Parents drop off their kids — most of them single children — at an elementary school in Beijing
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The social engineers who designed the one-child policy never intended for it to hold for more than a generation. Even they referred to their experiment as temporary and laced the system with loopholes. In the cities, which even three decades ago seemed unmanageably bloated, many families were generally limited to a single child. But the rules were looser for farming communities: the countryside had more space, and agriculture needed more hands. As in the case of Liu and his wife, couples in which both parents were only children could have two kids. And ethnic minorities were allowed multiple children.
Still, local officials, whose promotions depended on keeping population figures low, enforced the rules with chilling zeal, resorting to compulsory sterilizations and abortions--even on women just days from delivery. Women in many rural areas are still required to undergo gynecological checkups four times a year to ensure they are not pregnant. Local governments have also milked the system by collecting "social-support fees," as payments for illegal extra births are known. The fines are set locally and are often calculated at several times a person's annual income. Demographer He Yafu estimates conservatively that $330 billion in such fees have been levied since the one-child policy began.
Government statisticians claim that 400 million fewer Chinese were born because of the policy. Most demographers say other factors contributed to the slowing population growth: as people become wealthier and more educated, they tend to have fewer kids. But there's no doubt that Beijing's family-planning bureaucracy has been brutally effective. Since the policy was instituted, there have been at least 335 million government-approved abortions, 200 million sterilizations and an unknowable number of medical checkups to prevent pregnancies among women who had already filled their quotas.
Chinese conventional wisdom is that the results justified the draconian measures: policing the nation's wombs helped China dramatically raise living standards. Per capita GDP is now $6,000, compared with less than $200 in 1980. China has pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty since the one-child policy began. "The consensus for a long time in China has been that fewer people is good because that puts less pressure on the economy and environment," says Lu Jiehua, a social demographer at Peking University. "It's hard for leaders to go against decades of wisdom."
But it's one thing to force people to have fewer children and quite another to make them have more. Relaxing the rules likely won't fix all the population imbalances. The precise group that China's leaders want to see increase its family size--the urban, educated middle class--hasn't shown much interest in doing so. "Because my wife and I grew up as only children, we don't see the need for big families," says Liu, the software manager. "I guess we've gotten used to a society of only children."
Inconvenient Truths