Imagine growing up in Beijing, China.
The year is 1990.
You are an only child.
And you only know other only children.
You are much adored (especially if you are a boy).
But you shoulder heavy burdens: Your parents and grandparents have pinned their hopes and
dreams on you to succeed in school.
Find a high-paying job.
Get married.
Carry on the family name.
Support them in their old age.
This is reality for you, your relatives, your classmates, and your friends.
This became reality for children all around China after the Communist Party implemented
the One Child Policy.
The pressure is immense.
And the burden on society is unprecedented.
Let’s step back to understand where this began…
The year was 1966 and Mao Zedong and his Communist Party were starting to worry.
The country had recovered from famine, but the population growth rate was soaring.
It looked like China might again lose the race between mouths and food.
The government started gingerly with a birth control propaganda campaign.
Next came efforts to control “early marriage,” with marriage bureaus instructed to deny licenses
to those deemed too young – in other words, young enough to produce several children.
In 1976, Mao died…
And his successors were all too aware that he had bequeathed them a disaster in the making.
China’s population was still growing too fast for Beijing’s liking, and the economy
was stagnating.
Famine was still fresh in recent memory, and the question of how to feed extra mouths was
pressing.
By 1978, a worried Chinese government encouraged families to have no more than two children.
And from 1980 through 2015, China implemented what is known today as “The One-Child Policy.”
Its effects were swift.
By 2000, 24% of China's population under 19 had no living siblings.
That's 106 million people.
But why do we need studies to tell us this?
That fact of the matter is that a simple population count isn’t going to tell us who’s related
to whom.
In order to extrapolate that information, we need special computer simulations that
can map out family networks.
These simulations predict that by the year 2050, more than one third of Chinese citizens
will have no sisters and no brothers.
That’s 440 million people.
China’s population is still growing, but all too soon it’ll begin to shrink.
Many sister-less and brother-less men and women will only have parents, grandparents,
and children.
No uncles.
No aunts, and no cousins.
These are the unintended consequences China’s plan to reduce the birth rate and bring the
total population to an ideal, “sustainable” level.
But all those statistics are nothing more than numbers.
What’s missing is… family.
Family is particularly important in the People’s Republic because there’s very little public
assistance… family serves as the main social safety net, especially for rural residents.
It’s also a low trust-society – which is partly a legacy of the Cultural Revolution,
and the overwhelming surveillance state it created:
Neighbors ratted out neighbors for “bourgeois thoughts”;
leaders betrayed rivals for “Western” or “capitalist tendencies”.
In short, in China, people trust blood.
They trust family.
China has a long cultural tradition that emphasizes what’s called filial piety… essentially
the virtue of honoring and serving one’s parents and ancestors.
With this in mind, you can start to see how 440 million sibling-less individuals pose
a serious problem to China’s economy.
Not only will small family businesses that rely on kinship networks find it harder to
operate with shrinking family sizes, but the overall workforce population will begin to
decrease.
And since young adults area major driver of entrepreneurship and innovation, the Chinese
economy could become less innovative as the population ages.
To make matters worse for the young workforce, care for older generations puts an incredible
strain on their finances.
Consider an only child begotten by only children:
He wouldn’t have any siblings, no aunts nor uncles – only direct, linear ancestors.
A 4-2-1 family type emerges after just two generations.
An 8-4-2-1 family type after three.
Think of it like an upside-down pyramid, in which more and more weighs on that single
point at the bottom.
We’re seeing this all over China.
But it’s not just a Chinese phenomenon; single children everywhere have no one to
share the burden of aging parents: their bills; their health; their housing; their needs.
These are your parents… but what about your life?
If this is a serious problem in cities, imagine the impact in the countryside.
Rural older Chinese rely on intra-family transfer – money from their relatives -- as the main
source of income.
They are the most vulnerable to diminishing kinship networks.
For those living in an urban area in 2010, 66% of people over the age of 60 reported
their pension as their main source of income, while 22% relied on transfer payments.
In rural areas, that number goes up to 47%.
With less than 5% reporting their pension as their main source of income.
These, and other pressures facing many young, working, only-children are not promising – and
will likely contribute to a series of struggles in the decades to come.
But that is far from the worst of it.
You see it all around you in America, if you care to notice.
Until recently, almost no one adopted Chinese boys.
Because only girls were rejected.
Girls can’t work the farm.
They’re not top earners.
They won’t carry on the family name.
In a patriarchal society, boys matter.
Girls don’t.
The result in China was adoption; abortion; at the worst, murder.
But set aside the morality.
It means that now, there aren’t enough girls.
Girls who grow to be women to marry.
Women to have kids.
Women to balance society.
Almost one quarter of Chinese men between the ages of 50 and 59, are projected to not
have a living spouse in 2050.
And for men ages 30 to 39, almost half would have no wife.
That’s nearly 15 million and 40 million men, respectively.
What does having huge over-hangs of never married men mean to a society?
Large numbers of unmarriageable men might contribute to higher levels of criminality
and depression, which can become a liability for local communities.
And this issue isn’t just a problem for men...
Individuals and families in general will likely experience emotional isolation due to the
shrinking kinship networks and the out-migration of young people.
And these problems aren’t only localized to communities.
They affect the future security of the entire country.
A society with only “only” children is not a society enthusiastic about military
conflict.
The Chinese military may be more cautious about initiating war with cadres of spoiled
only children; the “little emperors” that now make up much of China’s youth.
Imagine losing your only baby, your only hope for sustenance in old age to military adventures.
The People’s Liberation Army may well have trouble recruiting and retaining highly skilled
personnel.
On top of this, millions of workers have migrated from rural areas to coastal economic centers,
creating a new family problem—scores of “left behind” children.
Unlike almost anywhere on earth, internal movement in China is regulated by visa and
permit.
If you want a job in the city… you are probably moving there illegally.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics estimates that there were almost 290 million rural migrant
workers in 2018.
So, for those only children in China... their struggles… their hardships… their years
of isolation… many hoped such sacrifices would be justified in service of a higher,
national purpose.
Was the One Child Policy all for naught?
Today, the Communist Party is aware of the long demographic shadow cast by its One-Child
Policy, but efforts to rethink it are coming too late.
With a slowing economy, a shrinking labor force, an atrophying family structure, and
a potentially reluctant military, China’s grand experiment in population control has
been rife with unexpected consequences.
The one-child policy was a brutal attempt to forge prosperity…
Instead it has wrought a human tragedy on a scale never before seen.