The Chinese government, then, introduced its radical policy in 1979 requiring that urban couples limit their families to one child each. As Fong (2004: 1) suggests, the aim of the initiative was “to help the country leapfrog from a Third-World economy into the First-World economy by mimicking First-World fertility and education patterns”. It was hoped that third and subsequent births could be eradicated and that about a third of couples would agree to adhere to having only one child. Feng and Hao (1992), note that strategies to discourage larger families included financial levies on each additional child and sanctions ranging from social pressure to restricted career prospects for those in government employment. The One Child Family Model, implemented in 1979 originally only encouraged one-child families. The government was trying to rapidly make China a developed socialist nation, and the costs of sustaining the projected population would take resources away from industry, technology, and defence (Croll, 1985). In 1980, One Child became mandatory. Women who had birthed two living children were forced to become sterilised. These sterilisations peaked in 1983, when the government launched an aggressive nation-wide campaign (Greenhalgh, 1994). Women who had one living child were forced to use contraceptives, the most common being the IUD (Intra-Uterine Devices). Second and third pregnancies were sometimes forcibly aborted by the government, against the wishes of the mother (Kaufman et. al, 1989).
As Kane (1999) asserts, all factors conspired to ensure that, within a short space of time, around 90% of couples in urban areas were persuaded to limit their families to a single child. Banister (1987) highlights how the attitudes of families in rural areas of China contrasted with those of families living in the towns and cities. Rural families tended to be more resistant to the one child policy, as poorer peasants with limited savings and no pensions relied on children to support them in later life. Greenhalgh (1992) describes how many peasants, unconvinced by government policies and their likely duration, were skilled at avoiding unpopular prescriptions forcing local authorities to rely on financial penalties for higher order births. He observes that, “village level family planning workers were caught between the state’s demands and the determination of their friends and neighbours” (1992, p.56). However, since its inception “reductions in Chinese fertility have reduced the country’s (and the world’s) population growth by some 250 million” (Kane, 1995). This reported decrease in fertility reduced at least some of the pressures on communities, the government, resources and the environment in China.
Conversely, however, authors have identified distinctions between the letter of the law where the one child policy is concerned and evidence that the policy has been avoided, evaded or flouted in ways that imply difficulties with successful management and reporting of population objectives (Johnson 1993). Variation in one child policy application have been identified, along with evasion and avoidance strategies on the part of Chinese individuals. Many commentators have noted that there is significant under-reporting of both male and female births, with the latter being twice as likely to be under-reported. It accounts for about half to two-thirds of the difference in infant sex ratios, which had risen to 114 boys to every 100 girls by the early 1990s (Kane, 1999). Johnson (1993) describes how unrecorded daughters are often left with relatives, adopted out or abandoned to orphanages and sex ratios are further complicated by widespread abortion. It has been noted that the Chinese government oversight of private lives through the one-child program encumbers the reproductive, living, and career choices of individuals throughout China (Banister 1987). Due to the prospect of losing state-provided benefits or of getting fined for exceeding the birth limit, it is disadvantageous for a family to put multiple children on its household register (Hull, 1991). Underreporting takes several forms: adopting the baby out, so that the adoptive family includes the infant in its registration practice; reporting the female as an immigrant some time after birth to account for registration delays; or simply not reporting the birth at all. This suggests that China’s actual population numbers may be different from officially reported figures and that the unregistered population could conceivably inflict stress on the social-welfare infrastructure (Hull 1991). Tellingly, unregistered births in China appear to be much more routine in rural areas where it is conservatively estimated there have been more than 20 million unregistered births, comprising at least 1.6 percent of the total population of China in 1996 (Chen 1996).
The growth of internal migration seems to have had a significant effect on the PRC’s success in limiting families to one child. The demand for labour in the towns and cities has grown in recent years and led to a relaxation of previously tight restrictions on movement. Government attempts to quantify and regulate the migrants have had limited success. Scharping (2002) recorded recent estimates which show that up to 150 million Chinese people, mostly adults in their 20s and 30s, constitute a floating population who leave their villages for periods of varying duration. These people often go unregistered with the authorities since they tend to earn cash wages, live in temporary accommodation, moving around between jobs, cities and villages. Such practices tend to render population statistics unreliable, with some estimates of a quarter of all births going unrecorded in 1991-2 (Zeng, 1996). Population distribution, like economic development has historically been quite uneven in China with coastal areas much more densely populated than the interior and mountainous regions. Most of china’s “floating” population swarmed into better-developed and developing cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Residential background information of migrant workers is kept where they came from (Freidman 2001) and accordingly, there is a potential for China’s migrant population to be uncontrolled by any family-planning authority (Goldstein 1997). Some observers have suggested that China’s migrant workers routinely ignore family-planning policy and have more than one child thus making the floating population largely responsible for an increase in the number of total births under the one-child policy (Christiansen 1996). Meanwhile, particularly owing to the economic reforms that led to a rise in their incomes in the past couple of decades some Chinese peasants were willing and increasingly able to pay penalties for having another child outside the birth quota (Goldstein 1997). Even though some migrant workers may not want to have them for economic reasons, if they desired to have them for cultural reasons, they might be able to do so and avoid penalty from the regulatory apparatus of the PRC.
The variety of ways that people have found to challenge the enforcement mechanisms of the one-child policy demonstrates that the existence of the policy, even in a one-party state where instances of coercion and intimidation have been connected to enforcement practices, does not guarantee compliance (Zeng, 1996). One unintended result of the government’s one child policy was the removal of first-born girls from the home. Couples who had a son as their first child, which should statistically be around half, were likely to voluntarily comply with the one child limit (Kaufman et. al, 1989). Those who had a girl were likely to try for a second child, regardless of penalty, or find some way to remove the girl from the home, allowing them another chance for a boy (Croll, 1985). Some families were able to adopt their girl babies outside of the home; some resorted to infanticide. China’s long tradition of preferring male to female children is described by Li and Cooney (1993) as a 2000-year old cultural norm wherein parents consider sons important for reasons aside from sentiment: as sources of support in their old age of contribution to a household labour force. There is also evidence of more extreme responses to the one-child policy. Johansson and Nygren (1991) refer to “the missing girls of China” in a survey of a change in sex ratios in China from 1970 to 1987. Tien et al. (1992: 15) comment on “a clear increase in the proportion of male babies…undoubtedly related to the government’s population policy”. One view of the increased ratio of male to female births in China is that extra-quota births are more likely to be reported even if fines are incurred if the infant is male and non-reporting is more likely if the infant is female (Yi et al. 1993). Misreporting births has been said to account for up to 85% of the sex ratio differential between males and females (Promfret 2001). As prenatal sex selection becomes more technologically feasible, abortions are expected to overtake infanticide as a sex selector of choice (Yi et al 1993) regardless of the government’s orders forbidding such prenatal sex determination activities.
China enjoys significant foreign trade with industrialised countries, illustrated by its membership of the World Trade Organisation as of 1991, however its social and economic “special circumstances” (Sen, 1994) position it as a developing rather than a developed country. Effective population control associated with developed countries are commonly tied to education of women, but this has been a vexed issue in the China of the One Child Policy. As Ruzicka (1998) points out, China has one of the highest rates of suicide for women of child-bearing age. Problems for rural women can only have been compounded by the increased pressure to produce the desired child and a decrease in the value of females. Greenhalgh (1994) is critical of the one child policy on feminist grounds, arguing not so much the benefits to Chinese women of multiple births as the benefits to women of having presumptive control over their reproductive decisions. Pomfret (2001) cites the Washington Post newspaper quoting her on the availability of spouses for China’s future young men, “they always frame it as a problem for the poor men who can’t find brides….What about the girls? I see this as another step toward turning Chinese women into commodities.” The Chinese government insist that the policy is essential to maintaining improvement in the living standards of the Chinese in the context of its “special circumstances”. It seems that penalties will remain in place for those who violate the spirit of the policy. Equally, however, it appears that policy violators have found a permanent place in China’s birth-control schemes (McElroy, 2002).
The continued interest of the Chinese government in maintaining the one child policy as a means of improving economic development makes it unlikely the policy will ever be reversed (Johnson 1993). Thus, its prospective success is reliant on the effect on Chinese people. Perceptions of the overall success of the one child policy throughout China give a sense of the “macro” picture of the policy’s consequences. There is also a “micro” picture of the policy’s impact on the immediate experience of living in a one child family culture. The one child policy has had consequences for family structures as well as perceptions and priorities of Chinese people in sometimes unintended ways. One such consequence has been the emergence of what observers of Chinese culture have characterised as “little emperors”, or spoiled children who have no concept of sharing or not having their own way (Johnson 1993). Fong (2004) comments on China’s new generation of what she terms “singletons”, or only children, having now grown into adults some 25 years after the policy was first introduced. Fong describes how these new young adults have had “both education and attentions of their parents lavished upon them, and, in urban areas, they have nearly universally been primed for good, white-collar jobs” (2004:.1). She goes on to note that the economic opportunities in the country have not met these expectations. McGurn (1994) queries whether China will be able to provide adequate social services, and whether China’s spoiled children will be psychologically suited as workers. However optimistically one child families may be viewed for the purpose of rearing children, the issue of adult children’s future capability to take responsibility for their elders, is pertinent in terms of the future overloading of the welfare state (Beech, 2000). The existence of one-child families also causes parent’s to have unrealistically high expectations for their children. Educational, social and economic pressures may be brought to bear on an only child and far from being protected from having problems, pampered only children may be under greater psychological stress (Beech 2000).
Authoritarian one child policy enforcement has been cited in connection with evidence that China’s elderly population has been increasing at a faster pace than the younger generation, causing a “greying” of China’s population since 1979. In 1994 the Chinese Statistics Bureau was quoted as saying that Chinese retirees would comprise 44.9% of the citizenry by 2050 (McGurn 1994). The greying of Chinese society implies that an emerging generation of children will be in the position of having to care for their elders and it implies that the country’s public services will have to find ways to provide for the health, social and economic welfare of an ageing population while also providing sufficient opportunities younger generation to assume their filial responsibilities. This is a prospect many other countries including the industrial democracies, also face, but, in China the situation is perceived as especially acute.
In Shanghai the second largest city in China the percentage of people aged 65 and over reached more than four times what it was in the 1950s by the end of the 1990s (Powell 1997). Enforcement of the one-child policy has already resulted in increased demand for and problems with elder care and retirement planning. While elderly retirees themselves may not wish to depend on their children for support, scarcity of social-welfare benefits or limited economic development in China may force such dependency. Persons born during the baby boom years (1950s) in part a product of Mao’s encouragement of many births at that time (Chen 1997) have began to add to the ranks of the greying generation in China. In rural areas after 1979 aggressive family-planning policies were not matched by aggressive retirement planning; indeed rural peasants have been formally excluded from pension plans (Du et al 2000). Whereas China’s traditional multichild family structure has historically spread the costs and filial duties to elders across several children in a family the emerging generation of only children may be obliged to bear responsibility for multiple generations of elders. The “little emperors” social dynamic lends urgency to the issue but the larger concern from a social demographic perspective is that a significant portion of China’s human capital is likely to be devoted to meeting social welfare needs of an aging population (McElroy: 2002). Such needs will emerge whether or not China achieves objectives of economic and industrial development (Zeng, 1993). A long-term implication may be that China’s dramatically changing age demographic may oblige the policy planners to regulate the allocation of social-welfare benefits between generations. According to Fong (2004), this constitutes a particular problem for China, in that with only one child and no national social security plan, the present generation will not be able to rely on their children to provide for their retirement, as has been the case for previous generations. As Fong concludes, “In addition to borrowing the First World’s most profitable fertility and education patterns, China may find itself inheriting the First World’s inequalities, frustrated aspirations, and social welfare struggles” (2004: 1).
Nevertheless, the government achieved population regression. Kaufman et al. (1989) reported dramatic decline in birth rates, comparing women who married in the period 1960 to 1969, 34% had three children, 32% had four children, and 17% had five or more children, with over 83% of women married in that period having three or more children. Women who married from 1970 to 1979 were less likely to have large families, with 20% having three children, 7% having four children, and less than 1% having five or more. The rate of three-plus births dropped from 83% to 27%. For women married since 1980, none were reported to have more than two children (Kaufmann, 1989). While such figures may seem dubious, the One Child policy became law in 2001, providing safeguards against government corruption and misreporting of statistics. It includes process by which couples can legally apply to have a second child, and provision for two children households where both parents are only children (Winckler, 2002). However, McElroy (2002: 21) reports on the increased fines being imposed by the Chinese authorities on couples who have a second child without permission. He writes that “villagers claim family planning officials operate by terror in many counties, forcing women to have abortions and imposing penalties on families, most commonly demolishing their homes”. The issue of the Chinese authorities’ collusion with forced abortions and the use of fines to force women to terminate pregnancies have been reported as prompting the withdrawal of U.S. funding for the United Nations Population Fund. It would seem that stories of brutality and corruption emerging from China in recent years may be seriously undermining the country’s attempts to present their system as becoming more humane over time (McElroy, 2002). As McElroy notes, “the Chinese Family Planning Agency is attempting to transform its role into a modern provider of advice and information but it still remains responsible for administering an uncompromising drive to limit the population to 1.6 billion by 2050” (2002: 21).
The statistical fertility declines between 1979 and 2000 suggest that the policy has accomplished something; but not everything that policy planners wanted to achieve. Family structure under the one child policy seems to be an artificial social construction enforced by government coercion and reinforced by party propaganda, instead of an organic, naturally evolving phenomenon, constrained by historical custom and practice (Bannister, 1987). If the one child policy had achieved its population control goals and policy planners could lift the label of China’s “special circumstances” and define it as a fully developed and industrialised rather than developing and industrialising nation, that would not dispose of the personal experiences of life in China that has been wrought by the one-child policy, and reinforced by governments’ monopoly on the apparatus of terror. There has been transformation of Chinese population structure (Croll 1985), a transformation accompanied by the appearance of competing priorities between and among generations, and in city and countryside, that have not been resolved by, but rather uniquely introduced by the one child policy. The uneven and coercive quality of one child policy enforcement balanced by various strategies of policy compliance-evasion begs the question of whether it is possible to revise the whole issue of population pressures in China in a way that limits strains on resource allocation while encouraging economic development. According to Sen (1994) measures aside from the one child policy have more favourably influenced the population picture, however, the governments’ commitment of resources to family planning in the form of education, contraception, and pregnancy termination would seem a plausible means of diluting the compulsory nature of policy enforcement in the future (Pomfret, 2001).
Therefore, if the sole measure of one child policy success were the statistical decline in the birth rate of China since 1979 then it might be acknowledged that the policy has had some effect in keeping down what might otherwise of been a much larger population. It is highly unlikely that China will ever achieve or maintain a One Child policy developed to create flat or no population growth. First, there will always be a portion of families who want more than one child, for various reasons. Some of these couples will find a way to achieve their family goals. Second, China requires a certain size of labour force to maintain its sustenance and national production. Epidemics, wars, or other significant reducers in population will require an easement of birth limitations so that China can have its necessary labour pool. This might force the government to change laws or their enforcement, and therefore lose at least some control over families’ choice in number of children. The difference in male versus female children in China (currently almost 108 boys per 1000 girls, up from 104 per 1000 in 1970), will cause growing discontent among men who are unable to find a wife. The People’s Republic of China can be considered the world’s first nation-wide sustained population control program that ostensibly reached its demographic goals; and laws aimed at improving the balance between rights of individuals and the state are likely to allow China to continue a policy of very low population increase for the foreseeable future. However, upshots of the policy are distinct and distinguishable, as are contradictions and irregularities embedded in deliberate underreporting of births, internal migration practices, gender discrimination and the greying of China’s population. These may well become matters of global scrutiny given China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001 and the vicissitudes of the global population. In epilogue, China remains attached to both its developing-country special circumstances and its rhetorically justified one-party enforcement authority, both of which impede attainment of its population goals.
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