A Reflection On China's One-Child Policy
November 9, 2004
[Editor's Note: This is a short excerpt from a much longer article.]
Soon after China implemented its one-child policy in 1979, reports reached the west of a new breed of plump, pampered creatures who had never learned to share. They were called Little Emperors, and nobody ever said"No" to them. It was as if our own country had decided to spawn millions of Prince Andrews. As these children have grown older, they have not, according to many bulletins, grown nicer. They are said to be in love with consumer durables and so obese, due to routine parental overfeeding, that they require regular sessions in fat farms. After the terracotta warriors, its army of spoilt tinies is now one of the most famous things about China. But like real emperors, these miniatures seem to avoid the vulgar gaze.
Because among the crowds loitering on the Bund, which once, according to Shanghai historians, swarmed with ragged, insistently begging juveniles, the number of promenading babies, each with a retinue of doting adults, can be counted on one hand. They are held up to be photographed against Pudong's brazen spikes and pinnacles. Elsewhere, in Shanghai's malls, parks and cafes, little children are rarer than British sparrows. In one big toy and baby shop there is not so much as a laden buggy, not even a glimpse of a pregnant stomach containing an embryonic emperor. The city looks as if the Pied Piper of Hamelin has just been through it. Or like a city with a very, very low birthrate. Professor Peng Zizhe, a demographer and director of the Institute of Population Research at Shanghai's Fudan University, thinks it may be as low as 0.7.
Although the contribution of a majority of larger, rural families keeps China's overall birthrate at an estimated 1.8, in urban Shanghai, the one-child policy is well on the way to becoming a half-a-child policy. The ruthless suppression of breeding may have succeeded almost too well."Twenty or 30 years of propaganda and government implementation of the policy has really changed people's minds about reproduction," explains Peng."The problem for demographers and policymakers in Shanghai is not, 'Will these children have two or three kids?' - but whether they will have any kids."
Nowadays, he says, it is not uncommon for people in their late 20s still to be living like children with their parents:"They still get enough love from their mothers, so they don't need to create the solid marriage unit." The fact that any couple wanting two children must file an application to the people's government, supported by the relevant documentation, probably doesn't help create the additional citizens Shanghai needs to avert a future pensions and labour crisis. Citizens who pledge to reproduce just once are still rewarded with a Certificate of Honour for Single-Child Parents, and a lump sum at retirement.
So it is likely that most classes, in most city schools, will continue to be composed of only children: individuals who were once pathologised by the psychologist and birth-order obsessive Alfred Adler as typically selfish loners, prone to exaggerated feelings of superiority and liable to have trouble building close relationships. Outwardly, of course, you would never know. No one in the group of 14-year-olds I meet at No 2 Fudan Affiliated middle school is even fat. Do they live like little emperors? Maybe, given that many Chinese emperors succeeded the throne as children and suffered thereafter an oppressed, semi-adult existence, they do."We don't sound like children, do we?" asks one boy, Zhang Zhe Yuan, who, like several of these children, has lived abroad. (Even those who haven't, speak to me in astonishingly fluent, expressive English.) In their uniform of blue and white tracksuits, with red scarves at the neck, they have a keen, active look, but they say they do nothing but study."For us it's a very hard life now," says another child."The competition is intense." One girl, Xie Lu, lived in Leeds for a while."It's so much pressure; the child has too much to live up to," she says.
Yes, the children say, their parents love them."They put so much love on us that love becomes a reason to do everything," Xie Lu explains. In particular, love is the reason they must work hard at school."One of the things that happens when you're an only child, the thing that happens in China," says, Zheng Xiu Yi, a boy who has lived in the States,"is that everything is focused on your grades, every aspect of expectation is focused on your grades. If you don't have good grades, you aren't a good child."
The good parent's job, accordingly, is to create a perfect studying environment."Our parents sometimes do lots of things that we should be doing for ourselves because they want us to concentrate on our grades," says Zheng Xiu Yi."For instance, my mom pushes my bike out of the door, presses the elevator button and waits for me to finish my breakfast and go out. It's just study, study, study, study and nothing else."
If they are, in every other respect, incompetent, it's not their fault."The one-child policy is a good way to reduce the population," says Zheng, judiciously,"but everything has its good side and bad side, and what may become of this generation of people is that when we grow up, we may not know how to do laundry, or wash our socks, or tidy up our rooms."