Artifacts | Done with one?

Vanessa Moore

Probably the most hyped-up single policy change to come out of China for years, the relaxation of Beijing’s one child policy has been chronicled to death in the media over the last few weeks. So why am I still talking about it if everything’s already been done and dusted?  Well actually it hasn’t.
First of all, a little bit of clarification is in order.  All the blaring “End of China’s one child policy” headlines have been somewhat misleading. They haven’t actually axed it, just “relaxed” it. The end of the one child policy does not equal reproductive freedom. The million or so bureaucrats who work for the Party’s Family Planning Commission would be out of a job if the policy disappeared altogether. In fact their policing work will continue, intrusively limiting the birth rate of couples who now pass the magic number of two.
Although the horror of forced abortions and calendars chronicling the monthly reproductive cycles of peasant villagers on office walls may well ease off, through a mixture of fines and withholding of household residency, the Party’s agents still manage to interfere in what is otherwise seen as a basic human right. Amnesty International recently issued a statement warning that the change in policy was “not enough,” adding that, “the state has no business regulating how many children people have”.
But before I get to the nitty gritty of why the change probably won’t matter that much in the lives of most city-dwellers compared to other policies, according to The Economist the official success figure being touted is its having prevented over 400 million births. As a result of a sustained decades-long propaganda campaign, most Chinese think their country has too many people. If anything, now there are too few.
A quarter of the mainland’s population will be over 65 by 2050, meaning an increased welfare burden as well as a drop in the number of working age adults. Result? China will suffer economically as its labor force shrinks up. Likewise, a preference for boys and selective abortions have skewed the gender balance ratio. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has projected that more than 24 million men will not be able to find spouses by 2020 because of the disparity.
So even if the one child policy has had a less dramatic effect than the Party likes to claim, it could have a titanic impact in the next century, putting it in the same category as the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward in terms of colossal social engineering failures.
Besides the threat of forced abortions or monetary fines, probably the other main weapon in enforcing birth control has been denying “hukou”, or household registration, to babies whose parents violate the one-child rule. (A hukou is required to access subsidized government services like healthcare and education. It’s so important in China that without a hukou you can’t even buy a train ticket).
Besides one-child policy violators, migrants don’t get the same access to schools and hospitals as resident city dwellers as the hukou system ties facilities to hometowns. Currently, migrant children can enroll in approved primary and middle schools, but most have to then return to their hometowns to attend high school. They can only take the Gaokao, the national university entrance exam, in their home provinces. The test results determine which university students can go to, in turn influencing the kind of job they can get, and their entire future in fact. That’s a lot of pressure.
For most parents a combination of propaganda and the rising cost of living has meant that even if they did feel inclined to expand their families, in all likelihood they won’t. Those who have been able to afford it have already paid the fines. But for migrants and smaller town residents who might consider a second child, going some way to reforming the strict Gaokao and hukou requirements might just give their offspring a better chance at one day achieving the all-elusive China Dream.