One Child (11 page)

II

The closer I looked at the workings of the population police, the messier they seemed.

When the one-child policy was launched in the 1980s, it was clear that enforcement of such a hugely unpopular policy would be difficult. In the beginning, execution of the one-child policy ranged from lax to excessive across China.
In some parts of the country, pregnant women without birth permits were marched off in handcuffs to undergo forced abortions. In others, officials ignored or paid mere lip service to these strictures from the central government.

It didn’t help that other national regulations undercut the one-child policy’s intentions. A new marriage law, also launched in 1980, lowered the legal age of marriage to twenty for women and twenty-two for men. This was done to combat illegal marriage and sex crimes, but of course it also encouraged more unions and, by extension, babies. The move toward agricultural decollectivization also undermined official efforts to enforce the one-child policy. Under
collectivism, pay, rations, and other benefits were meted out by village leaders, and bad behavior (having an out-of-plan child, for instance) could be punished directly; new reforms loosened official control over peasants’ livelihoods.

By 1984, the nationwide one-size-fits-all measure proved so unpopular that the central government was forced to decentralize a large portion of the one-child policy. It circulated new provisions enshrined in what population scholars call Document 7. Document 7 gave each province more power to adapt the one-child policy to local circumstances.

This was the beginning of a raft of exclusions that made it hard for people within China—never mind outside China—to understand the policy in anything but the broadest strokes, because conditions really were different from place to place. For example, residents in many rural areas were allowed to have a second child, provided their first was not a son—a tacit acknowledgment of the son hunger that was rampant in the countryside. Places like Tibet and Yunnan, with large ethnic minorities, had vastly more liberal policies than more populous provinces like Sichuan and Henan.

Document 7 was a nod toward making enforcement easier for local authorities. It was not intended to make things easier for the general populace. Authorities called this tactic “opening a small hole to close a big gap,” making small concessions to ensure overall compliance.

Document 7 did not remedy the lack of transparency and accountability within the system. Local officials had wide discretion in determining how much to fine violators. Sums could range from a multiple of two to ten times annual household income. People had no way of figuring out ahead of time what they were liable for, and two sets of violators, under similar circumstances, might pay vastly different penalties. In 2010, a family-planning official apparently imposed a fine of 5 million RMB, or over $800,000, on a violator.
When that person protested, the official allegedly increased the fine, saying, “You are just a piece of meat on the chopping block,” according to local media reports.

In essence, the central government gave local provinces the message, “Meet your birth quotas; we don’t really care to know how.” They also expected provinces to fund the bulk of population planning on their own. This created a system ripe for corruption.

Even though Feng Jianmei’s explosive forced abortion story rocked the nation in 2012, no birth-planning official involved actually served a criminal sentence, though several laws were broken. I asked Zhang Erli, who had been a high-ranking, national-level family-planning official, why this was so. He explained the national-level family-planning commission lacked the right to punish local-level family-planning officials. “We can only investigate them and report to the provincial leaders. They have the power to punish or even fire the officer involved, not us.”

Most on-the-ground family-planning officials told me there was a tacit understanding that they would never face criminal charges for their actions, because maintaining birth control targets was considered a top priority.

“As long as we kept the quotas, we could do anything: destroy homes, property, jail people, even threaten to confiscate people’s children, and no one would say anything,” one former Sichuan County official told me. (As it turned out, officials in another province did actually confiscate children, which I’ll elaborate on in chapter 8.)

Adding to the chaos was an internal battle that raged throughout most of the 1980s within China’s leadership. Liberal-minded leaders, who leaned toward a more humane two-child approach, argued with hard-liners, who urged the need to stay the course.

In 1988, a circular from the National Population and Family Planning Commission spoke of a “crisis in birth planning,” outlining
problems such as increasing attacks on overworked birth-planning personnel. Corruption was also a huge issue, with many provinces falsifying reports.
There was a growing realization that the 1.2 billion target simply could not be reached, for in 1988, 80 percent of China’s provinces had already breached population targets.

The 1989 student protests at Tiananmen, and the subsequent harsh crackdown, marked the triumph of the hard-liners. Leaders like Zhao Zhiyang, who had championed the two-child experiment at Yicheng, were purged. There would be no softening on birth quotas.

In 1990, the central government instituted a nationwide accountability system. Called
yipiaofoujue
(loosely translated as “one-vote veto”), it made birth-planning targets a major objective for all provincial authorities. Officials—not just family-planning specialists but also garden-variety administrators—who did not meet their area’s birth quotas would face sanctions in the form of wage deductions, demotions, or even dismissal. It didn’t matter, for example, if officials met other performance targets. That one black mark from not meeting birth quotas would blot out everything else they’d accomplished.

Yipiaofoujue
became the stick the central government held over provincial officials, and this in turn incited them to harsher acts. Some provinces would impose even tighter quotas, just to be on the safe side. One official told me there were times they would get decrees that made no sense, like “no births within the next hundred days,” which they were obliged to enforce.

Fines intensified, and not just for unauthorized childbirth. Women were fined for living with a man out of wedlock; for not using contraception, even if it didn’t lead to pregnancy; or simply for not attending regular pregnancy checkups. In Jiangsu, women had to line up twice monthly for pregnancy tests and publicly pee in cups.
The birth police weren’t squeamish about how they got the job done, and their methods produced results.

III

The woman who really explained the workings of the population police to me was a midlevel family-planning official who fled to the United States over fifteen years ago.

Gao testified before a congressional hearing in 1989, providing a trove of documents, video, and pictures detailing the inner workings of birth planning in her district, Yonghe Town, in southern China’s Fujian Province. She laid bare a system of coercion that ranged from detaining those who resisted and their relatives, to property destruction and late-term forced abortions.

Gao described how she once turned in a woman without a birth permit who was nine months pregnant. “In the operating room, I saw how the child’s lips were moving and how its arms and legs were also moving.
The doctor injected poison into its skull and the child died and it was thrown into the trash can.”

Gao now lives in a West Coast suburb. She agreed to meet me provided I did not reveal where she lives, for her neighbors don’t know her past.

After her testimony, Gao said, some colleagues and relatives were beaten and arrested. She claimed one colleague was beaten to death, and another was raped. I could not independently verify these claims.
Soon after her testimony, state-run news agency Xinhua ran a report saying Gao and her husband had defaulted on loans and were wanted for suspected fraud.

Gao maintains these charges are trumped up. “If I have a lot of money, why would I live such a miserable life now? I work as a domestic helper and my hands can hardly lift heavy things anymore,” she said.

It was just after Halloween, and the woman who once described herself as a “monster” was talking about giving out candy to the
neighborhood children. “They just kept ringing the doorbell all night long,” she said good-humoredly.

Gao lives in a double-story home decorated with cartoon posters and Taiwanese lucky-knot wall hangings. A massive leatherette massage chair holds pride of place, next to a Lion King poster proclaiming that immortal what-me-worry message, “Hakuna Matata.”

It’s a far cry from the stark cell where she used to lock people up. Her detainees were usually relatives of women with unapproved pregnancies, whom Gao would imprison until these women turned themselves in. Jailing elderly parents was most effective, she said. “Few people could feel good, knowing their old mother was in prison because of them,” she said. Detainees were kept in “black jails” in a building adjacent to the birth-planning office and charged a little over $1 daily for food. They were not allowed to make phone calls or mail letters and were sometimes kept for months at a time.

Gao also described a wage incentive for birth-planning officials, which was tied to how many sterilizations and abortions they were able to achieve. These bonuses could amount to as much as half their base pay, which was relatively modest. “That’s why everyone is so keen to arrest people. The more you arrest, the more bonus you earn,” she said. (Officials I interviewed in other parts of China also described similar bonus systems.) Even doctors would be incentivized to perform more abortions to increase the size of their bonus, said Gao. “Some girls were forced to get surgeries even though they weren’t pregnant at all,” she claimed.

With such a system, surely there was vast potential for bribery? Yes, said Gao, though she claimed she herself never took any bribes. A common form of bribery was to pay officials for a certificate stating that its bearer was not pregnant. This was needed by people traveling or working outside Yonghe. Since officers had discretion in determining the magnitude of fines, it was common to siphon some of
this money away, or take fines without issuing receipts. Gao remembers a colleague who “lost” an entire book of receipts.

Throughout her litany of horrors, Gao reiterated that she had no choice, that she was just doing her job. At the time, she tried to compartmentalize her life. There was her job, where “I was a monster in the daytime,” and her personal life, where she was a wife and mother. Even there she could not entirely escape, for she herself was in violation of the one-child policy. After the birth of her daughter, she secretly adopted a son. For years, she hid him in relatives’ homes and never allowed him to call her “Mother” in public.

Now Gao’s family is with her in the United States. Since leaving China, she has given birth to another son, cementing her ties to America. Still, she considers herself hard done by, and her residency situation is still precarious. She was brought into the country through the help of pro-life lobbyists, her testimony part of their efforts to get the US administration to defund the United Nations Population Fund. After her testimony, Gao sought but was denied political asylum, since US law grants asylum only to victims of persecution. With the help of her sponsors, she has the right to work in the United States but does not have a green card or a US passport. Speaking little English, she can only hold menial jobs and isn’t able to travel outside the country. She cannot visit her mother, who is very old and very sick, she said.

“In the end, I tried to do the right thing. Must I always be punished?” she said, eyes swimming.

As expiation, she recounted how she stepped in to save the lives of three infants. These were babies born alive even after their mothers were injected with chemical solutions to induce late-term abortions. “I would secretly wrap them up and give them to their fathers. I told them to put the child in their bags, as if it was a thing, not a baby, and not to open the bag when they left, so they could get away,” said Gao, sobbing.

Against those few lives, Gao, by her own reckoning, was personally responsible for about 1,500 abortions, of which about a third were late-term.

IV

The coercion Gao described is wrenching, but is it just one extreme example, far from the norm? How widespread were such tactics? And how long did they persist?

Up until the early 2000s, at least, many international actors chose to believe that adherence to the one-child policy was voluntary, despite growing evidence to the contrary. In 1983, the first-ever United Nations Population Award medals, for individuals who had made “outstanding contributions” to solving population issues, were conferred on Indira Gandhi—she of the forced sterilizations—and China’s minister of population planning, Qian Xinzhong.

As awards go, it was akin to the Nobel Peace Prize committee giving Yasser Arafat the nod. It is still a source of embarrassment to the UNFPA, but it did not stop former head Nafis Sadik from accepting an award from the Chinese government in 2002. Dr.
Sadik said she believed harsh enforcement of the one-child policy to be rare, thanks in large part to the UNFPA’s collaboration with Beijing. Because of the one-child policy, the US government seesawed between giving and withholding contributions to the UNFPA.

Former UN and other nongovernmental officials I spoke to privately said they worked hard behind the scenes to get China’s birth planners to move toward a more service-oriented system. When I spoke to them, Beijing appeared to be cautiously exploring these avenues, including a pilot project to turn enforcers into parenting counselors.
But such efforts were still limited.

Logic dictates that as long as the one-child system endured, and quotas and targets were imposed, coercion continued.
As recently as
2010, a mass sterilization campaign for close to ten thousand people was held in Puning City, Guangdong. According to Amnesty International, almost 1,400 relatives of couples targeted for sterilization were detained, to pressure these couples to consent.