Bereaved only child parents protest in Beijing

A child is wrapped up against the cold at a park in Beijing

Bereaved parents of only children staged protests in Beijing this week seeking greater compensation, in a sign of one of the far-reaching consequences of China’s recently scrapped one-child policy, the Financial Times reported yesterday.
According to FT reporter Lucy Hornby in Beijing, about 700 parents gathered by the National Health and Family Planning Commission on Tuesday, with a smaller group remaining yesterday, after officials escorted many of them back to their hometowns.
The protesters want monetary support for “orphaned” parents to be built into new regulations allowing all couples to have two children. China announced its move to a two-child policy in late October but has not yet enacted the change.
The UK-based newspaper notes that the issue of parents who have been left with no child to support them is an Achilles heel for Beijing, which beginning in the early 1980s enforced the one-child policy with coerced abortions, sterilization of women, destruction of houses, loss of jobs and the removal of infants from their families. Couples who complied were promised bonuses and life-long security under Communism’s cradle-to-grave “iron rice bowl”.
“Most of us end up being orphaned parents because we believed what the party and the government had told us. They said they would look after us parents if we followed the one-child policy,” Xie Jinlan, a 49-year-old from Hunan province whose 14-year-old son died in 2010, told the FT.
“My husband is a party member and if we didn’t follow the one-child policy he would have lost his job and the family would have lost our means of support. I had two abortions after the birth of our first child.”
Many of the protesters hail from the ranks of state-owned enterprises and even the civil service, the two groups for whom the policy lasted the longest and from whom the ruling Communist party derives much of its support.
China eased the policy for rural dwellers and minority ethnic groups after a few years of fierce resistance in the countryside, allowing a second child if the first was a girl. Increased wealth, urban migration and employment in the private sector allowed other couples simply to pay fines for a second child.
Despite recent attempts to build a national social safety net, the bankruptcy of many state-owned enterprises beginning in the 1990s and the lack of formal pension in the countryside mean that most elderly Chinese rely on their families for support.