The cover picture of this disturbing book says it all: a sweet-looking little boy sits alone on an ornate chair – one of China’s “Little Emperors”, the result of that country’s appalling experiment in controlling its demography.
In a sense, Mei Fong’s book, “The story of China’s most radical experiment”, will not come as news to Catholic readers. For years, pro-life organisations have been providing us with graphic descriptions of China’s brutally coercive one-child policy, not least through the reports of Steven Mosher.
A Stanford postgraduate, he first went to China in the 1980s to do research. His life was changed forever when he witnessed a late-term forced abortion. He became pro-life and, later, a Catholic.
Mei Fong, born in Singapore to Chinese parents, a writer for the Wall Street Journal and now resident in the US, does not go into Mosher’s story, though she does mention him briefly. She avoids taking a moral stance, preferring to describe the social problems that have arisen since 1980, when the Chinese government decided the only way to curb its immense population was to enforce a one-child policy. She does this very effectively, through a mixture of interviews with individuals and travel to different places and institutions, including a palliative care facility, a museum dedicated to the earthquake victims of 2008 and a “bachelor village”.
Overall, Mei Fong paints a comprehensive picture of a policy that has been a disaster, now uneasily acknowledged by the authorities as they contend with its unhappy results: below replacement birth rates for the last 20 years, a huge elderly population, a labour shortage and a gender inbalance.
As the author points out with some irony, the one-child policy was all in vain – it actually made very little difference to the population as a whole, which had already begun to fall by 1980. But this botched policy, invented by rocket scientists (literally), has resulted in many different sociological tragedies. For instance, sex-selective abortions and the infanticide of baby girls means that by 2020 China will have 30 to 40 million surplus men. This has led to a covert industry of sex dolls – and deep frustration for millions of young males.
As well as this, there are currently more than 13 million “black children”, the result of couples having an illegal second child. Officially these children don’t exist and are denied access to education, health benefits and work. There are also a huge number of shidu parents, those who have lost their only child through accident or illness and who will have a problem being accepted into nursing homes or buying burial plots.
Although Mei Fong prefers to avoid moral judgments, commenting that the enforcement of the one-child policy was “occasionally vicious, bordering on inhumane in certain cases” (surely it was intrinsically inhumane?), she does seek out one family planning official to ask him how he managed to cope with his job.
The official describes a case that occurred when he was just starting his career, a late-term abortion where the young woman was desperate to keep her baby. “I felt we were doing wrong but I had no choice,” he says.
The author includes her personal story alongside this larger narrative: her and her husband’s own longing for a baby, her miscarriage during her research for this book, and her eventual pregnancy and birth of twin sons in 2010, after IVF treatment in a Beijing hospital. She admits unease about including these details while researching a society where millions are denied a child at all or have undergone forced abortions. I think it might have been better to have left them out.
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