After 36 years of a policy that fueled human trafficking and infanticide, destroyed homes and robbed people of their agency and human rights, the Chinese Communist Party has changed its mind. Six years after abandoning its one-child policy, China’s government has now decided it’s lawful for couples to have three children.
From 1979 to 2015, propaganda signs painted on what seemed like every available surface in that country carried Orwellian messages like: “Have Fewer, Better Children to Create Prosperity for the Next Generation” or “If sterilization or abortion demands are rejected, houses will be toppled, cows will be confiscated.”
Under the two-child policy the propaganda shifted to messages like this sign: “One is too few, two is just right; the young will have siblings, the old will be cared for.”
Those messages and their corrosive effects are detailed poignantly in filmmaker Nanfu Wang’s 2019 documentary “One Child Nation.”
But now China finds itself in a different position than those prophesied by the posters, with an aging, weakening labor force, not to mention a lopsided one. Since male heirs are highly valued, infant girls were more often discarded under the old policy, creating a generation unbalanced between the sexes. More than 30 million Chinese men are left without partners. Party leaders are scrambling to correct their own monstrous mistake.
To state the obvious: Having children should be a decision for parents, not governments.
But there are other dynamics at play here. Relaxing the policy has not been successful in increasing the birth rate, as population manipulators expected. In fact, since the two-child policy was instituted in 2015, birth rates have fallen markedly, according to China Statistical Yearbook. Chinese women are reluctant to have more kids, even now that it’s legal.
Sociologists have long connected birth rates to optimism. The American baby boom generation didn’t happen only because soldiers came home from World War II. They came home to a grateful nation, a more secure world, and a sense that the worst was behind them. The birth rate peaked a decade later when the economy was strong and unemployment was low.
Or, in more negative terms, “the birth rate is a barometer of despair.” That’s what Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California told NPR in May.
It’s not hard to see why China’s barometer of despair might be high. As Wang’s film illustrates, the party’s policies have utterly robbed Chinese citizens of agency, and replaced it with a prevailing feeling that one has no choice in matters as intimate and morally fraught as family planning. With recent crackdowns on businesses, the press and religious minorities, it’s no wonder Chinese women are wary.
Perhaps those women understand what China’s aged party leaders can’t seem to comprehend: that no amount of propaganda can paint over 36 years of oppression. And that the more their government seeks to make parents’ choices for them, the more they’ll find the innate human desire for freedom and autonomy getting in their way.
