Lin Xia1 had no idea, until her mother happened to mention it at dinner.
“I was still breast-feeding you,” said her mother. “I hadn’t had my IUD replaced yet, because my chance of conceiving was low.”
She’d already returned to work, bookkeeping for a plant that serviced trucks. “Between my job and baby daughter,” she said, smiling at Xia, “I was too busy for another child.” Reaching for an apple chunk, Xia’s father, a retired schoolteacher, nodded agreement.
Not just too busy. That was only three years after China’s one-child policy began. Although they lived in Anhui province, six hundred miles south of Beijing, there were no exceptions yet for rural families, and they knew the rules. After having a baby, if a woman tried for another, she could be sterilized. So Xia’s mother dutifully informed her factory. In the inverse of maternity leave, she was given abortion leave, including a subsidy that paid for the procedure, her convalescence, and for replacement of her stainless-steel IUD ring. “They still give that today.”
It was the first time Lin Xia knew of the sibling she never had. “Were you scared? Or sad?” she said, gazing softly at her youthful, round-faced mother, who could pass for her older sister. If they had sisters.
They were in Xia’s Beijing apartment, on the eleventh floor in a complex of ten identical twenty-eight-story square towers. Her mother gathered Xia’s orange cat into her lap. “It was like having a tumor,” she said. “You have to get rid of it. I wasn’t scared, just a little nervous. After you went away to school, I missed not having another. But not enough to break the law.”
Breaking the law could mean a fine equal to more than a year’s wages. It still does, the amount varying by province and by how close local population planning officials are to meeting monthly quotas: Like speeding tickets elsewhere, penalties for extra children have represented significant revenue in China. In Shanghai or wealthy Jiangsu province, this “social burden tax” might be US$30,000 for a second child, and more for a third. But a peasant may pay only the yuan equivalent of a few hundred dollars.
“Back then,” said Xia’s mother, “they mainly forced you to give up the pregnancy. If a woman ran away to avoid an abortion, they’d jail her family until she returned.”
“ ‘We’ll buy you a rope or a bottle of poison,’ ” quoted her father. “That was their slogan for women who said they’d rather kill themselves than abort. Today, peasants ignore authorities and have three or four until they get a boy. In 1980, they would have bulldozed their houses.” He poured himself tea. “Those bad things were done by local officials. The central government’s intentions were good. China had to control births.”
Their own parents had suffered through history’s worst famine, from 1958 through 1962. It was during Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward, when private farms were collectivized and millions of peasants conscripted as industrial laborers. Grain was requisitioned for growing cities, even as yields plummeted under inept directives from distant Beijing. Nobody dared disobey. Nobody dared to report true figures from disastrous harvests in terror of being purged, which often meant execution. The shortfall was so grave that up to 40 million Chinese people perished—no one is exactly sure. Millions more were malnourished.
The memory of not enough food to sustain the population was seared into China’s collective consciousness. “It was offensive to smash houses and confiscate people’s appliances, or to jail a woman’s parents until she got an abortion,” said her father. “But we needed a government policy. There were just too many people.”
China’s contentious one-child policy, which in 2013 newly anointed President Xi Jinping signaled may be relaxed gradually during his incumbency, is already partly a misnomer. Some twenty-two legal exceptions have allowed 35 percent of families at least two; many Chinese refer to the “1½-child policy.” Because Lin Xia’s parents live in a rural region, they could have tried again for a son after six years—the required length of spacing also varies by province. Besides the rural allowance, since 2002 China’s fifty-six ethnic minorities—anyone other than the 92 percent Han majority—have been permitted three, lest they shrink into cultural extinction. Exemptions were also granted for miners (because of high mortality), for the disabled, and for children born abroad.
In recent years, single children who marry each other may now also have two, although most couples willingly stop at one: the cost of kids gets daunting if two singles also are expected to help support four retired parents and up to eight grandparents. With China building more and bigger cities than the Earth has ever seen, and filling them as soon as the concrete dries, the newly urban occupants no longer need sons for farmhands. Instead, they need factory salaries to raise the one allotted to them. Only the luckiest who, through some entrepreneurial stroke, propel themselves up the upwardly mobile spiral, even think of more children.
Although bereft of siblings, Lin Xia also benefited from the one-child policy. Before, when sons had preference, just one-fourth of university students were female. Today, it’s nearly half. After studying mechanical engineering and communications, she works as a science writer. Her magazine’s office is in one of the dozens of skyscrapers built in the pre-2008 Olympics frenzy in Chaoyang, a bleak industrial warren that metamorphosed into Beijing’s gleaming Central Business District. It’s exciting to live in this incredible city and bigger-than-anything country.
But how big can China actually get?
It is now the world’s biggest consumer of grain, meat, coal, and steel, and the biggest market for—and maker of—automobiles. It’s also the world’s biggest emitter of carbon, with the soot and CO2 to match. Although China contends that 40 percent of its smokestack emissions are from manufacturing goods for the United States, no one objects to the money, and they keep pumping out more.
There are now at least a hundred fifty Chinese cities with more than a million people; by 2025, there will be two hundred twenty. During the first quarter of this century, half the world’s new buildings will be built in China. With half the Chinese now living in cities—compared to one-fifth in 1980—and three-fourths expected to be urban by 2030, the construction will only increase. Although China’s fertility rate dipped to replacement within a decade of the one-child policy’s enactment, sheer momentum means that its population will keep growing for another generation. In 2012, China was adding another million people about every seven weeks.
“I can’t imagine 400 million more Chinese,” Xia says—that being the difference the one-child policy is widely believed to have made. She’s told her parents about her work, about seeing dried-up lakes around Beijing, the treeless dust bowl of Gansu province, the stinking Yellow River. And the dams: Half the world’s forty-five thousand biggest dams are in China. Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, which displaced 1.3 million people, is the biggest, costliest construction in human history. It will soon be surpassed by the even costlier South-North Water Transfer Project, which will take a half-century to complete and will channel the equivalent of another Yellow River twelve hundred kilometers north from the Yangtze Delta to thirsty regions around Beijing.
For the South-North Water Transfer, which will tunnel under the Yellow River itself, water must be pumped uphill over more than half its distance. That is akin to tilting Asia to make water flow backward, frightening to Shanghai, whose Yangtze Delta water will be siphoned northward. Shanghai has already pumped so much water that it’s sunk six feet. The South-North project assumes there will be higher rainfall in upper Yangtze basins as global temperatures rise. But so far, climate change instead has brought droughts so deep that coal barges can’t navigate low river levels, causing power shortages and driving China to the brink of needing to import rice and wheat.
Lin Xia recalls another slogan, from the Chinese National Population and Family Planning Commission: “Mother Earth is too tired to sustain more children.” She once heard a prominent Chinese demographer remark that 700 million would be the right population for China—just over half the current 1.3 billion. Given the dust storms the size of Mongolia that she has seen, and smog blanketing four contiguous provinces, she would agree.
“Imagine,” she says. “We wouldn’t have to burn all that coal, or build more dams.”
Seven hundred million was China’s population in 1964. Just a half-century ago.
Around 2030, China’s numbers should peak just below 1.5 billion—even an easing of China’s childbirth rules isn’t expected to change the modern preference for small families. Population will then drop dramatically as members of the transitional generation between high-fertility and low-fertility China pass away. After years of subreplacement fertility, there simply won’t be as many births to replace them. By 2100, there will again be fewer than a billion Chinese. The problem, however, is what will happen between now and then.
That aging transitional generation is on Jiang Zhenghua’s mind as he sits in the garden of the Red Wall Restaurant in a quiet alley in one of Beijing’s few remaining old hutongs, a few blocks from the Forbidden City. He is waiting to dine with an American scientist interested in his role in developing China’s one-child policy, whose thirtieth anniversary, September 25, 2010, is three days away. He looks forward to meeting her. She has been honored with awards in Europe, Asia, and America for visionary work that calculates the cost-benefits to humans derived from preserving the environment, showing that it’s in people’s best interest not to dismantle the natural infrastructure from which humanity springs. She is also, he understands, a protégée of American population biologist Paul Ehrlich, whose work was noted with interest when China decided to rein in its population.
In China, she is collaborating with one of his own protégés, demographer Li Shuzhou, an expert in an unforeseen consequence of the one-child policy: millions of girls missing from the census roles. In 2000, Li Shuzhou cofounded Care for Girls, a program that counsels and provides loans to families that wanted sons but got daughters, and monitors the girls’ upbringing. As for Jiang Zhenghua himself, now vice-chairman of the Central Committee of the Chinese Peasants and Workers Democratic Party, the government has called upon him to help solve a related challenge: how to care for the elderly, now that there are far fewer young people. It will be interesting to hear what the American scientist thinks about that.
“Professor Jiang, a pleasure,” says Gretchen Daily. He beams at the trim, athletic woman with short fair hair and friendly light eyes. She smiles back at the professorial man in pin-striped suit and paisley tie. With his hair still dark and his posture erect, only Jiang’s oversized rimless glasses suggest that he is in his mid-seventies. He introduces her to the woman who manages the restaurant, who dotes on him. He orders for them: duck, organic rice with braised sea cucumber, an Australian shiraz. He sits back, hands folded.
Jiang Zhenghua was born in one of China’s loveliest cities, Hangzhou—but just barely. It was during the Sino-Japanese War, and Hangzhou had just been invaded. His parents were fleeing when his mother went into labor at the city gate, where she delivered him, so they stayed. His father taught primary school, history, and geography; his mother taught mathematics. When the war ended and the country adopted communism under Mao Zedong, his historian father gave him books explaining how, over hundreds of generations, Chinese came to believe in government as the authority destined to unite people for a better life.
By the late 1950s, after graduating in electrical engineering from Jiaotong University, Jiang was already hearing discussion of plans to stabilize China’s population somewhere between 700 and 800 million people, so that his country would have a healthier environment in which to develop.
“What were the concerns?” Gretchen asks. “Food and health care? Forests? Land degradation? What were people thinking then?”
“Economic development,” he answers. “In the 1950s, Chinese people didn’t know about environment. To the Chinese way of thinking, we are a huge country rich in resources, so we don’t need to worry about that. Until, of course, 1958. The Great Leap Forward, you know. We did many silly things. We cut trees in the mountains until they were bald. We tried to smelt iron in poor ovens.”
During Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which jerked China from six thousand years of agrarian life into the industrial age, the air filled with oily smoke from hundreds of thousands of backyard brick furnaces that peasants were ordered to build to smelt scrap iron. To meet quotas, families melted down bicycles and their own pots and pans. Because the furnaces were fired mainly with green wood from millions of newly felled trees, the pig iron that resulted was mostly useless.
“Silly,” Jiang repeats. “But at the time nobody thought it was unreasonable. In the 1950s, the government was highly respected. This was just after the Japanese War. People believed the Communist Party could do anything.”
But the idea of restricting population growth was a radical departure from communism. Marx and Engels condemned Thomas Robert Malthus for suggesting that pressure of overpopulation on resources would limit production, when it was surely the opposite: population provides labor resources that enhance production. Malthus was considered a bourgeois apologist for the capitalist ruling class, who blamed the world’s problems on the lowly and exploited. At first, that was also Party Chairman Mao Zedong’s belief: population was strength, not a hindrance. But following the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai drafted scientists to help stabilize their reeling nation.
The idea of population control had first emerged years earlier. A 1953 census had produced the surprising news that there were nearly 600 million Chinese. Distribution of condoms and cervical caps ensued, along with a policy of encouraging women to postpone early childbirth and to wait several years before having a second child. Chairman Mao, torn between anti-Malthusian Marxism and realization that numbers were getting out of hand, frequently switched between the two positions. During the Great Leap Forward, he first proposed state birth planning, then abandoned it and persecuted his demographers.
Mao’s 1966 Cultural Revolution ultimately set the stage for the one-child policy, but in an unlikely way. “I was actually working in missile control,” says Jiang Zhenghua, grinning. “And atomic reactor control.”
“Amazing,” says Gretchen.
Just before Jiang graduated in 1958, much of Jiaotong University, including engineering, had moved from coastal Shanghai thirteen hundred kilometers inland to the ancient Chinese capital of Xi’an, in Sichuan province. Officially, this was to spread higher learning throughout the country, but Jiang recalls frequent sorties over Shanghai by enemy planes from Taiwan. There were strategic reasons for protecting his department, where Jiang was asked to work in the new field of computer science. His assignment was to design automatic controls for guided missiles and nuclear reactors.
During the Great Leap Forward, China’s nascent computational powers were squandered, he tells Gretchen, on trying to streamline steel production from backyard smelters. But following that debacle, for five years the work became very engrossing.
“We built rockets. We even made our own semiconductor chips.”
“My husband works in laser physics,” says Gretchen. “He gets all the chips from China.”
Jiang beams again. But his pride dissolves in a sigh as he recalls what followed. “The Cultural Revolution: If not for that, China might have developed so much earlier.”
Instead, in 1966 Mao began purging suspected bourgeois elements. That lasted until the mid-seventies, shortly before his death. No part of society, from agricultural collectives to the highest ranks of the Communist Party itself, was spared, and no sector more punished than China’s universities. Student brigades called Red Guards, whipped into a froth by Mao, denounced college administrators and faculties as “capitalist roaders,” counterrevolutionary intellectuals, and traitors. Professors were marched through the streets and beaten. Journal publication and contact with foreign colleagues ceased, and libraries were trashed. By 1967, most universities had closed, their faculties banished to remote regions for socialist reeducation by the proletariat peasantry, who handed them hoes. Many wouldn’t return for more than a decade.
There were strategic exemptions, however, and Jiang Zhenghua, working with missile systems, was among them. Only computer technology deemed vital to national defense was still intact—which was how the odd circumstance of the world’s most famous and severe birth control policy, something normally the purview of social scientists and demographers, ended up being designed by a pair of missile engineers.
Today, non-Chinese have difficulty understanding how the world’s fastest-growing economy, whose breathtaking growth inspires awe and envy in capitalists, persists in calling itself Communist. This discrepancy traces back to the Cultural Revolution, a time when China was simultaneously expunging itself of external influence, even as it reengaged with the world. In 1971, the United Nations admitted the People’s Republic of China as the legitimate government of China. Heretofore, that designation, and a seat on the UN Security Council, had been held by the Republic of China—Taiwan, whose population was one-sixtieth of Red China’s.
China began inserting itself noisily into the planetary dialectic, which then consisted of a so-called First World—capitalist North America, western Europe, and Japan, Australia, and New Zealand—and a Second World of communist-bloc countries. Both were trying to win—or force—the allegiance of less-developed Third World countries. China’s participation became especially pointed during the first UN World Population Conference in Bucharest in 1974. During that gathering, its representative, Huang Shu-tse, ridiculed Western fears that a population explosion would soon overwhelm world agriculture and resources:
The claim that over-population is the reason why the have-not countries are poor is a worn-out tune of the superpowers. What a mass of figures they have calculated in order to prove that population is too large, the food supply too small and natural resources insufficient! But they never calculate the amount of natural resources they have plundered, the social wealth they have grabbed and the super-profits they have extorted from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Should an account be made of their exploitation; the truth with regard to the population problem will at once be out.
As Harvard anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh writes in Just One Child, her sweeping twenty-year investigation of China’s reproductive policy, those acid denunciations referred especially to a 1972 study prepared by three MIT systems modelers, Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and Jørgen Randers. Their book-length report had been commissioned by an international think tank, the Club of Rome. Titled The Limits to Growth, the report to the Club of Rome echoed the warnings four years earlier of Paul Ehrlich and of “the notorious Malthus,” as the Chinese termed him. It predicted that swelling global populations and massive harvesting of resources were on a catastrophic collision course. Like Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, The Limits to Growth had sold millions of copies worldwide.
In 1974, China was having none of it. As Huang Shu-tse told the Bucharest conference:
Today, the world population has more than quadrupled that of Malthus’ time, but there has been much greater increase in the material wealth of society, thanks to the efforts of the broad masses of the people in surmounting numerous obstacles. In the twenty-odd years since her founding, the People’s Republic of China has increased her products many-fold. The creative power of the people is boundless, and so is man’s ability to exploit and utilize natural resources. The pessimistic views spread by the superpowers are utterly groundless and are being propagated with ulterior motives.
What Huang didn’t know was that back in China, his few compatriots with computer access, missile and defense experts, were modeling systems themselves. Because it was a national priority for scientists to keep up with their American, European, and Soviet counterparts, they enjoyed unique privileges, such as traveling to the West. In Western technical journals they read how systems engineering could be applied to anything from electrical circuitry to traffic control to social organization. They read The Limits to Growth and came to rather different conclusions than comrade Huang Shu-tse.
“These were very interesting ideas,” Jiang Zhenghua explains to Gretchen Daily. China’s leaders had asked him to model economic scenarios. “Economists in China were good in theory, but not mathematics. If we want faster economic development, what kind of input do we need? If we have limited resources, what is the maximum output we can get? They wanted to know the limitations of development, and how to allocate our resources. For the input-output model, we considered the balance among different economic factors, but also—I knew, because I had read the Club of Rome material—factors of the environment system.”
“Fascinating,” says Gretchen.
Besides Jiang Zhenghua’s systems department in Xi’an Jiaotong University, China’s other working computer complex was ensconced in Beijing’s Seventh Ministry of Machine Building, devoted to the space industry. The chief missile scientist there was a slight, mild-mannered man named Qian Xuesen. Qian graduated from Jiatong University in mechanical engineering in 1934, then earned a master’s at MIT and a doctorate at Caltech, whose faculty he was invited to join. He was a founder of Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and, during World War II, designed missiles for the United States and was commissioned as an Air Force colonel. Nevertheless, during the McCarthy era he was purged as a suspected communist over the protests of American scientists and military officials, and held under house arrest until the mid-1950s, when he returned to China.
Driven by U.S. anti-communist zealots into the arms of the very communists they feared, with detailed knowledge of the U.S. missile technology he’d helped develop, Qian became Mao Zedong’s and Zhou Enlai’s science advisor and father of the Chinese missile program. His brightest protégé in the Seventh Ministry was a cybernetics engineer named Song Jian. Song had designed an elegant calculus theory to optimize efficiency in applications from mechanics to military strategy to social structures. In the Seventh Ministry, he worked on missile guidance systems.
During the Cultural Revolution, he was sheltered by his mentor Qian Xuesen’s protection, and encouraged to apply his theory and the missile division’s computational muscle to develop models for China’s mounting social planning needs. Like Jiang Zhenghua, Song could travel and had access to scientific literature from the West. He recognized that quantifying fresh water, soils, and pollution as well as human demographics, and understanding how they interacted, was critical to guiding economic and social development. Both he and Jiang knew that American and European ecologists were alarmed that their populations were exceeding their carrying capacity. If so, what did that portend for high-fertility underdeveloped countries of the world, such as China?
Regardless of China’s bluster in UN conferences about solidarity with Earth’s downtrodden, the message these scientists heard from the leadership was not about pride in belonging to the Third World. The goal was parity, both scientific and economic, with First World powers. They were charged with applying cybernetic tools to determine how to achieve it.
Working independently in Xi’an and Beijing, Jiang Zhenghua and Song Jian focused on the ecosystem’s most easily quantifiable parameter: human population. As Susan Greenhalgh notes in Just One Child, population science is the intersection between natural and social sciences. As Jiang and Song applied their skills, models, machines, and interdisciplinary breadth to determine how many humans were the right number for their country, they were the advance guards in the latest, perhaps most decisive chapter of a saga that has engaged—and enraged—religious authorities, philosophers, and scientists throughout history. It is a saga summed up in a single question: What are we?
Are Homo sapiens so highly evolved, or divinely imbued, that we transcend rules governing the rest of nature? Or are we simply a part—an undeniably compelling part—of the Earth’s great living pageant, whose existence conforms to the same boundaries of everything else alive here?
Although the mandate from their leaders was economic—how many people can maximize our output, without requiring more inputs than we can provide?—the variables they had to consider were the same ones that concerned the authors of The Limits to Growth.
“We didn’t have a very clear idea about the relationship between population, economic growth, and the environment,” says Jiang, pouring more wine.
“It seems that we still don’t,” says Gretchen, taking a sip.
But they proceeded nonetheless, pooling data from ministries and feeding it to their computers, studying the works of demographers and economists back to Malthus, talking with biologists and agronomists. Depending on who is judging, humanity was either reduced to just another biological variable factored into their models, or it was precisely situated in its natural context.
In December 1979, Song and Jiang each presented their research at a National Symposium on Population Theory, held in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. Its sponsors were the State Council on Birth Planning Office and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Both had been ravaged during the Cultural Revolution, with top scientists exiled to farms and factories. But now China was poised to make one of history’s most astonishing forward leaps. The “Great Helmsman,” Mao Zedong, was dead. In his waning years, a power struggle ignited between Mao’s fourth wife, a former movie actress named Jiang Qing, and a Zhou Enlai protégé named Deng Xiaoping, who was purged during the Cultural Revolution yet managed to resurrect himself. An advocate of market-based economic reforms, he was purged again by Madame Mao, but by 1979 her “Gang of Four” had been disgraced and deposed, and Deng was back, taking charge.
The population symposium was a convocation of social scientists: demographers, sociologists, humanists, and ethnographers, all finally reinstated as universities and institutes reopened. Nearly a hundred fifty presented papers, but for a decade they been under severe research constraints. The State Council on Birth Planning Office, an informant told Susan Greenhalgh, was making its projections with abacuses.
Into this gathering came Song and Jiang, the missile scientists, who had enjoyed the number crunching of cybernetic computation and access to world knowledge. “We presented two different papers. We didn’t know what the other had been doing. He used different mathematics from mine. But there wasn’t much difference in the process, or in the results.”
That was far more mathematics than anyone else had. The charts, figures, and graphic simulations of different scenarios electrified interest well beyond the specialized audience. Calculating the carrying capacity of China involved countless variables, but they had focused on arable land, locally available raw resources, the cost of importing others, and the economic potential (and cost) of each added person. Referring to the Club of Rome report, Jiang had looked for parallels and found that, per capita, China had significantly fewer water, forest, and metals resources than much of the world. Song’s group, concentrating on food capacity and ecological balance, had calculated, like Jiang, that the optimal population for China would be somewhere between 650 and 700 million people.
Yet China had already passed 900 million, and was growing fast. Song’s presentation included a graph showing that if the current fertility rate of three children per woman continued, by 2075, China would have more than 4 billion people.
“Our conclusion,” says Jiang, spreading his arms, “was that we had no chance of holding population below one billion by the year 2000—even if every family immediately started having only one child.”
The demographers and social scientists knew that Deng Xiaoping believed that population must be checked before it became an economic impediment rather than an asset—he had once famously been banished for expressing such anti-Marxist blasphemy. To that end, they had prepared gradual plans involving incentives for voluntary limits, birth spacing, and postponed childbirth. They weren’t expecting Song Jian’s mathematical recommendations of one child per couple for the next few decades until a generation died off and the graph peaked at just over a billion Chinese—and then, as population momentum reversed and shrank back toward the optimum, people could gradually return to replacement-level reproduction.
They also weren’t prepared for his highly irregular but effective strategy following the symposium, and neither was Jiang. “Song got his findings published in People’s Daily,” he recalls, shaking his head with admiration and a hint of envy.
Song had used his high connections to reach the most influential news medium in the country, the official paper of the Communist Party’s central committee. Suddenly, the topic of population control burst from the obscurity of an academic conference and became national news. Publication in People’s Daily was tantamount to the government’s imprimatur. Accordingly, Song’s paper was joined by a front-page editorial advocating a one-child policy to halt population growth.
Jiang Zhenghua’s work, using different mathematics to arrive at the same conclusions, became an important corroboration of Song’s hypothesis. Rebuttals by social scientists who’d been blindsided by the statistical barrage of these defense scientists were drowned out in the Deng Xiaoping government’s clamor for a one-child policy, which, in 1980, became official.
Several of those rebuttals proved prescient, as in the coming years social problems materialized that the mathematical models missed, problems such as: What was the value of a child on a farm compared to a city? What was the traditional value of a son compared to a daughter, and how did those values change depending on class and setting? And while the current fertility rate of 3.0 was above replacement level, it had fallen from 5.0 within a generation. Couldn’t China’s population goals be met without such drastic measures?
Behind those questions lurked another, tricky to articulate in a country where the wrong word could get someone purged: Wasn’t drawing upon mathematical tools to engineer human behavior dehumanizing? Didn’t a policy that forbade humans to have the children they desired violate human nature?
“I didn’t want to apply harsh rules to people,” says Jiang Zhenghua. “But we were shocked by the numbers we saw. Numbers of resources, numbers of people. We knew what suffering would come.” Removing his glasses, he rubs his eyes, a man who remembers the years of famine in his early twenties. “My hope was for a China in which everyone could prosper. Lowering fertility seemed the best way to achieve that. We’re better off now for being fewer. But we have a long way to go before we reach an optimum level, so for a while this compulsory method has been necessary.”
The idea of nearly a half-billion more Chinese needing jobs, water, fish, grains, appliances, cars, and housing chills him. Although fertility would have likely dropped anyway with China’s astonishing modernization, as in western Europe, it is indisputable that it happened far more quickly by forced transition. But, Gretchen wonders, did the government consider the suffering that the policy would spawn? The late-term abortions dragooned by local officials obsessed with meeting quotas? The bulldozed houses and fines, the panicked hiding of children from surprise inspections by family-planning cadres, the institutionalized bribes to buy them off? And worst of all, the gendercide of infant girls drowned or left in the woods to die so that peasant parents could try for a boy to help work the farm?
“Did any of the models predict that?”
Jiang doesn’t answer this question. “Actually,” he says, “gender discrimination existed in China long before the one-child policy.” Although the custom of binding women’s feet had largely died out by the birth of the People’s Republic of China, which outlawed it, a purpose of hobbling women was to make it impossible for them to do men’s work, literally keeping them in their place. In the modern Chinese workplace, women’s fortunes have greatly improved. “The number of women employed, the proportion in Congress and of women officials here is better than in many developed countries. But the gender imbalance we see today is still from sex preference.”
The imbalance he means is an annual average of 118 male babies for every 100 girls. The natural birth ratio for Homo sapiens is about 105 male children per 100 females. The reasons for China’s unnaturally lopsided ratio are well known; what has been disputed, and possibly distorted, is the relative significance of each of them.
Despite worldwide outrage over female infanticide in China, it is now considered rare, and may have been through most of the one-child policy, especially after the policy was relaxed to allow rural couples whose first child was a girl to try for a boy (and then further eased to simply allow two, regardless of sex). Long before China’s mandatory birth control, in much of the world infanticide was a means of keeping families to a manageable size, dating back to our prehistoric ancestors. Reports of widespread slaughter of live baby girls under China’s one-child policy may have been based on hasty assumptions derived from skewed sex ratios, due in part to archaic prejudices against what Westerners once blithely called “the heathen Chinese.”
According to some anthropologists, two other causes may account for many, if not most, of the missing girls. The first—still repugnant—is prenatal sex screening followed by selective abortion. By coincidence, a year before its controversial birth policy, China began manufacturing ultrasound machines. Soon, in much of the country it wasn’t hard for a woman to learn the sex of her fetus. Because rural parents have been allowed to try for two since 1984, they usually don’t abort a first daughter. But the reported sex ratio for second-borns in rural regions runs as high as 160 boys to 100 girls.
Of course, many consider abortion to be no less murder than hurling a baby into the Yangtze River. The second, less violent reason that several researchers believe may account for much of the apparent surplus of Chinese boys is that girls’ births aren’t being reported. Both UN demographers and Chinese census takers have noticed that China’s skewed sex ratios seem to narrow in primary school enrollments. Besides bribing local family-planning officials to undercount children, the surge of Chinese industrialism has made it easier to conceal extra daughters. With millions of western rural parents heading east to Chinese factories for much of the year, someone must care for their children left behind. In the fluid new social mechanics of urbanizing China, families that lived close together for thousands of years are now scattered across the map, and offspring are often sent across provincial lines to live with aunts and uncles. When these young internal migrants start school, local officials have little way of knowing whether the aunt has slipped in another girl or two of her own.
Other researchers contend that something completely legal accounts for significant numbers of the missing girls: adoption. Domestic adoption, whether by infertile parents or by those wishing to legally have more than one child, is rising along with Chinese affluence. And the phenomenon of international adoption is impossible to miss in the beautiful sprinkling of Chinese girls appearing in recent generations of North Americans, Europeans, and Australians—girls adopted and adored by couples who can’t give birth, or who want their natural children to have siblings without risking another pregnancy or adding to the population.
Reports surface of officials confiscating female babies to sell to orphanages that are really baby farms for the adoption market. But the fact that discrimination against girls in China has also brought happiness to thousands of childless families may prove useful in a world that one day concludes that human populations must be managed. Whatever a country’s family-planning policy or lack thereof, orphaned or abandoned children have never been a scare resource. In the event that humanity were to agree that on an overcrowded globe we have entered a time calling for reproductive restraint, adoption is an alternative for families that choose to embrace as many children as their households can hold.
Demographers are sometimes called accountants without a sense of humor, since the ciphers they’re totaling aren’t mere shekels, but us. In China, creative evasions of the fertility police have made their work even harder. China reportedly now has between 24 and 50 million more males than females, more than half of them “bare branches”—men of marrying age who can’t find mates. Nobody really knows for sure how many. Few unequivocally trust the numbers, no matter how heroic the efforts of census takers. (China’s most recent census, 2011, put the population at 1.34 billion. The United Nations expected at least 1.4 billion—a difference of 60 million people, which sounds hard to hide, except most Chinese can’t name many of the biggest cities in their country, so dizzyingly fast do they materialize.)
Whatever the actual total of surplus Chinese males, it creates a tension that nature ultimately won’t tolerate. So far, crimes of passion between jealous men fighting over the scarce supply of eligible females aren’t epidemic. But single Chinese men now make marriage junkets to Vietnam, where, for upward of US$5,000, they can choose a wife from a lineup of poor village girls sold to a bridal broker by their parents. Like immigrant laborers in Europe, the cyber-and-jet-age version of mail-order brides is another way wealth gets redistributed in an inequitable world.
Sex-selective abortion following ultrasound became illegal in 1995, and many retired parents find that the most dependable single child to care for them—and up to four living grandparents—is a daughter. Infanticide may be rare, yet sensational press accounts still appear. Among the grisliest was a 2012 story from South Korea about seizures of thousands of smuggled capsules of an alleged health tonic. Citing the Korean Customs Service, the Associated Press reported that “the capsules were made in northeastern China from babies whose bodies were chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder.” No explanation was given as to how they knew the capsules came from China, nor whether the contents came from newborns or fetuses. But no denials were issued, and Chinese officials reportedly ordered an investigation.
If the value of an experiment is measured not only by whether it succeeds, but also by what it reveals, the Chinese one-child-per-family experiment, routinely denounced outside of China as horrific, has been eminently valuable. Without it, there would be hundreds of millions more Chinese today in a country where water, fish, and farmland are already growing scarce. But it has also revealed potential pitfalls of population control, such as the cruel and unexpected gender tilting of a generation that will take at least another generation to restore to equilibrium.
During the coming decades, the number of Chinese in their twenties will drop by nearly half, while the number above retirement age will rise even faster. “Life expectancy is rising insistently,” says Jiang Zhenghua. “By the end of this century, in developed areas it could rise to ninety.” That prospect has delayed Jiang’s own retirement, as he was pressed into service to help his government devise plans for an elderly nation. Like Europe, China worries that there will be too few younger wage earners paying into pension funds to insure the social security of so many aged.
“We are considering communes of retired people, with younger ones caring for those that can no longer care for themselves.” With fewer young people, some schools and campuses might house elderly enclaves. A pilot project already under way in some rural areas is known as the “old people’s bank”—a labor bank in which younger elderly donate hours or money to help older elderly, understanding that when they get old, they’ll be helped in return.
More unpredicted challenges will emerge as this becomes China’s broad reality, Jiang knows. Yet he has no qualms about the decisions they made.
“Our conclusion was that 1.6 billion people is the maximum size China can support. But that is not the optimum size. The optimum would be 700 million to no more than a billion, considering the pressure on resources, the limits of technology, and how much burden we can reasonably bear.”
“What do you feel the optimum size is now, with our new understanding about climate?” Gretchen asks as they make ready to leave.
He settles back in his chair, considering. “We should not take risks that harm the whole human race.” He studies his empty wineglass against the candlelight. “In ancient China, there was a philosophical argument about the nature of people at birth. One school said that people are born evil—that is our nature. The other said that we are born good and kind. My view is that both are incorrect. I think that people’s nature is always to want a better life. So from that, we should not expect human beings to behave for benefit of the rest of nature—of the environment. You can only expect people to help the environment out of their own interest.”
“I can see that—”
He lifts a hand, indicating there is more.
“This is why policy makers must decide. Because people cannot see it until the danger is already upon them. In 1958, the highest level of China’s central government was already discussing the need to control population. But the discussion was useless. Mao Zedong said we don’t have the means, and other party leaders wanted more people, not less. So nothing happened. Only when the population reached 800 million did they finally see the problem. And they were shocked by its size.”
After a twisting two-hour drive, Gretchen Daily alights with relief from the gray Buick minivan to relish the Sichuan landscape for a few minutes before the last thirty kilometers to Baoxing County. Before her stretches a mosaic of fields rippling up and down hillsides, covered with rows of green and yellow beans, sweet potato, cabbage, and bamboo. Scattered among the patchwork are conical sheaves of dried cornstalks for mulching.
“This is one of first times I’ve stood on actual soil in China,” she tells Ouyang Zhiyun, who heads the Research Center for Eco-environmental Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Wang Yukuan of the Academy’s Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment. All around her, white, blue, black, and orange butterflies swirl on the warm breeze. Four of the five major families, Gretchen notes, are present: Pieridae, Lycaenid, Nymphalid, and a lot of Papilionidae swallowtails. Huge bees bumble among the sweet potato blossoms.