On this episode of China Uncensored:
China ends its one-child policy!
Sort of.
Hello and welcome to China Uncensored, I'm your host, Chris Chappell.
Big news out of China last week—as explained in this video by British state-run media BBC.
(cheers)
Wow. I guess they're putting all their investigative resources into Sherlock.
Well, ending an unpopular and draconian population control policy is certainly cause for celebration.
"Now we have the introduction of a new policy: One couple, two children."
Wait. So they're ending the one-child policy...by making it a two-child policy instead?
You know, the one-child policy was never supposed to be a permanent thing.
It was established in 1979 after a huge population boom in China.
After the Communist Party began its rule in 1949,
the population of China almost doubled in 30 years.
And this wasn't a coincidence.
Mao Zedong encouraged people to have lots of kids.
That's partially because he was concerned about nuclear war.
He said in a 1957 speech that it didn't matter if half of China's population was killed,
because there were so many people, they could just repopulate.
At the time, the Communist Party even banned birth control.
But eventually, officials started worrying about overpopulation.
So they created the one-child policy.
It was a massive social engineering project designed to counter
the previous social engineering project that got out of hand.
It's also not precisely a one-child policy.
There are so many exceptions that two thirds of Chinese people are already allowed to have
a second child,
for example, farmers whose first child is a girl.
So what's the big deal about changing the one-child policy now?
For more on this, we go to former one-child and copy editor Shelley Zhang.
Chris.
Shelley, most people outside China have a negative view of the one child policy,
but some people also think it was a "necessary evil"
to stop overpopulation in China.
Was the policy a success?
The Chinese government says that the policy prevented 400 million births,
but demographers are pretty skeptical.
In fact, it's looking more and more like the one child policy was completely unnecessary.
Really. Completely unnecessary?
Well, the biggest drop in China's birth rate happened before the one-child policy.
In 1970, the government started running a propaganda campaign to encourage people to
get married later and have fewer children.
Family size dropped by half in just 10 years.
Researchers now think that the birth rate would have continued to drop naturally as
China's economy improved.
That was even confirmed by a secret government experiment.
So are officials changing the one-child policy now because it's clear it's not necessary?
Well, they're changing it because the one-child policy caused a demographic disaster.
China is now dealing with not having enough young workers to support the elderly.
This sounds like a huge amount of pressure on the next generation.
Yeah, and because of the preference for boys over girls,
there are now 30 million more men than women.
So how is the one-child policy enforced, anyway?
It's unevenly implemented through a massive bureaucracy.
Quotas are set by the central government, and enforced by local family planning commissions.
Wow. So what happens to people who violate the policy?
So it varies pretty widely.
You can be fined anywhere from a few thousand dollars to 6 to 8 times your annual income.
In some cases, if you can't pay, officials will force you to have an abortion, or sterilize
you.
Remember Feng Jianmei?
In 2012, she was seven months pregnant with her second child, and couldn't pay the fine.
Officials captured her and forced her to have an abortion.
A photo of Feng with her stillborn baby went viral on social media,
causing an outcry against family planning enforcement.
From what I remember, Feng lived in a rural area,
so she should have been able to have a second child.
Oh, yeah, she was eligible.
But she hadn't applied for a birth permit before getting pregnant.
So because she didn't have a birth permit, she was fined,
and because she couldn't pay the fine, she had a forced abortion?
Yes.
Under the one-child policy there have been more than 330 million abortions and almost
200 million sterilizations.
And if Feng's daughter had been born, she wouldn't be able to get a residence permit.
That means she couldn't go to school, couldn't get a job, couldn't even go to the doctor.
There are 6.5 million "undocumented" Chinese in that exact situation.
You know, I think about this sometimes because after I was born in China, my mother got a
government-mandated IUD (intrauterine device).
Even though IUDs are supposed to have a 99% effectiveness rate, she got pregnant.
So if we hadn't already moved to America by then,
my sister probably wouldn't be alive today.
That's really heavy.
So it sounds like changing the one-child policy will be a good thing?
Right now, it looks like family planning commissions will still exist to enforce the two-child
policy.
And a big reason is money.
A lot of local governments make a substantial part of their revenue from family planning
fines, especially in poorer areas.
There's even a saying that, for money,
"Big cities depend on land, small towns depend on birth planning."
Some estimate that fines have made more than 300 billion dollars since the one-child policy
started.
Will the new two-child policy help the demographic crisis the one-child policy caused?
It will take decades,
because the birth rate probably won't increase fast enough.
When the two-child policy was piloted back in 2013,
only 1 in 20 eligible couples applied to have a second child.
You know, in the end, stopping the one-child policy is good PR.
Most people outside China will probably think that it's a great thing.
But what they won't realize is that the underlying system isn't changing.
Chris?
Thanks, Shelley.
So the Communist Party is swapping the one-child policy for a two-child policy.
But that's not going to change the fact that the Party is still telling people how many
children they are allowed to have.
So will this new social engineering project
designed to counter the previous social engineering project
created to fix the first social engineering project work?
What do you think? Leave your comments below.
Thanks for watching this episode of China Uncensored and check out our Facebook page.
I'm Chris Chappell. See you next time.
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