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When the government of China was liberated their census data last month, it revealed the extent of the population slowdown. The country’s fertility rate is now one of the lowest in the world. Last year the number of births was similar to that of the early 1960s, when China struggled a multi-year famine.
The numbers are obviously too strong to ignore. This week the government announced a new three-child policy, further relaxing the population controls that have existed for four decades. The Chinese public responded to the online ad mocking its inadequacy. Although parents have been allowed to have two children since 2015, national experts and even the central bank have called for the population controls to be completely abandoned. They warn of the impending problems caused by a rapidly shrinking population, such as the burden on young individuals who have to support aging parents and grandparents.
But Beijing is reluctant to completely break its historic population controls. To acknowledge that the government has been wrong would be to admit that the most hated policy of the Communist Party since the Mao era has not only been cruel, but has also made sense. Developed in the late 1970s on the basis of population trajectories, the one-child policy was advocated by weapons scientists, one of the few groups of researchers who retained political influence after the Cultural Revolution. In the following decades, the one-child policy has led to so much state intrusion into women’s bodies that trauma is still far from being transmitted.
It is important to reflect on these traumas, from the multitude of forced abortions to the hidden daughters trying to have sons. But the Communist Party is not interested in reflection. In its change of restriction to encourage the parties, the government should avoid making similar mistakes. The population control apparatus has been created to collect fines and enforce sterilizations. A very different approach will be needed to support births.
The health and population policies of countries can empower or paralyze their citizens. The first time I experienced the difference was as a visiting student at Beijing University. In a class that talked about sexual health with graduate students in social work, I mentioned that women could get free IUDs in the UK NHS. My classmates, mostly female, gasped audibly. I flipped through the dictionary, wondering if I had made a translation error. Finally, it was asked whether the women got them voluntarily. For them, the IUD was a small metal weapon of forced sterilization. They could be inserted into women’s uterus against their will and left there. My classmates did not consider that a woman could willingly ask for one to have control over her own body.
When Chinese scientists projected the trajectory of the population in the 1970s, they did not take social variables into account. Combined with the historical preference for children common to patriarchy, the one-child policy led to sex-selective abortions, further reducing future fertility. The government has 17 million men 20 to 40 years older than women.
China’s demographic slowdown would probably have happened anyway as people moved to cities and women’s education and income grew. Now, China’s male leadership must struggle with a new generation of women. The surviving daughters had no siblings with whom to compete for resources, resulting in a highly educated and ambitious cohort of women after the 1980s.
Population policies often have unintended consequences. Ye Liu, a professor at King’s College London who has documented women born in the 1980s, says that while the two-child policy theoretically gave respondents more chances, they withdrew. “At the peak of their careers, they felt their benefits were slipping away; their employers suspected they would have another child,” Liu says.
Relaxing the one-child policy seems to have had little impact on the gender burden of parenting. Today’s women have experienced their share of scandals, from infant formulas to vaccines – They want to worry less. Now that local governments are presenting a cloth bag of pro-birth policies, it is time for the most radical intervention of all: to create public services that parents can trust.
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