How China’s One-Child Policy Backfired Disastrously
The three-decade old rule was officially rescinded this week. But its toll will haunt China for years to come.
Li Yan, pregnant with her second child, lies on a bed as her daughter rests her head on her mother's abdomen. Li’s family was the first in Anhui province to receive a permit to have a second child when the rules were relaxed in 2013.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHINA DAILY, REUTERS
China's one-child policy was aimed at slashing the nation's population to boost economic growth. It resulted in millions of forced sterilizations, abortions, infanticide, and marital misery.
After more than 30 years, the Central Committee of China’s Communist Party announced Thursday that it would end the rule, easily the country's most unpopular.
Mei Fong, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is author of the forthcoming book One Child: The Past And Future Of China’s Most Radical Experiment. Speaking from California, she describes how the policy caused an enormous demographic headache for China; why it will take decades to reverse; and how, as a result, China is full of lonely men.
Why has China made this decision now? What does it hope to achieve?
The reason China is doing this right now is because they have too many men, too many old people, and too few young people. They have this huge crushing demographic crisis as a result of the one-child policy. And if people don’t start having more children, they’re going to have a vastly diminished workforce to support a huge aging population. Right now the ratio is about five working adults supporting one retiree. That’s why they have ended a policy that should actually never have been started in the first place.
China has lifted 600 million people out of poverty. Surely, the one-child policy was the driver for that spectacular economic growth?
Journalists love that phrase. But China didn’t lift 600 million people out of poverty. They lifted themselves out of poverty. True, some policies helped. But the policies economists identify as having been the most useful were other things the Chinese government did, such as encouraging foreign investment or lifting barriers to private entrepreneurship.
Children attend class at a primary school in Qapqal, China.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ADAM DEAN, THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
What also drove the economy forward was more people, not less. China had this big population boom in the ’60s and ’70s. These people grew up to form the cheap labor force for the manufacturing boom of the ’80s and ’90s. Now, these people are forming a huge retiree community, which China needs to support—and which will dampen future growth.
Give us a picture of the human toll of the policy over the last three decades?
I was in Szechuan after the earthquake of 2008, the worst disaster in China for three decades with over 70,000 deaths, many of them children, because the school houses collapsed. Immediately after the earthquake, parents were racing to have surgery to reverse the sterilizations or vasectomies performed in China in their millions.
One was a miner who had lost his 16-year-old daughter. He and his wife were in their 50s, so they knew it was going to be hard to have more children. But they were desperate. They said, “In our village people avoid us because they know we have no children, and we’re going to be useless hangers-on.” They had lost all social and economic status because a child is economic security in rural China. It was so sad.
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