Growing up in China

The Chinese Communist Party does not often take the time or summon the patience and explain to suspicious ‘laowai’ (foreigners) that the one child policy is not a policy about parents being permitted no more than one child. What the world (in particular the world as caricatured by western media) has come to call China’s ‘one child policy’ is in fact a family planning measure that was connected to an understanding of socio-environmental circumstances.

A Party worker will more likely call it China’s one-and-a-half child policy, as the restriction of one child per couple is directed to the Han nationality (the majority in China, but the Party recognises 55 other ethnic groups) and moreover to those who carry a permanent urban residence certificate, a system called ‘hukou’. This urban ‘hukou’ is a certificate that opens the door to welfare which changes entirely the lives of its possessor — retirement pensions, nearly free medical insurance, jobless allowance, and children’s schooling rights in the better-administered cities. There is a pecking order within ‘hukous’ too — those issued by big and affluent cities such as Beijing, Shanghai or Shenzhen are considered the best as they can afford to give their permanent residents fatter welfare packages.

Ethnicity and the urban ‘hukou’ are two factors that determine whether a couple can abide by the rules and still have more than one child. The third factor is whether the would-be parents are themselves single children, and if they are, then they are fortunate. From all the available evidence — which is scattered and unreliable — about three in every 10 couples have one child and about five have “one-and-a-half” (which means two). What about the remaining two couples in ten? We can only guess.

The conditions, the uncertainty and the writ of the Party within the family have led to criticism — sometimes furious, at times resigned — of China’s family planning policy. The Party is used to it, for the policy has been firmly in place for two generations. In 2013 it all changed, quite unexpectedly in the eyes of the world outside, but those within had been expecting such change for a few years until it actually happened. The reason, once again, was the calculation by the planners in the Party that the fertility rate of women in China was falling. And so the Chinese Communist Party eased the one child policy conditionally in 2013.

According to China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission (the state agency which maintains the mountainous stack of files and records all of which together describe the make-up of the most populated country in the world), the new policy is meant to help the Party direct the size and age groups, the fertility and net rate of replacement (which means the rate at which new babies replace aged comrades who pass on) until the national ideal for 2020 which is 1.4 billion people.

Such careful shepherding of huge populations by the Party scarcely impresses the average young couple raising their precious only child. Instead of admiring the Party’s 30-odd years of family planning handiwork, they prefer (if they can afford it) to shower their child with gifts and satisfy the child’s every single demand, burdening society with more ‘bear children’ (put plainly, brats).

Since 2013 and the relaxation of the policy, several western macro-economists have argued that Chinese economic growth would still decline in the 2020s because the next generation’s working-age population is already so markedly small. There are some calculations that from 1979 (when the policy was implemented) the one child policy has reduced China’s population by an estimated 400 million people — compared to what the population might have been without the policy.

Among the side-effects produced they say is a gender imbalance, numerically favouring men over women, and a skewed age demographic where China must now plan for more older, elderly and aged people that it may otherwise have had. The Party’s calculations were and continue however to be based on what China can consume and how much the huge population — and its many fast-growing cities — can rely on a natural resource base.

Despite the scenarios of the doomsayers, China faces choices similar to what Europe and Japan are facing, and the Party is confident it has made the right choices. The frightful costs of massive over-urbanisation are now well recognised in China); there is growing environmental consciousness in Chinese society which indicates a slow but perceptible shift towards a society whose many different kinds of populations are dynamic but exert lighter demands upon natural resources in the Middle Kingdom and the world outside.

Rahul Goswami is an expert on intangible cultural heritage with UNESCO and studies agricultural transformation in South Asia