi yang), notes anthropol
ogist Vanessa Fong. As a result, record numbers of women in China are receiving a college education. In 2010, women made up half of the master’s degree students in China. The country’s female labor force participation is among the highest in Asia, with 70 percent of Chinese women either employed in some capacity or seeking employment, compared to just a quarter of their Indian sisters, according to Gallup.

  But it’s hard to make the case that the one-child policy advanced Chinese women’s rights when, balanced against urban women’s advancements, one considers the huge numbers of females killed at birth or abandoned, as well as aborted female fetuses. Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen estimates that infanticide and gendercide have contributed to a missing 100 million women in Asia. Roughly half of those would have been Chinese.

  With the current gender imbalance, women are certainly more valuable, but not necessarily more valued. In addition to a rising anti-feminist backlash, the female shortage has resulted in increasing commodification of women. Prostitution and sex trafficking in China have been on the rise for the past decade, though nobody has precise figures, for enforcement is lax and transparency low. In 2007, the US State Department estimated that a minimum of ten to twenty thousand victims are trafficked domestically within China yearly, earning traffickers more than $7 billion annually, more than selling drugs or weapons.

  While it’s possible to argue that the one-child policy benefited some women in China, it’s certainly been detrimental to women in bordering countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, and North Korea, where trafficking and kidnapping of women for Chinese men have risen in recent years. Many are forced or tricked into being sold as wives for Chinese men. Unlike the runaway brides of New Peace, most are unable to run away or, having escaped, face worse treatment. Chinese law tends to treat victims of sex trafficking as offenders, and there is very little in the way of shelters and support for these victims. Some, like North Korean women, if caught, are deported, where they face internment or death. According to the human rights organization Durihana Association, the bulk of the estimated fifty to one hundred thousand North Korean refugees in China are women sold for about $1,500 per head.

  Perhaps the creepiest example I witnessed of China’s increasing commodification of women came when I visited a sex doll factory in Dongguan, the same city where authorities shut down the most extreme of the Confucius workshops. At least one manufacturer there had come up with a unique solution: If China is running out of women, why not make fake women?

  In 2009, factory owner Vincent He (pronounced “her”) and his partners were casting about for a new business after shuttering a company that made office furniture. What kind of high-value item could they make that would be in great demand? Their answer: sex dolls. Not inexpensive inflatables, but life-size, steel-jointed skeletons covered with pliable PVC flesh, made to look as realistic as possible, and retailing for $5,000 upward.

  From 2009 to 2010, He and his partners experimented with different prototypes. They set up a test facility in Guangzhou’s university district, seeking college students as testers. Feng Wengguang was one of those who responded, after seeing a flyer with the headline “Fake Dolls, Real Love.”

  Feng, an industrial design major, was curious—and not just for a taste of forbidden fruit. “I thought it could be a good business model,” he said. After all, with the approaching avalanche of single men in China, fake women could be real business, he reckoned.

  It took him a little while to find the test location in a dark, narrow alley not far from his college, Guangdong University of Technology. The storefront was covered with a piece of red cloth. A famous song, “Love Game,” was playing. He hesitated outside, nervous and unsure, before pulling aside the red curtain. You can only go ahead of others by trying something new, he thought.

  Thus Feng joined a strange club of single men. Calling themselves the Kawaii—Japanese slang for “cute”—Club, the group of eight undergraduates started meeting regularly for meals, karaoke sessions, and road-testing sex dolls for He, who named his company Hitdoll Inc. (Slogan: “Finest Love Doll from China.”)

  In the beginning it seemed like a twisted form of Goldilocks and the Three Bears: Feng and the other testers complained that the five-foot-long dolls were too stiff, too cold, or too unreal. Hitdoll’s makers experimented with materials (silicone, rubber), breast size (C to EE), hair (synthetic, human), and ethnicity (African, Asian, Caucasian). “It was strange giving all this feedback because we didn’t think of ourselves as the end customer,” said Feng. With hefty price tags, Hitdoll was aiming the product squarely at the well-heeled and, most likely, married man.

  Kawaii Club members “never consider we might one day need these things. We’re sure we can find real women,” said Feng, with the supreme confidence of a twenty-four-year-old. After graduation, he even joined the company as a designer.

  In 2011, Hitdoll started production. Three years later, when I visited their workshop, they were selling ten to twelve units a month, with sales divided between domestic and international markets. Hitdoll’s business is difficult to scale up. For one thing, the five-foot dolls are not easily transported, and they are shipped in huge wooden crates resembling coffins. They can’t be folded up or stashed in a nightstand drawer. “They really are designed to take the place of real women,” said He.

  Nancy Cheng, manager of Buccone, a high-end sex toy shop in Guangzhou, told me a customer who’d bought a Hitdoll rang up a few days later to ask if there was any way the doll could be folded up. The customer explained that his mother lived with him and had taken a strong dislike to the doll. “Finally, he had to sit down with her and say, ‘Look, I’m a bachelor and I have needs. Do you want me to visit prostitutes?’ Then,” said Ms. Cheng solemnly, “she consented to him having it.”

  In 2014, Feng helped design a lower-end line of sex dolls purely for China’s domestic market, costing a more pocket-friendly $3,000. Features are scaled down: lashes and brows are painted, instead of made of real hair, and the dolls feel stiffer and less pliable. In dim light, they do look eerily like real women, in part because they have been designed to resemble specific East Asian soft-porn stars. Certain popular features from the higher-end model have been retained.

  “The nipples—they are very tough,” said He, tugging vigorously to demonstrate. “Normal ones,” he said, “could never withstand such treatment.”

  Of course, Hitdoll represents an extremely niche market. But I believe it is part of a bigger trend in China resulting from the scarcity of women, which is manifesting itself in increasingly hostile attitudes toward women and feminism.

  That’s not likely to go away even as the pressures generated by the gender imbalance act to slowly decrease the bias against daughters. China’s gender imbalance, while still high, has been slowly ebbing since its peak in 2004 of 121 boys to every 100 girls. Some social scientists believe it will move toward normal proportions, as has happened in other patriarchal societies like South Korea. Certainly, fewer people in China appear to be expressing a preference just for sons now. In 2013, a Zhejiang University survey showed that most people wanted both a son and a daughter. In cases where only one child was allowed, 21 percent preferred a daughter to 13 percent who wanted a son. Some of this is due to public campaigns such as the 2003 Care for Girls campaign initiated by the family-planning commission, which is designed to improve perceptions of the value of girls. Still, much more needs to be done.

  It’s worth remembering that the one-child policy accentuated a long-standing pernicious bias against females in China. The removal of the policy, on its own, isn’t going to solve the country’s gender inequalities. I was reminded of this when I visited my ancestral village after leaving Hitdoll’s premises.

  For many years, despite working in China, I’d resisted traveling to the Fong family village, Zili Village, just a two-hour drive from Dongguan.

  My antipathy stemmed from my gender. My grandfather, Fang Wenxian, had come to what was then prewar Ma
laya and made his fortune. He also sired eighteen sons, of which my father was the sixteenth. Even though the family wealth vanished with grandfather’s death and the Japanese invasion, the Fong/Fang family are proud of their lineage. When my mother married into this family and produced five daughters, no sons, it was a truth universally acknowledged among the Fongs that my father was in want of a better wife.

  For a long time, I was too young to understand the great stress this placed on my parents’ marriage, or the burdens this placed on my mother, particularly at great clan gatherings, like Lunar New Year. I simply rejoiced, in those times, at the chance to run wild with my male cousins. We pretended we were bandits, brandishing weapons and executing what we fondly imagined to be magnificent leaps and acrobatic kicks. In these games I was as loud and unmannerly as any boy and thought of myself as such. But at times my grandmother, Ah Ma, would interrupt our play, cooing for her favorite grandchild of the moment—always one of my male cousins—so she could feed him a sweet, or wipe his sweat.

  My sisters and I were never thus honored and took care to stay out of reach, for Ah Ma, a tiny woman with corpse-white skin, would occasionally reach out to viciously tweak our tummies, a pleasure she reserved exclusively for us girls.

  My father never got over his sonless state and took it out on his children in beatings and apoplectic rages. The latter probably did him in, for he was felled by a stroke, at age fifty-seven, and never recovered.

  I was not, therefore, particularly eager to explore my Fong roots. In the ways of the clan, the female Fongs are just temporary members, to be married out to other families and thereafter lost to the family.

  Still, over time I learned more about Zili Village from cousins who’d visited, and it piqued my interest. It turned out Zili was an enchanting landscape made up of thousands of towers that dotted southern China’s flat green fields. It had even been made a UNESCO World Heritage Site.