One Child (12 page)

I believe, however, that the nature of this abuse increasingly shifted away from forced abortions and sterilizations toward stiffer enforcement of fines. This was partly because these so-called social compensation fees (
shehui fuyangfei
) grew to become a major source of revenue for many counties, especially poorer ones. Over the past decade China implemented land tax reforms, requiring provinces to hand over income to the national treasury for redistribution. In practice, this meant that lower-level county and village governments lost almost all independent sources of income. The one exception was birth fines, which did not have to be handed over to the central government.
“It’s a common saying, for money, ‘Big cities depend on land, small towns depend on birth planning,’” said journalist Matthew Pang, who exhaustively documented such abuses by family-planning officials in a small town in Hunan.

In 2013, lawyer Wu Youshui took advantage of a provision in Chinese law, similar to the US Freedom of Information Act, to request that each province account for how much it collected in social compensation fees. The total came to $2.7 billion, an amount that is almost certainly an underestimation, says Wu.

“The numbers are definitely fake. Few of them are real,” he said. Lending credence to his assertion is the provinces’ refusal to account for how the money was spent, information he has also repeatedly requested and no province has yet supplied.

The term
social compensation fee
is a relatively new one, adopted in 2000. Before that, fines were called “excess birth fines” or “unplanned birth fees,” but the new term suggests the money would be put to use to help cover the costs of extra children to society. But family-
planning officials I spoke to say the money from birth fines—no matter what they are called—was spent on office maintenance, personnel, sometimes entertainment expenses, or funneled to other departments. A detailed accounting is almost impossible.

I met Lawyer Wu in his offices in a suburb of Hangzhou, the city that in Marco Polo’s time held the biggest population in the world and is now home to a variety of tech companies, including e-commerce giant Alibaba. That sheen has not rubbed off on Wu’s practice. It is a small one, located on a floor along with many small real estate businesses, some covered with Out of Business signs.

Wu, a small, erect man with a whisper of a mustache, is someone whose personal history has intersected with China’s family planning in a variety of ways. As a teenager, he remembers walking home and seeing women rounded up for a mass sterilization run. Some resisted by stripping off the local official’s pants. “They said, ‘You sterilize me, I sterilize you,’” he recalled. “But they were all sterilized in the end, forcibly.”

The youngest of eight children—three of whom died during the Great Famine years—Wu has a brother whose fourth child was forcibly aborted, as well as a sister who worked in the family-planning sector. “She helped to bury all the dead babies.”

Wu, a Christian, said he first became interested in the issue of social compensation fees during a business trip to a neighboring province. He noticed that many people there appeared to have three or four children. Locals told him that authorities actually encouraged violations so they could collect more fines.

In 2013, spurred by a belief that the family-planning commission’s power was waning following Beijing’s decision to fold the department into the Ministry of Health, Wu submitted his requests for information to each province. After that, he began doing pro bono work for clients who wanted to challenge the one-child policy.

Wu admitted his requests were by nature something of a Trojan horse maneuver, designed to challenge the issue of social compensation itself and draw focus to a wide variety of illegal practices within the family-planning policy. Wu said his actions were intended to “open up the space for discussion about family-planning policy.” “I raised questions with this application. It is a start.”

For example, it was technically illegal for the population police to use force or promote late-term abortions. Nor was it legal for authorities to deny household registration,
hukou
, to children born out of plan. But without such punishments it would have been impossible to enforce the one-child policy, said officials.

In the past three years, legal challenges to the one-child policy mounted, something that was previously almost unheard-of. About a third of these lawsuits protested the social compensation fee amounts incurred, while the rest involved out-of-plan children who’d been denied
hukou
s, as well as people who’d lost their jobs over one-child policy violations.

Most cases were dismissed and never made it to court. Claimants, however, saw glimmers of hope in a 2013 ruling. Two provinces, Shandong and Jiangxi, ruled that
hukou
s must be issued regardless of whether social compensation fees had been paid or not. (This was actually a reiteration of an existing nationwide regulation that was obviously not always followed.) It is a contentious issue for crowded cities like Beijing and Shanghai, anxious to limit the number of residents drawing on their social services and resources.
(A Beijing
hukou
, for example, is much coveted and can be worth over $100,000 on the black market.) With an estimated 13 million people without
hukou
s in China—most related to violations of the one-child policy—resolving this will be a major headache for authorities in years to come.

Wu said he was not worried about official repercussions. I reminded him of the fate of activist Chen Guangcheng. In 2005, Chen filed a class-action lawsuit against the city’s family-planning staff chal
lenging coercive measures endured by pregnant women in his home province. Chen, who is blind, served jail time and was under house arrest for years before making a dramatic escape to the US embassy in 2012. He now lives in America, but his family members in China are still persecuted, he says.

Wu thought he can avoid Chen’s fate by carefully picking “safe” topics, such as social compensation, which in general was hugely unpopular and, he believed, less politically volatile than abortions. He called the one-child policy “anti-human, illegal, and unreasonable,” but added, referring to the then-powerful family-planning apparatus, “I need to come up with ideas to talk about the issue in a nonsensitive way, but still make a fuss.”

In July 2015, Beijing began a crackdown on human rights lawyers, detaining over two hundred lawyers and associates over charges that they have exploited contentious issues and destabilized society.
At the time of writing this book, Wu is still at liberty but says he faces strong pressure to tone down his legal challenges. He now says, “All who pursue rule of law” are at risk. “Because from the present situation, you can never tell where is the government’s bottom line. Moreover, the line itself is ever-changing.”

V

The most memorable discussion I had on the workings of the population police came during a chance discussion with a man I’ll call Uncle Li.

Uncle Li was a relative of a friend, a businessman who’d volunteered to give us a ride to a neighboring town. He’d come to pick us up in his black Audi, a man in his late forties dressed in the uniform of moderately prosperous urban Chinese men—polo shirt, collar modishly flipped up, big clunky watch with many complicated dials, leather man-bag. I was just admiring how well kept his car was, with
tiny pouches holding sunshades, tissue boxes, and mineral water, and little bow-shaped pillow headrests, when we started talking.

It turned out that in 1994, Uncle Li’s first job out of college was as a county-level administrator. He became quite chatty talking about it. Meeting population targets was part of his job, and the most important one because of
yipiaofoujue
, he said.

“If they couldn’t pay, then you would confiscate some things of value in the home, but they were never such expensive things because villagers were poor—just things like grain, or homespun cloth,” he remembered. “Sometimes, we would climb up the roofs and make a hole, to show we meant business, or knock down some windows,” he recounted. In his province, the one-child policy was taken very seriously, so fines were heavily punitive.

We stopped for lunch, and he continued talking, quite cheerfully, about property damage, confiscations, and pay scales. I didn’t want to interrupt the flow, but at the back of my mind I was dying to ask the big question: How could you bear to be so beastly every day?

Finally, I ventured, “Doing this job must be hard, since people don’t want to do as you say.”

He fell silent. Then he said, “There’s this one incident I’ll never forget.

“I was twenty-four, and we had heard of a woman pregnant with an out-of-plan baby who had run away to a neighboring village. So we made preparations to catch her at night. I got together a team of six or seven people. We surrounded the house. We were very quiet, but I don’t know, somehow she must have heard something—maybe voices—because she ran.”

“How many months was she?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but she looked pretty big. She ran and ran and ran until she came to a pond. Then she ran in, until the water was at her neck”—his hand sliced his Adam’s apple. “She stood there and began to cry.”

I was transfixed by the picture he’d painted. The woman with her bellyful of child, keening in the dark, officials circling the water hole like predators.

“What happened?”

He looked away. “Please, wait a moment,” he said. The cheery insouciance was gone.

“She said a lot of things. She said she needed to have this baby. She would never have any peace, and her husband and her mother-in-law would never treat her well, until she had a son.”

He lit a cigarette, clearing his throat.

“Finally, two women officials waded in and took her away.”

We were silent.

“Why did this one incident stay with you, when you must have had so many of these encounters?” I asked.

“Maybe it was because I was young,” he said, slowly. “I felt we were doing wrong, but I had no choice. Later, I was promoted and left the area.”

That night, I was so moved by the story that I related it to a former student of mine whom I was meeting for drinks. She had grown up in the area and was now a PhD student in America. I thought the anecdote was powerful, but I figured she must have heard similar stories all her life.

She listened, her eyes widening.

“But you must have heard these stories before. What about your schoolmates? Surely some must have come from the countryside and told these stories?” I asked in surprise.

She knew, of course, the contours of the one-child policy. But the brutal vividness of this tale was something else. “You must understand,” she said. “I went to Renmin University. To get there I had to go to a top high school, and a top middle school, and those kinds of places are not easy for children from the countryside to get into. Most of my friends and classmates were like me, middle-class, children from the city.”

I was reminded yet again that despite the Internet and an increasingly globalized world, many Chinese people’s perceptions of recent historical events can be sketchy.

While writing her book on the 1989 student protests at Tiananmen, National Public Radio correspondent Louisa Lim visited four top Chinese universities and showed students a picture of “Tank Man,” the iconic picture of a single person stopping an oncoming line of tanks. To the Western world, it is one of the most recognizable images of the event.
Lim found that only fifteen out of a hundred students recognized the photo.

It struck me as ironic that people of my former student’s generation would know so little about a policy that birthed them and will continue to shape their reality. Yet to my student, such a story was a tale from another country.

People born in the 1980s are now, at most, 28 years old, and they exercise no real power to speak of, so the damage caused by abuses of power cannot be their fault. If you haven’t wiped your ass properly, don’t try to use the younger generation’s baby hair as toilet paper.

—
Han Han
, This Generation

If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

—
P. D. James
, The Children of Men

I

One of the most common sights in any Chinese public space is a staggering infant surrounded by a gaggle of hovering adults. This is, of course, the Little Emperor, a Chinese phenomenon more precious than pandas, though reproductively not as rare.

I was curious: What happens when this scenario reverses itself?
What happens when the Little Emperor grows up and has to return this attention sixfold, no longer the pyramid’s apex but the base?

Over 90 percent of China’s urban households were subject to the one-child policy at the time it was revised, which makes for over 100 million only children who will eventually have to shoulder the burden of aging parents, grandparents, and all the accompanying financial and emotional baggage—dementia, cancer, brittle bones, broken hips—with limited help from China’s still-nascent social safety net.

In 2007, I began searching for a way to report this. It wasn’t easy because the oldest children of the one-child policy were just thirty, with parents in their fifties, most still enjoying good health. I was trying to write about something that hadn’t happened yet.

I started looking around for someone in the unusual position of having an ailing parent while still in his or her twenties. That’s how I met Liu Ting, who became a minor national celebrity for a strange reason: he took his mother to college.

Now, when I say “took his mother to college,” I don’t mean that he physically brought her along to classes. Liu Ting’s mother had kidney disease and required careful nursing. His father, a gambler, had decamped, worn out by years of marital acrimony. Liu Ting was off to college in a different town, and there was no one to care for his mother, Yong Min. In an engaging bit of role reversal that happened to catch a nation’s fancy, he brought his mother to live with him on campus.