Received: from rivendell.vsta.com (rivendell.vsta.com [204.57.96.15]) by csf.Colorado.EDU (8.8.5/8.8.4/CNS-4.1p-nh) with ESMTP id RAA00765 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:59:28 -0700 (MST) Received: from eglaze.vsta.com (eglazeADSL.vsta.com [204.57.96.81]) by rivendell.vsta.com (8.8.8/8.8.6) with SMTP id TAA03553; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:01:26 -0600 (CST) From: "Ed Glaze III" To: "KZPG Overpopulation News Network" , "PPN Listserv" Subject: 2 articles on Chinese population policy Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:04:45 -0600 Message-ID: <01be0dd8$6fe30ac0$516039cc@eglaze.vsta.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.71.1712.3 Notice of this article was given to me by Keith Hurt ________ Ed Glaze IS ONE ENOUGH? Will China's generation without siblings break away from the one-child rule? by Vivienne Walt SALON Nov. 11, 1998 LANGXIA TOWNSHIP, China -- Just as the Chinese New Year celebrations exploded across the country last February, Hong Yuanqing and Xiong Jianrong threw a party to mark their wedding. They registered their marriage with the local Communist Party committee in this district north of Shanghai, and eight months later, on a brisk autumn day in October, sat on a hard bench in Langxia's "newlywed class," discussing the finer details of sex and love. Slightly built, with big glasses and a blue V-neck sweater, Hong, a 27-year-old hairdresser, doesn't look like the avant-garde of a country in the midst of major social upheaval. His soft voice barely breaks through the echoing din in the crowded classroom, and he visibly blushes each time he looks at his 25-year-old wife, whose hair, drawn back in a ponytail, frames a pale face and drops over a sedate maroon suit. But this couple is as good a mark as any of China's vast changes. Inside the classroom, there are astonishingly few inhibitions: The discussion this day ranges from why some men ejaculate too soon to how they can bring their women to orgasm before they ejaculate. The newlywed classes are only for married or engaged couples, whose bosses release them from work one afternoon a month to participate. Still, the topics would have been unthinkable nearly a decade ago, when the public newlywed classes first began in many Chinese towns. The teacher, a young woman, stands in the front of the classroom wearing a plastic apron on which is printed, to scale, the female anatomy -- a walking instructional tool. Yet for all this racy material, the talk among the couples inevitably reverts to the one crucial question intruding in all their lives: the government's policy to persuade, cajole and often compel couples to have only one child. "Here we learn about contraception," says Hong. "We're using condoms right now. But soon we'll plan to have a child." Then comes the zinger: "And if we're rich enough, we'll have two or three. We would like three." When Americans consider whether to have another child, they weigh factors like paying for education or a bigger house. But having a second child can be far costlier than that in China. In Langxia the government levies huge fines on couples who transgress family-planning rules by giving birth to more than one child. In a system that varies wildly across the country, here couples are fined about one-quarter of their annual income for each of the first five years of this surplus human being's life. And so, like much else in China's new freewheeling capitalism, you can, for a price, purchase your privileges, including those in the most intimate areas of your life. Even with parts of Asia in economic crisis, Hong and Xiong each still earn 10,000 yuan, or $1,250, a year, a handsome sum for a small-town Chinese couple. At this rate, they will be able to buy their way into a bigger family. And that's a very unsettling thought for government officials, charged with administering perhaps the most controversial and tightly controlled population program in history. Last month, for the first time ever, China's State Family Planning Commission, one of the country's most pervasive bureaucracies, invited a group of foreign journalists to tour the country and see how the government has dramatically eased the country's population problem -- or at least see its version of the success story. In a trip the Rockefeller Foundation in New York facilitated and financed, we received rare access to neighborhood clinics, factory health posts and rural families, and met with top family-planning officials in Beijing and Shanghai. It's been nearly 20 years since China imposed a policy dictating reproduction quotas. The policies are a labyrinth of regulations, varying greatly from district to district, and often resting on the quirky discretion of local officials. Still, some tough rules apply. No one in the big cities is permitted to have more than one child without facing dire fines: In Shanghai, where about 16 million people are crammed within the city limits, couples who have a second child are fined three times their total annual earnings, a kind of "social-compensation tax," as one official interviewed put it. One-child parents also get rewarded when they retire, with 2,300 yuan (about $287); childless retirees receive double that. In many places, women still need permission from their work units or local party committees to conceive a second child, and if they go ahead without that permission, local officials "encourage" -- the word I heard several officials use -- them to have an abortion. If they fail to abort, the government can deny the new baby the free schooling and health care due its fellow citizens. In rural areas, couples are permitted to have a second child only if the first is a girl -- an unabashed disappointment for many -- and then only after waiting four years from their first child's birth. And in remote areas, and among China's 55 ethnic minorities, there are no rules at all -- partly because enforcing them would likely be a bureaucratic fiasco. Ever since the party introduced its policies in 1979, Western governments have howled about human-rights abuses. Between 1986 and 1993, U.S. funds earmarked for the United Nations Population Fund were frozen, and although President Clinton lifted the freeze as one of his first acts as president, Congress continues to bar any U.S. funding from being spent on population projects in China -- the world's most populous country, with 1.24 billion people. Western attacks certainly found rich fodder in the grueling stories of forced abortions and sterilization, and of overzealous local officials, given extra funds for keeping population figures down, seizing the houses and furniture of families after the birth of a second child. Baby girls abandoned in orphanages have become poster children for the international furor over China's one-child policy, as well as a gold mine for American adoptive parents. By the late '80s, there was an alarming disparity between the number of boys and girls counted in the official Chinese census, apparently because man couples simply aborted girl fetuses, or gave birth to them secretly. But that, say Chinese officials, was then. "We were never coercive," Li Hong-Gui, vice minister of family planning, told us in Beijing. "Some parts of China did this, but central government didn't support it," he said, before adding this frosty comment: "The West has its own opinions about our policies. Maybe some Western journalists are just not friendly to China." In fact, despite their anxieties about what we journalists might unearth, the Chinese officials had impressive successes to tout. With an economic boom in recent years, they have flooded many parts of the country with free contraceptive services, rather than, as in the early one-child years, routinely fitting every woman with an often hazardous intrauterine device and then invariably sterilizing her after she gave birth. On a rainy afternoon in Shanghai, I watched a worker at a printing house upstairs from the factory discuss with a nurse how to choose from an array of contraceptives. Across the city, one local committee seemed to encourage couples to linger in the little fluorescent-lit family-planning clinic by displaying a cabinet filled with some tempting extras for sale: condom rings, vibrators and porno videos to spice up the sex lives of their quiet, one-child families. Such user-friendly services would be envied by most American women. But almost every official interviewed boasted of something far less tangible: a dramatic change in the mind-set of Chinese youth, most of whom, they say, have lost any desire they might once have had to have more than one child. Few scenes could capture so well what's happened within one generation as observing a class at a vocational college in Luwan, a Shanghai district of about 800,000 people. When asked who had a brother or sister, the 16 teenagers glanced around confusedly and shook their heads, as if they had been asked which family had a Great Dane at home. Finally, after a pause, one girl in jeans and sneakers raised her hand and said: "I do, my sister and I were born before the policy." All heads swung around in curiosity. When asked whether they wanted more than one child, no one in the class said yes, or perhaps none had the nerve to say so. In a country desperately short of housing, most of them are squeezed into decrepit apartments with extended families, and finding more space is a daunting prospect under any circumstances. And besides, an entire generation has simply lost the experience of having siblings; so effective has the party's social engineering been that few of them contemplate the possibility. "It is good for our country to have just one child," said one boy in class, echoing many other such statements. During their parents' generation, Mao Zedong was still preaching to couples to have big families as a way of beefing up the Communist ranks during the Cold War. China's population soared during Mao's rule. By the mid-'70s, shortly before these students were born, China was facing a population powder keg. Between 1970 and 1975, Chinese women had an average of 4.9 children; today it's 1.8. Demographers now think the world's population will hit its peak in 2050, at around 9.4 billion people, about 500 million fewer than earlier predictions. And in some part, we have the Chines Communist Party to thank. But can the sentiments of those Shanghai students win out? The government has good reason to worry, since in 1979, it included one crucial loophole to its one-child policies: that if two only-children marry, they would be permitted to have a second child. As the country gears up for next year's 50-year celebration of Communist rule, China's first only-child generation is beginning to think about marriage, and that loophole is coming home to roost. The one-child party line is ubiquitous. But you needn't dig very deep to find the same lingering doubts about one-child families that Americans argue over so passionately: that only children are overindulged, that they are socially backward. "Perhaps she's lonely," one Beijing journalist said to me over lunch, about her daughter. "I worry a little. I try to see she has other children to play with." In the Shanghai neighborhood of Hongchu, only six out of the 999 households have two children, and, said one official, "They are all twins." "Are the parents treated badly? Are the children scorned?" I asked. "No," she said. "We all celebrate! We think they are very lucky." Even with its one-child policies, China still adds about 20 million people a year -- about three New York Cities, or more than one Australia. And there's good reason to wonder whether second children might one day become a status symbol among the nouveau riche -- living proof of a comfortable life, but one that could severely throw off the country's population growth. China's new generation is beginning to like its experiments with individualism, and as yet, there's no knowing whether childbearing might become another way of distinguishing oneself. Back in Langxia, Hong and Xiong, at least, have already broken with the official line. How many more there are like them will emerge during the next decade or so, as Chinese couples weigh their country's health against their children's. "We each have one brother," says Hong. "We want our children to have siblings, too." ----------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ NPG Population-News Listserve http://www.npg.org To unsubscribe: send e-mail to MAJORDOMO@NPG.ORG with the message text: unsubscribe population-news ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ Population Control Measures Upped for Anticipated Baby Boom (c) 1998 Agence France Presse) BEIJING, Nov. 04, 1998 -- (Agence France Presse) China has launched an extensive campaign to promote later marriages and childbirth well ahead of an anticipated fourth baby boom at the end of the next decade, the state-run Xinhua news agency said Wednesday. Another peak period of rapid birth increases was expected between 2009-2014 due to the population structure, Xinhua said citing Yang Kuifu, vice-minister of the State Family Planning Commission. "China will witness over 20 million births annually during the period even if fertility rate of Chinese women is strictly controlled at two children," said Yang. "Therefore, controlling population growth will be at the top of the agenda for [a] long period of time to come," he added. Yang said the goal of the campaign was to promote new concepts of marriage and fertility which were beneficial to the family planning policy and would be carried out in all provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions. "The new concepts include later marriage and later births, healthier births and nurturing, girls are just as good as boys and men also bear responsibility for family planning," he said. Chinese, particularly rural residents, still hold to traditional beliefs that more children mean more happiness and only male children will carry on the family line. Surveys have shown a slight imbalance in birth rates of male and female children in recent years indicating the continuing general tendency to favor male offspring. Yang said both intensive and extensive publicity would be required to erase old concepts from the minds of many people and help sustain a low and balanced birth rate. "The effort will represent a long-term struggle between old and new concepts," Zhang Weiqing, minister in charge of State Family Planning Commission, was quoted saying. "We will exert every possible effort to enlighten more people." Six villages in central China's Henan Province have been selected to promote the new concepts of marriage and fertility. A sample survey last year recorded a population of 1.236 billion. The population is expected to hit 1.3 billion in 2000 and continue to climb to 1.6 billion by the middle of the next century before beginning to decline.