The ghost children: In the wake of China’s one-child policy, a generation is lost
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/the-ghost-children-in-the-wake-of-chinas-one-child-policy-a-generation-is-lost/article23454402/
Nathan VanderKlippe, BEIJING—The Globe and Mail, Published Friday, Mar. 13 2015, 5:28 PM EDT , Last updated Sunday, Mar. 15 2015, 10:10 AM EDT
Little Jie, in a yellow cap and grey hoodie, darts out the doors of his school and across the road to where his mother is waiting to pick him up for lunch. He jumps up and down in excitement. “My favourite food is French fries,” the nine-year-old says. His favourite period at school is xiake, when class is dismissed. “Because after xiake, you can have fun outside.”
While his mother, Lu Cuiping, steams vegetables inside their small apartment on the outskirts of Beijing, he brings out a Lego navy frigate, which in his hands becomes a Chinese vessel mounting assaults on the enemy. “I want to be a military expert,” he says, “researching naval weapons.”
“He’s very patriotic,” Ms. Lu says. Usually, “the enemy is Japan. … But sometimes he will aim at the family-planning committee.”
For most Chinese, a child who dreams of attacking the state would be horrifying. But Little Jie is not Chinese – at least not according to the country in which he was born and lives. To China, he is no one. A ghost.
Forty-five years ago, China inaugurated an era of population control, amid fears that too many people would bring catastrophe. In 1980, it officially announced a national one-child policy, forcibly limiting the size of families. But there have been, inevitably, second (and, rarely, third and fourth) children: children who go unrecognized by the government, have no official identity – who are left to live outside the institutions of regulated society. Little Jie is one of them.
Since 1971, China has seen a total of 336 million abortions, completed 196 million sterilizations, and inserted 403 million intrauterine devices.
More difficult to count are the ghosts: the ones who were born, but have no official status. China’s 2010 census estimated that there were 13 million people without official documentation – a population almost the size of Ontario’s.
China’s one-child policy has been called the “most spectacular demographic experiment in history,” and “one of the most draconian examples of government social engineering ever seen.” It has also been, according to the best available evidence, a failure even on its own terms.
It did little to alter birth rates – much of the decline had come earlier, under a 1970s-era two-child policy. Meanwhile, the most significant purported economic benefit of the one-child rule – that women who bear fewer children would be better able to join the work force and boost national productivity – is being offset by the mess China faces today, due to its vast forgone population.
While population restrictions fundamentally reshaped China, the one-child policy itself, which coincided with a time of growing wealth that brought natural declines in birth rates, didn’t do China much good. Instead, by artificially cutting families to just one child, it brought decades of pain — and the millions of ghosts it has created are still without official home or respite.
Life as a ghost
The foundation of Chinese civic life is the hukou, a maroon-and-gold household-registration document. It is a form of identity used to control people’s movements inside the country, set up by the Communist regime, and similar to systems used in Soviet Russia and imperial China. With it, a person can secure a national-identification card, attend school, access basic medical services, find a place to live, board a bus or train, open a bank account, get a job, and secure a passport. Without it, each of those things becomes difficult and, for those with too little money or too few connections, often impossible.
There is, for those with fat enough wallets, a way around it. Although families are limited to one child, Chinese authorities allow them to simply pay a fine – that, if unpaid, grows over time – for any extra offspring; the wealthy, in other words, can buy for themselves as many children as they please. Pay the fine, and your child gets a hukou, becoming indistinguishable from any other child. Those with more modest salaries, meanwhile, struggle with sums so punitive that they are effectively impossible to pay.
The last time Ms. Lu checked, in 2012, her fine was at 333,466 yuan (about $67,500). Before Ms. Lu lost her job recently, she earned 2,000 yuan a month (about $400). It would take 166 months – nearly 14 years – of her entire salary to pay off the fine.
She lost that job, in part because she turned down her boss’s request to move to a new location, a neighbourhood where she knew she would not find a school with a sympathetic administrator – the only way Little Jie (the name his mother calls him) is able to attend elementary school right now. Even if they stay put, his education won’t last: Little Jie won’t be allowed to write the standardized exam that provides entry to middle school.
Ms. Lu, who is 42, has grown consumed by a desperation that she has cursed her child merely by giving birth to him. She tried to sell a kidney to raise money to pay the government fine, but was told she was too old. “I have thought about robbing a bank,” she says. “But I don’t have those kinds of skills.”
For the most part, she hides her feelings from Little Jie, but he already feels his situation keenly. When he found out about bird flu, he stopped eating chicken, afraid it would make him sick and that a hospital wouldn’t help him without proper documentation. For his last birthday, he begged his mother not to get presents or a cake. At the grocery store, he tells her not to buy anything unless it’s on sale. He wants her to save money in hopes of paying the fine.
Over a lunch of shredded potato with chili peppers, bok choi and dry tofu, Little Jie suggests another solution. “Maybe you can marry a big official, so he can kill Mr. Ji,” he says, with childlike naïveté. In Chinese, “ji” is the first syllable in “family-planning office.”
None of this was supposed to happen.
In 1993, Ms. Lu had her first child, a daughter. Six years later, she divorced; her husband got custody of their child. Then, she fell in love again, and although they didn’t marry, she became pregnant. She was thrilled – a new child might help assuage the pain from the girl she had lost. Fears of violating the one-child policy did not enter her mind; she has Mongolian ancestry, and minorities are largely exempt from birth restrictions. Besides, her first child had already been taken away.
But after Little Jie was born, she was asked to show marriage credentials. She didn’t have any. A court eventually deemed her legally married to Little Jie’s father, who himself had lost custody of another child from a previous marriage. “So the family-planning office judged that [Little Jie] is my third kid,” Ms. Lu says.
She is so crushed by the thought that she has ruined her son’s life, she is willing to give him up if it can give him a better one. “Find me some family to adopt him, so he can go to school,” she says. “Otherwise, I’m going to destroy him.”
A new population theory
There are lions of history inside the curving halls of Beijing’s Millennium Monument: 40 men and women cast in life size, each a towering contributor to the country’s culture. Confucius and Sun Tzu are here, as are those who invented paper and movable-type printing, founded Taoism, pioneered railroads and performed new styles of opera. Among them is Ma Yinchu, a man born in 1882 and identified as an economist, educator and demographer.
“Ma advocated birth control for China,” the plaque reads. To many, he is the father of the one-child policy.
Mr. Ma’s own family is horrified at that association. It “patently was not Ma Yinchu’s theory,” says Ma Size, his grandson, during an interview in Beijing, where he showed photos of the sprawling courtyard house in which he grew up with his famed ancestor. “Actually, my grandfather’s demography theory called for families to have two children,” he says. “And he opposed abortion. He saw it both as the killing of a life and bad for women’s health.”
Ma Yinchu’s story is, nonetheless, in many ways the backdrop to the grand narrative of China’s attempts to control its population.
When the Communists took over in 1949, Mr. Ma was among China’s most prominent academic voices. He served as president of Peking University and was friends with Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People’s Republic of China. And Mr. Ma was worried about babies. The first census of Communist China, in 1953, counted 600 million people, a shocking rise from 450 million in 1947. The prospect of the population cresting a billion was suddenly possible – and frightening. If China wanted to make each of its people wealthy, Mr. Ma reasoned, it would be easier to do so if there were fewer of them. Besides, he added, China didn’t have the land to feed so many new mouths.
As a fix, he proposed a “new population theory” that embraced the widespread use of child-restraint propaganda, encouraged birth control, offered incentives for small families, and called for bureaucratic dissuasion of large families.
China was not the only country wrestling with these questions. For different reasons, the U.S. military began to sound the alarm in the 1950s, worried that burgeoning Asian populations would provide fertile ground for Communist revolutions. In the 1960s, after the global population passed 3 billion, environmental concerns also arose internationally. The United Nations and the World Bank both advocated population control, the latter deeming unchecked population growth a detriment to economic expansion. Richard Nixon called it a “world problem which no country can ignore.”
The world took notice, often in problematic ways. India oversaw a campaign that forcibly sterilized 8 million women in the 1970s. (Coerced sterilization remains a concern there today.) Bangladesh paid women to be sterilized. Indonesia set reproductive targets for local leaders to enforce.
For a long time, China had resisted these ideas. When Mr. Ma unveiled his theory to the public in 1957, it was met with hostility; he was called “a lifelong opponent of the Party, socialism, and Marxism-Leninism.” Mao Zedong famously believed that more workers meant more production, and that a big enough population would make the country invincible in war. “The more people there are, the stronger we are,” he once said.
But just over two decades later, when China’s population surpassed 800 million, Beijing began to warm to the idea of taking action, and in 1971, China set explicit goals for reducing the growth rate. Under the slogan “Later, longer and fewer,” the country set rules for delaying marriage (with specific age requirements for men and women) and required couples to wait at least four years after the birth of their first child before having a second. In cities, families were cut off at two children. Officials had already started handing out birth control for free in the 1960s.
Then, in the 1970s, great numbers of Chinese women were forced to use intrauterine devices. Compliance was not optional. A campaign of forced abortions and sterilizations was also launched, though not implemented to the extent it would be later on.
Propaganda played a part, too. People were told about their local community’s financial situation, as a way of creating peer pressure on couples not to burden the system with additional children. A famous 1979 state-newspaper editorial suggested the country had erred grievously by ignoring Mr. Ma. Its headline: One Individual Wrongly Criticized, 300 Million More Births.
The next year, the full-fledged one-child policy was introduced, amid fears – based on faulty science – that without more drastic action, China’s population risked growing to 4 billion, and its people risked running out of water and food. At the time, medical groups rallied around a slogan of “having only one child for the revolution.”
Immediately, the use of coercive tactics spiked. In 1983 alone, 20.7 million Chinese women were sterilized, and there were 14.4-million abortions. Many were not done by choice.
Losing faith in the system
Mr. Feng was a senior engineer at a rocket-research institute. It was a coveted job, a high position at a state-run organization in Beijing. He and his wife tried for years to have a child, eventually resorting to in-vitro fertilization, at a cost of roughly $10,000. They had a girl in 2009, and thought they were done.
Then his wife, against all odds, got pregnant again, this time naturally. And their lives began to unravel.
“I knew for certain that I was going to lose my job. But then we talked about it and thought, ‘Maybe we can have the baby in secret,’” says Mr. Feng, 42, who asked that only his surname be used because of continuing sensitivities around violating the one-child policy. That decision launched his family into a cat-and-mouse game with colleagues, friends and neighbours that would shake his loyalty to the very system that had once brought him such success.
As his wife began to show, she stayed inside. But someone – he still doesn’t know who – reported the couple to his local work unit, who called Mr. Feng to ask about the pregnancy. He denied it to them, and then denied it to the leader of his research institute, who asked as well. “They said, ‘Okay, then call your wife here. Let’s have a look.’”