One Child (3 page)

Anyone over the age of sixty in China will have a hardship tale to tell, but one that still sticks in my mind is an anecdote by Chinese journalist Xinran Xue. She once visited a family so poor, they rotated one set of clothing among four children. The rest would lie naked under a blanket, happily dreaming of their turn to “wear the clothes.”

China was like a terrier puppy that had been brutally mistreated by history’s vicissitudes. It was hard not to cheer a little to see it lick its wounds and limp along gamely. Starting in the late 1990s, there was much to cheer. Children of peasants became the first in their families to enter college. Infant mortality rates fell. Starbucks outlets bubbled up like so many foamy lattes. A veritable fleet of Bentleys, Beemers, Hondas, and Hyundais took to the roads, and local Xinhua bookstores were crammed with travel guides for China’s first generation of group tourists.

When my Mandarin teacher excitedly recounted her first trip to Europe, I asked her to name her favorite European country. “Germany,” she said promptly. I was surprised. Why not France, Italy? She paused a beat, then said, “It’s so orderly.”

In 2005, I spoke to a contractor who built dormitories for factory workers. He complained of having to put in more electrical outlets, as workers now had so many gadgets to charge. In 2007, I witnessed the opening of Beijing’s first Hooters, or “American Owl” in Chinese. As I eyed waitresses with jacked-up décolletage dishing out overpriced chicken wings, it seemed, strangely, like another milestone had been reached.

People used to joke that a year in China was like a dog year: so much changed that it would be as if seven years somewhere else had passed. In the four years I lived in Beijing, the city’s subway lines expanded fivefold. IKEA opened its largest-ever store outside of
Stockholm in Beijing, with extra-wide aisles to accommodate the multitude of first-generation homeowners. The car population quadrupled. Despite the growing pollution and the corruption, it was hard not to feel the quickening excitement, echo the prevailing sentiment:
Jiayou, Zhongguo, Jiayou!
“Go, China, Go!”

It took me a while to realize that, contrary to popular thinking, the one-child policy had very little to do with China’s double-digit economic growth of the past thirty years, and will actually be a drag for the next thirty. That the Chinese government’s claim that the one-child policy had averted 400 million births was an exaggeration based on faulty math and wishful thinking. Or that the one-child policy was, in the final sum of things, a painfully
unnecessary
measure, since birthrates had already fallen sharply under earlier, more humane measures.

More intriguing are the future effects of the one-child policy on the economy: Could it prove detrimental, stalling future progress? The answer here is: most likely, though how much remains to be seen. Predicting long-term economic growth is a chancy business, and few economists, if any, anticipated that the country’s economic rise would be so swift, so spectacular, or so prolonged. Equally, these experts’ basis for predicting a future economic slump is the premise that what goes up must, at some point, come down, a prognosis that would perhaps be more useful if we knew when, and by how much.

Clearly, though, a large graying population in China will likely mean a less productive China. It will also mean the China that global companies currently see—world’s largest cell phone market, world’s largest car market, soon-to-be world’s largest luxury sales, home of KFC’s biggest customer base even—will change. With the manufacturing boom in its last days, the country is now trying to move to a consumption-driven model of growth, with increased domestic spending and growth in the service sector. A large population of retirees will likely prove as helpful in this transition as the Great Wall was in repelling northern invaders.

There is also a growing body of evidence suggesting that China’s population would have fallen significantly—exactly how much is in dispute—even
without
the one-child policy. A family-planning policy that predated the one-child policy, called
wanxishao
, or “Later, Longer, Fewer,” had already halved family sizes successfully using less coercive tactics.

In 2009, demographers Wang Feng, Cai Yong, and Gu Baochang challenged the Communist Party’s assertion that the one-child policy averted the births of more people than the entire US population. Until then, the 300 to 400 million number had been pretty much taken as gospel truth. It was, and continues to be, a key part of the central government’s claim of the global good wrought by the one-child policy. Without the one-child policy, Chinese officials argue, the world would have reached the 7 billion population mark in 2006, instead of five years after. Wang et al. contend that the real number of births averted was probably no more than
half
of what the Communist Party claims.

How did this huge gap occur? They argue that the original calculations used a simplistic extrapolation method that projected what China’s future birthrate would be in 1998, based on birth trends between 1950 and 1970.
The number arrived at was 338 million, which was subsequently rounded up to 400 million. But this method was flawed. First of all, it was based on the assumption that people’s reproductive habits would roughly trend the same from the 1950s to the 1990s, a period when changes such as urbanization, feminism, and advances in infant mortality dramatically altered social behavior.
This is patently as absurd as modern-day tour companies drawing up itineraries on the assumption people still travel by steamship. Second, the Communist Party’s method counted birth reductions from the 1970s. The one-child policy didn’t start until 1980. In Chinese parlance, this kind of misrepresentation is called
zhiluweima
—pointing at a deer and calling it a horse.

Even as the policy loosened up, many were still adversely affected. Yang Zhizhu, a law lecturer in Beijing, lost his job because he had a second child. In 2010, the peppery Yang advertised himself as a slave for anyone who could help him pay the $36,000 fine. “Whoever decides to buy me, I will become their slave and serve them until I die. I reject donations as I don’t want to become a parasite for the sake of my child,” wrote Yang in his tongue-in-cheek ad. Yang was eventually reinstated at his university, but at a lower position. His wages were garnished, and university administrators took away his spacious university-assigned housing and made him live in a smaller flat. “The policy is just an ingenious way to tax people without giving any kind of service in return. What could be more natural than having children? Might as well tax for breathing and eating,” Yang told me.

I met a girl, Li Xue, or “Snow,” who spends her days fruitlessly lobbying for the all-important
hukou
, or household registration, that authorities will not allow her because she is an out-of-plan second child. Her parents were laborers who couldn’t afford the birth fine. Without a
hukou
, she hasn’t been able to attend school, get proper medical treatment, or so much as apply for a library card. Without a
hukou
, Snow is a nonentity, without the ability to legally hold a job or get married. Any future children she might have might also be locked in this limbo.
An estimated 13 million people share her predicament as an undocumented
hei haizi
, literally, “black child.”

During the summer of 2008, as the country geared up for the Olympics, the fifteen-year-old Snow bravely showed up at Tiananmen Square every morning, holding a sign that said, “I want to Go to School.”

She was never there for more than five minutes before being seized by authorities. Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, is one of the most tightly policed places in the world. In 2008’s Olympic year, security was tighter than usual. Still, she managed to doggedly
show up there all summer long. Sometimes, public security officials would try to grab her just outside her house. There’d be frantic chases as Snow and her motorbike-mounted mother weaved through Beijing’s narrow warrens, all in a mad attempt to get to Tiananmen for those brief few minutes.

Her actions filled me with both admiration and exasperation. So much risk, so little yield. It all seemed so valiant, so
futile;
whatever did she hope to accomplish?

“I just wanted someone to notice me,” said Snow.

Years later, I met a man who’d had an affair with his teenage coworker in the factory where they worked. She became pregnant, so he brought her to his village to have the baby. They couldn’t legally marry because she was underage, and their baby was born without a birth permit. Later, family-planning officials used this as a pretext to seize the child, who was sold into adoption. This man has now spent the last five years in search of the child, whom he believes is living in an Illinois suburb.

Such were the costs of the one-child policy.

IV

I was on a flight returning from Kunming, the nearest major Chinese city bordering Myanmar. A sour taste of failure was in my mouth, for I’d failed to get a visa into the country. Myanmar was in a news blackout after a cyclone, and they weren’t letting in foreign aid workers, let alone journalists of any stripe or color. I flew back to Beijing unaware that the earth was ripping apart thousands of miles under me.

The Sichuan quake measured a cool 8.0 on the Richter scale. This was China’s most serious quake since Tangshan, which happened thirty-two years before, measured 7.6, and is accounted one of the world’s deadliest disasters. For years, the Communist Party covered up the severity of the Tangshan quake, which happened at the
tail end of the Cultural Revolution. State-run news agency Xinhua eventually put the number of fatalities at 250,000.

Nearly every family in Tangshan had a casualty.
Every year, on the quake’s anniversary, “paper money burnt for the dead is like black butterflies flying low on the Tangshan streets and alleys,” wrote resident Zhang Qingzhou. “People are used to this kind of quiet and speechless way of mourning rather than speaking out their sorrows.”

Since Tangshan, building standards had improved somewhat, but it was a fair bet Sichuan would have huge casualties. With over 80 million inhabitants, Sichuan is one of China’s most populous provinces, with a mountainous terrain that would complicate rescue efforts.

At the Beijing airport, I turned on my BlackBerry and watched in disbelief as dozens of messages scrolled by. My colleagues were already in the air headed to Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital.

I stomped to the office, cursing. Why, oh why did I have to return so quickly? If only I’d lingered in Kunming. There’s roughly only 400 miles between Kunming and Chengdu, about the same distance as between New York City and Buffalo. I could have
driven
to Chengdu and be reporting now, I fretted.

Meanwhile I banged out a couple of bread-and-butter stories, including one recounting how Chinese citizens were using a newfangled, Twitter-like service called Weibo to report the disaster. It was one of the first instances of citizen journalism in China. Looking back, the piece seems as quaint as a story about ancient drumming techniques.

I cudgeled my brains thinking of other ways to cover the story.

There are a lot of Sichuan migrant workers in Beijing, and just about everywhere else in China. Most Westerners know the province as home of China’s cuddly mascot, the panda bear, but the region is also China’s Appalachia, poor and populous.

More than half of its natives labor as guest workers, powering factory assembly lines and cleaning crews, the kinds of menial tasks
most urban Chinese no longer want to do. Factory owners and construction crew bosses quickly learn to include spicy Sichuan dishes on cafeteria menus in order to retain these hardy workers, who are likened to the tiny peppercorns they so love: diminutive, fiery, and with boundless ability to
chi ku
—eat bitterness.

Since the earthquake, many were frantically trying to return. What would it be like, I wondered, to have to fight your way across the quake’s wreckage to your remote home? And what would you find there?

I headed to the railway station.

I spotted Tang first. Her face was a series of
O
s, a smooth oval face, dark circles under the eyes, her mouth a half circle of misery, lips chapped and bitten. She was in her best gear: jeans embroidered with glittery butterflies, a coral satin coat. Railway journeys were a rare thing for her, and she was observing the formalities by dressing up, even though she was dizzy with worry.

She hadn’t heard from her fifteen-year-old daughter, Huimei.

Tang’s husband, Liu Jishu, was a wiry five-footer. He looked a little like a Dutch doll: small, with glossy black hair and round apple cheeks. It was an immobile face but for his red-rimmed eyes, which glared with fierce intensity.

Tang and Liu worked on a construction crew in Beijing, roaming from work site to work site. They were now frantically trying to return home with a group from their village.

The quake had ripped through railways and highways, so it wasn’t clear how far they’d be able to travel, but there was no alternative. They couldn’t afford to fly. Liu sketched out a rough trip scenario that might include twenty-hour bus journeys, days of hiking and sleeping in the open, to get to their remote mountain village.

I wavered. How could I keep up with manual laborers on a physically taxing journey? I rang my editor.

“Can’t we just hire a car and give them a ride home?” I asked tentatively, already knowing the answer. The journey was the story.

We boarded the train two days after the quake. The third-class compartments were packed. Most slept wedged standing up, or perched on tiny seat barriers. During the Spring Festival period, when the whole country is on the move, sales of adult diapers inevitably shoot up. I could see why, for there was no way of getting to the toilet in this crush. Take a train journey in China, and you will know absolutely, indubitably, that the Middle Kingdom is the most populous nation on Earth.

Liu grinned at me fleetingly as I mashed his toes.
“Ren tai duo,”
he muttered. “China has too many people.” I heard that all the time.