One Child the Story of Chinas Most Radical Experiment Review
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/books/review/1-kid-by-mei-fong.html
'One Child,' past Mei Fong
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Readers would be forgiven for thinking that the announcement, on Oct. 29, 2015, that China was irresolute its ane-child policy would accept turned this book from an account of the daily lives of Chinese people into a work of history. Non and so. The event itself came rather tardily for Mei Fong'southward "Ane Kid." But she makes disconcertingly clear that the repercussions of population control will continue to reverberate throughout China. The policy itself remains a monument to official callousness, and Fong'southward volume pays moving testimony to the suffering and forbearance of its victims.
It is often assumed that the limitation to a single child was an human activity of Maoist despotism. In fact, equally Fong shows, it was associated with the mail service-Mao opening. Deng Xiaoping, China's leader after 1978, had set a target of quadrupling the country'due south per capita national income by 2000. Cathay's planners decided that they could achieve this goal simply if, in improver to increasing the size of the pie, at that place were fewer people to share it.
So they determined, in their words, to "adjust women's average fertility rate in accelerate." The human who ran the program that treated women as if they were production functions was a rocket scientist, Song Jian, who had worked on ballistic missiles. Song went on to help manage the giant Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. His was a world in which unintended consequences were not of import.
Population control was not unusual in the 1980s. India too had a fertility-control program. The United Nations gave its first-e'er population award to the Chinese minister for population planning in 1983 (along with Indira Gandhi). But China's application of population control was specially ruthless.
In 2012, Feng Jianmei, a mill worker meaning with her second child, was taken to a clinic, forced to sign a certificate consenting to an abortion and injected with an abortifacient. She was in her seventh month. Pictures of her lying next to her perfectly formed 7-month dead fetus went viral. But hers was hardly an unusual case. In the 1990s, population targets became a major criterion for judging the performance of officials. It is no surprise that they carried out the one-child policy ruthlessly. Reading this business relationship, one wonders why rape as a weapon of war is (rightly) seen as a war crime, whereas the forcible violation of women's bodies in pursuit of government policy wins United Nations awards.
As Fong makes clear, the one-child policy was non simply a crime. It was a corrigendum. Fertility would accept fallen anyway, as happened in other Asian countries, albeit not quite so far and fast. Just the policy farther distorted sex ratios, resulting in more boys than girls. And it inverse expectations: Most people now want only i child. That is why the policy may bear witness to exist hard to reverse.
The greatest strength of Fong'due south book is her reporting (she was a contributor for The Wall Street Periodical in Communist china). Fong meets Liang Zhongtang, who fruitlessly attempted to dissuade Cathay's leaders from adopting the policy in the 1980s. She interviews people at adoption agencies that are suspected of seizing second children and selling them to Westerners. She sees Tough Sus scrofa, a boar that survived for 36 days without food or water under the rubble of a vast earthquake in Sichuan Province. The earthquake highlights how unexpected are the tragedies of Cathay's population policy: Thousands of simply children were killed when shoddily built schools collapsed, leaving their stricken parents childless — a disaster in a country where the importance of family has survived even the one-child restrictions. Dissimilar the earthquake, that policy was — and remains — an unnatural disaster.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/books/review/one-child-by-mei-fong.html
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