The Chinese Communist Party’s one-child policy, implemented since the 1980s, has brought immense pain and fear to countless “extra-birth” families, casting shadows over their children. Now, China is facing a serious population crisis, prompting a major shift in policy towards encouraging childbirth, but facing resistance from many women.
Since the 1980s, the CCP has enforced the one-child policy through the Family Planning Association, using forced abortions and fines to implement it. However, more than 30 years later, China is facing a population crisis. In 2016, the CCP began the “two-child policy,” which was further revised to the “three-child policy” in 2021. The Family Planning Association has transformed into a “fertility promotion association,” launching campaigns to promote a culture of childbearing, but without much success. Official figures released by the CCP in 2023 showed a fertility rate of only 1.0, far below the 2.1 replacement rate required for population stability. The number of births in China has been declining for seven consecutive years.
Young people have various reasons for not wanting to have children, with some of them resisting childbirth due to the shadows left by the one-child policy.
According to a report by CNN, when Fang, a 9-year-old girl, was in the third grade, her teacher asked her to say her parents’ names. She hesitated to answer this simple question because this young girl had found herself in a dilemma.
Since preschool, Fang had been officially registered as the daughter of an aunt and uncle, a way her biological parents devised to avoid the severe penalties for giving birth to a second child under the one-child policy.
To avoid devastating fines, unemployment, forced abortions, and sterilization, Fang’s parents had kept her situation secret from the outside world.
Finally, at the age of 10, Fang was allowed to return home but still registered as her aunt and uncle’s daughter. She was instructed to maintain consistency with the officially registered information when asked about her parents.
Today, although the one-child rule no longer exists, the past trauma lingers on. For the new generation of women like Fang, plagued by the struggles their parents faced under the one-child policy and the sacrifices made during their childhood, they are reluctant to have children, making it harder for the CCP to promote childbearing.
Now 30 years old and married, Fang has no desire to have children at all.
“All the fears, displacement, and insecurity I felt in my childhood, more or less affect my life now,” Fang said.
The one-child policy also brought pain to Yao, a 25-year-old woman, making her childhood full of loneliness.
As China’s population drastically shrinks and decreases, the CCP has initiated nationwide propaganda campaigns to cultivate a “fertility culture.” Posters and slogans that once warned of the dangers of multiple births have now been replaced by those encouraging having more children.
The policy shift from restricting childbirth to promoting it has left Yao “speechless”.
“The family planning policy is so ‘meticulous’!” Yao mocked. “They used to slap us for having two children, and now they want us to have three?”
Fang expressed her anger at the CCP’s efforts to stimulate childbirth, stating that the decision to have children should not be determined by any policy.
In May of this year, the CCP Health Commission issued more than a dozen “pro-fertility themed posters” to local governments, calling for “widespread dissemination” from social media to community parks. This move sparked ridicule among Chinese netizens, mentioning past slogans of the one-child policy such as “Have fewer children, live happily” and “To become wealthy, have fewer children and plant more trees”.
To promote childbirth, debt-ridden local governments have implemented measures such as cash incentives and extended maternity leave. Additionally, to encourage single individuals to enter into marriage, some local officials have organized matchmaking events. However, these measures seem to have produced little noticeable effect.
According to a report by Yuchang Population Research, in China, the cost of raising a child to the age of 18 is 6.3 times the per capita GDP. Discussions on whether to have children mainly revolve around economic concerns, but some people on social media platforms have shared receipts of fines for having extra children decades ago, expressing the shadows left by the one-child policy.
Quoting Lu Pin, a PhD candidate in Women and Politics at Rutgers University in the United States, CNN stated: “Childbearing is not just an economic issue.” “As a form of state violence, forced family planning has left deep scars on women…People have not yet emerged from this trauma.”
Forced abortions and sterilizations can be said to be the most outrageous aspects of China’s one-child “social engineering,” leaving indelible marks on the minds and bodies of hundreds of millions of Chinese women.
Lu Pin stated that the CCP government has not engaged in any “public self-reflection, nor has it even acknowledged the trauma caused by the state,” asking whether they expect Chinese women to forget everything and accept their push for childbirth. The prospect seems bleak, she said.