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China's Baby BustBy: Hannah Beech Carol Yang is convinced she has it all. Her mother, steeped in a different era's values, isn't so sure. True, Yang has a cushy job at an international public relations firm, travels to exotic locales like Nepal and, most important in these divorce-prone times, is married to a loving husband. But Yang doesn't have children, and her mother worries, as mothers will. "She thinks that I'm not a complete woman if I don't have kids," says Yang, a 33-year-old general manager at Hill & Knowlton's Shanghai branch. "But I tell her that times have changed and that children are no longer the measure of a successful woman." Such an attitude
should hearten China's draconian womb police, who have spent two decades
trying to control the nation's burgeoning population through any means
possible. They've succeeded remarkably well. The average Chinese woman has
two kids today, compared with six children 30 years ago. "For all the
bad press, China has achieved the impossible," says Sven Burmester,
the United Nations Population Fund representative in Beijing. "The
country has solved its population problem." But this solution
has spawned a host of new problems. China's population will start
declining from 2042, according to U.N. statistics. In the nation's
fast-paced cities, the one-child policy has morphed into a no-child
philosophy. While country folk still pine for a large family to plow the
fields, city dwellers—the very people that China hopes will power its
economic engine—are eschewing the delivery room altogether. In Beijing
and Shanghai the population would be shrinking were it not for an influx
of migrants from the countryside. Such alarming
news has shaken China's usually torpid parliament into action. This
summer, the rubber-stamp body proposed amending its one-child policy so
that some urban couples can have a second child. It also suggested letting
each province decide how many children a family could have. "A
one-size-fits-all family-planning policy doesn't work," says Zhao
Baige, a director general at the State Family Planning Commission.
"China is a large place with diverse citizens and diverse
needs." The need for
family-planning reform is most apparent in China's cities, which are
springing into the modern age with few of the usual safety nets attached.
The first generation of "little Emperors," the coddled offspring
of the one-child policy, are reaching adulthood, and many are showing
distressingly little sense of family obligation. "They're rebelling
against all concept of family," says sociologist Li Yinhe. A record
high 29% of urban twenty somethings profess little interest in marriage or
children, according to a market research poll. In a once unthinkable
breach of Confucian tradition, many are even refusing to care for their
elders. China's graying population is estimated to peak in 2040 and the
nation has no mechanism to finance its welfare. Even those young
men who are interested in starting a family are finding themselves
stymied. Two decades of infanticide and sex-based abortions carried out by
a populace that favors males over females has drastically skewed the
nation's gender balance. There are now 117 boys born for every 100 girls,
compared with a ratio of 105 to 100 globally. "Every girl I meet has
already had several marriage offers," says Gong Min, a 24-year-old
computer salesman from Beijing. In some rural areas, the situation has
gotten so bad that a trade in abducted brides is burgeoning. Last year,
110,000 women were freed during a crackdown on human trafficking, but
millions more will never be found. "When we started our
family-planning policy 20 years ago, we had no idea of the social problems
that would follow," concedes Zhao of the State Family Planning
Commission. "Now we must address the consequences." But the proposed
family-planning amendment may be little more than a token gesture. In
truth, the one-child policy has already been slowly dismantled, especially
in rural China. Certainly, some women are still forced to abort late-term
fetuses in remote rice paddies, so that family-planning officials can hew
to population quotas. But, in general, most peasants are already allowed
to have two children—if the first is either handicapped or a girl.
Ethnic minorities like Tibetans have never had any limits on family size.
And in the teeming cities, only children are themselves allowed to produce
two progeny, if they marry another only child. Indeed, the bill under
debate in China's National People's Congress only legalizes—and perhaps
enhances—what has been de facto practice in recent years. Still, by
formalizing its family-planning policies on a national level, China hopes
to combat one major problem: corruption. In villages, local officials
routinely slap arbitrary fines on citizens with extra children, and share
profits with doctors who push patients to get sterilized. By bringing
decision-making closer to the grass-roots level, Beijing hopes to
eliminate the opportunity for graft. But none of this addresses the larger
problems caused by two decades of social manipulation. Ironically for a
developing country, China is now faced with a decidedly First-World
problem: a declining fertility rate combined with a rapidly graying
population. "Instead of tinkering with family-planning policy, China
needs to tackle its social welfare system," says a Peking University
professor. "We need to figure out who is going to take care of our
parents and grandparents." In addition, merely loosening rules on urbanites isn't going to convince people like Carol Yang to suddenly go forth and procreate. "It used to be that if you didn't have kids people assumed it was because you couldn't," says Yang. "But now people realize it's your own personal lifestyle choice." That's a choice too many Chinese may now be making. |
