fine, saying, “You are just a piece of meat on the chopping block,” according to local media reports.
In essence, the central government gave local provinces the message, “Meet your birth quotas; we don’t really care to know how.” They also expected provinces to fund the bulk of population planning on their own. This created a system ripe for corruption.
Even though Feng Jianmei’s explosive forced abortion story rocked the nation in 2012, no birth-planning official involved actually served a criminal sentence, though several laws were broken. I asked Zhang Erli, who had been a high-ranking, national-level family-planning official, why this was so. He explained the national-level family-planning commission lacked the right to punish local-level family-planning officials. “We can only investigate them and report to the provincial leaders. They have the power to punish or even fire the officer involved, not us.”
Most on-the-ground family-planning officials told me there was a tacit understanding that they would never face criminal charges for their actions, because maintaining birth control targets was considered a top priority.
“As long as we kept the quotas, we could do anything: destroy homes, property, jail people, even threaten to confiscate people’s children, and no one would say anything,” one former Sichuan County official told me. (As it turned out, officials in another province did actually confiscate children, which I’ll elaborate on in chapter 8.)
Adding to the chaos was an internal battle that raged throughout most of the 1980s within China’s leadership. Liberal-minded leaders, who leaned toward a more humane two-child approach, argued with hard-liners, who urged the need to stay the course.
In 1988, a circular from the National Population and Family Planning Commission spoke of a “crisis in birth planning,” outliningproblems such as increasing attacks on overworked birth-planning personnel. Corruption was also a huge issue, with many provinces falsifying reports.There was a growing realization that the 1.2 billion target simply could not be reached, for in 1988, 80 percent of China’s provinces had already breached population targets.
The 1989 student protests at Tiananmen, and the subsequent harsh crackdown, marked the triumph of the hard-liners. Leaders like Zhao Zhiyang, who had championed the two-child experiment at Yicheng, were purged. There would be no softening on birth quotas.
In 1990, the central government instituted a nationwide accountability system. Called
yipiaofoujue
(loosely translated as “one-vote veto”), it made birth-planning targets a major objective for all provincial authorities. Officials—not just family-planning specialists but also garden-variety administrators—who did not meet their area’s birth quotas would face sanctions in the form of wage deductions, demotions, or even dismissal. It didn’t matter, for example, if officials met other performance targets. That one black mark from not meeting birth quotas would blot out everything else they’d accomplished.
Yipiaofoujue
became the stick the central government held over provincial officials, and this in turn incited them to harsher acts. Some provinces would impose even tighter quotas, just to be on the safe side. One official told me there were times they would get decrees that made no sense, like “no births within the next hundred days,” which they were obliged to enforce.
Fines intensified, and not just for unauthorized childbirth. Women were fined for living with a man out of wedlock; for not using contraception, even if it didn’t lead to pregnancy; or simply for not attending regular pregnancy checkups. In Jiangsu, women had to line up twice monthly for pregnancy tests and publicly pee in cups.The birth police weren’t squeamish about how they got the job done, and their methods produced results.
III
The woman who really explained the workings of the population
In essence, the central government gave local provinces the message, “Meet your birth quotas; we don’t really care to know how.” They also expected provinces to fund the bulk of population planning on their own. This created a system ripe for corruption.
Even though Feng Jianmei’s explosive forced abortion story rocked the nation in 2012, no birth-planning official involved actually served a criminal sentence, though several laws were broken. I asked Zhang Erli, who had been a high-ranking, national-level family-planning official, why this was so. He explained the national-level family-planning commission lacked the right to punish local-level family-planning officials. “We can only investigate them and report to the provincial leaders. They have the power to punish or even fire the officer involved, not us.”
Most on-the-ground family-planning officials told me there was a tacit understanding that they would never face criminal charges for their actions, because maintaining birth control targets was considered a top priority.
“As long as we kept the quotas, we could do anything: destroy homes, property, jail people, even threaten to confiscate people’s children, and no one would say anything,” one former Sichuan County official told me. (As it turned out, officials in another province did actually confiscate children, which I’ll elaborate on in chapter 8.)
Adding to the chaos was an internal battle that raged throughout most of the 1980s within China’s leadership. Liberal-minded leaders, who leaned toward a more humane two-child approach, argued with hard-liners, who urged the need to stay the course.
In 1988, a circular from the National Population and Family Planning Commission spoke of a “crisis in birth planning,” outliningproblems such as increasing attacks on overworked birth-planning personnel. Corruption was also a huge issue, with many provinces falsifying reports.There was a growing realization that the 1.2 billion target simply could not be reached, for in 1988, 80 percent of China’s provinces had already breached population targets.
The 1989 student protests at Tiananmen, and the subsequent harsh crackdown, marked the triumph of the hard-liners. Leaders like Zhao Zhiyang, who had championed the two-child experiment at Yicheng, were purged. There would be no softening on birth quotas.
In 1990, the central government instituted a nationwide accountability system. Called
yipiaofoujue
(loosely translated as “one-vote veto”), it made birth-planning targets a major objective for all provincial authorities. Officials—not just family-planning specialists but also garden-variety administrators—who did not meet their area’s birth quotas would face sanctions in the form of wage deductions, demotions, or even dismissal. It didn’t matter, for example, if officials met other performance targets. That one black mark from not meeting birth quotas would blot out everything else they’d accomplished.
Yipiaofoujue
became the stick the central government held over provincial officials, and this in turn incited them to harsher acts. Some provinces would impose even tighter quotas, just to be on the safe side. One official told me there were times they would get decrees that made no sense, like “no births within the next hundred days,” which they were obliged to enforce.
Fines intensified, and not just for unauthorized childbirth. Women were fined for living with a man out of wedlock; for not using contraception, even if it didn’t lead to pregnancy; or simply for not attending regular pregnancy checkups. In Jiangsu, women had to line up twice monthly for pregnancy tests and publicly pee in cups.The birth police weren’t squeamish about how they got the job done, and their methods produced results.
III
The woman who really explained the workings of the population
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