PRAYING FOR A BABY BOOM
China’s one-child policy was implemented through coerced abortions. Now, as the work force diminishes, couples are being encouraged to have a second baby
Introduced in the late 1970s, China’s one-child policy involved large scale monitoring of the population and forced abortions and sterilisations, and led, in some cases, to fractured families where the ‘extra’ child had to be given away. However, the policy did not apply to all Chinese couples. Minority communities like the Uyghurs, rural couples whose firstborn was a girl and, later, if both the wife and the husband were single children — could have a second baby. Last week, China scrapped the old policy and introduced the two-child rule. “China will allow all couples to have two children, abandoning its decades-long one-child policy,” a brief communiqué issued by the Communist Party of China (CPC) said at the end of a meeting on the upcoming 13th five-year plan. “The change of policy is intended to balance population development and address the challenge of an aging population,” it said. It is easier said than done; the scars of the onechild policy have hardly been hidden and are far from healed. The couples not exempted by the earlier policy could only have the second child at considerable risk of government censure and physical and emotional trauma. Apart from forced abortions and sterilisations, punishing fines were levied to cover the welfare and education costs of the “illegal” second child; those employed by the government lost their jobs.
Birth control authorities comprising hundreds of thousands of CPC members were directed to monitor women. “In local communities, work places, universities and the like, women of childbearing age were monitored by birth control authorities, down to menstrual cycles and contraceptive practices to prevent unauthorised pregnancies and to terminate pregnancies that should not have happened,” said Stein Ringen, professor of Sociology at Oxford University.
This abuse of women’s reproductive rights went on for decades. The ominous long-term impact gradually emerged but the information was quickly submerged in the din of development. Allegations of large-scale forced sterilisations were made as recently as 2010. “Amnesty International (an international rights group) has continued to receive reports of coerced abortions — which are technically illegal — and sterilisations in China. In 2010, 1,377 relatives of couples targeted for sterilisation in Puning City, southern China, were detained in an apparent attempt to pressurise the couples to ‘consent’ to sterilisation,” said William Nee of Amnesty. By the middle of the last decade, the negative impacts of the policy had become clear even to population researchers within the Communist fold. Opinions against the policy became sharper and so did the clamour for adjusting it. By late 2013, the CPC announced a new exemption: in cities like Beijing and Shanghai, if either the wife or the husband was a single child, they could have a second one. But, clearly, that didn’t still add up for China. Wang Guangzhou of the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences recently. wrote: “…figures indicate China will face a worsening labour shortage and increased aged population in future decades if the national family planning policy isn’t adjusted.”
Fuxian Yi, senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose “Big Country with an Empty Nest” — a book critical of the one-child policy — was banned in China, said the policy had zero positive impact on Chinese economy and society. “China should not have implemented the one-child policy in the 1970s. If the policy never came out, the fertility rate would still drop and now China’s population would be 1.5 billion, which means that the one-child policy only helped to get rid of 0.2 billion people instead of the official figure: more than 0.4 billion,” Fuxian said. Experts say the one-child policy has left China with a shortage of labour force in the working age between 15 and 64. “The two-child policy will reduce the aging population by about 2 percentage points. But the aging issue cannot be entirely solved by the relaxed policy because China already has a huge elderly population of people above 60-65. The absolute numbers cannot be reduced. To address the issue, economic and social help (for the elderly) might be more important,” said Yang Juhua, demography expert at the Centre for Population and Development Studies at Renmin University in Beijing.
This brings us to an inevitable comparison of the population graph between India and China. India’s 2011 Census said that India has one of the largest proportions of population in the younger age groups in the world. 35.3 per cent of the population of the country was in the age group of 0-14 years and 41 per cent were under 18. “With economic and cultural development, the total fertility rate (the UN defines this as the average number of live births a woman would have by 50 if she were subject, throughout her life, to the age-specific fertility rates observed in a given year) in India has naturally dropped from 4.7 in 1980 to 2.3 in 2013. India’s demographic structure is far healthier and younger than that of China. India has a rich a labour force, little pressure from aging population and without doubt will have greater economic potential than China,” Fuxian said. The focus is will now be on how many couples opt for a second child given the rising costs of living and education here. It will also be on what the government can do to provide social insurance for the elderly. After the partial relaxation of the onechild rule in late 2013, 1.45 million couples registered for a second child by the end of May 2015. The Communist party will be hoping for a minor baby boom in the short term and a major miracle in the long-run to continue on its path to all-round economic and social development.
The GDP per capita increased by about at least 7.7 per cent each year in the 1990s, and in last decade, by over 10 per cent. The one-child policy has largely improved social development as in education, health and life expectancy.” PROFESSOR YANG JUHUA In the next 15 years, the share of the population that is 60 or older will increase from 14 to 25 per cent. Selective abortions have resulted in an imbalance in the numbers of boys and girls born — about 117 boys for every 100 girls.” PROFESSOR STEIN RINGEN ‘INDIA HAS A RICH LABOUR FORCE, LITTLE PRESSURE FROM AN AGING POPULATION AND, WITHOUT DOUBT, WILL HAVE GREATER ECONOMIC POTENTIAL THAN CHINA’