Review
Flipping the baby switch
Andrea den Boer on a personal account of China’s one-child policy
One Child: The Past and
Future of China’s Most
Radical Experiment
Mei Fong
Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt
£12.99
In May 2008, a 7.9-magnitude
earthquake struck Sichuan
province in China, killing
87,000 and leaving 4.8 million
homeless. As Mei Fong
explains in the opening story
to her book aptly titled One
Child: The Past and Future
of China’s Most Radical
Experiment, the human cost
of the earthquake takes on
greater meaning when viewed
alongside China’s coercive
family planning programme:
‘Sichuan and all its
connotations – the one-child
policy, the ruthless cover-up
of the schoolhouse collapses
– represent the dark side
of China’s nationalism’.
In the aftermath of the
quake, parents rushed to
reverse sterilizations in order
to conceive replacements for
the children who had died. In
the absence of state pensions
for rural residents, parents
without children in China
are pitied for the loneliness
and lack of economic support
that will face them in old age;
childless adults are financially
and emotionally more
vulnerable, leading to
difficulties securing places in
nursing homes or cemeteries,
and face marginalization
within a society that places
great value on filial piety.
Based on her experiences as
a correspondent for The Wall
Street Journal, Mei Fong
vividly documents how the
state’s attempt to exercise
control over the lives of its
citizens through coercive
family planning has affected
every aspect of life in China,
from birth to dating,
marriage, ageing and death.
One Child is a political and
social narrative as well as a
personal story, as Fong’s own
experience of pregnancy,
loss, and fertility treatment
is suffused with accounts of
the consequences of family
planning in the world’s most
populous state.
Many of the statistics
concerning China’s one-child
policy are fairly well known
– the claimed 400 million
births averted, the abnormally
high birth sex ratios and the
number of missing women –
but Mei Fong’s observations
go beyond the statistics
to examine the impact
on individual lives, and in
so doing, Fong challenges
claims that the one-child
policy has been a success by
revealing the human costs
of China’s attempts to control
population growth on
its rise to power.
Drawing on research by
Thomas Scharping and Susan
Greenhalgh, but enriched
by personal interviews,
Fong explains how Chinese
policymakers came to adopt
a one-child policy in 1980.
Despite the already
declining fertility, and despite
the fact that the state had
not conducted a census since
1964, economist Liang
Zhongtang explained to
Fong that there was a sense
that China was ‘drowning in
people’, which was seen as a
barrier to development.
Liang was one of the few
voices critical of the one-child
policy put forward by a team
of missile scientists offering
mathematical solutions to the
problem of over-population.
Once adopted, however,
opposition was not
permissible, Fong explains,
until 2000, when China’s
demographers and former
officials began seeking ways
to change family planning in
the state. In fact, the critical
voices of Gu Baochang and
other Chinese demographers
began to outline the negative
consequences of China’s
family-planning policies
as early as 1994, when they
published articles setting out
the consequences of the rising
birth sex ratios. But it was
only in the post-2000 period
that the government began
to acknowledge these negative
consequences – while denying
the link between the high sex
ratio and the one-child policy.
Fong navigates her
way through conflicting
hypotheses regarding
the characteristics of little
emperors (who may or may
not exhibit greater levels
of selfishness and weaker
life skills), the fragility of the
single-child family, the issues
arising from the export of
babies to the United States
(who may have been trafficked
rather than abandoned),
and a lengthy discussion of
the marriage squeeze caused
by the sex imbalance in the
adult population resulting
from years of sex selection.
As Fong notes, the
marriage market has become
increasingly competitive
due to the lack of women,
but the chances of marrying
are furthered reduced by the
practice of hypergamy, or
women marrying up, and by
the resurgence of bride prices.
In order to increase their
eligibility, young men and
their families are investing
huge sums of money in
expensive property, which
some economists believe has
led to a jump in housing prices
in China over the past decade.
Interestingly, Fong points out
that women have been left out
of this form of wealth-creation
because wives are seldom
named on property deeds.
One Child offers a counter-
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argument to those who
believe that the increased
demand for women resulting
from the sex imbalance will
increase the value of women.
Although Fong begins by
stating that ‘the one
group that has substantially
benefited from the onechild policy is urban
Chinese females’ who,
as single children, have had
the advantage of being the
sole recipient of parental
investment in their health
and education, she qualifies
this statement by later adding
that women as a whole are not
more valued.
As she explains, significant
numbers of women have been
‘Liang was
one of the few
voices critical
of the onechild policy
put forward
by a team
of missile
scientists’
aborted, abandoned, or
killed at birth and ‘the
female shortage has resulted
in increasing commodification
of women’ in the forms of
prostitution, sex trafficking,
and the kidnapping and sale of
women.
While urban women mostly
comprise the rising numbers
of university graduates in
China, those who pursue
higher levels of education
are discovering that too
much education hinders their
chances of finding marriage
partners and they become
among the ‘leftover women’
in this hypergamous society.
Fong concludes her
discussion of the gendered
effects of enforced family
planning with the reminder
that ‘gender discrimination
was a poison in China long
before the one-child policy’,
but unfortunately, her
analysis does not extend to
a discussion of the roots of
son preference.
Although Fong interviewed
family planning officials about
their enforcement of family
planning policies – offering
some insight into the human
face within the massive
machinery supporting the
state’s policies – individual
parents were not questioned
regarding the choices they
made regarding the sex of
their offspring.
There is also a tension in
her writing between arguing
that China’s populace has
internalized the one-child
norm as ideal, and support
family planning (stating that
this is ‘easier to understand
if you’ve lived there and had
to fight for spots everywhere
from the crowded subways
to elite schools’) and the
numerous examples of
individuals who hide
additional births, undergo
IVF to circumvent the
one-child rule by giving birth
to twins, or those who risk
heavy fines to expand their
families. To what extent
is state control over family
planning really accepted
within China?
Although China has
announced shifts in its policy
towards a two-child norm,
as Fong points out, China will
not be able to ‘flip the baby
switch on as successfully as
it turned it off’. The one-child
policy has caused parents
to think too rationally about
the decision to have a child,
Fong argues, and the response
of the population to recent
changes suggests that she
is right. Whether China will
gradually increase its fertility
rate and reverse current
trends in population growth
is unclear, however, the
problems outlined in One
Child – the declining labour
force, sex imbalance, and
ageing population – will shape
China’s future for decades
to come.
WANG ZHAO/AFP/GETTY
China’s one-child policy has
caused parents to think too
rationally about having a child
Andrea den Boer is a Senior
Lecturer in the School of Politics
and International Relations
at the University of Kent
and co-author, with Valerie
Hudson, of ‘Bare Branches: the
Security Implications of Asia’s
Surplus Male Population’
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