Lotus. “I told her you should set an example for other women, people are watching us.”
While talking, I learned to my surprise that Moon Lotus herself had four daughters and a son. To be sure, her son, her youngest, was born in 1978, before the one-child policy. But Moon Lotus’s job all these years has been to encourage smaller families and discourage son preference. How did she explain the discrepancy between what she preached and what she practiced?
At first, she ignored my question. “My circumstances were special,” she finally said, stubbing out her fifth cigarette. “My adoptive parents weren’t in good health. Me neither. They don’t have any children, so I wanted to have a boy so he can take care of me and my parents. I tried to wear an IUD but that made me bleed badly.”
After the birth of her son, Moon Lotus finally did what she spent years convincing others to do. She had her tubes tied.
II
The closer I looked at the workings of the population police, the messier they seemed.
When the one-child policy was launched in the 1980s, it was clear that enforcement of such a hugely unpopular policy would be difficult. In the beginning, execution of the one-child policy ranged from lax to excessive across China.In some parts of the country, pregnant women without birth permits were marched off in handcuffs to undergo forced abortions. In others, officials ignored or paid mere lip service to these strictures from the central government.
It didn’t help that other national regulations undercut the one-child policy’s intentions. A new marriage law, also launched in 1980, lowered the legal age of marriage to twenty for women and twenty-two for men. This was done to combat illegal marriage and sex crimes, but of course it also encouraged more unions and, by extension, babies. The move toward agricultural decollectivization also undermined official efforts to enforce the one-child policy. Undercollectivism, pay, rations, and other benefits were meted out by village leaders, and bad behavior (having an out-of-plan child, for instance) could be punished directly; new reforms loosened official control over peasants’ livelihoods.
By 1984, the nationwide one-size-fits-all measure proved so unpopular that the central government was forced to decentralize a large portion of the one-child policy. It circulated new provisions enshrined in what population scholars call Document 7. Document 7 gave each province more power to adapt the one-child policy to local circumstances.
This was the beginning of a raft of exclusions that made it hard for people within China—never mind outside China—to understand the policy in anything but the broadest strokes, because conditions really were different from place to place. For example, residents in many rural areas were allowed to have a second child, provided their first was not a son—a tacit acknowledgment of the son hunger that was rampant in the countryside. Places like Tibet and Yunnan, with large ethnic minorities, had vastly more liberal policies than more populous provinces like Sichuan and Henan.
Document 7 was a nod toward making enforcement easier for local authorities. It was not intended to make things easier for the general populace. Authorities called this tactic “opening a small hole to close a big gap,” making small concessions to ensure overall compliance.
Document 7 did not remedy the lack of transparency and accountability within the system. Local officials had wide discretion in determining how much to fine violators. Sums could range from a multiple of two to ten times annual household income. People had no way of figuring out ahead of time what they were liable for, and two sets of violators, under similar circumstances, might pay vastly different penalties. In 2010, a family-planning official apparently imposed a fine of 5 million RMB, or over $800,000, on a violator.When that person protested, the official allegedly increased the
While talking, I learned to my surprise that Moon Lotus herself had four daughters and a son. To be sure, her son, her youngest, was born in 1978, before the one-child policy. But Moon Lotus’s job all these years has been to encourage smaller families and discourage son preference. How did she explain the discrepancy between what she preached and what she practiced?
At first, she ignored my question. “My circumstances were special,” she finally said, stubbing out her fifth cigarette. “My adoptive parents weren’t in good health. Me neither. They don’t have any children, so I wanted to have a boy so he can take care of me and my parents. I tried to wear an IUD but that made me bleed badly.”
After the birth of her son, Moon Lotus finally did what she spent years convincing others to do. She had her tubes tied.
II
The closer I looked at the workings of the population police, the messier they seemed.
When the one-child policy was launched in the 1980s, it was clear that enforcement of such a hugely unpopular policy would be difficult. In the beginning, execution of the one-child policy ranged from lax to excessive across China.In some parts of the country, pregnant women without birth permits were marched off in handcuffs to undergo forced abortions. In others, officials ignored or paid mere lip service to these strictures from the central government.
It didn’t help that other national regulations undercut the one-child policy’s intentions. A new marriage law, also launched in 1980, lowered the legal age of marriage to twenty for women and twenty-two for men. This was done to combat illegal marriage and sex crimes, but of course it also encouraged more unions and, by extension, babies. The move toward agricultural decollectivization also undermined official efforts to enforce the one-child policy. Undercollectivism, pay, rations, and other benefits were meted out by village leaders, and bad behavior (having an out-of-plan child, for instance) could be punished directly; new reforms loosened official control over peasants’ livelihoods.
By 1984, the nationwide one-size-fits-all measure proved so unpopular that the central government was forced to decentralize a large portion of the one-child policy. It circulated new provisions enshrined in what population scholars call Document 7. Document 7 gave each province more power to adapt the one-child policy to local circumstances.
This was the beginning of a raft of exclusions that made it hard for people within China—never mind outside China—to understand the policy in anything but the broadest strokes, because conditions really were different from place to place. For example, residents in many rural areas were allowed to have a second child, provided their first was not a son—a tacit acknowledgment of the son hunger that was rampant in the countryside. Places like Tibet and Yunnan, with large ethnic minorities, had vastly more liberal policies than more populous provinces like Sichuan and Henan.
Document 7 was a nod toward making enforcement easier for local authorities. It was not intended to make things easier for the general populace. Authorities called this tactic “opening a small hole to close a big gap,” making small concessions to ensure overall compliance.
Document 7 did not remedy the lack of transparency and accountability within the system. Local officials had wide discretion in determining how much to fine violators. Sums could range from a multiple of two to ten times annual household income. People had no way of figuring out ahead of time what they were liable for, and two sets of violators, under similar circumstances, might pay vastly different penalties. In 2010, a family-planning official apparently imposed a fine of 5 million RMB, or over $800,000, on a violator.When that person protested, the official allegedly increased the
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