TAYLOR: This is no ordinary family. When Zhang Yichi was born he became a symbol of China’s One Child Policy. The Beijing baby boy officially brought China’s population to one point three billion. It was national news. The authorities decreed that the first child born after midnight in the Beijing maternity hospital would represent the magical number.
NEWS REPORT: [Doctor making announcement] It’s Beijing time, January 6, 2005. The 1.3 billionth citizen of China was born at 00:02. Let’s congratulate.
ZHANG TONG: [Baby’s father] To tell you the truth, we are the parents of a celebrity.
LAN HUI: [Baby’s mother] I feel one little baby is enough. I don’t want to have a second one.
TAYLOR: China never misses a chance for propaganda. Little Zhang Yichi’s birth was acclaimed as a national virtue. Had the one child policy not been introduced, China’s population would have reached one point three billion four years ago.
Today more people live in China than any other country in the world, more than a thousand million people. It’s almost impossible to grasp just how many people that is, but next time you’re looking at a national weather map, imagine a thousand cities the size of Adelaide, Brisbane or Perth or four hundred cities with roughly the population of Sydney or Melbourne.
This is one couple who’ll never feature on national television in China. Ma Baochang and his wife Liu Shuling live in China’s rural north. They have lived through the darkness of breaching China’s population laws.
LIU SHULING: Well, after having one baby if people tried to have a second one and didn’t have money, they’d have their house pulled down. If they didn’t pull down your house, they’d take away your timbers and horse-carts. If you didn’t give them money, they’d sell it themselves.
TAYLOR: Mr Ma and Mrs Liu though have two children, sons aged twenty seven and twelve. They deliberately flouted the population policy, they wanted a second child to help on the farm and look after them in their old age.
MA BAOCHANG: A son to help us in old age. It’s true.
LIU SHULING: To have a girl doesn’t work.
MA BAOCHANG: The ordinary people need boys.
TAYLOR: Ma Shumin is now a happy, healthy twelve year old but when he was in the womb, local officials pressed his mother to have an abortion. Unlike many other Chinese women of the day, she escaped the trauma of a forced abortion but the family was punished. Their penalty? A so-called ‘social compensation fee’ a fine amounting to about four times their annual income.
MA BAOCHANG: After being fined it was hard. We had no fine food grains left and we had to eat porridge. We ate the porridge three times a day. Fortunately we didn’t starve to death.
TAYLOR: When Mao Zedong came to power in 1949 China’s population was five hundred million. Thirty years later, it had nearly doubled. Fearing the exploding population would create chaos and crisis, China conceived its radical plan. For twenty-five years population control has been a major priority for the Chinese Government.
SIRI TELLIER: [United Nations Population Fund, China] I think it is seen as a pre-condition for all the others. It’s seen that unless there is a containment of population growth, there will be no economic growth and unless there is economic growth there will be no social stability, no social harmony.
TAYLOR: Beijing, the capital of China, officially home to fifteen million people, is increasingly modern and prosperous. In Beijing’s sprawling middleclass suburbia live the Zhang Family. Their one hundred thousand dollar apartment is beyond the imaginings of most Chinese but they worry they’re missing something – their daughter, eight year old Zhang Jingyu who would like a brother or sister. It’s lonely being an only child.
ZHANG JINGYU: Sometimes when I do homework alone at home all day, after I finish my homework there’s no one to play with.
TAYLOR: Yet the Zhang’s are considering having another child. China’s economic reforms have weakened the state’s hold over people’s lives and for an increasing number of couples, the fine is not a deterrent.
Zhang Yufan and his wife Zhang Hong are both professionals with well paid jobs in the software sector. For them, the dilemma is how to juggle family and careers.
ZHANG YUFAN: In general, the cost for the child is not a big problem. But from kindergarten to primary school and afterwards… she needs to take part in all kinds of activities.
TAYLOR: All the dancers are girls and they have another thing in common – everyone is an only child.
ZHANG YUFAN: As she’s an only child we worry about her growth and happiness during childhood. Without a brother or sister she won’t have a sense of fairness. It will affect her growth after she steps into society.
TAYLOR: There’s now real concern that the One Child Policy has created a generation of spoilt children, little emperors and empresses. Teacher Sun Kaiyun believes that all the attention an only child commands is more likely to breed fragility than stability.
SUN KAIYUN: They are very delicate, and can’t cope with setbacks and they lack confidence. Lots of the children are like that. So these children need to be encouraged and praised.
TAYLOR: China’s so vast its family planning policy means different things in different places. This is the Xinyu steel and iron factory in central Jiangxi province. Nationwide the family planning network boasts more than a million branches but the state owned enterprise does more than turn ore into metal, it’s also a factory for social engineering.
YANG JIE: We use our propaganda battlefield, for an example the home for the pregnant women, the population school, our company’s newspaper, the propaganda billboard and the radio and television network to publicise our country’s guiding principle.
TAYLOR: At the factory’s family planning office, women receive free contraception and their personal health is overseen. Here the health of the pregnant workers is closely monitored and pre-natal classes are provided.
YANG JIE: We’ve established an information network for the women of childbearing age. Within this network we have detailed information on every employee. For example, who will get pregnant, or who will get married. We have all this information. We also know when they get the birth permit and when their baby is due. We’re very clear about it.
TAYLOR: China has become the factory to the world, conjuring up images of a highly industrialised nation but more than half of all Chinese live in the country with most people working in agriculture. It’s here that China’s One Child Policy is misleading. It’s a case of different strokes for different folks. In the countryside, couples are generally allowed two children. A few hours drive away from the Xinyu steel factory, local family planning doctors are on the road.
DR WANG ZHENXIN: The family planning policy is based on our country’s status and it suits our national conditions. I think it’s very good. I don’t think it is soft or tough.
TAYLOR: One positive side effect of China’s focus on population control has been a better health service for women and a reduction in the risks of death and injury associated with pregnancy. For fifteen years Dr Wang has been making trips like this.
DR WANG ZHENXIN: Well, we are serving the people. We’re serving women of childbearing age, to improve the quality of population - and the quality of the whole nation. It is a kind of service as well as a job.
TAYLOR: In 2002 China outlawed the use of physical force to make a woman submit to an abortion or sterilisation but some provinces demand abortions if the pregnancy violates local regulations. In this part of Jiangxi Province, Yin Hongquan is the District Communist Party Chief. Here there are unspecified ‘remedial measures’.
YIN HONGQUAN: We punish them based on the relevant parts of the law. Some people have more than one child, some have an unplanned child, some people abandon the babies, some people did not put in an IUD. There are a lot. It’s hard to explain. We have the regulations. If someone breaches the regulation, whatever rules they violate we will punish them.
TAYLOR: Penalties and punishment are highly sensitive issues. Despite his status, a local official saw fit to interrupt the interview.
WOMAN CHINESE OFFICIAL: Our country has a law relating to family planning. We open to the world. We will follow this law. Let’s not talk about it. Is that all right?
TAYLOR: China’s One Child Policy has given birth to an alarming imbalance between the sexes. Many couples have turned to ultrasound machines to guarantee they get the baby they want.
DR CHANG YUSUI: The baby’s head is okay. It’s growing well.
ZHANG HUIHUA: How about the other parts?
DR CHANG YUSUI: The foetus’ head is normal.
TAYLOR: Cheap small ultrasound machines have swept through even remote parts of the country. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of female foetuses have been aborted. A few years ago in this very part of Jiangxi Province, one hundred and forty two boys were being born for every one hundred girls. Since 1994 it’s been illegal in China to reveal the sex of an unborn child. That’s been easily by-passed with the help of red packets – bribes given over in red envelopes.
DR CHANG YUSUI: Well, it did happen before. As everyone knows, some couples gave the red package to the doctors, and asked for the sexual identification. In the past I think people believed this behaviour was morally correct. You help people, people give you the red package. I also faced this same problem.
TAYLOR: Twenty three year old Zhang Huihua would still like to know if she’s having a boy or a girl.
ZHANG HUIHUA: Can I know now? Of course I want to know. It’s not bad to know my baby’s sex in advance. I could prepare a name.
TAYLOR: The Chinese Government is extremely sensitive to the hostility and division it’s population policy generates outside the country.
SIRI TELLIER: Yes it is the biggest, the most conspicuous and probably the most organised family planning programme in the world but it is not the only one that has any kind of coercion.
TAYLOR: Farmers Ma Boachang and his wife Liu Shuling know the terror of coercion in China. A few years before the birth of their second son, Ma Shumin, Lui Shuling was pregnant with a girl.
LUI SHULING: I said to them as I was pregnant I would not go for an abortion. If I have an operation and I bleed will you look after me? They injected me, but in the wrong spot and I had to take oxytocic. The baby was still alive. I was on the edge of massive haemorrhage, and couldn’t move. The baby was carried away. The hospital gave her to somebody.
TAYLOR: Li Shuling’s daughter lived but her family never saw her again. Every day more than twenty thousand babies are born in China. For every one hundred girls there are one hundred and twenty boys. This imbalance leads to warnings of tens of millions of Chinese men facing a future with no prospect of a female partner. They are known as ‘bare branches’. Such thoughts are not for these people on this day. The joys of new life are uppermost in their mind.
Experts fear that ‘bare branches’ will create crime and violence. Here at the Jian Culture and Kungfu School in Jiangxi province, there are close to a thousand students but only forty two girls. Chinese officials have warned of the shredding of China’s social fabric and a future angry army of seventy million single men.
In various places in China, the Government’s rolled out a ‘Care for Girls’ programme. Zhou Min is the school principal and the aim is to eliminate cultural discrimination against girls in rural and underdeveloped areas through subsidies and education.
PRINCIPAL ZHOU MIN: Once born we are equal, and we are all human beings. We need to respect each other. I think, even though some older people don’t agree, it should be eliminated.
TAYLOR: With Government help, the school provides free boarding and tuition for eight girls from poor families with no sons. Fifteen year old Wu Yu is amongst them. She knows too well the cultural preference for boys. Her mother is dead but Wu Yu remembers that she believes sons were more valuable.
WU YU: My father has never thought so, but my mother did. The think boys produce a male heir to continue the family line. They just want a family heir.
TAYLOR: Back in Beijing, the Zhang family is preparing Sunday dinner. Tonight the grandparents are joining them and when they leave little Zhang Jingyu will go with them. She only spends time with her parents on weekends.
YANG HENGZHEN: I have no other choice because both of them are very busy with work and are far from home.
TAYLOR: The grandparents cherish the idea of a grandson, the family can afford to raise another child and pay the fine but the question is not so much financial as philosophical. To whom to they owe a greater loyalty - their family or their country?
GRANDFATHER ZHANG YIFU: The Chinese population is really too huge. The social pressures are too heavy. It’s not good for the children. Our children should be very happy but many children are not. We feel uncomfortable with that.
TAYLOR: While critics denounce China’s family planning programme as a violation of people’s rights, an attack on the sanctity of the family, Chinese authorities hail it as a great success. Without the One Child Policy the country they say would have been in for a rough ride. China estimates it would have an extra three hundred million people today, most condemned to lives of poverty and misery.
SIRI TELLIER: Everybody thinks of China has having had enormous economic growth and they have but you still have six hundred million people in China living on under two dollars a day.
TAYLOR: China’s population is still growing and on present trends won’t peak for another twenty five years. Pragmatic if not popular, China’s One Child Policy looks destined for a long life.
NEWS REPORT: [Doctor making announcement] It’s Beijing time, January 6, 2005. The 1.3 billionth citizen of China was born at 00:02. Let’s congratulate.
ZHANG TONG: [Baby’s father] To tell you the truth, we are the parents of a celebrity.
LAN HUI: [Baby’s mother] I feel one little baby is enough. I don’t want to have a second one.
TAYLOR: China never misses a chance for propaganda. Little Zhang Yichi’s birth was acclaimed as a national virtue. Had the one child policy not been introduced, China’s population would have reached one point three billion four years ago.
Today more people live in China than any other country in the world, more than a thousand million people. It’s almost impossible to grasp just how many people that is, but next time you’re looking at a national weather map, imagine a thousand cities the size of Adelaide, Brisbane or Perth or four hundred cities with roughly the population of Sydney or Melbourne.
This is one couple who’ll never feature on national television in China. Ma Baochang and his wife Liu Shuling live in China’s rural north. They have lived through the darkness of breaching China’s population laws.
LIU SHULING: Well, after having one baby if people tried to have a second one and didn’t have money, they’d have their house pulled down. If they didn’t pull down your house, they’d take away your timbers and horse-carts. If you didn’t give them money, they’d sell it themselves.
TAYLOR: Mr Ma and Mrs Liu though have two children, sons aged twenty seven and twelve. They deliberately flouted the population policy, they wanted a second child to help on the farm and look after them in their old age.
MA BAOCHANG: A son to help us in old age. It’s true.
LIU SHULING: To have a girl doesn’t work.
MA BAOCHANG: The ordinary people need boys.
TAYLOR: Ma Shumin is now a happy, healthy twelve year old but when he was in the womb, local officials pressed his mother to have an abortion. Unlike many other Chinese women of the day, she escaped the trauma of a forced abortion but the family was punished. Their penalty? A so-called ‘social compensation fee’ a fine amounting to about four times their annual income.
MA BAOCHANG: After being fined it was hard. We had no fine food grains left and we had to eat porridge. We ate the porridge three times a day. Fortunately we didn’t starve to death.
TAYLOR: When Mao Zedong came to power in 1949 China’s population was five hundred million. Thirty years later, it had nearly doubled. Fearing the exploding population would create chaos and crisis, China conceived its radical plan. For twenty-five years population control has been a major priority for the Chinese Government.
SIRI TELLIER: [United Nations Population Fund, China] I think it is seen as a pre-condition for all the others. It’s seen that unless there is a containment of population growth, there will be no economic growth and unless there is economic growth there will be no social stability, no social harmony.
TAYLOR: Beijing, the capital of China, officially home to fifteen million people, is increasingly modern and prosperous. In Beijing’s sprawling middleclass suburbia live the Zhang Family. Their one hundred thousand dollar apartment is beyond the imaginings of most Chinese but they worry they’re missing something – their daughter, eight year old Zhang Jingyu who would like a brother or sister. It’s lonely being an only child.
ZHANG JINGYU: Sometimes when I do homework alone at home all day, after I finish my homework there’s no one to play with.
TAYLOR: Yet the Zhang’s are considering having another child. China’s economic reforms have weakened the state’s hold over people’s lives and for an increasing number of couples, the fine is not a deterrent.
Zhang Yufan and his wife Zhang Hong are both professionals with well paid jobs in the software sector. For them, the dilemma is how to juggle family and careers.
ZHANG YUFAN: In general, the cost for the child is not a big problem. But from kindergarten to primary school and afterwards… she needs to take part in all kinds of activities.
TAYLOR: All the dancers are girls and they have another thing in common – everyone is an only child.
ZHANG YUFAN: As she’s an only child we worry about her growth and happiness during childhood. Without a brother or sister she won’t have a sense of fairness. It will affect her growth after she steps into society.
TAYLOR: There’s now real concern that the One Child Policy has created a generation of spoilt children, little emperors and empresses. Teacher Sun Kaiyun believes that all the attention an only child commands is more likely to breed fragility than stability.
SUN KAIYUN: They are very delicate, and can’t cope with setbacks and they lack confidence. Lots of the children are like that. So these children need to be encouraged and praised.
TAYLOR: China’s so vast its family planning policy means different things in different places. This is the Xinyu steel and iron factory in central Jiangxi province. Nationwide the family planning network boasts more than a million branches but the state owned enterprise does more than turn ore into metal, it’s also a factory for social engineering.
YANG JIE: We use our propaganda battlefield, for an example the home for the pregnant women, the population school, our company’s newspaper, the propaganda billboard and the radio and television network to publicise our country’s guiding principle.
TAYLOR: At the factory’s family planning office, women receive free contraception and their personal health is overseen. Here the health of the pregnant workers is closely monitored and pre-natal classes are provided.
YANG JIE: We’ve established an information network for the women of childbearing age. Within this network we have detailed information on every employee. For example, who will get pregnant, or who will get married. We have all this information. We also know when they get the birth permit and when their baby is due. We’re very clear about it.
TAYLOR: China has become the factory to the world, conjuring up images of a highly industrialised nation but more than half of all Chinese live in the country with most people working in agriculture. It’s here that China’s One Child Policy is misleading. It’s a case of different strokes for different folks. In the countryside, couples are generally allowed two children. A few hours drive away from the Xinyu steel factory, local family planning doctors are on the road.
DR WANG ZHENXIN: The family planning policy is based on our country’s status and it suits our national conditions. I think it’s very good. I don’t think it is soft or tough.
TAYLOR: One positive side effect of China’s focus on population control has been a better health service for women and a reduction in the risks of death and injury associated with pregnancy. For fifteen years Dr Wang has been making trips like this.
DR WANG ZHENXIN: Well, we are serving the people. We’re serving women of childbearing age, to improve the quality of population - and the quality of the whole nation. It is a kind of service as well as a job.
TAYLOR: In 2002 China outlawed the use of physical force to make a woman submit to an abortion or sterilisation but some provinces demand abortions if the pregnancy violates local regulations. In this part of Jiangxi Province, Yin Hongquan is the District Communist Party Chief. Here there are unspecified ‘remedial measures’.
YIN HONGQUAN: We punish them based on the relevant parts of the law. Some people have more than one child, some have an unplanned child, some people abandon the babies, some people did not put in an IUD. There are a lot. It’s hard to explain. We have the regulations. If someone breaches the regulation, whatever rules they violate we will punish them.
TAYLOR: Penalties and punishment are highly sensitive issues. Despite his status, a local official saw fit to interrupt the interview.
WOMAN CHINESE OFFICIAL: Our country has a law relating to family planning. We open to the world. We will follow this law. Let’s not talk about it. Is that all right?
TAYLOR: China’s One Child Policy has given birth to an alarming imbalance between the sexes. Many couples have turned to ultrasound machines to guarantee they get the baby they want.
DR CHANG YUSUI: The baby’s head is okay. It’s growing well.
ZHANG HUIHUA: How about the other parts?
DR CHANG YUSUI: The foetus’ head is normal.
TAYLOR: Cheap small ultrasound machines have swept through even remote parts of the country. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of female foetuses have been aborted. A few years ago in this very part of Jiangxi Province, one hundred and forty two boys were being born for every one hundred girls. Since 1994 it’s been illegal in China to reveal the sex of an unborn child. That’s been easily by-passed with the help of red packets – bribes given over in red envelopes.
DR CHANG YUSUI: Well, it did happen before. As everyone knows, some couples gave the red package to the doctors, and asked for the sexual identification. In the past I think people believed this behaviour was morally correct. You help people, people give you the red package. I also faced this same problem.
TAYLOR: Twenty three year old Zhang Huihua would still like to know if she’s having a boy or a girl.
ZHANG HUIHUA: Can I know now? Of course I want to know. It’s not bad to know my baby’s sex in advance. I could prepare a name.
TAYLOR: The Chinese Government is extremely sensitive to the hostility and division it’s population policy generates outside the country.
SIRI TELLIER: Yes it is the biggest, the most conspicuous and probably the most organised family planning programme in the world but it is not the only one that has any kind of coercion.
TAYLOR: Farmers Ma Boachang and his wife Liu Shuling know the terror of coercion in China. A few years before the birth of their second son, Ma Shumin, Lui Shuling was pregnant with a girl.
LUI SHULING: I said to them as I was pregnant I would not go for an abortion. If I have an operation and I bleed will you look after me? They injected me, but in the wrong spot and I had to take oxytocic. The baby was still alive. I was on the edge of massive haemorrhage, and couldn’t move. The baby was carried away. The hospital gave her to somebody.
TAYLOR: Li Shuling’s daughter lived but her family never saw her again. Every day more than twenty thousand babies are born in China. For every one hundred girls there are one hundred and twenty boys. This imbalance leads to warnings of tens of millions of Chinese men facing a future with no prospect of a female partner. They are known as ‘bare branches’. Such thoughts are not for these people on this day. The joys of new life are uppermost in their mind.
Experts fear that ‘bare branches’ will create crime and violence. Here at the Jian Culture and Kungfu School in Jiangxi province, there are close to a thousand students but only forty two girls. Chinese officials have warned of the shredding of China’s social fabric and a future angry army of seventy million single men.
In various places in China, the Government’s rolled out a ‘Care for Girls’ programme. Zhou Min is the school principal and the aim is to eliminate cultural discrimination against girls in rural and underdeveloped areas through subsidies and education.
PRINCIPAL ZHOU MIN: Once born we are equal, and we are all human beings. We need to respect each other. I think, even though some older people don’t agree, it should be eliminated.
TAYLOR: With Government help, the school provides free boarding and tuition for eight girls from poor families with no sons. Fifteen year old Wu Yu is amongst them. She knows too well the cultural preference for boys. Her mother is dead but Wu Yu remembers that she believes sons were more valuable.
WU YU: My father has never thought so, but my mother did. The think boys produce a male heir to continue the family line. They just want a family heir.
TAYLOR: Back in Beijing, the Zhang family is preparing Sunday dinner. Tonight the grandparents are joining them and when they leave little Zhang Jingyu will go with them. She only spends time with her parents on weekends.
YANG HENGZHEN: I have no other choice because both of them are very busy with work and are far from home.
TAYLOR: The grandparents cherish the idea of a grandson, the family can afford to raise another child and pay the fine but the question is not so much financial as philosophical. To whom to they owe a greater loyalty - their family or their country?
GRANDFATHER ZHANG YIFU: The Chinese population is really too huge. The social pressures are too heavy. It’s not good for the children. Our children should be very happy but many children are not. We feel uncomfortable with that.
TAYLOR: While critics denounce China’s family planning programme as a violation of people’s rights, an attack on the sanctity of the family, Chinese authorities hail it as a great success. Without the One Child Policy the country they say would have been in for a rough ride. China estimates it would have an extra three hundred million people today, most condemned to lives of poverty and misery.
SIRI TELLIER: Everybody thinks of China has having had enormous economic growth and they have but you still have six hundred million people in China living on under two dollars a day.
TAYLOR: China’s population is still growing and on present trends won’t peak for another twenty five years. Pragmatic if not popular, China’s One Child Policy looks destined for a long life.