In this episode, Larry Herzberg contextualizes China's so-called "one-child policy" to help us understand it in its cultural and historical contexts.
Episode 043 – China: Family Planning
Penny: Welcome to another episode in Understanding China. In this episode, Chinese language and culture expert Larry Herzberg explains the background and history of the so-called one child policy in China. We learn a bit about the cultural and historical context of China's family planning policies, and we learn about the changes and the effects of those policies today.
Welcome to the Diversity and Inclusion for All project supported by Calvin University and the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. Together, we'll listen to key perspective, build our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world.
Like, what are the top things we need to know, the facts about the one-child policy in China.
Larry: There's a lot that I would like to say about that. Again, we need to look briefly at the historical background here. So, Mao Zedong comes to power in 1949 and in the fifties, sixties and seventies he encourages the Chinese…. The Chinese population at the time was around 500 million people. Little more than a third of what it is now. Okay. And this is-- I was born in 1949, to give you some perspective. So, he encourages the Chinese to have as many babies as they can for those three decades in order to have more hands to build the new China. His policies are disastrous, by and large, for the Chinese people economically. However, he does to be fair to Mao, by the way, life expectancy doubled and literacy increased 10, 20 fold under him, but nevertheless also. So he's encouraging all these Chinese people, their babies.
Mao dies in 1976, and by 1980, the more enlightened Chinese government that came to power was still the Communist Party, but the more enlightened leaders that came to power, I should say, realized that China was still a really poor nation. 80% of the people still lived in the countryside. And if they continued with the population increase that was happening, that they wouldn't be able to feed these people because the Chinese leaders had lived through mass starvation in the 1950s due to Mao’s disastrous agricultural policies, and they knew what what starvation was and China's so poor. So, then they issued this policy, which is not called the one-child policy, nor should it be. Actually, it was called family planning.
Now, it did mean that for the 20% of Chinese that lived in cities and then a couple of their largest provinces, that women of childbearing age were restricted to just one child unless a child was disabled in any way. But the 80% of Chinese that lived in the countryside could, if their first child was born a girl, could try for a boy and have a second child. And that was a girl...I mean, they were obviously allowed to keep it. All right. Maybe I shouldn't say obviously with the demonization of China, but they could have two children.
And then for the 8- 9% of Chinese who belong to the 55 minorities who weren't Han Chinese, they were allowed to have as many Chinese as they wanted. That included the Uighurs, the Tibetans, the Mongolians and so on, by the way.
So, what the so-called one child policy actually resulted in was in the 36 years from 1980 until 2016, when it was abandoned…for those 36 years, the Chinese population grew by a half a billion people. And if they had not instituted that policy and by a half billion, so that's 500 million, the population of the United States is around 330 million. And China was still just a developing country and fairly poor. And so most Chinese, there was some great resistance to this in the early years, and the human rights abuses mostly occurred in the really early years in the 1980s.
There are no people, arguably, that love children more than the Chinese, and in fact, the Chinese character that means good also means fine, well, okay, all right. But their character for good shows a woman and a child together.
Penny: Oh, wow.
Larry: A woman giving birth to a child to continue the family line --that was the Chinese ideal and and continues to be actually. But the policy was carried out fairly strictly but differently depending on the local officials and how stringent they were in trying to please the central government in Beijing. And there were forced abortions in those days and they kept track of women's menstrual cycles and so on. And only told you, okay, now you have permission to try to have a baby and stop using birth control in these… this particular year or whatever. That was in the 1980s.
And but the Chinese people came to realize rather quickly that as especially as they started to move into the cities and we've seen the largest mass migration of people in human history that's occurred in China in the last four decades of people moving from the countryside into the cities.
So that now when I started teaching at Calvin, around 80% of the Chinese people were farmers, lived in the countryside. Now it's only 44% of the Chinese people live in the countryside, a majority live in the cities. And the living space is really small. Nobody has a house. They all live in these small apartments. And the Chinese came to realize that it was to their benefit to limit their family size to one child in the cities because it became increasingly expensive to have an apartment that was big enough for them as the Chinese government moved to total capitalism, When it came to…. You had to buy your own housing, suddenly wasn't provided for free for the government, which is true communism which happened 1950s through the seventies. No. And by the 1990s people had to buy their own apartments. Then just to raise one child and have enough space and enough food to eat, the Chinese realized, hey, maybe this one child policy isn't so bad.
So, when it was abandoned in 2016, and why did the Chinese government abandon it? It wasn't because the people had continued to protest. It wasn't because of protests. It was because the Chinese government saw how rapidly aging the Chinese population was. And just like we're afraid of, will there be enough young workers in America for Social Security to continue to be funded by increasing number of older folks like me, the Chinese government saw that, too. So then they said, okay, everyone can have two children. And in the last five years, most Chinese people, most Chinese families didn't take them up on that because they did…. It wasn't because they thought, oh, the Chinese government, after they have the second child, will punish them. No, it was because they realized again, our life, our standard of living is so much better if we just have one child. We'll put everything into that one child. Yes, this creates all sorts of problems that have been pointed out in various documentaries and the Chinese government isn't ignore those at all.
So then this year the Chinese government says, okay, everybody can have three children because they saw that allowing two children did almost nothing to the birthrate. And I think it's rather doubtful that many people are going to want to have three children, because, again, we look at it from an American perspective, not just of human rights, but from our huge homes that a majority of us live in. I don't know, something like 80% of Americans own homes. The only people that own homes in China are the people in the countryside who are mostly very poor. That's why their younger people are leaving for the cities. So sure, they own their houses in the country, but they're really poor. The people in the cities that are middle class by western standards, they're apart…. They all live in apartments that are really so small by Western standards. They're what, a 10th the size of our homes or whatever. They don't feel like they have a room or can afford…. And their housing in the cities has gotten to be some of the most expensive in the world.
So the Chinese, it's really they call it family planning and they did it to prevent the Chinese people from starving.
Penny: So that was effective. They've been able to kind of reverse the trend that was happening, right, in the fifties and sixties. And the whole sort of quality or standard of living for a huge percentage of the population has increased a lot in part because of the family planning.
Larry: Well, that's right. And our friends who now are upper middle class, even by American standards, and they all have one child, that they just lavish all sorts of things on, give them the best in education when they get into high school or and university, send them abroad to the United States or Great Britain to study and really make sure that that one child succeeds. There are problems with this, of course, and we talk about the spoiled only child, imbalance between men and women, young men and women in China and so on. And the policy that the draconian policy that the Chinese issued in 1980, which we call the one-child policy, would never fly in a democratic, free nation, nor should it, nor should it. But there was a reason why the Chinese government did it. It was for the sake of the people and not for the government. And it has greatly benefited the Chinese people, and they recognize that.
Penny: So I want to talk a little bit about what what we do hear in different documentaries are stories about really horrific stories about maybe the early eighties, that beginning period where the family planning was very strictly enforced. So, you know, I've heard and seen stories about about the forced abortions, forced sterilization, also stories about basically killing live born babies. Is that all true?
Larry: Everything you said is true except the killing of babies that were already born. The Chinese made sure that that didn't happen. But yes, tragically, there were forced abortions. We're talking 40, 50 years ago. My wife and I are close friends with one of the top experts on family planning in China. And she's on as to she's retired now, but she's asked to be on TV programs in China to talk about family planning. And we interviewed her for our first documentary film, China Today issues that trouble Americans at the start of the 21st century. We interviewed her in her apartment outside of Beijing where she spoke really openly with us for a couple of hours about the one-child policy. And she admitted, yes, it was terrible. I mean, she herself felt it was tragic and terrible that local officials to please the national government, to show they were doing their part, did force abortions and sterilizations. But killing newborn babies? No, there is absolutely no proof of that. But she was open and with us about the rest of that and admitted it was horrible. It was absolutely horrible. But but in time, as I said, the Chinese people became convinced in the last three or four decades that having only one child in the cities and often two in the countryside was for their own benefit and the benefit of the society as a whole.
Penny: Another thing that people associate with this family planning policy and this era in Chinese history is devaluing of women and girl babies and then the export through foreign adoption that was part of the eighties and nineties.
Larry: Traditionally, girls were married out by their Chinese families in arranged marriages when they reached puberty or even before, and never to return to their families, except maybe once at New Year's to visit always to another village or city. And they weren't allowed careers or freedom until the Communists took over, by the way, in 1949, in which case China said women hold up their half of heaven and gave women equal rights with men and equal education and so on. And women have done very well. Nevertheless, especially in the countryside where men stay with their families and more hands to help with the farming work. Boys were valued way much than girls.
This is really changed, by the way, for people living in cities now in China who are now for the first time in their history, a majority. And our friends all have girls. One girl. And they and many like them have come to realize that a girl child since… And by the way, these women have husbands that are very successful, but they all make more money than their husbands do. And they realize that not only can girls grow up and become very successful in China and have major positions in companies or organizations or whatever, but they usually take better care of their parents in their parents’ old age than boys.
And so many Chinese people in the cities who I've spoken to, they actually are glad they had a girl rather than a boy. So most of the baby girls that have been adopted from China until recently adopted here in the West were from rural families or from poor urban families that felt they couldn't afford another child.
China does not have a tradition of adoption of people, people's children from other families the way we do in the West. And there are so many admirable things about Americans and about people in the West in general. And one of them is our sense of of charity, of the desire to do charitable works and the case of adopting children from countries where they wouldn't have a good life.
This was a tremendous source of humiliation for the Chinese government and the Chinese people as a whole, to see that our country is so poor we can't take care of our own children. So, as China became more prosperous, there were a lot, lot fewer even rural families giving up their baby girls for adoption. The Chinese government wanted to end that humiliation anyway of foreigners adopting their children, and so they started limiting adoptions.
But back at the height of foreign adoptions, back 10 to 20 years ago, there were as many as 10,000, 12,000 children from China, largely girls adopted by American families. So now adoptions are much less frequent, but they did occur and it showed a developing country. It wasn't just from the one child policy. China has control of their population, so there are not people starving in China or where there are in India, where India has not had population control measures. And so perhaps in our lifetimes and the lifetimes of certainly of our listeners, India will surpass China as the world's most populous nation. But there are so many really, really poor people in India, and you don't have that level of poverty in China, which is amazing for a country that's still developing that has 18% of the world's people.
Penny: If you haven't already, we invite you to listen to all the episodes in our little mini-series on understanding China in order to expand your background knowledge for understanding China today. Check out our episodes 40, 41 and 42. In those episodes, we learn facts and perspectives to help us understand some of the thorny issues and common associations that folks have with China.
Episode 40 explores some history and cultural perspectives that help us understand China today. In Episode 41, Larry Herzberg discusses pollution, China's relationship with Taiwan, and the COVID crisis. Episode 42 provides information and perspectives on human rights in China, looking at the Uighurs, religious rights, and Hong Kong.
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