Parents drop off their kids — most of them single children — at an elementary school in Beijing
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Yet China continues to promote the one-child policy as something other developing countries should emulate. Beijing acts as the wise older brother, dispensing advice to Asians, Africans and Latin Americans who wish to help their homelands replicate China's economic trajectory. Visiting delegations of social scientists rarely hear of the policy's more problematic consequences. Says demographer Gu: "I try to tell the foreigners I meet, 'No, don't do what we did.'"
If all these delegations really wanted to learn from China, they'd do well to consult the statistics from the windswept region of Jiuquan, near the westernmost reaches of the Great Wall. Residents there have long been able to freely have two kids. Yet even without forced abortions and the mortifying tracking of women's menstrual cycles by government workers, Jiuquan's fertility rate is lower than the national average. You Shengguo, a 42-year-old villager, explains why he had no wish to expand his family beyond his only daughter. "It's better to raise one child well than have lots whom you can't care for properly," he says.
Equally significant, the gender disparity that plagues other parts of China doesn't exist in Jiuquan. At the Dingjiaba primary school, for instance, there are more girls than boys. Nature, it turns out, is better at regulating human demography than any Communist Party apparatchik. After more than three decades of misguided family planning, that should be China's lesson to the world.
--With reporting by Gu Yongqiang/Beijing and Chengcheng Jiang/Jiuquan