China Drops One-Child Policy

Even in 1900, China was home to 400,000,000 people, one quarter of all the people on the planet at the time. For centuries, both deaths of infants and infanticide were so common that births were not counted until the child was a year old, and even today, some elderly Chinese count their ages from their first year, not their births. World War II and the Communist revolution in 1951, however, changed attitudes toward family size.

 

 

In the 1950's and 1960's and even beyond, China's military strategy was based on having an overwhelming number of troops. To build the people's army, there had to be more people. Chairman Mao encouraged large families, and many Chinese had three, four, five, and six children. The population grew from 540,000,000 in 1949 to 960,000,000 in 1970. Mao's successor Deng Xiao-Ping, however, decreed that a new policy was necessary to ensure that “the fruits of economic growth are not devoured by population growth.” 

 

Most Chinese families were strictly limited to one child after 1971. The law was enforced by heavy fines and forced abortions. Even after an abortion, contraception was not readily available, and some families had to wait several years before they were allowed to try again.

 

There were, however, up to 22 exceptions to the one-child rule. Couples could apply for permission to have a second child if their first child died, or was born with significant disabilities. Disabled servicemen were allowed to have a second child. Many provinces allowed couples to try for a second child if their first-born was a girl. Ethnic minorities in lightly populated Tibet and western China were exempted from the rule. Wealthy families could have additional children overseas (or in Hong Kong or Macau) and bring them back, although these children could not become Chinese citizens.

 

Even with the one-child rule, China's population soared to its current 1.3 billion, with an excess of male citizens. Since Chinese parents depend on sons to support them in old age, many couples opted to abort female fetuses. The practice of sex selection by abortion was outlawed, but prosecution was difficult because it was hard to prove what parents knew about the gender of their babies before birth.

 

Many baby girls were simply abandoned, often in a basket in a public street with a little money or some milk powder. This practice was also outlawed, but it fueled the building of orphanages and an adoption industry that for many years catered to families in the United States desperately seeking children. With the new two-child rule, the already-dying adoption industry may be coming to an end.

When China adopted its draconian family planning policies, coming immediately after the Party encouraged large families, there was widespread fear that the world was running out of resources. Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb influenced policy making all over the planet, even China, and there were numerous predictions that the world would run out of oil by 1975 and run out of food by 1985. Smaller populations seemed to make sense.

The predicted catastrophe failed to materialize. Even if a majority of Chinese women now choose to have two babies (and experts don't believe this is likely), China's population will peak at 1.42 billion in the year 2043. The population of China is expected to fall to under 900,000,000 by the end of this century. Declining population puts even more strain on elder care, and leaves a huge surplus of housing that will decimate investments. The twentieth century's solution is becoming the twenty-first century's problem. All of the effects of the policy, however, are not economic.

The announcement of the end of the one-child rule brought many tears to American families. For tens of thousands of Americans who were adopted from Chinese orphanages, changes in the one-child rule trigger a cascade of painful questions of what if. It's important not to lump all adoptees together, but certain questions come up again and again. What if the two-child rule had been in place when I was a baby? Would I have grown up poor? (Most American families adopting Chinese babies are well do to.) What if I had been a better baby? Would my parents have kept me? 

 

As one young American woman who was adopted as a baby in Changzhou puts it, "Growing up in America conferred unimaginable material advantages. I would not now be attending an Ivy League university had I stayed with my family tending the rice fields. I would not have been as free to choose my direction in life. But I have never really felt that I fit in, and I have always wondered what I have missed from the home I never knew."

 

 

Some American adoptees were abandoned late enough in life that they have some memory of what they left behind. In a 2012 interview the San Francisco Chronicle, Jenni Fang Lee told her story of being four years old, waiting for a ride from her step-brother who never came. She said she vaguely remembered her mother's long braided hair and her father's chubby cheeks. Taken to an orphanage and adopted by a Massachusetts family, she publicly recounts her years of emotional pain from her experience, even in a loving adoptive family.

 

Lee's comments can be paraphrased something like this:

 

The news that girl babies in China will no longer have to be abandoned brings about a wild maelstrom of emotions. There is joy. There is sadness. There is rage. There are questions of "Why me?" and "Why not me?"

 

Nothing is more demeaning than to be considered a "China doll" in one's adoptive country. Being adopted into a white family led to constant questions from other children about why she didn't look like her mother and father. It caused a disconnect from heritage that separated her from other children. When other fifth graders gave their presentations during heritage week, she did not know whether to honor her adoptive family by talking about Ireland or to pursue the even more alien option, talking about her own life in China. It led to ambiguous feelings about being teased about being Chinese; it made her angry but on some level she did not really know why.

 

Every day there were questions about how her birth mother really felt. Did she regret her choices? Did she long to know how her daughter was faring, or even if she was alive at all? Could she forgive her  birth mother? Would her birth mother ever know?

Unlike many other countries, there is no publicly accessible birth registry that give adoptees like Lee clues of where to look for their birth parents. Their origins may always be a mystery. Some resolve, however, to keep their own children close, so that the next generation will never have to go through the pain of abandonment felt by unwanted children born under the one-child rule.

 

The abolition of the one-child rule, propelled by economic concerns rather than reproductive freedom, is as close to an answer as many Chinese adoptees will ever get. For them, the decision came too late, but their stories will not be forgotten.