China’s baby trouble

Press, 12 May 1987, Page 16

China’s baby trouble

From the “Economist’s” China correspondent

For all the fear that turbulence at the top of the Communist Party will slow down China’s economic reforms, one of the biggest threats to the country’s prosperity is still its expanding population. In 1949 there were about 540 million Chinese; the figure today is almost 1.1 billion. The birthrate has slowed, partly because of pressure on parents to have only one child, and partly because three-quar-ters of Chinese women are now said to use some form of birthcontrol. China came an impressive fourteen million births under its official target for the five years up to 1985. But the population ceilings of 1.13 billion by 1990 and no more than 1.2 billion by 2000 are unlikely to hold. Resistance to the one-child policy and the arrival at marriageable age of China’s Cultural Revolution baby boomers look like upsetting the planners’ hoped-for head count. Relying on a single child for support in old age still does not appeal in China, especially if the child is a girl. Television advertisements for State-run homes for the elderly are clumsy and off-putting. And China is still a

long way from nationwide welfare and pension schemes. The best bet for a comfortable old age is still to have a lot of kids. By 1983, strict enforcement of the one-child policy had led to an increase-in the killing of baby girls in some parts of China, and even to the murder of women who gave birth to girls. In Chongquing, one of China’s largest cities, 2800 such cases were under investigation in 1984. Some officials, especially in southern China, were too eager to meet family-planning targets; they forced parents to be sterilised after the birth of their first child, and insisted that women have abortions even in advanced stages of a second pregnancy. Families who nevertheless managed to have more children were denied food rations and state education for the over-quota offspring. Opposition to a strict one-child policy led the Government into a softer line in 1984, when it began urging local officials to apply the policy more flexibly. If a village successfully promoted later marriages and met birth-control quotas, it could apply to become a “two-child village.”

America’s withdrawal in 1985 of tens of millions of dollars in contributions to the United Nations Fund for Population Activities did not end the Fund’s activities in China, but it did make the Chinese Government realise it would be dangerous to be too ruthless.

The reforms in agriculture, which over the past nine years have given individual families responsibility for what they grow and have allowed them to keep most of the profits, have also worked against the one-child policy. The relaxation of the one-child policy, which anyway was never really enforced among China’s national minorities, has coincided with an increase in the number of couples planning to start a family. Whether because of Government pressure for later marriage, or because they could not afford it, many young couples had previously refrained from starting a family. It was just a postponement. Like their yuppie counterparts in America, they are having junior now.

Copyright — The Economist