Secrets and Siblings: The Vanished Lives of China’s One-child Policy 9781786997326, 9781786997333, 9781350222489, 9781786997357

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Secrets and Siblings

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mari Manninen is a Finnish journalist, currently writing for the daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat. She lived for four years in Beijing, where she reported on China’s rapidly changing society for a number of newspapers and magazines.

Secrets and Siblings THE VANISHED LIVES OF CHINA’S ONE-CHILD POLICY

MARI MANNINEN TRANSLATED BY MIA SPANGENBERG

Secrets and Siblings: The Vanished Lives of China’s One-Child Policy was first published by Atena Kustannus, Finland in 2016 under the title Yhden lapsen kansa: Kiinan salavauvat, pikkukeisarit ja hyläyt tyttäret. This edition published in 2019 by Zed Books Ltd, The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London SE11 5RR, UK. Published by agreement with the Kontext Agency. This work has been published with the financial assistance of FILI – Finnish Literature Exchange. www.zedbooks.net Copyright © Mari Manninen 2016, 2019 English language translation © Mia Spangenberg 2019 The right of Mari Manninen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 Typeset in Book Antiqua by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon Cover design by Steve Marking Cover photo © Pierre Montavon-Strates, Panos Pictures Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78699-732-6 hb ISBN 978-1-78699-733-3 pb ISBN 978-1-78699-735-7 pdf ISBN 978-1-78699-734-0 epub ISBN 978-1-78699-736-4 mobi

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

In the Beginning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The 36-year experiment that transformed the life of every person in China.

1 Undocumented. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24 Mrs Wang had too many children. Now her children can’t get a job, get married, or even board a train. 2 Unborn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Mr Li worked for the government, so his child had to be aborted. Mrs Zhang’s fetus was taken by force. 3 No Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Hannah searches for the Chinese family who abandoned her. Mrs Li searches for the daughter she gave up. 4 No Discipline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .94 As a child, Zhao thought that meat and seats on the bus were only for children. But she paid a high price for her privileged childhood. 5 No Brothers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .121 Cecily and Zhao have done well in life, because their parents weren’t allowed to have a second child.

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6 No Wives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Women of marrying age are in such short supply that Mr Zhou bought his son a wife from Vietnam. 7 No Children. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .152 Mrs Guo’s only child died, so she tried to get pregnant again and had twins at the age of 56. 8 No Mercy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Mrs Dong monitored her neighbors’ menstrual cycles and pressured them to have abortions. And she’s proud of it. 9 The Usual Story. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .181 Yang gave birth, then suffered through a month of bed rest and a year of her mother-in-law’s authority.

How Is Everyone Doing Now? . . . . . . . . . . . . . .197

Key Sources, Recommended Reading, and References . . . . . .212

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to all of my Chinese friends who patiently explained what the one-child policy has meant to them and their inner circle of family and friends. I’d like to extend my special thanks to my dear Chinese friend and fellow journalist Karoline Kan. She helped me find many of the people I’ve interviewed here and served as my interpreter for half of my interviews. My sincerest thanks go to writer Kaisa Haatanen who told my Finnish publisher, Atena Publishing, about my work. Atena’s editor-in-chief Laura Kuitunen gently but firmly guided me into the secrets of writing a nonfiction book. She has my utmost gratitude for that. And thank you to the entire energetic publishing team. To Professor Matti Nojonen and journalist Suvi Ahola, I offer my humble thanks for reading and commenting on the manuscript. I take full responsibility for any mistakes. My most heartfelt thanks go to my husband Mikko Paakkanen. He worked hard at his day job and paid our mortgage and grocery bills without complaining so I could write. Mari Manninen Beijing, August 11, 2016

IN THE BEGINNING The 36-year experiment that transformed the life of every person in China.

Warning: You may get a lump in your throat while reading this book. I myself cried sometimes as I was writing the nine chapters that follow. In them, I tell the stories of ordinary Chinese people and how the one-child policy affected them. What does it feel like to abandon a daughter so you can have a son? How do you survive a forced late-term abortion without losing your mind? What is it like for a girl adopted abroad to return to China as an adult in search of her biological parents? I also attempt to correct some of the many common misconceptions about China’s one-child policy. The biggest one is that there were only single-child families living in China during the time of the policy. Siblings were common in the countryside. And it’s not true that the Chinese didn’t want to adopt girls. They certainly did, but they weren’t allowed to. The one-child policy (1980–2015) was the most restrictive and controversial program of childbirth regulation in world

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history. China forced its citizens to content themselves with little, and in most cases to have just one child. The policy has in one way or another affected the life of every single person in China – which is every fifth person on the planet. When I revealed to friends in Beijing that I was planning to write a book about the one-child policy, nearly all of them started to tell me a story about themselves or someone they knew. One friend told me about her mother, who ended up aborting her second child to avoid losing her job. Another friend talked about her “twin sister,” who was actually born a year after she was, but because of the fines for an extra child, was registered as her twin. Someone else told me about her cousin who she had begun to suspect was actually her brother and had been given to someone else in the family. Another friend told me about a neighbor who had the roof torn off their house by family planning authorities because of an extra child, and also of a woman who fled a raid and hid in the homes of relatives long enough to give birth to her second child. But only a couple of the stories recounted in this book were told to me by friends of mine. I wanted to interview people of different ages from different parts of China, people with diverse backgrounds. In theory this shouldn’t have been difficult, because the effects of the one-child policy can be seen everywhere. In practice, however, finding people to interview was a laborious process. Most Chinese want to keep these painful memories private from all but their families and friends. Many also wish to forget them. And it’s no wonder. I found some of my interviewees through acquaintances, some by means of Chinese news articles, and some through

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Chinese online discussion forums. Sometimes my interpreter and I hopped on a train in Beijing knowing nothing more than an interviewee’s name and village. We asked around the village until we found the right door, and knocked. In situations like these I was always given an interview, which was surprising, and wonderful. The pleasure was often mutual, because a foreign visitor is still a rarity in a rural Chinese village. It took the most time to find a mother who would agree to talk to me about giving up her child, and a family planning official willing to give an interview about monitoring the pregnancies of her neighbors. Both of these acts carry a heavy stigma of shame. It was easier to interview people who had been victims of the one-child policy, such as women taken in for forced abortions, even though they knew local Chinese authorities didn’t approve of the interviews. On the other hand, victims knew that they would be allowed to tell their stories from their own point of view precisely because Chinese authorities are themselves hardly eager to discuss this sore subject, at least not with foreign journalists. Sometimes my interviewees were caught in contradictory stories, sometimes they refused to tell me everything, and sometimes it was obvious that they were sugar-coating the truth. Whenever I noticed this, I also point it out to the reader. There is a lot of discussion in China about the lasting effects of the one-child policy. People are horrified, for instance, at how difficult it is for men to find wives because fewer girls were born than there should have been, or at what kinds of adults pampered only children grow up to be, or at how a large family can survive with so few offspring. But there has

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been almost no discussion of the momentous moral choices women and families have been forced to make – and often in secret. Millions of women agonized over whether to get an abortion or lose their job and be fined. Should they abort a girl fetus or suffer the anger of their family when they didn’t have a son? Some women have even had to make the horrible decision of whether to let their child die. Forced abortions continued throughout the final years of the one-child policy in China, as did child abandonment, but luckily they happened much less frequently than they did in the 1980s and 1990s. Children are rarely found left on the side of the road nowadays, because only seriously ill or disabled babies are abandoned. The greater lasting effect of the onechild policy is not in such cruel events as these, but in how it has become a part of the ordinary burden of Chinese life. This book also describes the worry of an only child over how to care for aging parents without any siblings, and the young people who study morning till night, living under a crushing pressure to succeed in school so that they can support their entire families. Such are the concerns of the younger generations in China. But the one-child policy also had its upsides. One large group – urban women and girls – have benefitted greatly from the policy. As resources and hopes traditionally reserved for boys in a family were channeled to an only daughter, the education and status of young women in society showed a marked improvement. Of those I interviewed, this group was the most grateful for the one-child policy. The respect accorded girls and women in rural areas has also risen considerably, although it occurred later, and their status is still not as high as it is in

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cities. The death rate of women and children has also fallen, and their health has improved due to fewer births and fewer mouths to feed. As China has prospered, the standard of living has quickly risen for families raising just one or two children. Although these are significant changes, they are the only obvious positive effects of the one-child policy that I encountered while writing this book. I tried very hard to find others. When I began writing the book, I imagined that I would gain insight into more positive aspects of the policy, and that the horror stories that had appeared in Western media over the years would prove to be overly harsh. Perhaps behind the shocking individual cases, a more focused and brighter picture would emerge. Quite the opposite happened. The one-child policy began to seem an ever more cruel and strange experiment the more I wrote about it. Some of the conventional praise in the West, in fact, proved to be half-empty propaganda, as was the case with population projections, for example. The Chinese have claimed – and Western media have often repeated the claim – that if not for the one-child policy, there would be 400 million more people in China today. In 2016, there were 1.35 billion people, but without the one-child policy, there would now be 1.8 billion people instead. It has thus been argued that the regulation of births has played an immensely important role in preserving the environment in China and the rest of the world. Claims by Chinese and Western media have been made that the Chinese have helped to save the planet with their sacrifices. There are still Western demographers who strongly believe in the number of 400 million or an even bigger one. But

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400 million is a badly overstated reading of the situation, as Martin King Whyte, Wang Feng, and Yong Cai have proved for example in their article “Challenging Myths about China’s One-Child Policy.” The number is calculated as if fertility rates in China wouldn’t have fallen anyway in a rapidly prospering country – as they have at a considerable rate in many neighboring countries as well. That estimate is also calculated based on figures from before the time the one-child policy went into effect. The one-child policy cut population growth much less than has been proclaimed. Yong Cai, a researcher at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina, estimates the number at most at half of the official prediction, or 200 million people. Other estimates halve the number again. Yong Cai stresses that it is very difficult to estimate the effect of the one-child policy because the policy was implemented in the context of the most drastic social and economic change in China – there is no way to separate the socalled policy effect on fertility from the effect of other factors. The one-child policy nevertheless accelerated the narrowing of the lower end of the demographic pyramid such that China is facing a mammoth problem in the near future due to the disparity between its large elder population and the low number of people of working age. * * * When Chinese politicians were thinking about implementing a one-child policy at the end of the 1970s, they were genuinely concerned about the number of Chinese. They were genuinely afraid that their country would suffocate from the number of

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people. Politicians were concerned about how to provide food for a growing population, and also a better standard of living. Mao Zedong, who ruled the People’s Republic of China from its founding in 1949, died in 1976. During his reign, the Chinese population grew from 540 to 940 million people. Child mortality collapsed to one fourth of what it had once been, and Chinese life expectancy increased by several decades. China’s new ruler, Deng Xiaoping, wanted to bring wealth and prosperity to the closed and underdeveloped country and improve the lives of the Chinese. Under his leadership, from 1978 to 1989, China opened to the world and began to liberalize its economy. An important measure of success was the growth in GDP. Deng’s goal was to quadruple GDP to 1,000 USD per person by the year 2000. It was decided that in addition to aiming for prosperity, the birth rate had to be controlled: fewer people; more to share. This idea wasn’t peculiar to the Chinese. The whole world was afraid of a population explosion. In particular, The Limits to Growth, published by the Club of Rome in 1972, was the breakthrough for the idea that the planet could not continue to sustain population growth and growing consumption. Once natural resources have been depleted, starvation will ensue, and there will be a shortage of everything. The Western countries provided developing countries with foreign aid to decrease their birthrates, and many countries campaigned for smaller families. India also took a tough approach by implementing forced sterilization. It’s amazing that in 1983 the United Nations gave India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Qian Xinzhong,

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China’s minister of family planning, the first United Nations Population Awards for their exceptional efforts to solve the population problem! It took the world another few years to realize the suffering actually caused by these coercive measures. But China took birth regulations to the extreme in deciding to restrict families to a single child. It likely would not have been possible anywhere else, but in China, the country was ruled by an autocratic Communist Party that had frequently organized huge campaigns for its people. Deng Xiaoping and many of his fellow party leaders used to be soldiers, because they had all fought in the communist ranks in the Chinese Civil War and WWII against the Japanese. Their entire lives – as of those of all Chinese citizens – had been one continuous state of emergency. War was followed by many campaigns led by Mao. The Chinese had become used to grandiose goals and brutal methods. The Cultural Revolution, which officially lasted for one decade, ended just before the one-child policy started. During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese intellectuals had been browbeaten into submission, universities were closed, and many city dwellers were forced to move to rural areas to work. People were pitted one against the other, and they killed and shamed one another. In the beginning of the 1980s, China’s wounds were still raw, and people were just beginning to take the first steps back to civilization and morality. The country’s leadership had also treated the people like a herd in its previous campaigns. Rural people were harnessed into communes, or citizens were suddenly ordered to make steel in ovens slapped together in their yards. Controlling the

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population wasn’t new, because even before the one-child policy, Chinese leaders had closely monitored the movement of the population, and it had been difficult for people in rural areas to move to the cities. It was as if the people were just one pawn among others in China’s planned economy, and the politicians determined the size, place, and tasks of the population at their whim. Even campaigns aimed at limiting fertility weren’t anything new in China. Even before the one-child policy was implemented, similar methods were used to control population growth. In the 1970s, an important campaign carried the slogan Later, longer, and fewer. Citizens were encouraged to marry later – between the ages of 23 and 25 at the earliest in rural areas, and between the ages of 25 and 28 in the cities – and to wait longer between children, or at least four years, and to have fewer children to begin with. Propaganda was propagated all around China in the 1970s. People were assigned to monitor women’s menstrual cycles and the size of their bellies in villages, cities, and workplaces. Women were outfitted with IUDs, and after the second or third child, sterilization was recommended. The campaign was quickly effective. In the 1970s, the average number of children dropped from almost six to under three! This kind of rapid fertility decline is rare in world history. Because of the Later, longer, and fewer campaign, a large number of women were forced or pressured into using IUDs, being sterilized, or having abortions. But the pace accelerated at the start of the one-child policy, because Later, longer, and fewer wasn’t enough for the politicians. They wanted the birth

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rate to go down even faster. And so the more cruel and unconditional one-child policy came into effect. The sad truth is that unlike what Chinese propaganda suggests, the increased brutality of government measures wasn’t effective. From the beginning of the 1970s to today, 70 percent of the drop in the fertility rates of Chinese women happened before the one-child policy came into effect. In other words, it occurred already in the 1970s. Fertility rates didn’t drop significantly during the time of the one-child policy until the end of the 1980s, even though the methods used were brutal. One reason the rates didn’t drop further is that China dropped the marriage age in 1980 – according to the new law, women could get married at the age of 20, and men at the age of 22. This meant that people in the large age groups were able to marry earlier than they were during the campaigns of the 1970s. Additionally, people in rural areas resisted the one-child policy for years. They had been driven into a corner, because at the same time that the one-child policy was implemented, what little health care and elder services the farmers received was scrapped. Boys became an ever more important security for old age. When fertility rates finally did begin to fall again, there were many reasons for it: The campaigns at the beginning of the 1990s were especially harsh, the population grew accustomed to smaller families, the cost of childrearing had risen, and perhaps above all, China was prospering. The number of children families have tends to fall in prospering countries. Susan Greenhalgh, research professor of Chinese society at Harvard University, claims the most significant impact of the one-child

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policy on the drop in fertility rates was the dissemination of information and contraceptives, and not its forceful measures. In a way, the one-child policy was successful in achieving its goals, or at least the leadership was able to meet the target they had planned for while it was in effect. In the year 2000, there were just over 1.2 billion Chinese, in other words just slightly more than the stated goal. Amazingly, GDP was over 3,000 USD per person, which was three times more than Deng Xiaoping had hoped for. China’s economic growth was larger than anyone had been able to predict. But the future was beginning to look frightening. Just as the Chinese who protested the policy had predicted, now that fewer children were born, they were faced with ticking time bombs in the pension and dependency ratio. The suffering caused by the one-child policy was also significant. * * * The one-child policy was unpredictable, and its effects surprised political decision-makers time and time again. People said one thing but did another in its name. In principle, the one-child policy was supposed to be realized through education, but the central government handed out such strict goals to its provinces that forced abortions and mass sterilizations were very common. The government could not have been mistaken about this connection to the fulfilment of their goals. Sometimes, for example during the most brutal year of the policy in 1983, the government even gave out clear orders for the sterilization of people in rural areas.

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The year 1983 was such a terrible one, because the first years the policy was in effect had scared the politicians – so many babies had still been born. The government ordered local officials to enforce the one-child policy strictly. The result was an unprecedented number of abortions and mass sterilizations, and a large number of those were certainly forced. That year, at least 15 million abortions and 20 million sterilizations were performed in China. Women’s physical and mental health and their sense of selfworth suffered tremendously. Parents were caught killing their daughters. The People’s Daily warned of the large-scale “slaughter and drowning” of baby girls. People in rural areas rebelled and attacked officials. Even the Party’s village cadres hated what they were forced to inflict on their own. The reputation of the Communist Party was badly tarnished. The government was horrified, and loosened the reigns. Families were given exceptions to have more children. The most significant exception was that rural couples were usually given permission to have another child, if their first child was a girl. Even so, the children still had to be spaced many years apart. Rural families hoped for boys, because traditionally boys were the ones who cared for their elderly parents. Permission for a second child was also granted if the first child was disabled, or if both parents themselves were only children. Ethnic minorities were also allowed to have more children, and in the villages largely populated by ethnic minorities, large families were common. The list of exceptions grew longer and varied from province to province. By 2000, there were already more than 20 exceptions that entitled families to more than one child.

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It would in fact have been more accurate to call the “one-child policy” the 1.5 child policy. The rules around the one-child policy also varied by region. The long-standing main principle held that each region had its own baby quota. Married couples were granted permission to have a child if the quota allowed it, and couples had to apply for permission before trying to get pregnant. If a woman became pregnant without official approval, she was encouraged – and sometimes forced – to have an abortion. Families with too many children were punished with fines and lost their jobs. It wasn’t just about whether families could have one or two children. Children had to be brought into the world during the window prescribed by officials. Local officials began implementing harsher measures again at the beginning of the 1990s when the government intensified its birth regulation activities. A particularly effective method was to evaluate local officials according to whether the number of children in their region remained within the limits of the established quota. Even if the official had performed all of his or her other duties well, it was pointless to hope for a promotion if too many children had been born. In a way, controlling the birth rate became the number one job of these officials. To the central government’s surprise, officials began to compete with each other over who had the lowest number of babies. The regions didn’t want to end up on the wrong side of the country’s average. The use of more brutal methods intensified again in the countryside, and in many areas, officials attempted to have all babies from all unauthorized pregnancies aborted. Local officials’ orders were sometimes

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senseless. They might for example demand that no child be born in the villages under their purview for the next three months! As a result of new restrictions on adoptions and the enthusiasm of the officials, the abandonment of girl children increased markedly. Implementation of the one-child policy was very different between the cities and the rural areas. While enforcement measures were harsher against villagers than city dwellers, the latter were strictly limited to one child. Even after having a girl child, families were not allowed to have another. On the other hand, there was not such a great need for boys in the city, because city jobs had advantages that those in rural areas could only dream about: social security, pensions, and health care. It was also easier to monitor women in the cities. Since they worked, it was possible to monitor their possible pregnancies at their neighborhood as well as at the workplace. Having a child in secret was almost impossible, and an unauthorized child could mean losing your job with all of its benefits. This deterrent alone kept families down to one child. It was easier to have an unauthorized child in rural areas. It was possible to flee to relatives in another village to give birth in secret, and farmers didn’t have city jobs with good benefits to lose. They were probably heavily fined instead. People were uneducated in rural areas, and often illiterate as well, and the tradition asserting the necessity of a boy child had deep roots. On the other hand, the one-child policy had the most severe effect on the rural population, and especially on women, when the officials used harsh measures to force

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disobedient people to toe the line. The cities didn’t “need” to resort to such measures as much. The difference in standard of living between the rural areas and the cities was and continues to be enormous. Even though rural areas have prospered in recent decades, cities have grown wealthy in a completely different way. Western journalists tend to compare Shanghai to a wealthy Western city and a Chinese village to a slum in Africa. The one-child policy also advanced at a different pace based on where people lived. In the cities, soon after the implementation of the one-child policy, women noticed that they didn’t even want to have more than one child. It was difficult to balance employment with housework. As the 1990s rolled around, urban women had already accepted the idea of having only one child. In rural areas, people began to accept the idea of having one child later, by the turn of the new millennium. Families everywhere began to notice that smaller families were better-off than families with many children. People also learned to value girls in rural areas, because they often took better care of their blood relations than boys did. Migrant work also helps to explain the shrinking size of families over the course of the 1990s. As young people moved to the cities, they adopted city dwellers’ views on the benefits of small families. Women went to work and sent money to their families in rural areas just like the men did. People realized that they didn’t necessarily need to have a boy to be a breadwinner for the family. In China, birth regulation hasn’t ever just been about the number of children, but also the quality of those children.

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The Chinese leadership considered the citizens of China, and especially those in rural areas, to be a backwards impediment that kept the country from developing into one of the world’s superpowers. In the 1990s and 2000s, the one-child policy and those selling goods and services aimed at children were successful in inciting parents to prepare their children to be competitive at every level: Only children are cared for, coddled, and educated with the resources and enthusiasm of the entire family. And because this job is so laborious and costly, families don’t even have the resources for another child. * * * The one-child policy caused unnecessary cruelty and could have been averted: It was less effective at cutting birth rates than previous campaigns, and it brutally curtailed people’s rights to make decisions about reproduction and their own bodies. Its benefits in no way outweigh the human suffering it caused. According to opinion polls, a clear majority of Chinese supported the one-child policy. Although opinion polls must always be approached with some skepticism in China, the Chinese I encountered support this claim. Of the people I interviewed for the book, many supported or at least understood the mandatory birth regulations. They told me so, even though some of them have experienced horrible things, things that have ruined their lives. The idea that there are too many Chinese is firmly ingrained in the everyday experiences of China’s citizens. One can easily gain an intimate sense of that by riding on the subway in

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Beijing or Shanghai during rush hour. During holidays and vacations, attractions become so crowded that people walk pushed up against one another. The sheer number of people defines every aspect of the life of the Chinese, because competition for success at school, university spots, and nowadays also for good jobs, is extremely fierce. The Chinese say that we Westerners don’t understand what it is like to compete with blood, sweat, and tears from childhood onwards. And it’s true, we don’t understand. Without the one-child policy, there would be even more Chinese, and the competition for limited resources would be all the fiercer. The Chinese have more or less completely accepted the Communist Party’s propaganda on this subject: The one-child policy was effective, and that is precisely why there are 400 million fewer Chinese today. Even though neither claim is true, the country’s leadership has explained for decades that population control and reducing the size of the population have been the preconditions for China’s growing prosperity and prominence on the global stage. This kind of rationale resonates deeply with a very patriotic people. Another common misconception is that the government did a good job implementing the one-child policy, and that it is only the bad local officials who succumbed to overreaches of power. Of course the Chinese were enraged when they learned of forced abortions and how houses were bulldozed to the ground, but those are considered to be events that happened long ago, and errors committed by local officials. The Chinese do understand the many serious disadvantages brought about by the one-child policy. On social media,

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people mourn parents who are childless, because their adult only children have died, or they mourn their extra living children who have no papers, and whose parents haven’t had the money to pay their fines for them. People envied the rich, who could afford the fines and have as many children as their hearts desired. In fact, middle-class and poorer families also saved for a long time to be able to cover the fines for having an additional child. This aspect also helped cause the one-child policy to crumble. The overall mood of the Chinese in the past few years can perhaps best be summarized in this way: Even though the one-child policy was painful, it was still useful for China. It had been a collective sacrifice for the country’s future. But just as there is a time and place for everything, the one-child policy became unnecessary and empty of meaning. * * * When China introduced the one-child policy, the leadership promised that it would only be a temporary measure in place for one generation. So when 30 years were drawing to a close and 2010 was approaching, the Chinese began anxiously waiting for an end to the policy. Based on their own experiences, the Chinese knew that hardly anyone even wanted more than one or at most two children anymore. There were already too few babies born in China, and population researchers were concerned. During the last years of the one-child policy, the fertility rate was 1.05– 1.60, depending on the source. In 2011, the fertility rate was 1.60 in the European Union, and even that was considered low.

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India will surpass China’s population by 2025, and in the same decade, China’s population will begin to decline. When fewer babies are born, the population pyramid begins to hollow out at the bottom, and the number of elderly people in relation to children and those of working age begins to grow disproportionately large. Who will take care of the elderly in the future? Does the government have the means to care for them and to offer pensions? China’s age dependency ratio could be called a ticking time bomb. Currently the ratio is almost perfect: There are five people of working age for a single pensioner. But this situation will change quickly in the next 20–30 years. Then there will only be 1.5 people of working age for every pensioner. That’s what has happened and is happening in the Western world as people live longer and have fewer children. But in China, the one-child policy has only increased the speed of this development. The Western countries have had time to prepare for the future – though not enough – and become wealthy in peace, but not China and the Chinese. Even though China has the second largest economy in the world, its GDP is only about one tenth of what it is in the United States per person. The number of pensioners is growing at a very fast rate in relation to the number of people of working age. There are already huge gaps in pension funds, and the elderly population isn’t well off either. In her book One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment, journalist Mei Fong summarizes one of her main premises well: “Deng’s economic reforms may have lifted 500 million above the poverty line, but that still leaves nearly a

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quarter of its 185 million retirees living on less than a dollar a day. China’s greying transition is a first-world problem, but China hasn’t achieved first world prosperity yet.” Due to the vagueness of Chinese statistics, people can have many different opinions about the number of poor in China and how to define them. But the problem is clear: Who will provide for the elderly in the future? China hesitated to give up the one-child policy. China’s leaders evidently had different opinions on the matter. It wasn’t easy for the Party to give up something that had been trumpeted to the people as good politics for decades and where its successful implementation had been considered the number one metric for party cadres. The leadership was also stricter in requiring party members and government workers, the backbone of China’s bureaucratic machinery, to comply with its birth regulations. The Chinese often say that the most important reason the one-child policy lasted so long has to do with the power exercised by the family planning officials who oversaw the policy. This group of half a million people was afraid of losing their power and status. The fines collected from additional children were also a notable source of income in many areas around China, as were the bribes given to officials. China has loosened regulations gradually, and due to the different kinds of exceptions available, the strictest iteration of the one-child policy in 2007 only affected slightly more than one-third of the population. In 2013, all couples were already being encouraged to have a second child, in instances where at least one parent was an only child themselves. But the Chinese

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weren’t enthused by this change. Just as many population researchers had predicted, once couples acquire the taste for a smaller family, they won’t consent to having a larger one. In a little less than two years, only 15 percent of the families with permission to have two children actually applied to have a second one. According to one opinion poll, 60 percent of parents with one child said that they wouldn’t have another child under any circumstances, no matter what the policy was. Finally, in October 2015, China announced that it would be moving to a two-child policy which would give every family the right to have two children. It implemented this new policy in the beginning of 2016. The 36-year-old one-child policy had come to an end at last. * * * Now China needs to increase its birthrate, but how? When the one-child policy ended, Western researchers predicted that China would have a baby boom for the next two to three years, especially in the cities where people have lived under the strictest iterations of the policy. After that, the pace would likely slacken. Opinion polls conducted in the fall of 2015 found that 40 percent of the Chinese polled said they would only have one child, and 30 percent said they also wanted another child. The rest were either still thinking about how many children to have or were not interested in having any children at all. It is unlikely the birth rate will increase very much with these kinds of numbers. Now everyone is waiting to see when China will stop enforcing its mandatory birth regulations altogether – as it

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stands, officials continue to monitor the number of babies, and families are not allowed to have more than two children. Even without birth regulations, China will likely not see large families. Children are considered to be expensive investments, and citizens used to the 1.5 child policy find the idea of a large family strange. Many researchers believe that by 2020 or so, the Party could yield to releasing its grip on the bedrooms and wombs of its citizens. The Party can save face by introducing a slow and “deliberate” removal of birth regulations that has guided the direction of the country in so many ways. It hasn’t been easy for the pawns of the policy, the citizens, to save face either and live their lives honorably. I don’t know if I would have the courage to publicly share being pressured to leave my baby on a street corner or being forced to buy a wife for my son because of the shortage of women. I am very thankful to my interviewees, many of whom bravely came forward and consented to using their real names. I am especially thankful to Aurora, a Chinese girl adopted to Finland, and to her family, her mother Hanna, her father Hannu, and her brother Arttu. I wrote a story about them for Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s largest daily, right after I moved to China in 2013. That year, the family went to Nanjing to bring their new daughter to Finland. I think that’s when the spark for this book was born. My thoughts kept returning to abandoned girls and other mysteries surrounding the onechild policy. What has this policy meant for ordinary Chinese? The repercussions of the dead and buried one-child policy will continue to haunt China’s economy and the everyday lives

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of its citizens for decades to come. In this book, many women and men reveal their lifelong sorrows: How a child born without papers is doomed to be poor and without a family of their own. How only children, known as Little Emperors, may not lack money in their lives but will feel relentless pressure from their relatives. How daughters abandoned decades ago are now looking for their biological parents. And how biological parents are looking for the daughters they abandoned. In reality, that is exactly what the one-child policy has been all about: millions and millions of stories of individual people and families that will continue to reverberate for a long time to come. PRIMARY SOURCES AND ADDITIONAL READING Fong, Mei (2016) One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York. Greenhalgh, Susan and Edwin Winckler (2005) Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics. Stanford University Press, Redwood City, CA. King Whyte, Martin, Wang Feng and Yong Cai (2015) “Challenging Myths about China’s One-Child Policy,” The China Journal, vol. 74 (July), pp. 144–159.

1

UNDOCUMENTED Mrs Wang had too many children. Now her children can’t get a job, get married, or even board a train.

Seven children! In the Chinese context, a family with seven children sounds so incredible that it’s hard for me to believe the story. My driver can hardly believe it either. “Seven children! My goodness!” my driver keeps saying over and over again. “That can’t possibly be true.” How could it be possible for a family to trick local family planning officials so many times? And why would a couple want to do something that would surely cause major problems for themselves and their children? “Do all of the seven children have hukou?” the driver asks. That’s a self-evident question for the Chinese. Hukou, China’s official household registration record, is a citizen’s most important piece of identification. Without it, one officially does not exist. People with no hukou are not allowed

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in hospitals, they can’t get married, go to work, or even board a train. To buy train tickets, citizens must show their identity cards, and it’s very difficult to get one without hukou. The Chinese call people without hukou “black children,” and there are millions of them. Many unpermitted additional children are undocumented citizens. This is one of the consequences of the one-child policy. What is it like to live your life as someone who doesn’t officially exist? The question is so intriguing that I travel to the village of Zaolinzhuang in October 2015 to see if the rumors about Mr Zhang Bozeng’s large family are true. The village lies on the outskirts of Beijing, a one-and-a-half-hour ride by subway and taxi from downtown Beijing. Skyscrapers haven’t managed to spread to this corner of the capital. The taxi drives through open fields, along a paved but pockmarked road. Zaolinzhuang, a genuine Chinese village, sits at the end of the road. It looks more like a densely populated community, because the gray and white brick homes, shops, kiosks, and simple restaurants are all packed in close together along the intersecting streets. My taxi driver drops me off on the main road in the village, and I start asking passersby if they know where Mr Zhang lives. A man on a bicycle shakes his head, but I am lucky with the next person. A woman carrying two heavy pails covered with lids points around the corner. Over there. The house is large, with a big, red front door. Long, traditional red paper streamers hang from either side of the entrance. They are covered in Chinese characters, wishing for a happy

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new year to come. The streamers were hung up months ago during Chinese New Year, so they look rather tattered now. I knock on the door. The door opens, and two school-age girls are the first to tumble out the door. A man who is almost toothless and looks to be in his sixties stands on the threshold in a sweater and quilted jacket. This is Mr Zhang. A tall teenage boy peers over one of his shoulders. “Mr Zhang, is it true you have seven children?” “Yes, it is,” he replies. * * * There are three sofas in the large living room, all with enough room to seat at least three people. Chairman Mao glows like a god from a poster on one of the walls, and in another poster, fish are spouting a fountain of colors. Fish are believed to bring luck and prosperity to a home. The sofas are soon filled with people, because Mr Zhang Bozeng and Mrs Wang Maochen’s five youngest children still live at home. No one can remember the exact ages of all of the children, so Mr Zhang looks for a paper at the bottom of a box that indicates their birth years. Thus we are able to determine everyone’s ages: • Songtao, 31 • Zejin, 29 • Zelong, 23 • Jinxin, 21 • Zedong, 18

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• Xiaomin, 11 • Xiaoman, 9 The youngest girls, Xiaomin and Xiaoman, sit down to watch cartoons on TV, and Zelong and Zedong, two tall and thin young men, offer hot tea from small glasses, which one should carefully pick up from the top of the glass using two fingers. Mr Zhang and Zelong then go into the dining room to eat the cabbage stir fry Mrs Wang has prepared, the family’s staple meal. The family has a plot of land located at the edge of the village, and Mr Zhang and his son will return to the field after lunch. In the 1970s, large families such as these were still common in China, and people over 40 often have many siblings. Mr Zhang and Mrs Wang’s gaggle of children is of course a rarity from the time of the one-child policy. “This is my revenge,” Mrs Wang says. “As an ordinary citizen and a woman, I had no other way to rebel than to have children.” Initially, Mr Zhang and Mrs Wang had planned to have three children. Even though that was a serious offense, Chinese families with three children aren’t exceptionally rare. Especially in rural areas, many families have continued to have children until the awaited boy child was born. But no one actually knows how many families there are like these, because unpermitted children were often hidden from the authorities. On the other hand, families with two children were normal in rural areas. The most significant exception granted by officials under the one-child policy usually allowed rural families to have a second child if the first child was a girl.

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In the case of Mr Zhang and Mrs Wang, it wasn’t about trying to have a boy or a girl – their first child was a girl, the second a boy – but rather that they liked children so much. Their plan was the following: Mrs Wang hid at home during her second and third pregnancies. The family planned to save and pay the fines for the additional children and then receive the hukous for their children. In theory, all children were to be given hukous automatically, but in practice, authorities across China withheld hukous until families had paid the fines for their unpermitted children. Officials were thus able to ensure that those who broke the law received their due punishment, and local officials received the money owed them. It was possible to bypass the one-child policy with money for quite some time. Couples had to pay a fine known as a “social compensation fee,” usually equivalent to a few years of income, for unpermitted children. Consequently, wealthy and frugal families were able to afford larger families, especially as the fines were often at least partly calculated according to the average earnings in the area. The wealthy simply had additional children and paid for them. Zhang Yimou, a famous Chinese movie director, was given an enormous fine of about one million euros for unpermitted children in 2014. Rumors circulating on social media asserted that Zhang had as many as seven children with different women. Zhang finally admitted that he had three children with his current wife. He also had another child from a previous marriage. These fines have been a significant source of income for local government coffers in the poorest corners of China. As

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the one-child policy was winding down, money-grabbing local officials were caught red-handed trying to pressure families into having unpermitted children. In 2012 alone, over 20 billion yuan, or 3 billion euros, were collected in fines for unpermitted children. Mrs Wang successfully hid her pregnancies and gave birth to her children at home, but she and her husband couldn’t pay the fines they owed, no matter how hard they tried. According to the family, the local family planning officials refused to give the children their hukou, because they did not want to be caught allowing too many children to be born in the district. This is a credible claim, because in the Chinese planned economy, no one could fail to fulfill, or in this case exceed, the mandated quota without suffering the consequences. The couple was surprised and horrified. Because they couldn’t officially register their children, the children were threatened with the possibility of not being able to go to school, find a partner, go to work, or receive social services. Often families wanted to hide their children for fear of fines or other types of punishment. In addition to receiving a fine, a government worker – whether a professor or a worker in a government factory on an assembly line – could lose their jobs for an unpermitted child. In rural villages, officials often confiscated family valuables such as TVs, and sometimes they even bulldozed houses to the ground. It’s impossible to know the exact number of unpermitted children, because there is no trustworthy record of them anywhere. According to Liang Zhongtang, a population researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, there

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could be as many as 25 million undocumented Chinese. This figure is much higher than the estimate of 13 million used by China and the Western Media and contains other undocumented persons, not just the so-called black children. Every Chinese person understands the importance of hukou, because it directs their lives in so many ways. Not all hukous are of the same value either: A hukou indicating the right to reside in Beijing or Shanghai is envied and highly desirable, while a hukou for a rural village is far less attractive. The purpose of the hukou system has been to control migration to the cities, but it is often called the Chinese version of apartheid that discriminates against rural Chinese. Even if a Chinese person moves to a city, their schools, health care, and many other public benefits are tied to their hometown. And even if their children are born in the city, they inherit the rural status of their parents, and consequently, they often cannot enjoy the superior public services cities have to offer. Especially in the biggest cities, it is still hard for people from rural areas to change their official status to that of a city dweller, even though restrictions have been significantly loosened in recent years and increasing numbers of migrant workers are now able to access some city-based services. Mrs Wang’s fourth pregnancy was an accident, and she went to the family planning officials to ask for an abortion, as honorable citizens were supposed to do. The office was empty; apparently everyone was on a business trip. Time passed, and Mrs Wang became attached to the child she was carrying. She decided to keep that baby, too.

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Family planning officials came to see Mrs Wang for a home visit when she was in the last stages of her pregnancy, and they noticed her round belly. “They forced me to go to the hospital. I didn’t want an abortion, but they asked me what I wanted in exchange for having an abortion. I demanded hukous for my second and third children, and they promised me my children would get them.” During lunchtime, the doctors stuck a needle in the head of the baby in Mrs Wang’s womb. The next day Mrs Wang gave birth to a dead baby. She saw the body, and the sight haunted her. “She was a perfect little girl. I was very sad for a long time.” She couldn’t eat or sleep, and when she was finally able to sleep, she had nightmares about the baby. Sometimes she thought she was going crazy. Months went by, and she still wasn’t given the hukous she had been promised for her second and third children. Her sorrow turned to rage. “The officials demanded that I be sterilized. I asked them if they thought sterilizing fellow citizens made them good communists.” Throughout its existence, the Chinese Communist Party has used propaganda to glorify party members and officials as good members of society who help and serve the people. “I wanted to kill the people who forced me to have an abortion,” Mrs Wang says, her round cheeks flaming. The anger in her voice is clear. Mrs Wang molded her murderous thoughts into revenge. She refused to be sterilized and instead planned to have as many children as she possibly could. And so she gave birth to four more children.

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The fourth and fifth children were born at home, but she went to the hospital to give birth to the sixth and seventh children, because she was concerned about their health. She waited until the last minute to go to the hospital to ensure the local officials couldn’t intervene in the pregnancies. She also entered the hospital using a false name. Now Mr Zhang and Mrs Wang had seven children, but only Songtao, their lawful firstborn, had hukou. Mrs Wang’s sacrifice, the abortion of her daughter, did not legalize the status of any of her other children, despite the promises she had been given. The future for her six other children looked bleak, nonexistent as a matter of fact. * * * The family’s home is quite large. In addition to the living room, they have a kitchen, a dining room, a spacious foyer, and five bedrooms. Each bedroom has a bed, but no closets. As is common in China, clothes are stacked here and there in the corners of the bedrooms. A washing machine hums away in the foyer’s doorway. The family enjoys their own company inside these four walls. The villagers eye them suspiciously, and even little children make fun of them. “I tell my children: Don’t bother others with your problems. You are children who shouldn’t even exist.” Children who shouldn’t even exist. Those words sound cruel coming from a mother’s mouth, but Mrs Wang says them with affection. Her youngest daughters clamber into her lap, and Mrs Wang pushes stray wisps of hair back into their braids

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and massages their legs. The older boys look on their parents and their younger siblings with beaming eyes. It is as if the family has become more close-knit because of their troubles. And the family certainly has enough problems, because their earnings are few. Farming the fields they rent brings in about 1,000 euros a year. Songtao works in a store, and sends the majority of her earnings home to the family, amounting to almost 300 euros a month. Luckily they spend very little, because they get cabbage and other vegetables from their own fields. They wear their clothes until they are worn out. Almost everyone has holes in their shirts and pants. But Mrs Wang isn’t worried about money. The biggest problem is the missing hukous. In terms of their education, the children have had more luck than many other children without hukous, because the local principal is Mr Zhang’s old classmate. The children have all been allowed to go to school, and the youngest are still in elementary and high school. But it’s still pointless for them to dream of going to the university or getting a job. After Zejin and Zelong, the second and third children, finished school, they stayed home to help their father in the fields. Even though Zejin doesn’t have his hukou, he managed to marry unofficially, and the couple had a happy wedding. But the young couple could not register their marriage or get a marriage license. In the eyes of their families and the village, they were still married. Zejin’s wife moved in with the family. At that point, the young people weren’t bothered about their lack of papers. Zejin’s wife did not come from a wealthy family

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either, and her husband and mother-in-law were good to her. In China, it is quite common for husbands to be abusive and violent. Wives are also often afraid of their mothers-in-law, because traditionally women must obey the mother of their husband. Stories about awful mothers-in-law are common. The young couple was happy for a while and even had a baby boy. But the baby couldn’t get hukou, because in the eyes of the officials, the couple wasn’t married – and Zejin himself didn’t have hukou to make the marriage official. When their son became seriously ill at the age of three, he wasn’t allowed in a proper hospital. That’s when Zejin’s wife’s family decided that she had to leave her undocumented partner, and take her son with her. The fourth child, Jinxin, didn’t manage to finish high school. She felt it was pointless, since university wasn’t an option. Jinxin found a boyfriend on the internet, married him unofficially, and moved in with her husband’s family. And the same thing happened again: The young couple had a girl, the baby couldn’t get hukou, and the husband’s family sent Jinxin back home. Jinxin’s daughter stayed with her husband’s family. She last saw her a year ago. Jinxin became depressed and now takes medication for her depression. Mrs Wang sighs as she strokes her subdued daughter’s hair. Jinxin hardly says a word, even as the younger children periodically pop into other rooms, whisper to each other, and roll impatiently around the sofa. Jinxin is wearing a short quilted jacket and sitting hunched between everyone else, but she is in her own world. When someone addresses her, she simply smiles and shrugs her shoulders in response.

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“She’s gained weight. She used to be thin and beautiful. According to the doctor, Jinxin will have to take medication to fight her depression for the rest of her life,” Mrs Wang says. The fifth child, 18-year-old high schooler Zedong, tried to commit suicide a little less than a year ago. Now he is standing and leaning against the doorway, and he says he feels better. “I felt like I had no worth. Even dogs have papers, but I had nothing. Everyone looks down on me. Now I am training myself to think that what others think of me doesn’t matter. It’s not my fault that I don’t have hukou.” The power of positive thinking seems to be working on Zedong. He answers all of my questions cheerfully and closely follows his mother’s narrative, and he even occasionally breaks into a heartfelt smile that reaches his eyes. Songtao, the oldest child, has always had hukou, but her life isn’t exactly in order either. She lives with relatives and works in a shop. She doesn’t dare to date anyone, because she is afraid a potential boyfriend’s family would be shocked by her large family. It is the duty of married couples to help their relatives as long as they live. A few years ago, the family began fighting for their rights, and now their situation isn’t as hopeless. * * * It all began on the internet. Zelong decided to share the family’s story on Chinese social media. He explained that the officials in their home district refused to accept payment for their fines, and that consequently, most of his siblings had no hukou. A lively discussion about the family ensued. The discussion has since

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been taken offline, but the family shares some of the comments with me: Oh what a terrible fate, you poor things! So selfish to have so many children! Blame yourselves! Children shouldn’t be punished for their parents’ mistakes! And soon things started to happen. As the family tells it, the police were rattled and called the family with the promise to give the second and third children their hukous for a total of 5,000 yuan, or about 7,000 euros – the amount of the fines at the time the children were born. The local officials finally agreed to recognize the existence of the other children as well. All of the children’s names and birth years were recorded in an official document, the same one we all looked at earlier when we checked the children’s ages. But the officials also declared that the fine for the last four children, including the accrued interest over the years, would amount to about 80,000 euros. Of course the family didn’t have the money to pay a fine as large as that. The head of the district-level office promised hukous for all of the children against an IOU. And so Mr Zhang and Mrs Wang signed a document stating they owed 80,000 euros in fines. But they still didn’t get the hukous. A Chinese journalist became interested in their story and interviewed the family. When the journalist asked districtlevel officials for their comments, they were taken aback and asked Zelong, the third child, to come to their office. Zelong was too afraid to go, because he was afraid of a trap. It is not at all rare for officials to detain, threaten, and even use force against citizens demanding their rights.

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As a matter of fact, the police had already detained Zelong and his brother Zejin once before, when they tried to go to the State Bureau for Letters and Calls in Beijing to plead their case. Dissatisfied citizens from around the country stream to the bureau to lodge complaints against local officials who have mistreated them, but often they are detained in front of the bureau and sent back home instead. But the pressure the family was able to exert finally produced results. In the summer of 2015, Zejin and Zelong received the hukous they had long been waiting for. It was a happy day. They finally existed! And their official status had immediate consequences. Zejin was able to get a driver’s license, and then he got a job as a guard and moved into his employer’s dorm. Zelong was able to take the qualification exam to become an electrician. But Mrs Wang still isn’t satisfied. “Their lives have already been ruined in a way, because they couldn’t properly attend school.” And the officials still haven’t agreed to give the other children their papers, despite the IOU. “If they could get their hukous, their lives would change. My three youngest could still get a better education and a good career.” But according to Mrs Wang, it all seems so difficult because the officials are shirking their responsibility by purposefully serving the family with difficult requests. Officials claim that they need the children’s birth certificates from Mrs Wang’s home province of Hebei. That is of course impossible, because the children were born either in secret at home or under the security of a false name at the hospital.

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A quiet Jinxin opens her mouth and says she would like to go back to high school. But the principal rejected the idea. Mrs Wang shakes her head and says that there is no more hope in Jinxin’s case. Many people on the internet have blamed Mr Zhang and Mrs Wang for their children’s suffering. Why did they have so many children when they knew what the consequences would be? But Mrs Wang refuses to regret her actions. Or maybe she does every now and again. “Sometimes I think three children would have been a good number.” * * * Soon after my visit with the family, China announced that all undocumented children would be given hukous. So in the winter of 2016, I decided to visit the family again after hearing this fantastic news. But on my visit, I encounter a frustrated Mrs Wang sitting on the sofa. When the family first heard the news, they did believe for a moment that their lives would finally change for the better. The principal at Zedong’s high school had even called him out of class and congratulated him on the news. But things didn’t turn out as they expected. “The local officials said that they were not going to believe any news they saw on the internet. They were waiting to receive the news directly from the central government.” Now the family is anxiously waiting to find out whether the official orders will make it to their village in time for Zedong

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to take the university entrance exams in a little over a year. He is doing very well in high school; English is his only difficult subject. “I’d like to go to the university and work in IT,” Zedong tells me. But the family does have some good news. Jinxin’s exhusband has promised her that she can see her daughter soon. Everyone in the family also has new clothes, and I don’t see any more holes in their shirt cuffs. I also see many different kinds of food on the table, including meat. This is partly because they have just celebrated the New Year when people traditionally dress in new clothes and eat better food. I also see brand new red streamers hanging by the front door. But the main reason the family is doing better is because the family’s income has increased dramatically. Zejin works as a guard and Zelong as an electrician, and they both give their parents a large portion of their salaries. Their two hukous alone have already revolutionized the family’s life. But I still leave feeling sad. Will the local officials ever agree to give hukous to the other children? It seems that granting official status to all of the undocumented children in China will take time. In the first half of 2016, China announced that about 800,000 people had been granted hukous. Many provinces and cities continued to enforce fines, though now it was possible to pay them off afterwards. Parents who had hidden their unpermitted children and avoided paying fines were still afraid to come forward to the officials.

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* * * A few months later, in the summer of 2016, I am taking a trip with some Finnish friends to Fenghuang. This city in Hunan province with cobblestone streets is a favored destination among the Chinese. We look out over the river from our restaurant table by a window. An endless stream of Chinese tourists wanders along either side of the river. Suddenly I get a text message in English from Zedong: “Our family account.” I immediately suspect that Zedong has used translation software to produce this strange message. That spring, I had talked to Zedong on the phone a couple of times and also sent him text messages to help him practice his English. That’s his stumbling block in high school. But I can somehow guess what Zedong is trying to say. “You got hukous?” I text him back. “Yes,” he responds. Most of the children have finally gotten their hukous! That’s fantastic! I smile broadly as we clink our wine glasses in Fenghuang. Zedong can now buy train tickets and join the legions of enthusiastic Chinese tourists! Later I ask for a phone interview with Zedong. Mrs Wang’s hearing isn’t good enough for a phone conversation. Zedong is ablaze with excitement and is positively gushing with dreams. But he isn’t dreaming about traveling; he is thinking about passing the university entrance exams. And first things first: He is going to look for part-time work after school.

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“Now that I have hukou and an identity card, I can easily get a job. I’m already an adult, and I need to take responsibility for my family instead of always asking them for money,” he says emphatically. But what’s most important is the feeling that he finally exists. “Whenever someone used to talk about anything having to do with hukou, I felt discouraged. Now it doesn’t feel like that at all anymore. Now that I have hukou, I’m just like everyone else.” In the end, the hukous were “easily” arranged. After the officials had demanded the children’s birth certificates, it only took a few months to receive the remaining hukous. Mr Zhang and Mrs Wang were able to convince one hospital to write birth certificates for Zedong and his younger sister. Then the family marched to the police station with their documents, and the hukous were ready just a few weeks later. Now Jinxin is the only child in the family who doesn’t have hukou. The hospital said it could only provide documents for children born after 1996. Jinxin and her parents will have to take a DNA test to serve in place of a birth certificate. The family is hopeful that things will now turn out for the better. The first four children didn’t have the opportunity to receive a proper education, but the doors to the university are open for the rest. And there are no more obstacles to marriage, having children, or getting a job! As Zedong says, “I’m full of hope. It feels like my life is starting over again.”

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* * * Zhang Zedong: The one-child policy was a product of a particular time period in China’s history. I don’t hate it, because it played an important role in China’s development. But it wasn’t good either. Even foreigners were able to get official papers to live in China permanently while many Chinese couldn’t even get the basic hukou. I believe that the changes to the one-child policy are a sign that China has started paying attention to human rights.

2

UNBORN Mr Li worked for the government, so his child had to be aborted. Mrs Zhang’s fetus was taken by force.

Li Dapeng is talking very quietly, in fact he’s almost whispering. He doesn’t want his wife, son, or mother to hear what he is telling me in the bedroom behind closed doors. “We’ve become numb to abortions in China. We see them all the time. We don’t see a growing life, but calculate advantages and disadvantages instead.” I’m sitting beside 33-year-old Li on the edge of his double bed. As is customary, there is a wedding picture of the couple the size of a poster hanging on one of the walls. They live in an apartment building without an elevator, and their apartment has a bedroom, a living room, and a tiny kitchen. Li’s wife is sitting on the couch in the living room and reading a book to their six-year-old only son. In the kitchen, Li’s mother is making meat dumplings and steaming the dough. Everyone is acting as if Li’s mother and wife have no idea what I am interviewing Li about in the bedroom. It’s a handy way to avoid family arguments.

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Li has been an activist on the internet for a few years, protesting the one-child and now the new two-child policy. He maintains a website where fellow Chinese can share their experiences and discuss their opinions about birth regulations. The other members of the family think his activism is pointless. And besides, Li’s brother is a big supporter of birth regulations. His brother believes China would have choked on the size of its population otherwise. But Li refuses to let his family restrain him. He spends half of his free time maintaining his website. It’s hard for the family to understand the underlying reason for Li’s passion. Li became radicalized after his wife had an abortion. The abortion itself was in no way shocking. On the contrary, it was a very ordinary procedure in China. But for Li, it marked a turning point in his life. * * * Li and his wife live and work in the city of Handan, in the province of Hebei. Handan has 10 million inhabitants and is a center for countless steel, clothing, and cement factories. The pollution in Handan is among the worst in China, and even today the air is so thick and gray that I immediately get a headache. The family doesn’t react to the pollution; they have lived in Handan all of their lives. Four years ago, Li’s wife accidentally became pregnant when their birth control failed. The couple wanted to keep the child, but they already had a two-year-old son. Even though they would have had the money to pay the fee for a second child, keeping it felt reckless. Both Li and his wife work in the

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public sector, and they faced possible punishment at work as well. They decided to get an abortion. Li’s yearly bonus from his job at the department of forestry, which was worth one month’s salary, was largely tied to remaining faithful to the planned birth regulations. “Everyone in our 40-person unit would have lost their bonus if I had had another child. Could I have been so selfish? My colleagues would have suffered.” No one in the department of forestry had any children born without permission, or if they did, they had managed to keep them a secret, because Li had never heard of any. Only two of his colleagues had two children, but they had permission for them because their first children were handicapped. Li’s wife is a teacher, and teachers haven’t been in the habit of bringing more than one child into the world either. “We didn’t know what might happen to my wife. Different schools have different punishments. We know of many instances in which someone working in the public sector was fired for having a second child.” Even professors aren’t safe from the possibility of being fired. In the current decade, out-of-quota children have sealed the fates of many researchers. One professor threatened with being fired jumped out of a ninth-floor window on campus and died. So Li and his wife had every reason to believe that they might be fired or subjected to some other sizeable punishment. Members of the Communist Party and state employees, including public officials, teachers, doctors, and workers in state companies, were all held to stricter standards under the one-child policy.

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The entire lives of state company workers and public officials, and even their homes, have been tied to where they work. Their benefits continue to be very good. If group pressure and monitoring employees at their workplaces failed to temper their desire to have children, then losing one’s apartment, workplace meals, and pension and other benefits certainly did. * * * Nevertheless, Li’s family spent a long time considering whether to keep the baby or not. “We calmly talked to each other and my mother about what we would do if we were fired from our jobs. Could we still provide for our family? My wife made the final decision, because the abortion would be performed on her. My father and I had the least influence in the decision, really we had no influence at all.” Li would have kept the child, even though terminating the pregnancy didn’t feel like such a big deal at the time. As he said earlier, the Chinese are used to them. According to statistics, up to 13 million abortions are performed a year, or one abortion for every hundred people. The real number is considerably larger, because abortions are performed in private clinics, too, and also illegally. By comparison, in my home country of Finland, there are 9,800 abortions per year, or one abortion per 550 people. People in China are often forced to make decisions about abortions under a great deal of pressure, but there is no shame or secrecy surrounding it. It is a common topic of discussion

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among Chinese women. People talk just as openly about visiting the abortion clinic as they do about going to the dentist. One Finnish women who works in a leadership position in China told me that 10 percent of the women at her company had had an abortion within the past three years. Perhaps there were even more, but those were the ones she had heard about from the women themselves. There are dozens of women at the company, and they have all attended university. Abortion became commonplace in China alongside the one-child policy. It was easy to get an abortion, and women were given at least two weeks of sick leave. Officials have been encouraging women – or forcing them – to rid themselves of their accidental pregnancies for decades. Birth control has been available, but it has often been ineffective, or people simply haven’t known how to use it. According to Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winckler, three-fourths of accidental pregnancies were a result of failed birth control in the 1980s and 1990s, and these pregnancies usually led to an abortion. At the beginning of the 1990s, a young Chinese woman could expect to have an average of more than two abortions over the course of her lifetime. Those with bad luck had as many as five; in the countryside, women could have as many as nine as they aborted girl fetuses in their zeal to have a boy. The quality of birth control has improved, but people don’t always use it properly. Currently the problem is young people’s careless attitude towards birth control. Sex education continues to be nonexistent, but sex before marriage is more

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commonplace. Children born out of wedlock are forbidden in China, so young people have to choose between abortion or marriage. Private clinics use sweet, pink pictures featuring beautiful and smiling young women to advertise their abortion services. They don’t really have an effect on the number of teenage pregnancies, especially when the Chinese seem to believe quite strongly in what is being advertised. The ads extol the virtues of abortions as if having one were like going to a fancy hairdresser: “Like a dream! Painless! Over in three minutes!” or: “Unintended pregnancy? Be a queen!” When I tell my Chinese friends how seriously abortions are treated in the West, they are surprised. People in Finland use birth control pretty carefully, and having an abortion is usually the result of a long and painful process of deliberation. In China people have even asked me, with some surprise, if I haven’t ever had an abortion. It seems as though abortion has become an accepted method of birth control in China. One Chinese acquaintance of mine had two abortions after her first child in the 1990s. Having an abortion felt easier than using an IUD or condoms. At the time, she had never even heard of birth control pills. “I would have had the money to pay the fine for another child, but I didn’t want it. It takes time and effort to raise a child, and I want to work,” my acquaintance told me. * * * But many Chinese notice afterwards that having an abortion was harder than they could have imagined beforehand. That’s

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also what happened to Li. His thoughts kept returning to the aborted child. What if we had acted differently? What would our child have been like and looked like? He kept thinking to himself. Li’s wife was depressed, and she cried a lot. “My wife suffered more, the fetus was inside of her after all. My wife was also afraid of becoming pregnant again.” Right after the abortion, Li began to surf the internet looking for information on the one-child policy that had brought them so much sorrow. He quickly became an activist on the internet, though he is a careful one. Even though Li runs an online discussion forum, he doesn’t share any of his own thoughts or opinions. And even when he does write something, he never criticizes the Chinese government directly. He shares links to news articles and researchers’ critical positions on controlling the number of children. He lets ordinary people talk about their experiences and provide each other with advice. The discussions are often very pragmatic. For example, these kinds of tips were shared while the first child policy was still being enforced: Zhengxiu:

I finally have permission to have another child!

Yinsuiyuedong: What papers did you need? I live in Henan province, and I was required to hand in my identification, my hukou, my marriage certificate, and the certificate for my first child. I gave them the papers and have waited for a week now, but I still haven’t gotten a response. How long did you wait?

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Zhengxiu:

I didn’t wait long at all, and then I filed a complaint. Then I quickly got a response.

Yinsuiyuedong: Which phone number did you call? Sometimes some of the forum users have been detained – not because of something they have written, but because they have tried to have an unpermitted child. People have then shared the phone number of the officials who detained the person on the forum, and many have called the officials on the detained person’s behalf. As a result of this kind of citizen action, a woman who was expecting her second child was released after only paying a third of the fine the officials had originally demanded. Li’s forum hasn’t caused him any problems. The police have only talked to him once, or as the Chinese like to say: “The police invited Li for tea.” They asked Li what he was doing on the internet and why. Their conversation was over quickly. “I just told them that I want to have another child. They don’t care about people like me.” But Li has a clear understanding of the significance of birth regulations policies on China and on himself. “I think the one or two-child policy keeps China from becoming a more humane country. I’m doing all I can to stop this policy and to see that all of the money used for it is used for something better. I believe that God is made out of the seven billion people on this planet. I am one of those souls, and I am now doing my part.” “This policy has affected my life. I want to decide for myself how many children I want to have.”

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He is already going to be a father to a second child. There is a knock on the bedroom door. Li’s wife comes in to get a coat from the bedroom closet. Her belly is clearly protruding even though she has only been pregnant for four months. I interviewed Li at the end of 2015, and the baby was born in 2016, when the twochild policy took effect, even though the two-child policy was not announced until after the baby was already on its way. For Li, the change in policy was like a gift from heaven. “Now our child is safe.” Li had in fact applied to have another child due to his son’s poor eyesight, but his wife had become pregnant before permission was granted. Their son manages just fine with glasses, but Li was certain their wish would be granted. When they were informed about the two-child policy, the officials dropped their application for a second child. Li smiles broadly. If it were up to him, he might even like to have a third child. * * * Li knows that their second child will be a girl. Hospitals and clinics aren’t supposed to share the child’s gender from ultrasounds, because aborting girl fetuses has been such a problem in China. But technicians often share the gender for a few euros, even though they are under threat of substantial punishment. When an expecting mother has an ultrasound during a routine check-up of her fetus, the technician may pass the parents a blue or pink card or point their thumb up or down. If official hospitals or doctor’s offices refuse to share the information, there are other “clinics” that will. As such,

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the ban has no effect whatsoever, and many people, like Mr Li, simply want to know out of their own curiosity. Still, it is correct to assume that the Chinese population have aborted and continue to abort many female fetuses. In addition to the abandonment of girls, this has been the biggest factor that has shaped foreigners’ perceptions about the onechild policy. People often talk about the genocide of girls. The UN Population Fund has calculated that China has over 60 million girls and women fewer than it should have, because fewer girls have been born or more have died as children. Who is to blame? The one-child policy, the obsessive tradition to have boy children, and the ultrasound machines that betray the fetus’ gender. Ultrasounds became more widespread at the end of the 1980s, and during the 1990s, determining a baby’s sex became extremely common. Indeed, in 2000, when researcher Chu Junhong asked 800 ordinary Chinese women in rural central China how many of them had had an ultrasound during pregnancy, the answer was startling: When they were pregnant the second time, less than 40 percent had an ultrasound if their first child was a boy. But if their first child was a girl, 70 percent of the women had an ultrasound of the fetus – and if it, too, was a girl, over 90 percent of the women had an abortion. In the new millennium, there were already 120 boys being born for every 100 girls, which is a huge overrepresentation of boys. In Finland, for example, there are 104 boys born for every 100 girls, which is the normal ratio. Of course the statistics don’t provide the whole truth, because many girl

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children born in China simply weren’t registered with the authorities, and they lived as undocumented children, at least until they had a brother. According to teachers, more girls started school than one would have been able to infer from the birth statistics. On the other hand, the statistics do show that girls in China were more likely to die as small children than boys were. Girls may not have been fed as well, and they weren’t given the same care as boys when they were sick. But the fate of girls wasn’t just a result of the one-child policy. There is a long-standing tradition of getting rid of girls in the Chinese countryside. The Chinese-British author Xinran shares a terrible scene in her book Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother. In it, she happens to witness the killing of a newborn girl. Xinran was staying with a family where a woman was giving birth in a neighboring room. Suddenly she heard the disappointed voice of a man cry “Useless thing!” Soon thereafter, the midwife brought out a bundle. Xinran saw the leg of a dead baby girl dangling out of the bundle. Xinran claims that long before the one-child policy, in the far flung corners of the poor provinces, families wanted their first child to be a boy. Anything else brought bad luck. But above all else, girls were killed because poor families didn’t have the means to feed so many children. According to researchers, killing baby girls wasn’t at all uncommon in China in the 1930s and 1940s. The practice tapered off substantially – and then increased again to some degree in the 1980s when the one-child policy came into effect. As ultrasounds have become

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commonplace, and as the worth of girls has grown, killings like these have gone down again and likely have almost stopped altogether. When it became possible to determine a baby’s sex with an ultrasound, an abortion surely felt like a better solution than the thought of drowning a baby – or abandoning it. It was also common practice to give girl children to other families or to leave them by the side of the road. Boys were valued more than girls for many reasons. They could handle the tough work on the farms. They inherited land. They took care of their aging parents. They continued the family line, and they could make sacrifices for their ancestors. But as I describe in many chapters throughout this book, the different values accorded to boys and girls hasn’t actually been so black and white. Rural Chinese families very much wanted both a boy and a girl (at least from the beginning of the 1980s). If they had to choose between a boy and a girl, they usually chose a boy. In rural areas, where it was possible to have another child if the first child was a girl, usually only the second fetus was aborted if it, too, was a girl. Statistics from parts of China where families exceptionally had the right to a second child even if the first child had been a boy also reveal the longing for girls. The families who had boys as their first children had a disproportionately large number of girls as their second children. In our horror of the Chinese, it’s important to remember that China isn’t the only place where many girl fetuses have been aborted. In many other Asian countries like India and South Korea where the value of boy children is emphasized,

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strangely few girls were being born after it was easy to determine a baby’s sex using inexpensive ultrasound technology. For me, the abortion of girl fetuses is still the largest mystery of all topics in this book. My acquaintances, people I interviewed, the studies I read, and the other Chinese researchers I interviewed almost all said the same thing: Girls are valued more now in China. For increasing numbers of families, it makes no difference if their baby is a girl or boy, and many families would actually rather have a girl. But there are still only 100 girls born for every 116 boys. And this isn’t a problem confined to rural areas – baby boys are also overrepresented in the cities. * * * The women who suffered the most violence under the onechild policy are the women who endured forced abortions. Twenty-nine-year-old Zhang Xin is one such victim who is using social media to seek justice. I take the night train to Shandong province to find her. In an online discussion forum, Zhang Xin’s brother-in-law has described how officials dragged Zhang, late in her pregnancy, to a nearby hospital and killed her baby about five years ago. The family wants the local officials to pay damages and be held accountable for their actions. My train arrives in the city of Linyin, and from there, I take a taxi to the village of Moshan Dongcun. The taxi driver tells me that the village has a bad reputation. Apparently it’s full of criminals and violent gangs. Taxi drivers refuse to go there at night.

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To me, the city looks just like any other small Chinese city. There are new houses sandwiched between old ones, and one-story residential neighborhoods, where the surrounding walls have been built of stone; others have been plastered to form an even surface. There are lots of cars, and a thick cloud of pollution hovers in the air. People sell fruit, vegetables, and live chickens on street corners. Vendors butcher chickens right in front of their customers’ eyes. Then they throw each chicken into an empty barrel as it thrashes about in its final death throes before plucking it for a customer to take home. Zhang Xin lives here somewhere. I ask around, and we keep circling the city streets. Zhang clearly isn’t very well-known in her hometown. The hours go by. Forcing rural and working women to have abortions played a key role in birth regulations in the 1980s and 1990s. If a woman carrying an unpermitted child didn’t consent to having an abortion of her own free will, family planning officials came by for a chat. They would try to persuade and eventually threaten the woman. They might even take the family’s bicycle or TV, or detain another family member until the pregnant woman finally agreed to an abortion. Sometimes officials simply took the woman to the hospital. Many Chinese from rural villages have these kinds of stories. A good friend of mine had the good fortune to be born because her mother was able to run fast. She managed to break free of the officials who had come to fetch her, and she ran away and hid. She had already lost one child to a forced abortion.

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Of course there is no official information on the actual number of forced abortions. Local officials and the government haven’t wanted to share information about cruel measures such as these. And what exactly is a forced abortion? Isn’t Li Dapeng’s wife’s abortion a forced abortion, because the couple only agreed to it out of fear of losing their jobs? Or is it only forced when officials actually take a woman to a clinic against her will? The latter, “clear-cut” cases of forced abortions are illegal in China, but laws were interpreted in different ways in different parts of the country. Sometimes lawbreakers also got away without any punishment. Compared to previous decades, the most egregious kinds of forced abortions have been few and far between in the 2000s. That is what Chinese and international experts think as well. The majority of Chinese haven’t even wanted to have over-quota children in years. Birth control is more reliable, and even if it hasn’t worked, people have been obedient and gotten an abortion. The one-child policy was no longer as merciless in the 2000s, and local officials were more interested in gathering fines for unpermitted children than dragging women to clinics. The era of forced abortions should therefore be over. And so even the Chinese were horrified when stories about forced abortions performed on women late in their pregnancies surfaced in the final years of the one-child policy. Social media has revolutionized the situation, because local officials cannot stop couples from sharing their stories, which have spread like wildfire on the internet. In the era of social media,

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atrocities such as these incite waves of rage, and journalists are prompted to write stories. After three hours, I finally find Zhang Xin at work in a laundromat in the courtyard of an apartment building. She is standing at the door of the laundromat wearing pants and a blouse. There are two small children standing next to her. Before I have a chance to finish telling her why I’m there, her husband and brother-in-law appear and gesture frantically at me to follow them. We take the stairs to the top floor and an office in the same building. There are six more men waiting for us there – word of a foreign journalist has spread quickly. Foreigners are rare here, so the men in the neighborhood have come to listen in on the interview. They smell of beer and alcohol, so it seems they’ve just come back from a long lunch. It takes a long time for me to get the men to leave. These are women’s matters, I say. Zhang doesn’t mind if the others hear, Zhang’s brother-in-law says. But it bothers me, I say. Zhang herself says nothing and simply smiles. I feel like I will never understand what kinds of topics are appropriate for everyone to hear and discuss in China. Abortion seems to be a sensitive topic to me, and a story that someone I am interviewing should be able to tell in peace. Finally the men reluctantly leave, dragging their feet out the door. Now only Zhang, her children, her husband, and her brother-in-law remain in the room. We sit down on sofas arranged around a low Chinese-style tea table. There is an electric kettle, a glass pitcher for steeping tea, and small tea cups on the table, but no one starts making tea.

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Zhang sits at the head of the table with her three-year-old son in her lap, still smiling a bemused smile. Her older six-year-old son is wandering around the room. I try to ask Zhang some questions, but her brother-in-law interjects with his own answers every time there is a break in the conversation. I do learn that Zhang’s pregnancy wasn’t as far along as had been stated on the internet; she had been seven months pregnant. And Zhang doesn’t know very much about the campaigns on the internet. Those were her brother-in-law’s idea and his initiative. A row of men has appeared again outside the window. The men we dismissed have returned; they’d at least like to watch the interview. The brother-in-law’s phone rings on the table. He recognizes the number: The local family planning officials are calling. I tell him not to answer. Soon the phone rings again. It seems that the local authorities are also aware of my visit, and they will likely show up soon. Zhang’s brother-in-law indicates they should come, in a relaxed tone of voice, but I think it’s better for the family if I leave. And I’m not even sure if Zhang wants to be interviewed. As sometimes happens in China, I leave before I’ve had a chance to get properly started. The next evening I call Zhang from Beijing over a social media platform that allows face calls. Now she is alone with her children at the laundromat. And yes, she does want to be interviewed about her forced abortion. “I don’t remember it very well, somehow it has been wiped from my memory. And I don’t usually talk about it. The memory of it is so sad.”

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Zhang slowly begins to talk, providing me with short answers to my questions. I finally hear the full story. About five years ago, she was home with her first child; her husband was at work at a construction site. Zhang was seven months pregnant. It’s true they didn’t have permission for the baby, but she wasn’t worried. Many of the other villagers had had additional children, and everyone had managed to get away with it by simply paying a fine. The gate to the courtyard and the front door were both open. “All of a sudden, 20–30 men walked in the door, there were a few women, too. I didn’t know any of them, they must have been family planning officials from the neighboring village. They just took me with them. I didn’t scream or try to resist. I was alone and pregnant and afraid.” Zhang remembers being forced into a van, and then being taken to two different offices, first to the local family planning office, and then to the district equivalent. “I just sat there in a corner. No one talked to me, they just talked to each other. I heard them call my husband and tell him that if he doesn’t pay 28,000 yuan (about 4,000 euros), they would abort the baby.” Zhang’s husband hurried around the village trying to borrow money from their friends and acquaintances. Zhang was still alone with the officials. After some time – she doesn’t remember how long – they took her to the hospital. Some officials from the family planning office and hospital staff tried to persuade her to have an abortion. She refused, crying.

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Zhang can’t remember if she had to sign some forms. Often women forced to have abortions are given something to sign which “proves” that they actually agreed to it. Her husband arrived at the hospital with the money for the fine. But they wouldn’t take the money, and they wouldn’t allow him into the room where the abortion would be performed. Zhang had no one with her. “I tried to resist getting the shot. Everyone around me assured me that everything would be fine. I lay down on the hospital bed and immediately regretted it. They didn’t let me get up again.” Zhang starts to cry. Her face crumples on the screen. She tries to stifle her tears and blows her nose. She is silent for a long time. “Then they stuck a shot in my stomach. It was supposed to kill the baby. That was sometime around seven or eight in the evening. I went into labor at night, it took hours, and it was much harder and more painful than my first birth. The baby was born at five in the morning. It was a girl, so precious.” Zhang starts crying again, and I only hear sniffling and swallowing on the line. “The baby wasn’t dead after all. It was still alive and started crying. The doctor drowned the baby in a bucket of water. Then the doctor just walked out of the room without saying a word.” The doctor’s indifference, silence, and quick exit have all continued to haunt Zhang. Somehow it crystallizes the cruelty of this forced abortion to her.

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Zhang’s husband, mother-in-law, and brother-in-law were let into the room sometime during the birth or afterwards. Zhang isn’t sure exactly when they came in. Soon after the birth, the family was shooed out of the hospital. “I wasn’t even allowed to hold the body of my baby,” Zhang says, and she is shaken with grief. She is unable to say anything else for a long time. She then goes on to say that she was depressed and tearful until she had her second child three years ago. She did get permission for her son, because the family made an agreement with the family planning officials. “My brother-in-law got a picture of my dead baby and put it on the internet. Investigators from the district level office came to our village to find out what had happened. We made a kind of agreement with the local officials about what we would tell the district level officials. That’s why I was given permission to have another child.” Zhang doesn’t know the exact details of the agreement. Her brother-in-law later tells me that in addition to getting a permit for the second child, they were also promised about 1,500 euros. In exchange, the family agreed to lie to the investigators and say that Zhang hadn’t been subjected to a forced abortion. Zhang’s brother-in-law is angry they haven’t received all of the money they were promised. It’s impossible to determine whether Zhang’s or her brother-in-law’s stories are completely true. Zhang doesn’t remember everything that happened on that traumatic day, and the details her brother-in-law provides, like the amount of damages they were to receive, change over the course of the

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interview. But the outline of the story sounds just like many other stories of forced abortions that have been leaked to the public in recent years. The most well-known of them all centers on the abortion Feng Jianmei was forced to undergo when she was seven months pregnant in 2012. She and her husband were unable to pay the fine imposed on them by the local family planning officials, and so they kidnapped Feng. Feng was taken to the clinic with her face covered, and there they aborted her baby. Feng’s husband put a picture of Feng with the bloody corpse of her baby on social media. It became the top topic of discussion in China, and it enraged average Chinese citizens as much as it did population researchers. The case may have even hastened the move to the two-child policy. That same year, there was another case that caught the attention of the whole world: the blind, self-taught lawyer Chen Guangcheng who fled house arrest and found safety in the United States Embassy in Beijing. He was wellknown for his defense of women who had undergone forced abortions and sterilizations, and he had even been to jail. Chen, his wife, and children ultimately made it to safety in the US. But his story took a strange turn in the US when he began working with local pro-life advocates. In China, Chen had fought for women’s rights to make their own decisions about their bodies – and reproduction – so they wouldn’t be forced into abortions. But in the US, pro-life advocates want to take away women’s right to an abortion – in other words, their right to make decisions about their own bodies.

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When people were wondering about this in the international media, many realized for the first time that the people in China who were against forced abortions were actually on the same side as those defending the right to have an abortion in the West. * * * Li Dapeng: The government has spent a lot of money on birth regulations. If they had used that money to educate poor women and girls instead, the number of births would have dropped automatically. And this is a question of human rights, even though we don’t talk about that in China. I know that international agreements forbid governments from interfering in the number of children individual couples can have.

3

NO FAMILY Hannah searches for the Chinese family who abandoned her. Mrs Li searches for the daughter she gave up.

Her name is Xinyi, and she is four years old. She has lived in an orphanage and then with a foster family in China. In pictures she is wearing a pink dress, and her hair is in pigtails. In a video, she plays with a balloon. And that’s all Xinyi’s new parents Hanna Hyväri and Hannu Aaltonen know about their daughter. Today they will finally meet each other, on Monday March 18 in the city of Nanjing. People dressed in fine clothing are sitting in the breakfast room of the Mandarin Garden Hotel. Hannu has exchanged his black T-shirt for a suit. Hanna is wearing a floral printed tunic, and their six-yearold son Arttu is wearing a vest and tie for this festive occasion. They also want to make a good impression on China’s adoption officials. I’m their friend currently living in Beijing, and they’ve taken me along for additional support. This is where my 2013 story about one Finnish couple’s adoption trip to China got its start, and it appeared in Finland’s

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largest daily Helsingin Sanomat. Their story stayed with me as I followed them for days and was witness to their emotion: their fear, moments of sorrow, but also boundless joy. Those feelings were contagious, and that is when I became interested in the one-child policy. Writing their story raised so many questions: What is the biological mother of an abandoned child like? What kind of life has she had? How many children would have been abandoned without the one-child policy? In the West, of course, the one-child policy has been seen and is seen through the children, mostly girls, who are adopted from China. China began its extensive adoption services to families abroad in the beginning of the 1990s, and by 2010, about 120,000 children had been adopted to Western countries. China became an adoption hub. Finland has about 1,000 children from China, and in 20 years, more children have come from China than any other country. So Finland has 1,000 or so families that have a direct connection to the one-child policy, and these families have surely talked to their adopted children about why Chinese parents had to abandon their babies. China has had enough children available for adoption because of the one-child policy. Adoptive parents are also united by their journeys to pick up their adoptive children in China. It’s a nerve-wracking trip, just as nerve-wracking as going to a maternity ward. As I discover in Nanjing on the day Xinyi is adopted, adoptions bring up many kinds of emotions, and contradictory ones as well. * * *

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Hannu’s hands are visibly shaking. Soon they will learn so much about this new member of their family, the daughter they have been waiting to meet for so long. Will their daughter be shy or outgoing? Will she be shy around her new parents? How will they get along without a language in common? And how well can she walk? In adoption terminology, Xinyi is a child with special needs. There was a problem with her legs when she was born, and she only learned to walk after having surgery. Hanna and Hannu applied for a child with special needs because families usually don’t have to wait as long to adopt these children. China adds children with special needs to its international adoption list once a month, and adoption agencies around the world pick out suitable children for expecting parents. So parents nervously wonder if they will hit the bull’s eye this month, next month, or half a year later. It’s impossible to predict exactly how long parents will have to wait, but the wait time for children with special needs is shorter than it is for other children. Families oftentimes have an excruciating wait of many years ahead of them. “You can’t enjoy life, you just wait,” Hanna says. They waited to adopt their son Arttu from Thailand for almost four years, and that process was painful as well. Before parents are even put on a wait list, they are put through a long period of counseling. They must give an account of their jobs, their net worth, their health – whatever the officials in the child’s home country want to know. China, for

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example, requires parents to be between the ages of 30 and 50, to have more than a high school diploma or the equivalent, to earn at least 10,000 USD per person per year, and to have no serious illnesses. Parents are also not allowed to be (pathologically) obese. Hanna and Hannu weren’t worried about adopting a child with special needs, but they struggled with the long application form. They had to decide whether they would take a child with epilepsy. Would they accept a child with large moles? Or how about a child with a difficult developmental disability? “It was just awful,” Hanna remembers. “We had to think about what we could put up with, so that the child would be happy with us. We drew the line at serious, permanent disabilities. Our criteria were ultimately pretty loose,” Hannu says. Many children, and especially girls, have been adopted out of China into Western countries. At its highest point in 2005, up to 14,000 Chinese were adopted abroad. Adoption numbers have collapsed since then, and now the majority of children who are adopted abroad have special needs, either a disability or a disease. They are both girls and boys. There are many reasons for this decrease. According to Chinese officials, for years families have no longer abandoned healthy children. The Chinese have become accustomed to birth regulations and having “just” daughters. The criteria for foreign adoptive parents have also been tightened while they have been loosened for parents within China in order to place more healthy children with families in China.

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Currently the majority of abandoned children in China have special needs or diseases, because it is often considered shameful to have a child with disabilities in China. The large majority of families who abandoned their children is likely poor, and many orphanages can often afford the kind of expensive care they need. So families are often also hoping for better future for their children in the orphanage. Cities have set up warm and safe places where babies can be dropped off – people can secretly drop off a baby in an empty cubicle. The babies are then quickly placed in someone’s care. * * * In the breakfast room back at the hotel, six-year-old Arttu has lost his patience. “Are we going to go meet my sister soon?” Once they are all in the car on the way to pick up their daughter, they realize that they have forgotten something important: candy and snacks. Adoptive children are often drawn out with treats, just as Arttu was when he first met his parents. But it’s not a problem, the guide will buy some lollipops. The local guides specialized in adoption can just as easily talk about the concubines of the Chinese emperors as they can rush out to buy candy or help in filling out adoption paperwork. A huge stack of official papers must be filled out before a child can leave the country. Without a guide, it would also be hard to find the building where the family is to pick up their daughter, the Registration

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and Service Center of International Marriage and Adoption of Jiangsu Province. It’s a large office building with a huge room on the bottom floor. Desks line one side of the room – though there is still no one sitting behind them – and on the other side there is a row of chairs. Arttu feverishly turns his head back and forth as he tries in vain to find a little girl somewhere in the room. His sister still hasn’t arrived. The wait is agonizing for Arttu, but his parents are pleased to have a moment to set up their video camera. And finally! A car drives up in front of the building. The family looks through the window and sees a car door open. Something in a pink coat is lifted out of the back seat. They run out onto the front steps. And there they see a girl with big eyes standing on the steps, holding on tightly to her Chinese escort. Their first impression of Xinyi: She is incredibly beautiful. She walks well. She is scared. Hanna lifts her on her lap. Xinyi struggles out of her grasp and stares at them with a serious expression on her face. Inside, she takes the hand of any Chinese person she sees, even the family’s guide will do. Xinyi only agrees to hold hands with Arttu in her new family, maybe because Arttu is also a child, and maybe because he looks more familiar than her new parents. Arttu smiles, flashing his baby teeth. “Dad, take a picture!” Xinyi is offered toys, but her frightened staring continues. Hanna and Hannu dig out a photo album from their backpack, the same one they had sent Xinyi earlier. Together they all look at pictures of Hannu and Arttu, Hanna and Arttu, their

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dog Onni with his wrinkled muzzle, and a kid’s room filled with toys in the neighborhood of Malmi in Helsinki. It doesn’t help. Xinyi sits in the corner of the sofa and sniffles as she sucks her lollipop. In the middle of all of this, Hanna and Hannu are grilling the head of the orphanage for as much information as they can get about their new daughter – this could be their only chance to ask important questions. Does she have any allergies? No. What are the foods she doesn’t like? Nothing spicy or sour. Can she run? Yes she can run, but not very fast. How did she end up in the orphanage? Someone left her at the gate to the orphanage when she was a newborn. How long has she lived in a foster family? Three years. That’s a surprise. Three years is most of Xinyi’s life. Xinyi has had a mother, mama, and a grandfather, laoye in her foster family. She just left them this morning. “She’s going to be awfully homesick for a long time,” Hanna sighs. In the hotel room, Xinyi doesn’t let anyone take off her clothes. She sits on the bed and scowls at three pairs of leggings. Xinyi eagerly eats her lunch, but she refuses to go to the bathroom. It doesn’t help when Hanna uses a big doll to show Xinyi how to use the toilet. Has Xinyi ever seen a toilet seat before? When she falls asleep on the couch, Hannu strokes the bottom of her feet. “You are the sweetest girl in the world,” Hannu says. “And I am the sweetest boy in the world,” Arttu responds crankily, feeling jealous.

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And then the afternoon of tears begins. Arttu is the first to start crying: “My sister isn’t fun.” Soon Xinyi wakes up and starts crying inconsolably. “Yao hui jia, yao hui jia,” Xinyi says over and over again between her sobs. She wants to go home. I go out to the hotel hallway to cry in secret. I’m pretending to have nerves of steel, and I don’t want to add to the tears already flowing in the room. Hanna wakes up distressed in the middle of the night. She’s thinking about the foster family and how much Xinyi must miss them. She had been told earlier that the foster family couldn’t keep Xinyi. She doesn’t know exactly why, but apparently the adults in the family are either too old or too young to adopt. An adoption could also affect a young couple’s ability to have their own biological child. Xinyi was on her way to a foreign family in any case. It doesn’t make Hanna feel any better, though, and she is no longer able to sleep. In the morning, Xinyi officially becomes Hanna and Hannu’s daughter. At the center they all sign documents with thumbprints. In them, the parents promise never to abandon their daughter or to mistreat her. With these thumbprints, Xinyi’s name also changes and becomes Aurora. The officials are paid for the documents, and the orphanage also receives a donation worth thousands of euros. The donation is mandatory. The family has already spent about 25,000 euros for Aurora’s adoption, including various fees,

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their trip, and things they’ve purchased for Aurora. They’ve taken a loan out to cover all of their expenses. Aurora has just begun to notice that Hannu’s lap feels warm and safe. By dinnertime, she has completely taken over Hannu’s lap. When Arttu tries to take his father’s hand, Aurora pushes his hand away. “It’s so great that she trusts me like this. Maybe she’s thinking that I will surely be able to take care of her,” Hannu says gruffly. But Aurora refuses to sit on Hanna’s lap at all. And it is Arttu who is sitting there, demanding the same amount of lap time as his sister. Hanna and Hannu’s backs hurt. Hanna sighs again in the evening. “Will I ever gain her trust?” But she knows that her daughter will learn to care for her, too. Many adopted children first become attached to just one parent. The next day brings happy surprises. Hanna and Arttu are allowed to visit Aurora’s orphanage – Hannu stays behind at the hotel with their daughter. The family wanted to meet the foster family as well, but they weren’t granted permission for that. Such meetings aren’t customarily granted. But another happy surprise is in store for them when they arrive at the orphanage: The foster mother and foster grandfather have come to meet them after all. The mothers hug each other tightly, and they both cry. The foster family tells Hanna all kinds of things about Aurora. She loves eggs. She’s energetic and smart, and has a gift for languages. She likes

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routines, and first thing in the morning, she always drinks a glass of water. The families promise to write and send pictures and even to visit. Hanna returns to the hotel with red eyes, feeling tired. But she is also relieved. “Aurora isn’t just my child. She is also the child of her foster parents and grandparents. And of course she is the child of her biological parents, whom we will always keep in our hearts.” Hannu is sitting on the bed with Aurora glued to his side and can only come up with an English word to adequately express what he is feeling: overwhelmed. * * * Adoption is guided by, or at least it should be guided by, the intention to offer every child what is best for them. For example, it would be ideal to find a new family nearby – if possible. But there are challengers even to this rule. When children adopted outside of China return to visit the country of their birth, they are often shocked by the poverty they see in rural areas and are happy about the opportunities afforded them in a more prosperous country. Nowadays even Chinese have to wait years to adopt a healthy child. Kay Ann Johnson, a professor of Asian Studies in the US, has even suggested in an interview with a Chinese newspaper that China should stop adopting healthy children out of China altogether. She has studied child abandonment and adoption in China for 20 years. The results of Johnson’s research would likely surprise many adoptive parents in Western countries. As she explains

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in her book China’s Hidden Children, Chinese families have always wanted to adopt girls, and they have, at far higher numbers than foreigners ever have. For example, during the 2000s, between 35,000 and 50,000 children were officially adopted each year within China, and unofficially, an even greater number of children were simply passed along from one family to another. So the Chinese have adopted children even though adopting domestically has been very challenging. For a long time, adoptive parents were required to be at least 35 years of age and childless. The authorities also tried to stamp out the traditional form of unofficial adoption in which “additional” children were handed over to acquaintances or other relatives. Johnson goes so far as to claim that almost all of China’s abandoned and healthy girls could have found homes in China if the government had not made official and unofficial adoptions so difficult in the beginning of the 1990s. Around the same time, China opened adoption to foreigners. The orphanages quite simply filled up with girls, because the government made adoption within the country difficult. I’ve believed just the opposite, and I bet almost all other Westerners have, too. We have gained the impression that Chinese don’t easily adopt children, because blood relations are considered so important in China. And we have believed that even if a Chinese person did decide to adopt, they certainly wouldn’t adopt a girl, a child that is valued less. And that is why Chinese orphanages have been full of girls. In the US, adopting children from China was discussed as an act of charity. In this narrative, a good Westerner goes

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to China to rescue abandoned girls whom no one in China wants. A number of newspaper articles in the 1990s and documentaries like the 1995 The Dying Rooms all supported this narrative with their depictions of the awful conditions in Chinese orphanages. According to these sources, baby girls were constantly dying, and even intentionally being killed. The interviews conducted by Professor Johnson and her colleagues in China’s rural areas reveal a different truth. Even before the one-child policy took effect, people sent children to their relatives and friends, often constituting an unofficial adoption. Some parents didn’t have enough money to support all of their children, and other parents wanted more children or at least one child. While the one-child policy was in effect, this kind of unofficial adoption continued, but it changed in nature. In rural areas in the 1980s, it was very common for a family to give a second daughter to another family for a short period of time as a way to hide their daughter from the authorities, or then they gave up their daughter to another family completely. When a family gave away their second daughter, a family could still try to have a boy, but with three children, they could be fined. It was also common for women to be sterilized after their second or third child. Many different kinds of families adopted children. A baby might be left at the front gate of a childless couple or a bachelor, with the people who might want a child. Girls were often given to relatives or friends, or friends of friends who already had a son.

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In the 1980s, rural families in China were already dreaming of having not just a boy, but a boy and a girl. The Chinese wanted girls and longed to have them in their families. The Chinese dream family had children of both genders, though this may come as a surprise to many Westerners. Essentially, rural families wanted a boy to continue the family line, to do the hard manual labor, and to care for aging parents. But they also wanted a girl, if at all possible. In Johnson’s interviews, the families often described their daughters as bringing more warmth and closeness. And so many families who only had boys were happy to unofficially adopt a girl. Either the family hid the illegal girl from the authorities, or they paid a large fine to claim the girl as their own. If they had connections, they could arrange for the girl to get official papers. * * * Mrs Ma Li adopted a relative’s daughter in 1981 in the Chinese countryside. She does not want me to use her real name, because she managed to deceive the authorities with her unofficial adoption. Ma Li is a gray-haired lady, and she lives in Beijing with her son. I have already known the family for some time, but I only recently realized that her son’s twin sister is actually adopted and eight days younger than her son. The family generally doesn’t share this information with outsiders. But 35 years ago, when Mrs Ma gave birth to her second child, a son, a relative came to see the baby a week after his

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birth and asked Mrs Ma if she would take a girl who had recently been born to another family. The girl was the second girl in the family, and the family wanted to give her away so they could try to have a boy. Mrs Ma discussed the matter with her husband, her fatherin-law, and her husband’s sister. The family is very fond of children, so everyone agreed that taking the child as a “twin” was a good idea. They also knew that they would not be able to have any more children anyway. The officials would take Mrs Ma to be sterilized, since she already had a girl and a boy. “I also had so much breast milk. I was easily able to breastfeed two children. And of course my heart went out to that baby girl and her situation,” Mrs Ma says. Mrs Ma and her relatives were poor farmers, but in adopting the baby girl, they weren’t thinking about money. Everyone else around them was just as poor. And besides, they wouldn’t have to pay a fine for the baby if they claimed she was a twin. In Mrs Ma’s village, giving girls away to another family wasn’t very common. Families did send girls away to hide in the homes of relatives for a few years, until the family managed to have a boy and the girl could return home. Some girls remained undocumented; other girls were in luck if their parents were able to pay the fine or acquired the necessary papers through connections. “The baby came to us when she was just four days old. I was happy as soon as I saw her. My daughter cried much more than my son did, and she had no patience at all. She

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wanted to continue breastfeeding even when she was already two, and she wanted milk as soon as she was hungry,” Mrs Ma says and laughs at her memories. She says she treated her twins equally from the start. Her daughter felt just as much her own as her son did. Mrs Ma believes that her daughter inherited her features through her breast milk. Her daughter was praised as beautiful, and people said she looked just like her mother. Mrs Ma didn’t know her daughter’s biological parents, but when her daughter was a year old, Mrs Ma contacted them. They lived close by. It became an annual tradition to visit them. “I thought about how I would feel if I was forced to abandon a child. I would at least want to see my child sometimes. That’s why I arranged the visits. The biological parents and grandparents were always happy when they saw her. They tried to offer us the best possible food on our visits, too, even though we were all poor then.” Mrs Ma didn’t tell her daughter that she was adopted. “We’ve never talked about it openly with each other.” She doesn’t really know why. Mrs Ma does know that her daughter knows. A few years after the adoption, the family realized that the whole village knew about it. Her daughter’s school friends must have told her, and after that, she no longer seemed interested in visiting her biological parents. She had realized that the people they visited weren’t just friends. Interviews have shown that girls given to other families have found it difficult to meet their biological family without feeling ill will towards them when they were children and

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young women. They didn’t want to visit their biological family, or they sulked during visits. It seems many girls sent to live with relatives while their parents tried to have a boy were also long aggrieved by their treatment. Now Mrs Ma’s adopted daughter is an adult, and she does visit her biological family, though at the behest of Mrs Ma. When she married, she invited her biological father and aunt – her biological mother had died – and openly called them her father and aunt at her wedding. Local officials often looked the other way when it came to unofficial adoptions, but in the 1990s, the first adoption law and officials’ actions made all kinds of adoptions inside the country more difficult. Officially, an adoptive parent had to be for example over 35 years of age, and registering an adopted child was very difficult. The authorities wanted to be sure the child wasn’t an over-quota child from another family. Officials even began to conduct raids on the homes of families suspected of harboring over-quota children. Children were taken to orphanages. There have even been cases where babies were snatched from the arms of their biological parents. The goal of the authorities was to ensure that everyone followed the one-child policy. They wanted to stop all unofficial adoptions. However, this approach likely increased the number of girl babies abandoned on the streets, because fewer and fewer families dared to take in other people’s children. And that is how Chinese orphanages became filled with girls. The one-child policy created a surplus of girls, and

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because of the increased restriction on adoptions at the time, girls were pushed into orphanages at an ever faster pace. As the 2000s rolled around, the abandonment of healthy children dwindled, but new problems emerged. For example, some orphanages have been caught buying children from middlemen. These middlemen sold over-quota children across provincial lines to provinces that have run out of abandoned children. It is hard to determine the extent of this practice, but money has likely been the motivating factor, because adoptive parents must give orphanages a large donation in connection with their adoption. Nowadays, Chinese families are prepared to pay even more than foreign families for children. Even though national adoption laws have been loosened – for example the age of the adoptive parents has been lowered – Chinese families have to wait a long time to get their children, too. In recent years, police have also broken up child trafficking rings that have stepped in to fill the childless void. Traffickers have bought, and even kidnapped, children from China’s poorest areas and sold them to childless Chinese or families without boys. * * * In adoption stories, it is common to hear the perspective of the Western adoptive family and their adoptive children who are now adults. It’s less common to hear stories about parents who abandoned their children. They aren’t very eager to share their experiences, because they are ashamed and often regret their actions.

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Married farmers Li Jincai and Wu Shouhui have decided to tell their story and share what it was like to give up their daughter, even though it’s clearly not easy for them to do so. Mrs Li Jincai keeps looking down at the floor and then up at the ceiling, and her answers come in short sentences. “I was young then and didn’t know anything, I was 21. It’s only as I’ve grown older that I’ve realized that abandoning my child was wrong.” I’m sitting with the couple and their daughter Wu Yuhuan in the front hallway of their small farmhouse. Their five-yearold granddaughter is running around with one of the children from the neighborhood. The walls are covered in long, red streamers; they are wedding decorations with good wishes printed on them in Chinese characters. They have saved them from their son’s wedding. A red paper lantern hangs outside the open front door. The rain has just stopped, and mosquitos are greedily nipping at our ankles. The city of Lingxin in the province of Zhejiang smells of damp, warm earth. In 1984, the couple had their second daughter. They wanted to keep the child, but Mr Wu’s father and the head of the family, who has since passed away, told them to give up the baby. They needed a boy in the house, and no more than two children were allowed. Mr Wu’s father was afraid that the authorities would come any day and take his daughter-in-law away to be sterilized. “At first we gave the baby to my sister. She already had a boy, but she also wanted a girl. But after a month, my sister

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returned the baby, because she was so weak and wasn’t gaining any weight,” Mrs Li says. The couple still wanted to keep the child, but Mr Wu’s father refused to budge. Mrs Li and Mr Wu thought about what they should do for a month. They tried not to become too attached to their daughter. The baby slept and cried alone downstairs. They didn’t even give her a name. In the end, the couple couldn’t come up with any better solution than to leave their baby in a public place. “One morning, it was very early, I dressed my daughter in an outfit decorated with flowers and put her in a basket. I also hid a note with her birthdate on it in the basket,” Mrs Li says. Mr Wu continues: “I lifted the basket on my bicycle. It was between three and four in the morning when I arrived at the fish market. I left the basket by some stairs, where I knew it would be safe from all of the foot traffic. Then I quickly rode back home so that the first people to show up at the market wouldn’t see me.” The fish market was known as a place to bring babies. Children were often abandoned there, and couples who wanted children also knew to go there to look for them. A few days later, one of the neighbors asked them if they had left their baby at the fish market. He had news for them: Someone had seen a childless couple from a neighboring village go to the market. They had clearly been looking for a baby, and they took the basket with Mrs Li’s baby in it. After that, the couple went to a store to buy infant formula.

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The news calmed the sad couple – at least their daughter had been taken into a family right away, a family that wanted a child, even if they didn’t know who the family was. But their grief didn’t go away. Grief is the word the couple uses to describe their feelings about abandoning their baby. No, they haven’t cried, and they don’t know how else to describe how the grief has manifested itself. They haven’t talked about those feelings. “I was just very sad. Abandoning a child is very difficult,” Mrs Li says. Their grief continued for two years, until they had the boy Mr Wu’s father had so badly desired. Then they tried to forget their daughter, and in some ways they managed to do so. At the very least they never talked about her. Their remaining daughter and son grew up, and both married. When their son married a few years ago, it brought back memories of their abandoned daughter. “I realized that a daughter-in-law isn’t at all the same as your own daughter. Daughters care about you, but daughtersin-law don’t,” 53-year-old Mrs Li says. Mr Wu, 59, is more direct with his comments, and I hear bitterness in his voice: “My father thought he could save face by having a grandson. It was very important to him for the family line to continue. For us it was important to have someone to take care of us. But when our son married, we realized that having a son isn’t as great as we thought. Our son listens to his wife, not to us. Our son doesn’t even come to visit us very often. It is our oldest daughter who visits us and helps us.”

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Wu Yuhuan, who is 35 and runs a clothing store, nods beside them. “My mother loves to talk. I can listen to her for hours on the phone. But my brother doesn’t have the patience for that.” Around the time of her brother’s wedding, Wu Yuhuan noticed an article in the paper about a woman who was looking for her biological family. The woman’s adoptive family was from the same village that their neighbor said the baby had been taken to. Wu told her mother, who burst out crying. Wu started to cry, too. They started talking about how they longed for their daughter and their little sister. Then Mrs Li had a dream about her younger daughter, and she was unhappy in the dream. Mrs Li couldn’t stop crying and worrying. “I could have kept my daughter and hide myself somewhere until I had a son. I regret not having done that,” Mrs Li says. The family decided to look for their lost child. They wrote messages on Chinese social media, apologizing for abandoning her and asking her to contact them. The local paper wrote about their search. One woman contacted them, but a blood test revealed that she wasn’t their daughter after all. Their search continues. Many other families in their village have found the children they have abandoned, but they have often known where their children were. Mrs Li remains hopeful. “If we ever find our daughter, I don’t expect she will consider us her parents. I just want to see what she looks like. Maybe we could meet sometime.”

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“It would even be enough if I could look at her secretly from afar. She wouldn’t have to know anything about me.” * * * Many children are also looking for their biological parents in China, including children who have been adopted abroad. One of them is 22-year-old American Hannah Dejong. She and I are sitting in the park at the Temple of Heaven in the shade of some trees, 100 meters to the east of the southern entrance. This is the approximate location where Hannah was found when she was about one year old in March 1994. She doesn’t know if she was found on the path, by the fence, or under the trees. On the other side of the park, Chinese retirees are practicing Tai Chi. Other elderly people are practicing kung-fu kicks, and one elderly gentleman is even standing on his head. Hanna has studied design in the US, and she looks casually stylish, as designers often do. She has a blue Converse shoe on one foot, and a red one on the other, and she’s carrying a backpack on her shoulder. Hannah is excited. She and her Dutch-American adoptive father have just finished touring different offices in Beijing, and they were able to get their hands on the official report documenting how she was found. “The report says that a school boy was on a fieldtrip to the park when he heard a child crying. He went to fetch a guard from the park, who then looked for the parents, but they were never found. Then I was probably given to the officials

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who deal with abandoned children, but we’re not completely certain about that.” “I was a little disappointed that there weren’t any pictures of me as a baby among all the papers.” Hannah moved to Beijing from the US two years ago. First she studied Chinese at a university, and now she has just started a job in the marketing department of a language school. Hannah is also trying to piece together the mystery of her childhood. The role the school boy had played was a new bit of information. She already knew where she had been found, because that information had been in the report her adoptive parents had received when they adopted her. The certificate also contained her birthdate and her Chinese name, Cao Haofei. “Now I also learned that the authorities gave me my name and guessed my age. I’ve wondered if my name and birthdate are my real ones. I often wonder if I really am 22.” Notes providing a name and birthdate are often attached to the clothes of an abandoned child, or tucked in their basket, but apparently there wasn’t such a note in Hannah’s case. Hannah also learned something else important that may help her to track down her biological parents. Hannah has stumps in place of fingers on her right hand, the result of some kind of accident. She had surgery on her hand when she was very young, but previously she hadn’t known exactly when the operation had taken place. Now she knows that her fingers were already missing when she was found,

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and the papers don’t contain any medical documentation about the operation. “That means the surgery was performed before I was left in the park. And the surgery required a skin graft using skin from my stomach. At that time, there were only a few hospitals in China that could perform that kind of surgery. Maybe one of those hospitals knows the names of my biological parents.” Hannah’s theory about why she was abandoned has also become more focused. Earlier she thought that her biological parents wanted a boy or were afraid that their handicapped daughter would be unable to marry. Now she believes that a firecracker exploded on her hand during Chinese New Year. Her parents brought her to a good hospital in Beijing from a rural area. It likely became clear to her parents that Hannah would continue to need expensive surgeries as she grew up, and that she would have a permanent scar on her hand. “I can honestly say that I don’t have any negative thoughts about my biological parents. I’m sure they did what they thought was best, both for me and for them. My adoptive father has influenced my thoughts on this quite a bit. He has always shared my story openly, without any shame.” Hannah lived in a large government orphanage in Beijing until she was five. She only has a few memories of the orphanage: Her crib was too short, because her legs hung over the edge. And she and some other children were once punished for something they had done. She remembers crouching in a corner for what seemed like forever. When Hannah was five, she was moved to a foster home close to the eastern railroad station in Beijing. The woman

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who ran the home knew that children with disabilities were less likely to be adopted. First there were only three children in the home, but later there were more. “I have great memories from my time at the foster home. The government orphanage had so many children that no one cared just for me or looked after me. The lady we called nainai (grandmother) in the foster home was there just to be with us and to play with us.” American volunteers came to the home to teach the children English, as well as different games and hobbies. The children thought that was fun, too. The food was really good. Terrible things also happened in the foster home. Hannah was sexually abused twice. She doesn’t remember what happened very clearly; she completely erased the memories of the incidents from her mind for a long time. Hannah thinks that she forgot the abuse, because she wanted to forget it as a child. She does remember the perpetrators: Two teenage boys who had stayed at the foster home for a short time were the culprits in the first incident, and the later incident involved an older male staff member. When Hannah finally told nainai what had happened with the staff member, he was sent away. “I don’t really consider myself a person who has been sexually abused. But the abuse did make it difficult for me to trust men for a long time when I was a child. I was afraid of older men, and I didn’t even want my adoptive father to touch me or hug me. At first I was only close to my adoptive mother.” Hannah was adopted by a family in the US in 2000. She was seven-and-a-half years old. Three families from Texas all

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came to the same foster home to pick up their children. And so it was that Hannah, Paul, and Maria, who all knew each other from the orphanage, went to Texas together. Hannah still remembers the moment when her mother came into the foster home, and Maria whispered to her that her mother was beautiful. In Texas, Hannah lived less than half an hour from Paul’s and Maria’s families. They saw each other often and had sleepovers. “It was a strange feeling, because there were others going through the same things as me, like culture shock, after arriving in a small town like Lindale, Texas. There were only 3,000 people there then. I was one of three Chinese people there.” Hannah’s new family was wonderful. Hannah had a sister who was three years older, and a brother who was one year younger. They were excited about their new sister, and they were nice to her, even though they hadn’t been asked if they wanted a sibling from China or not. But the beginning was also hard, because her parents didn’t know Chinese, and Hannah didn’t know English. Thankfully the family had a big dog. “At first I was afraid that it would come and eat me in the middle of the night. In Beijing, there were always dogs barking in cages between my foster home and school, and I was scared to death of them. But then I noticed that the dog didn’t know English either, and we became best friends.” Hannah was the oldest child when she went to preschool as an eight-year-old. Then she jumped straight into third grade. To everyone’s surprise, she even won the reading competition. She was motivated to learn English quickly, because no one could understand her. But she forgot Chinese.

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“Soon after arriving in the States, I wanted to be like everyone else. I wanted to be an American, just like all of my friends. At some point my dad took me to Chinese lessons in a bigger town a couple of times a week. There were Chinese children with Chinese parents in my classes who were more focused on learning to write. It was really hard for me, because I didn’t know any Chinese at all.” The other Chinese children were mean to Hannah. She was also upset that her brother and sister went shopping or to the zoo while she was in Chinese class. When she was 12, she told her father she no longer wanted to take Chinese lessons. “My dad said I would regret the decision, and of course he was right. When I came back to China for the first time, I really wanted to speak Chinese.” Hannah returned to China for the first time when she was 15, and she visited Beijing, Shanghai, and Xian. She was surprised by how at home she felt. In Texas, she had always stood out, but now all of a sudden, she looked just like everyone else. It felt good. Memories also flooded her mind: When she ate Peking duck, she remembered that she had eaten it in her foster home, too. She loved the sauce. When she was 16, Hannah returned to China and volunteered in her former foster home over the summer. She taught the children English and did arts and crafts projects with them, the same kinds of activities she had enjoyed when she was a child. All of the women at the foster home remembered Hannah. “They told me I cried a lot. And then I remembered I did actually cry a lot, and no one asked me what was wrong.

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Of course I didn’t understand everything they said. But it was a strange feeling, as if I had come full circle.” It was around that time that Hannah began to understand who she was. She accepted and befriended the Chinese side of herself. “I realized that I wasn’t 100 percent American, but I wasn’t 100 percent Chinese either. And that actually I am culturally more Dutch than American, because my adoptive father was born in the Netherlands, and his culture has affected me a lot.” “When I was younger, I didn’t want to have anything to do with my past, I just wanted to be an American. But then I realized that whether I want it or not, my roots are in China and Beijing.” After completing her Bachelor’s degree in record time, Hannah went to China to study Chinese. She already knew that she loved China, and now she speaks the language as well as the locals do. In her spare time, she volunteers at an orphanage with children with disabilities. She is in no hurry to leave the country of her birth. “I can also move to Vietnam or some other country close by. If I move back to the US, I’ll be disappointed in myself, because the US isn’t very exciting. Things are so calm there. In China, everything is changing quickly, even the economy. The one-child policy has become a two-child policy.” She’s also still searching for her biological parents. “But I don’t feel like some part of me is missing without them. I’m happy with my adoptive parents. They’re awesome, they’re five star parents. But it would be very interesting to meet my biological parents. There’s so much I don’t know.

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What do my biological parents look like? Do I have any brothers or sisters? What happened to my hand? I can’t answer these questions until I find them.” * * * Hannah Dejong: I don’t think the one-child policy was the best solution for China, but the decision-makers of the time were trying to do what was best for China. They had to slow down population growth. Without the one-child policy I would never have made it to the US. And maybe not even to Beijing, because it could be that my parents are from a rural area. My life would be totally different. I don’t know if it would be better or worse.

4

NO DISCIPLINE As a child, Zhao thought that meat and seats on the bus were only for children. But she paid a high price for her privileged childhood.

China’s little emperors have developed a reputation that has preceded them to the West. They are spoiled only children who don’t know how to behave, and their two parents and four grandparents serve them hand and foot. Little emperors were born as a result of the one-child policy; they are only children who receive all of their family members’ attention. But at the same time, people talk about them in condescending tones: Those little emperors! Just look at that little emperor! Sometimes the term is used to describe all only children in China. It’s similar to how we say, oh those young people, they have such poor manners. Little emperors have been nurtured on fruitful soil. According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, there are about 150 million families in China with only one child. That’s a third of all households. In the cities, nine out of ten families have only one child.

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And it is easy to run into little emperors in China. I once observed an entire family trying to soothe a twoyear-old that had lost her temper at the Great Wall. In China, people often travel in big groups, with grandmas and grandpas in tow. The little girl dressed in a bear suit was screaming, her face bright red. Her dad held her in his lap and rocked her. Grandma waved a piece of banana in front of her face. Grandad tickled her back. Mom tried to say comforting things to her. But the little girl didn’t calm down, even though the whole family was doing its best to soothe her. Little emperors can be boys or girls, but in my experience, more boys seem to be little emperors. In China, people tolerate more outrageous behavior from boys than they do from girls. That’s certainly true in Finland, too, but the difference is more noticeable. In China, few people have heard of raising children in a gender neutral way, so boys are given toy weapons, and girls are given dolls. Boys are expected to be physical and brave; girls are expected to be sweet and good-natured. On another occasion a friend and I shared a train compartment with a mother and her five-year-old son. The mother asked her son what he wanted to eat, and took a banana and some nuts out of her bag. The boy demanded chocolate, and his mother quickly found some for him. The boy jumped on my friend’s bed, until my friend sternly told the boy to move to his own bed. He threw trash down on my bed from his upper bunk, and he didn’t stop until I yelled at him. When it was time to go to the restroom, he simply cut to the front of the line.

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His submissive mother catered to his every whim. She was submissive to us, too, and she was clearly ashamed of her child’s behavior. She smiled miserably as she apologized on her son’s behalf. And yet she was focused on fulfilling his every need. Do you need to go to the bathroom? Do you want your slippers? How about some noodles? There are crazy stories in the Chinese media about selfish only children: One boy threatened to jump from the family’s apartment balcony if his mother didn’t make his favorite food. A mother aborted her second child because her firstborn indicated he didn’t want a baby in the family and was even cutting himself. When China made the announcement that it would be moving to the two-child policy, a group of young elementary school children decided to band together to pressure their parents into abandoning any ideas about additional children. They didn’t want to share the undivided attention they received with anyone else. But what kinds of adults do little emperors actually become? Zhao Min, a 30-year-old lawyer, is sitting with me in a café next to the university area in the city of Guangzhou, and she talks in a quiet voice. That is a sign of good manners in China. She refuses the offer of pastries and only wants to drink hot water. She was pampered as a child, and she shares that with me now with a slight blush on her cheeks. “My family was poor. My mother had two jobs, so that she could prepare food with meat in it for me. My parents didn’t eat any meat, it was only for me. Sometimes I did catch my father secretly grabbing a piece of meat. When I told my mother, she yelled at him.”

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For a long time, Zhao thought that the best food was reserved only for children. She was also used to adult strangers giving her, a school-aged child, their seat on the bus. Her parents scrimped and saved in order to pay for her studies. When Zhao was a teenager, she thought that was normal, because that’s what other parents did, too. There are stories in China of parents who bought their child a computer and saved the money for it by bathing in cold water themselves. “As an adult I’ve come to understand that my parents and their generation want to give their children a better life than they had themselves. They were always poor, and they had to work so hard. They experienced the Cultural Revolution, and they didn’t have the opportunity to go far in life.” During the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, China closed universities for years. Young people and the intelligentsia in the cities were sent to work in the fields. When the schools were open, the children mostly read Mao’s teachings. China descended into violent chaos. Educated people and local leaders were detained for having the wrong views, and even their family members were abused and beaten publicly on the streets and in markets. Hundreds of thousands of people died. During the one-child policy, China opened up to the world, and suddenly it became possible to become wealthy or at least climb out of poverty. Families are hopeful that if their offspring are economically successful, the entire family will prosper. So it is that children must be given as much as their families can afford. Different surveys have shown that families often use half of their income on their only child.

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Paying for extra lessons and an apartment for an adult child is very expensive in of itself, but it is also considered important to provide children with the food, hobbies, and toys that can help them become well-rounded individuals. Investing in an only child dovetails nicely with the quality goals of the one-child policy. After all, the Chinese leadership has not only wanted fewer children, but also higher quality children. And parents have learned to do anything to see their offspring make it to the top. Economic forces have also played an important role. You can sell anything in China by claiming it is good for children. In the 1990s, even McDonald’s managed to market itself successfully as an upscale restaurant for children, and parents willingly waited in line to get hamburgers and French fries for their offspring. Today, parents in big cities feed their children organic food if they can afford it. Of course, toys, clothes, and sweets can also be a way to show love. In China, people traditionally don’t proclaim their love out loud, but they do, for example, put the best pieces of food in their loved one’s rice bowl. And because there has been only one child sitting at the table, parents have had more good food to offer. * * * If I observe children at the Great Wall or on a train more closely, I notice that most of them aren’t noticeable at all. They behave very well, and even better than Finnish children in public. Only a small percentage of children are true little emperors. They are very noticeable in a group, and of course it’s the same

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with young people in Western countries, too: The loudest ones are the ones you notice on the streets and in the news, even though most of them are very nice and perfectly ordinary. The vast majority of Chinese children are subject to strict discipline, and the discipline is even too strict from a Nordic point of view. They must be obedient to their parents, and they must treat all adults with respect. I have seen children being slapped on many occasions for not immediately obeying an order. It is true that little emperors are spoiled with stuff, food, and attention, but parents generally don’t allow their children to act like awful brats. Zhao Min is a case in point. She did get meat every day, but she was also slapped often. “I remember one time in particular when I was taking a bath. I was farting in the water and making little bubbles. I was laughing, but my mother was angry. I ran away from her, and she threw a shoe at me. And then she beat me with the shoe. I didn’t even understand what I had done wrong.” And even if a toddler is the perfect example of a little emperor, they are sure to grow out of it once they go to school. And that’s when childhood ends as well, or at least the kind of world filled with play and fairy tales as we Westerners think of it. As a young child in school, Zhao was never allowed to play. She went to school in the morning, and after school she did her homework until it was time to go to bed. “If I managed to watch even a little TV in secret, my mother would cut off the electricity.” It is impossible for Westerners to fully grasp the kind of pressure Chinese live with from the time they are children. Yali

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hen da. Life is difficult, as the Chinese often say. When people ask me what the biggest difference is between the Chinese and the Finns, I reply with yali, the pressure of life. Finns have incredibly easy lives compared to average Chinese. A Chinese person’s yali begins as soon as they go to school. * * * I’m shadowing 14-year-old Chen Wei on his “day off” on Saturday for a piece I am writing for Suomen Kuvalehti, a Finnish weekly news magazine. During the week, Chen’s schedule on a typical day is as follows: He is already at school at 7 a.m. School is over at 7 p.m., and then he works on homework until 11 p.m. Then he goes to bed and sleeps until 6 a.m. and goes back to school. I have changed Chen’s and his mother’s name since it didn’t occur to me to tell them that their story might also be translated into English when I interviewed them. On Saturdays, Chen doesn’t eat breakfast until after 7 a.m. His mother Feng Ying has made him a breakfast of oatmeal, fried eggs, and sausages. The family doesn’t lack for money. Their home is filled with heavy, dark wooden furniture, and there are ceramic elephants and vases on the book shelves. A Western oven, a dishwasher, and a huge steel range hood gleam in the spacious kitchen. Chen is very excited about Saturdays. It’s a special day because he gets to play soccer in the evening. He actually would like nothing better than to play soccer all the time, but he’s only given permission to play once a week. His parents aren’t especially strict. Most of his classmates aren’t allowed

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to have any hobbies at all. On school holidays, Chen even gets to go skiing. “My classmates don’t even know the word xiuxi [to rest],” Chen says. Chen does have to make his own bed, pack his bag, and choose his own clothes. His classmates’ parents usually take care of everything for their children, since chores take away valuable time from studying. Indeed, many only children don’t learn how to make their own beds or how to use an electric kettle until they go to college and live in a dormitory. Of course, Chen never cooks, cleans, or washes his own clothes. It makes for long days for his mother, who takes care of her son’s needs and also runs a successful chain of pharmacies. Chen’s father is a businessman, and he is often away on business trips, as he is now. But before Chen can go play soccer, he must study for a few hours, even on a Saturday. Now a ninth-grader, Chen has had private lessons on the weekend since he was in second grade. Chen is already at his prep school staring at his math book at nine o’clock. His shirt reads: “Sweat plus sacrifice equals success.” Chen can’t understand what the English words mean; English is his most difficult subject. Luckily he doesn’t have his extra English lesson until tomorrow, on Sunday. Now he has to practice his proportionality problems to prepare for an upcoming test on the subject. Chen’s tutor is sitting right next to him. “How would you solve this problem?” his tutor asks.

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Chen can’t solve the problem, so the tutor assigns an additional one hour lesson for the afternoon. Chen’s two-hour long chemistry lesson doesn’t go well, either. When Chen tells his tutor that he received a bad grade on his chemistry test, his tutor decides to have Chen practice chemical formulas. “Those are really hard! Can’t we practice something else?” Chen pleads. But it’s of no use – Chen has to fill in letters and numbers in the periodic table and remember what they symbolize. What is CO2 again? The gloomy classroom is filled with long tables, and screens divide the tables into sections for two people. Students ranging from 6 to 18 years of age sit at the tables with their private tutors by their sides. A plastic wreath hangs from the water pipes on the ceiling. It is supposed to bring cheer to the classroom. The walls are decorated with streamers from the children’s parents, thanking the prep school for helping the students to get into university later on. Chen continues with his physics lesson and then practices math for an extra hour. He only has six-and-a-half hours of lessons on his day off, although he will still need to work on homework for two more hours in the evening. In principle, elementary school is free in China, but because competition is so fierce, parents buy their children expensive private lessons. On average, Chen has ten private lessons a month, which cost about 500 euros. That is equal to half a month’s salary for an average Chinese person living in Beijing. Even if an entire family chips in to pay for a child’s education,

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many Chinese families simply don’t have the means to pay for private lessons. In these cases, families push their children to study even harder at home. The gaokao, or the university entrance exam that students can take after completing high school (12 years of primary and secondary education), is the focus of all of this pressure to study. The exam has enormous consequences for the lives of young people. Their scores determine whether they can go to university, and how prestigious the university will be. A young person is much more likely to land a good job after attending a well-known university, whether they have done well in their studies or not. The top universities are located in Beijing and Shanghai. China also has vocational schools, and many young people go to work without any secondary education and work in stores, restaurants, and on construction sites. But there are huge differences in how people in different professions and positions are valued. Those who work in the public sector and have higher degrees are the most respected; an uneducated worker at a private company is at the very bottom of the ladder. Manual laborers and people who care for others are also less-respected in terms of their profession. It is parents living in cities who are most keen to see their children go to university. It is an honor for the entire family, and people believe that a higher education will bring money and status. Families essentially arrange their lives around their children’s education. Chen’s family moved to an apartment within walking distance of his reputable elementary school

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so he would be zoned to attend that school. Their apartment building is surrounded by wealthy neighbors who park their expensive SUVs in the building’s basement-level parking garage. There’s also a lush park inside the fenced area of the building complex. By Beijing standards, the area is unusually attractive. If a child is able to attend a good elementary school, it will be easier for them to get into a good high school, and they stand a better chance of doing well on the gaokao. But the pressure to do well on the entrance exam is so extreme that many have nightmares about it, even as an adult. But you survived the gaokao, Chinese will comfort each other in the face of being fired or getting a divorce. I feel sorry for Chen. He is a 14-year-old boy who loves soccer and basketball and all kinds of physical activity. He isn’t a bookworm, but he has to study for the sake of his family, although he doesn’t phrase it that way himself. He wholeheartedly believes that his path in life includes going to university. He hasn’t ever been offered any other option. Chen clearly seems unhappy. He doesn’t smile once during the day. It is only after six in the evening that I see him smiling broadly. His teammates are teasing him out on the soccer field. All of the other players on the team are in their thirties, because Chen’s parents believe it is more instructive for him to play with older people. Chen doesn’t know he is unhappy, because the life of all of his classmates is just as rough. None of them are allowed to play or to enjoy the joys of childhood and youth. They don’t know anything better. Generally Chinese only realize how

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dismal their lives were as children when they become adults. Once they go to university, they finally have some free time. They can go on walks together, play games, and have conversations over tea. University students live in dormitories, away from their parents, and they begin to realize that they were not allowed to make any decisions for themselves as children. Indeed, many young wealthy couples want to move abroad because of the rough life they had as children. They don’t want their own children to experience the same kind of childless childhood. Chen’s mother Feng Ying suffers on her son’s behalf. She knows what childhood should be like. “When I was a child, we played in the forests and in the yard. We had our own adventures and built toys and played with them.” But now all of the children in their circle of acquaintances sit with their nose to the grindstone. “I would like to let my son play more soccer, but I can’t because he has so much homework. It doesn’t feel right. We parents talk about the pressure our children face in school a lot, but what can we do? The competition to get into universities is so fierce.” In China, schools don’t take into account a student’s interests or strengths. Instead, everyone is forced into the same mold studying the same subjects. Chen does have half-hour of P.E. at school every day, but the time is used for marching or gymnastics. School is always focused on the next round of tests. Chen tells me that at his school, they don’t study history, biology, or geography in the ninth grade because there are no tests in

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those subjects at the end of the year. They use their time on other subjects. “If he isn’t motivated, there won’t be good results, either,” his mother sighs. According to Young Zhao, a professor at the School of Education at the University of Kansas, the Chinese education system kills a child’s creativity, curiosity, and drive. By his calculations, only 10 percent of the students who graduate with a Bachelor’s degree from a Chinese university are actually good enough to work at an international company. At a cursory glance, it is easy to assume that children face less competition and pressure since there are fewer children as a result of the one-child policy, but in fact the opposite is true. If Chen had siblings, all of them would certainly be pushed to study, but they wouldn’t all need to be stars. Parents could push the children who truly wanted to study and go to university. On the other hand, in such a scenario there is the danger that the education system could revert to favoring boys rather than focusing on every young person who truly wanted to study. * * * An only child’s yali doesn’t end with getting into university either. After university, the pressure begins all over again when it’s time for payback. Parents expect that the sacrifices they make for their children’s education won’t be made in vain. The Chinese have believed in the power of education for 2,000 years. They also respect ancient Confucian teachings

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which instruct children to honor their parents. Many parents still expect obedience from their adult children. Jurist Zhao Min is wearing a stylish flower-patterned dress as we sit together in the café in Guangzhou. She sighs. She knows she hasn’t fulfilled her parents’ expectations, and their relationship is tense. Zhao is anxious and consumed with guilt, but she still doesn’t intend to bend to her parents’ will. In her summary, Chinese parents expect their children to marry, have a child, and earn lots of money. Zhao has studied diligently, and even completed two law degrees. Her parents paid for her education, even while she was studying in Europe. Zhao learned about human rights law while she was in Europe, and that’s where the trouble with her parents began. Zhao wanted to work for a non-governmental organization and help the less fortunate, but her parents wanted her to get a job that was more prestigious and paid more. Nevertheless, Zhao now works for an international agency that supports Chinese agencies providing local humanitarian aid. She has asked me not to use her real name, because her work is closely monitored by the Chinese authorities. It’s not the kind of job that brings in a big paycheck, even for a lawyer. “My mother finds it incomprehensible. Lawyers are supposed to make lots of money after all. First my parents paid for my studies, and now I don’t want to earn money according to their expectations. As another option, my mother thinks I could work for the government, in a stable and secure job. Or then I could move back home to be closer to my parents

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in northern China and start my own company there to make the whole family wealthy.” Zhao’s parents have lived in poverty all of their lives, and she has realized that for them, the road to happiness means a life with money. Zhao herself believes that happiness is a more spiritual pursuit that involves friends, beauty, and helping others. She has been trying to explain her views to her mother for the past ten years. “I would like my mother to support me, but I can’t get that from her because she simply doesn’t understand.” Zhao is 30, and her parents would like her to marry as soon as possible and have a child. The family line must continue. But her family won’t accept just anyone as a partner. “I have a boyfriend here in Guangzhou. When I brought him home to meet my parents, my mother asked me if I couldn’t find a more suitable candidate to be her son-inlaw. My boyfriend works as a teacher at an NGO, and he earns very little. He’s from a rural area, so his family isn’t well-off either.” On the other hand, Zhao isn’t even sure if she wants to get married or have children. And that is something her mother definitely does not understand. It’s no surprise that there is such a huge gulf between parents and their children in China. They are separated by a chasm spanning the equivalent of several generations in the West. The pace of change in China has been so fast that the Chinese count one generation as those born in the 1980s, and another generation as those born in the 1990s, and so on.

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Some young people with university degrees have parents who can’t write. Zhao’s mother may not understand her daughter, but she continues to be part of her daily life. “She calls me all the time. If I am happy, she is happy. If I am sad, she is, too. It’s awful, but so typical in China. Parents live through their children. Why can’t they live their own lives?!” But what life would that be? Parents have dedicated their lives to their children, and they see their children as a continuation of themselves. It’s difficult for them to find a new reference point. Especially when everyone else thinks the same way. “When people my parents’ age meet, they just compare their children and talk about how all of the children are doing,” Zhao says. Of course not all parents are constantly breathing down their children’s necks, but in Western eyes, even the gentlest parents have a huge influence over their adult children. For their part, only children feel thankful and guilty in equal measure. They are all too painfully aware of the sacrifices their parents have made for them. Zhao believes that if she had a sibling, her relationship to her parents would be easier. Her parents’ attention would be divided, and her mother wouldn’t cling to her like a drowning person clinging to a sinking ship. Her boyfriend Li Wei (his name has been changed) has a brother, and Zhao has jealously noticed how no one in Li’s family has tried to rush him back to his rural hometown. Luckily Li’s brother wants to stay in the countryside and take care of their parents.

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“When I was a child, I didn’t even know that siblings exist. I lived in a factory town where everyone worked for the government, and no one was allowed to have two children. I didn’t know anyone my age who had a sibling.” It was only when she went to university that she met people from rural areas. They had siblings, because the one-child policy wasn’t as strictly enforced there. “It was an earth-shattering realization. They told me how they had played with their siblings. It was only then that I realized that I had been lonely as a child. It would have been so wonderful to share secrets with a brother or sister. Or beatings at least.” In China, the most important secrets are kept inside the home. Children can’t tell their parents everything, so many consider their siblings to be the only people they can truly share everything with. As the Chinese have discussed the little emperor phenomenon, they have become afraid that only children are worse than other children by their very nature, because they haven’t had any siblings to help shape them into better individuals. Zhao also believes that she would be more social and more flexible if she had had a brother or sister. Even job advertisements occasionally state that only children need not apply. I think Chinese only children are often too eager to use their lack of siblings to explain away their personality defects. It’s an easy excuse for past mistakes and not getting things done. I like to tell people in China that even though many of my Finnish friends have siblings, they could still do more to

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improve their personalities, just as we all could, including me. My Chinese friends often describe me as open-minded but also stubborn and too eager. And I have a brother and a sister. People in China tend to be very direct in their assessment of each other’s personalities when among friends. There is little Chinese research supporting the refining power of Chinese siblings. One noteworthy study about China dates from 2012, and in it, a group of economists compared two groups of Chinese, those born right before the implementation of the one-child policy, and those born during the early years of the one-child policy. The researchers had about 400 survey respondents, and they were asked about their attitudes towards the future, among other things. The study participants were also asked to play games, and the researchers observed their behavior. Based on their survey responses and their behavior during game play, the Chinese who were born during the one-child policy were more pessimistic than their counterparts born before the one-child policy. They also trusted other people less, and they didn’t like to take risks. So it very well could be that a lack of siblings can shape one’s attitude towards the world. It’s interesting that the group born in the 1980s is so pessimistic. They have grown up in an era of peace and constant economic growth in China. But the fruit of the one-child policy is ripening in a pressure cooker. These children have been expected to fulfill the hopes and dreams of parents who have endured hard times. They have been forced to be competitive

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throughout their education. They have been instilled with the idea that after university, they must get a high-paying job. But that simply is no longer possible. Millions of young people graduate from university every year in China, but China doesn’t have enough jobs for all of them, much less high-paying ones. It is all very depressing of course. People have even begun to notice a new phenomenon in China. It’s always been more difficult for those in rural areas to get into universities, but now many rural families don’t even dream about sending their children to university. Young people working in a factory can earn as much as someone working in an office with a university degree. Because of the one-child policy and the boom in education, there is already a shortage of factory workers. The idea that only children are more selfish, shy, and incapable of getting things done than children who grow up with siblings seems to be akin to the idea of the generation of little emperors. These ideas have been discussed so much that people have begun to believe that they are generally true, even though they are not. Of course there are some adult only children who are so spoiled they can’t help themselves. I’ve met two such people, a little by accident. * * * I’m a bit taken aback, and I don’t know if I should ask the questions I’ve prepared. Actually I find myself coming up with a new battery of questions on the spot. The interview

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completely changed as soon as I stepped inside this particular apartment in Beijing. My intention had been to ask only children about the latest pressure only children face, yali, or caring for their aging parents, but my interviewees have surprised me. It turns out that they, the adult only children, are actually the ones being cared for. Thirty-year-old Li Ou is sitting at the head of a coffee table fashioned from an enormous tree stump. His wife Wang Xu is a few years younger, and she is sitting on a thick rug on the floor. They are casually dressed. Wang is wearing attractive pink loungewear, and Li is wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. Li does all the talking. Even when I ask Wang questions directly, her husband answers for her. Their two-year-old son Li Tian is also standing by the coffee table. He is using his toy shovel to poke at a heap of sand in a portable sandbox on the table. The four-room apartment is immaculate and filled with expensive furniture, including a piano and fancy speakers. From outside, the low apartment building looks like an ordinary, deteriorating building from the 1980s situated next to other buildings just like it, but in the apartment, everything indicates that Li and Wang come from wealth. A tall and very thin woman enters the living room. She introduces herself as Jiang Ying, Li’s mother. I realize that we aren’t in Li and Wang’s apartment, but in the home of Li’s parents. “During the week, we live at my wife’s parents’ home, and during the weekends we live here with my parents. It makes childcare easier,” Li says.

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Wang’s retired mother cares for their son during the week, and then Li’s parents, who are still working, care for little Tian during the weekends. The young couple has their own apartment, too, one bought by Li’s parents, but everyone in the family believes that living with a child would be too difficult there. So the couple rents out their own apartment, and Wang, Li, and their son take turns living with their parents. Their parents also cook and clean. The young couple doesn’t have to do any housework at all, and they have never needed to. Do they even know how to cook? “Sure, my wife will sometimes fry an egg when we come home late at night,” Li replies. I’ve read stories about Chinese only children who never become independent, but now I’m meeting such people for the first time. In China, it’s been common for many generations of family members to live together under the same roof, and grandparents have taken care of their grandchildren. But nowadays, some parents are arranging full service inns for their adult children. It’s as if parenthood – and childhood – is never turned off. Parents continue to take care of their thirtysomething children as if they are small children. Li and Wang seem to find the situation completely normal. “Our parents want to take care of us. They like to do it.” Li happily describes his life with his wife. In the evenings, they go to the movies and meet their friends, and they take trips to nearby cities on the weekends. They plan to travel farther as soon as they can leave their son with their grandparents for more than three days at a time. The young couple

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has the money to have fun, because their parents take care of their living expenses as well as the shopping bills. I’m wondering where Li and Wang’s parents find the energy to manage the daily routines of caring for the family. Li’s mother works in human resource management, and his father works for the Chinese army. Wang’s mother has already retired, but her father still works for a government company. So their jobs are easily as demanding as those of their children. Li, who studied management at a Western university, manages the intranet at an IT firm. Wang, who studied at a university in Beijing, is in charge of managing the pension cards for the residents living in the nearby neighborhoods. She was previously employed at a private company, but she found the work too taxing. Handing out pension cards is a nice and relaxing activity. Jiang Ying, Li’s mother, bursts out with a long reassurance about how light the housework is. “I’m not tired at all. In China, it’s natural for families to keep childcare within the family. Our children’s generation doesn’t have as much money. Those of us over 50 have lots of energy to help out, and at the same time, we get to enjoy life with our grandchild.” But doesn’t it bother the young couple to always be living with their parents? Wang manages to answer before her husband this time. “Sometimes I think it would be nice to live alone, just the two of us, but then we couldn’t have a child. It would be too hard to go to work and take care of a child.”

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In China it’s customary for one of the grandmothers to move in with their son or daughter’s family to care for a newborn baby, and grandmothers often stay for a year or more. The Chinese are often amazed by Western families who manage to bring up their children without any help. The family is close-knit. But I am skeptical when Li and Wang claim that they tell their parents everything. They say they keep no secrets from each other. Wang even discusses the arguments she has with her husband with her mother. I guess I have to believe them. “But we don’t tell our parents what we’re going to buy beforehand, like clothes or electronics,” Li says. He explains that they discuss and make decisions about important matters together as a family, and his mother nods in agreement. Their family democracy seems to work, one generation doesn’t steamroll the other, and they claim that they only argue about the upbringing of Tian. The grandparents give in as soon as little Tian starts crying. Everyone assures me that they have no other disagreements. I didn’t come to interview the family from this perspective. I was originally interested in investigating what happens when a family’s grandparents are so old that they need assistance. There has been a great deal of public discussion in China about how only children will be able to care for their parents. This is called the 4-2-1 problem in China: Only children have two parents and four grandparents to support. Traditionally children have always cared for their aging parents in China, but the children have been able to share

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the burden with their siblings. Li and Wang’s parents also continue to take turns caring for their own parents with their siblings, and they live a few hours away by car. As only children, Li and Wing won’t have the luxury of sharing the burden of caring for their parents. In the future they will have both sets of parents to care for. And how will little Tian, busily making mud cakes, manage this burden? As an only child of only children (his parents don’t plan to have any more children), little Tian and his future partner face an even greater burden: He could be responsible for four parents and eight grandparents. One couple could ultimately be responsible for 12 elderly people! Little Tian will need to set up his own retirement home. This problem is just beginning to emerge in China. For the most part, the first generation of only children’s parents are still in good health and under the age of 65. Wang and Li’s parents are all under the age of 60, so they won’t need regular care until much later. Li is unconcerned about the future. “My wife and I haven’t actually discussed how we will care for our parents when they’re older. I know they don’t want to go to a retirement home, so we’ll need to care for them at home. I don’t think we will all live under the same roof, since there would be seven of us after all. Maybe we’ll care for one set of parents and hire a caregiver for the other pair.” “We’re lucky. We live in Beijing, and our parents have money. Their salaries are better than ours, so I doubt they will need our money when they retire. They have good pensions.” “It’s different for migrant workers,” Li says.

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Li is right. Those born in the city most likely own their own apartment. And their parents have pensions and access to good health care. City dwellers and their parents most likely live in the same city, too, at least if the city is Beijing or Shanghai. People don’t want to move to other parts of China from those cities. Migrant workers, on the other hand, have left their homes in rural areas to work in the cities and, more often than not, rent an apartment. Their poor, aging parents have stayed behind in their rural hometown where the pension system is only just being set up. It’s not easy for these parents to follow their children to the cities, because their health care is tied to their home district. The horrific image of lonely elderly people suffering in poverty with no one to take care of them is a scenario that threatens rural areas in particular. But in the countryside the biggest culprit hasn’t been the one-child policy, since families with two children have been common. These elderly people have been left behind in their rural villages as a result of the largest migration in world history. In just a couple of decades, Chinese villages have been abandoned by young people who have flocked to work in the cities. Researchers believe the suicide rate is so high among the elderly in rural areas because of the break-up of families caused by migrant work and the resulting loneliness elderly face. The door of Li’s family’s apartment opens and closes, and a little dog with a wrinkled muzzle runs in. Mr Li Shounan, Li’s father, steps in behind the dog, and he has a soldierly demeanor as befits his profession. He looks surprised and

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even a little angry. No one has told him about this interview with a foreign journalist. Li Ou, now silent, cowers back in his chair. The rest of the family is silent as well. Maybe there are secrets in this family after all. Now only Mr Li answers the questions, and his opinions are clearly very different from those of the rest of the family. “As the head of the family, I make the decisions, and generally everyone listens to me.” Mr Li is also the one who decides that the family will not share their real names for the interview. It is understandable in a way, because soldiers are not to have any contact with foreigners, and especially not with journalists. Then Mr Li drops a bombshell. “It is Chinese custom for adult children to live with their parents and take care of them, but this custom has its roots in the agrarian culture, and it is no longer sensible. My wife and I don’t really care, we can live in a retirement home.” Both his wife and son look surprised. Li did mention earlier that he doesn’t expect little Tian to care for him and his wife until they pass away. I’ve heard the same refrain from many city dwellers who are parents of small children, but more rarely from the mouth of someone who is almost of retirement age. Opinions change quickly, especially in the cities. China will have to hurry to build more retirement homes. In Beijing, the waitlist can be years, and in rural areas, the wait can be even longer, because there are even fewer homes for the elderly. * * *

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Li Shounan: How many people are there in Finland? Five million? Ha ha. You can’t possibly understand. The one-child policy was necessary. We have almost 1.4 billion people in China now. Without the one-child policy, there would be 1.8 billion people. Food, land, places to live, places to study, there wouldn’t be enough of anything. My son’s generation would be far worse off. And China’s population isn’t just China’s problem, it’s the world’s problem. So you see, China has helped the world.

5

NO BROTHERS Cecily and Zhao have done well in life, because their parents weren’t allowed to have a second child.

Cecily Huang is visible on the screen of my smartphone, and it appears that she is sitting in a roomy car with her seatbelt fastened. Cecily is looking for a café in Sydney with a WIFI connection so she doesn’t have to use 4G for our video chat. We laugh at how backward Australia is. In Chinese cities, any halfway decent restaurant will have WIFI. Cecily is studying for a Master’s degree in journalism in Sydney, which she greatly enjoys. The fact that she can pursue an education is a direct result of the one-child policy. “I’m so sick of American journalists’ articles about the onechild policy. They think it was all just awful,” Cecily huffs. She’s referring to the stories we all know about abandoned girls and aborting girl fetuses. Cecily agrees that these are heart-wrenching stories that need to be told, but these stories aren’t the whole truth. Very few Westerners know that there is one group of people who has benefited immensely from the one-child policy. And

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surprisingly this group is exactly the group of people we in the West have been taught to feel sorry for: Chinese girls. But the status of girls, especially those living in cities, has improved dramatically as a result of the one-child policy. And Cecily is one of those beneficiaries. In traditional Chinese fashion, Cecily’s parents wanted a boy. After Cecily was born, her parents petitioned to have another child, but they weren’t given permission. Just like the majority of other parents of girls, they accepted their fate and cherished their only child. “I had all of their love,” Cecily says. Her childhood in the city of Zhengzhou in the province of Henan was a happy one. The family wasn’t wealthy, but they lived as comfortably as their neighbors did. Her parents enjoyed their jobs. Her mother worked in a fabric factory, and her father worked at the same factory as the orchestra’s flutist. Cecily went to the factory school. Her father treated her like a son, and encouraged her to play rough games and even whipped her himself. In their neighborhood, fathers usually disciplined their sons, and mothers their daughters, but not in their household. Nevertheless, her parents didn’t believe she had any opportunities. They would have immediately sent a son to university, but instead, they placed Cecily in a vocational school to become a secretary. They didn’t believe girls could make it far in life, especially where they lived, and where they expected her to stay. In their plans, she would later care for them when they were older.

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“My mother thought that the best I could hope for was to work at a toll booth collecting tolls. It used to be considered a good job, because workers are on the government payroll,” Cecily explains. Her parents thought that their daughter would be in good hands working for the state. Work in the public sector was reliable and brought lifelong security. But Cecily believed she could do better. She saw many other girls doing well in high school and going on to university, and so Cecily convinced her parents to pay for night school and then for university. She was accepted at Renmin University, a renowned university in Beijing, to study law. She switched to journalism and got a job at the British paper The Guardian as an news assistant in their Beijing office. Now 34, Cecily is continuing her studies in Australia, again with her parent’s support. “My father says that if I had had a brother, they wouldn’t have been able to educate two children.” Cecily believes that without the one-child policy, she would have ended up working in sales. Her salary would have been used to help educate her brother and pay for his apartment. In China, it is customary for parents to buy sons their own apartment, and the whole family pitches in to pay for it. Many Chinese young women have had it even easier than Cecily, because they haven’t had to convince their parents about the importance of education. Parents have channeled their resources into their daughters and even forced their only daughters to attend university. Never before in Chinese

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history have families invested so much in their daughters and treasured them as much as they do now. In the previous chapter, I shared the story of 30-year-old lawyer Zhao Min whose parents placed all of their resources and hopes in her. Her mother worked two jobs to buy meat for her only child. Zhao has also experienced the cultural collision course the one-child policy caused between parents and grandparents in her own family. She has her mother’s stubbornness to thank for being alive at all. “When my mother gave birth to me, my father’s mother, aunt, and the whole family were waiting in the hospital with flowers, presents, and chicken soup. My grandmother was sure I would be a boy. When my family found out I was a girl, everyone disappeared and left the gifts in the hallway,” Zhao says. Traditionally grandmothers help care for their grandchildren, but Zhao’s grandmother refused to help, not even when Zhao’s mother offered her money. Zhao’s mother had to take a long leave of absence from her job at the factory. “I was often very ill as a child and coughed constantly. The doctor urged my mother to prepare for my death. My mother did everything for me, but it annoyed my grandmother. ‘Don’t care for the child,’ she would say. ‘Let it die! Then you can have a boy.’” Zhao’s mother refused to give in, even though the rest of the family turned away from them – and even though she and her husband had really wanted a boy, too. Zhao

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says it was common to think that way in her hometown in northern China. “My mother believes that a girl’s life is much harder than a boy’s. Girls menstruate and have other issues to deal with. Parents have to worry more about their daughters, and a girl’s life is less secure.” “But then when I was born, my mother gave me all of her love.” Zhao had so much love and support that she managed to complete two degrees. The one-child policy has given girls in China the opportunity for an education and a career. And they have certainly taken advantage of it! In 2010, one-fourth of Chinese women in cities had a university degree, a figure that has doubled since 1990. Of course Chinese society hasn’t completely changed over the course of one generation, but it is clear that the status of women and girls has improved. People used to think that women couldn’t properly earn a living. The one-child policy has rapidly changed people’s attitudes about the role of women in cities. Anthropologist Vanessa Fong has noted that women who are mothers of one child are able to give their all to their job and earn money for their families in a way that wasn’t possible before. Consequently, families now have more faith in their daughters’ abilities to care for their families. In rural areas, migrant work has also increased the value of women and girls. Young women from rural areas work in the cities and send money home just like men do.

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I have heard many women say they really want to have a girl in recent years. They are downright afraid of having a boy, because parents have to save so much money to buy boys an apartment and a car. Apartment prices have exploded in the larger cities. China’s only daughters know from their own experience that they can manage just fine as a woman in the world. Now that many of them are of the age where they can have their own children, why should they pin their hopes on having a boy? * * * But as is often the case when women succeed, there is a backlash. China is no different in this regard. Politicians were alarmed when the number of educated Chinese women grew very quickly. As crazy as it may sound, educated women threatened the system of birth regulations. One would think that highly educated women would be the best possible gift for the one-child policy. They marry less and later than other women, so the number of children would decrease, and they would wait longer to have them. But birth regulations in China aren’t just quantitative but also qualitative; the aim is not only to have fewer children, but to have better children. The Communist Party wants smarter, better educated, and more capable citizens. And it is precisely for this reason that university-educated women, the country’s smartest and best educated women, should be persuaded to become mothers as quickly as possible so they can bring up

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quality children. But the leadership is afraid that the same thing will happen that has happened in many other countries: Educated women have children later. They want to work and enjoy their lives. The Chinese media has also been trying for years to intimidate educated women into marrying quickly, well before their thirtieth birthday. Newspaper articles claim that educated women are so picky when it comes to choosing a partner that they eventually end up as lonely old spinsters. Cartoons depict ugly, bespectacled women with doctorate degrees sitting in ivory towers. They are called “leftover women,” or shengnü in Chinese. Researcher Leta Hong Fincher has done the best job of describing this phenomenon in her book Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China. She also describes how this word came about. A women’s organization working under the auspices of the Communist Party launched the term in 2007, soon after the Party had expressed its concerns about the quality of the population, as well as the lack of wives for men. It became the task of the women’s organization to encourage quality women to marry, and it started a propaganda campaign. In its most well-known article, the same one which also angered educated women the most, the organization discussed ways pretty girls could get married, even without an education. Ugly girls had a different fate: “These girls hope to improve their competitive advantage by educating themselves further. It’s a tragedy that they don’t understand how

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women’s value decreases year by year. And so by the time they get their Master’s and doctorate degrees, they are already old, like overripe fruit.” The campaign was a success. Soon the term shengnü spread into women’s magazines and everyday speech, and it was even added to the Chinese dictionary. Parents demand that their educated daughters accept partners not of their equal, and single women under the age of 30 are in a panic about not having a partner. All of the unmarried, university-educated women I know complain that their families are constantly pressuring them to marry. Many of them are reminded of the importance of looking for a husband on a daily basis. The campaign has also sparked opposing campaigns. “The Alliance against Forced Marriage” put up posters in the Beijing subway with the following message: “Dear Mom and Dad, please don’t worry. The world is so big. There are so many different ways to live. Singles can be happy, too.” The Japanese cosmetics brand SK-II released a video which shared leftover women’s anxieties about the pressure they feel to marry. This touching, if slightly naïve, video instantly became a hit on Chinese social media, and both leftover women and their parents cried after seeing it. In the video, a mother and father rebuke their daughter for not finding a partner. They suspect that their daughter’s appearance may be the cause. At the end of the video, the parents realize that being single is an acceptable life choice after all. Thirty-four-year-old Cecily keenly feels the weight of this pressure.

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“My father says that it’s useless to wait for the man of my dreams, that I need to lower my expectations or I’ll end up alone, that I’m already old. People have been pushing me to get married for a long time, and everyone does it, my family, my neighbors, my acquaintances. If I were a man, this pressure would have started later.” Cecily believes that the increased pressure to marry is above all else a backlash fueled by traditional values under assault. In the documentary film she made while studying in Australia, she describes how the status of women began to improve in the 1950s. The propaganda of the time depicted strong women working alongside men in the factories. Women were working everywhere. And in Cecily’s childhood, men also cooked at home. “Now the situation is different. Previously women had to go to work, because a man’s salary wasn’t enough to support the whole family. Now not all women have to work if they don’t want to. China has grown more prosperous.” The difference between classes is huge, but in wealthier families, people can live well even on one salary, especially if they bought their apartment before the dramatic increase in housing prices. I myself know unmarried Chinese women who would like to be housewives. Couples are nowadays also influenced by romance movies. “My parents never told me that they loved me, and they didn’t say it to each other either. That’s just not done in China. Now Mom demands that my father buy her flowers,” Cecily says and laughs.

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She reminds me that traditionally a woman’s role in life was to get married, not to get educated. Men also wanted wives less educated than they were. “Chinese men find me exciting, because I’m educated, and they like flirting with me. But they don’t want anything else. They’re afraid of me, because it’s difficult to control an educated woman.” Cecily has noticed that even boys with Chinese parents born in Australia have the same attitude, which to her says more about the power of tradition than propaganda. As a result of the one-child policy and favoring boys, China has tens of millions of leftover men, so one would think that all women who want to marry could easily do so. But it’s not easy to form compatible matches between leftover men and leftover women. Leftover men are concentrated in rural areas, and they are often less educated and less well-off. Leftover women live in cities and are highly educated. For example, according to the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics, 45 percent of the city’s 30–44-year-old singles are women, and four out of five have a university degree. These women are unlikely to readily accept a partner who earns less, is an uneducated migrant, or is a construction worker or farmer. In China, people talk about what’s known as the A–D class hierarchy. Men want to marry less-educated women with fewer means, so A-class men marry women in class B, B-class men marry C-class women, and C-class men marry D-class women. The people at either end of the class spectrum are out

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of luck: The A-class women in the cities remain single, as do the D-class men in rural areas. In her book, Leta Hong Fincher also discusses women who go so far as to leave their management roles to please their boyfriend or husband, and in so doing diminish themselves to make a suitable wife. It’s quite common for a bride to provide money towards the purchase of the couple’s first apartment, but couples typically don’t share this information with anyone. And the woman’s name isn’t included on the title so her husband can save face. As real estate prices have soared in the past few years in China, Chinese men have become wealthy at women’s expense. This isn’t the whole truth, of course. There are also many A-A couples in China, and I bump into such couples often. Moreover, according to newspaper articles, more women are choosing to remain single. They have the money to do so, and many are brave enough to say no to tradition. If they can’t find a partner they like, why should they settle for a bad marriage? But there aren’t any Chinese singles in my circles who don’t want to get married. And I don’t believe singles culture has spread very much yet in China. The family and societal pressure to marry and have children is much stronger than it is in Western countries. Single women over 30 and single men over 35 are still considered to be unsuccessful in life, and they are a shame to their parents. For only children, this pressure is even more intense. I have a great deal of respect for the Chinese who willfully choose a life without marriage. It is difficult to swim against the current, and only those with a strong will can do it.

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Cecily Huang is now dating an Australian man, and she is taking her time to see how it goes. She doesn’t plan on giving in to the pressure. “I’ve seen many acquaintances struggle in bad marriages when they quickly wanted to marry just for marriage’s sake. But our generation has seen Western movies and romantic TV series. I want love.” * * * Cecily Huang: The one-child policy was necessary, even though many of the actions carried out by local officials in the name of politics were awful. But the foreign prejudiced critics don’t know what it’s like to live in a little room in a university dormitory stuffed full of eight students. They don’t know what it’s like for children to board a train that is so full of people that they have to be pushed in through the windows. Or how children used to die, when a poor family couldn’t take care of all of their children. There were simply too many people in China. The intent behind the one-child policy was good.

6

NO WIVES Women of marrying age are in such short supply that Mr Zhou bought his son a wife from Vietnam.

Mr Zhou Fugen would like to talk downstairs. I’m surprised by his suggestion, as the room is a dark storage room. Zhou sets out two low stools on the concrete floor next to two motorcycles, and we sit down to talk. In the next room, a window frame lies on a bare bed frame. Potatoes are heaped in the corner, enough for the family to make it through winter. Yet another room contains a bed piled full of blankets with a sack of rice sitting next to it. Piles of clothes and other items lie strewn about the room. It’s so cold that I’m shivering in my down coat and hat. Mr Zhou isn’t freezing, but he is also wearing a red North Face winter coat over a shirt and woolen pullover. I ask him if it wouldn’t be possible to go upstairs to talk in the apartment. “This is our apartment,” Mr Zhou answers in surprise and gestures around the “storage area” with his hands. Mr Zhou’s elderly father Zhou Xinghua shuffles past us in a blue Mao suit – a short tunic and straight pants – and sits down on

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the bed in the room with the sack of rice. So that must be his room. The old gentleman lights his pipe; it’s carved out of a curved piece of wood. His hands shake, but his eyes twinkle. The smell of the pipe tobacco spreads like perfume and covers the cold, damp smell. Another door opens, and Mr Zhou’s wife, Mrs Yi Tingying appears in a long blue winter coat. She smiles broadly and welcomes me. I can see a neatly made double bed and a TV with scratch marks on the corners through the open door. Mr Zhou agrees to take me upstairs. The second floor looks like it is from another world: Light streams in from the balcony window, the floor is covered in tiles, and the walls have been painted. Three sofas line the wall, and they all look new, as does the coffee table. The flat screen TV is covered in a sheet. It’s obvious that the wooden double bed in the next room hasn’t been used much. A huge photograph leans against the wall. A groom in a black and white suit is sitting in a meadow holding a bride dressed in a blue lace dress and a tiara. The bride has long, fake curved nails and long lashes. The second floor has been decorated for Mr Zhou’s son and his wife from Vietnam who ran away a couple years ago, soon after the wedding. Here in the province of Jiangxi with its 40 million inhabitants, this story is common. Many brides have been purchased from abroad here, and many brides have run away. There simply aren’t enough local women for all of the men here. In China there are far more men than women of marrying age, and the gap is growing. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, by 2020, China will have 30 million more men than women of marrying age.

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The gap in Jiangxi province in Southeastern China is especially large. The census, conducted about ten years ago, found that there were only 100 girls for every 140 boys among children one to four years old. Mr Zhou says that the situation is even worse in the area around his village. “Only about one-third of 25–30-year-olds are women. The one-child policy was very strictly enforced at the beginning of the 1990s,” he says. The migration of people to the cities is one of the reasons for the shortage, since women who go to the cities tend to stay there. But the main reason for the shortage of women has to do with favoring boys during the one-child policy. Women aborted girl fetuses, and apparently parents also killed or treated their daughters so poorly that they died. More girl fetuses and young girl children have died in Jiangxi than in China on average. No one knows for sure why the number of girls in Jiangxi is so low. There are many farmers here who traditionally wanted sons, but this is also the case for many other parts of China. Mr Zhou says he doesn’t know anything about those practices. His silence on the subject is understandable, because some acts could be illegal. Generally people don’t talk about the fates of their daughters and granddaughters outside the family. Now Chinese men are paying a high price, financially, too. * * * Mr Zhou sighs. After arranging for his son’s marriage, the family has had little to live on. The three working members of

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the family work as construction workers and cooks and earn almost 2,000 euros a month, quite a lot by rural standards, but their earnings are quickly drained by the debt they owe on the wedding. They spent 200,000 yuan, or about 30,000 euros, on renovating the house, buying furniture and gifts for the bride, arranging the wedding, and paying for their son’s trip to Vietnam. Now they have to find a new bride for their son and start saving all over again. “I try to see it as a gambling loss. The money’s gone, nothing to be done about it,” Mr Zhou says. He has high cheekbones and bushy eyebrows, and he looks me straight in the eyes. He seems to be a sincere and friendly man. I feel sorry for him. In this next attempt to procure a bride, they may be forced to spend more money, because the Vietnamese bride was still cheap by Jiangxi standards. Gifts for a new bride from a nearby village could alone cost 30,000 euros. Or as young men like to say in slang: “A wife costs 1.5 kilos plus a bell,” according to the English language magazine That’s Beijing. That translates to one-and-a-half kilos of 100 yuan bills (or about 20,000 euros) plus a car. In the past, people in rural areas paid a dowry to the bride and her family, but it wasn’t until the new millennium that the price of wedding gifts soared as the number of men of marrying age grew. During Mao’s time it was enough if the groom gave his bride and her family a pair of pants and a coat. Since there are so few unmarried women, and poor villages like Fanshen don’t attract them, women can name their price.

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“And it’s not enough to have a house like this in the countryside, they demand to have a new home in the city. We don’t have the money for that,” Mr Zhou complains. In China people often say that a man must build a nest that can attract a phoenix, that is a wife. Building a nest has become an important part of marriage proposals in the cities, too, because it is difficult for a man to get married if he doesn’t have a car and home of his own. Apartment prices in the big cities have risen so high in recent years that many men are stuck in mortgage traps. Parents and the entire family have to save a long time to be able to buy a home for their son. When Mr Zhou’s son Wu Dong was a little over 20, his parents first pushed him to find a girlfriend himself. He didn’t succeed, and so his father started acting as his spokesperson. As soon as Mr Zhou heard of a girl in their area who was of marrying age, he rushed to meet her. Competition was fierce, because every young woman in the area had throngs of potential suitors. “Women have 20 dishes to choose from, and they eat what they want,” Mr Zhou explains using a Chinese turn of phrase. “I wore out my shoes making so many rounds.” He doesn’t sound bitter. He just states things as they are. His shy and quiet son wasn’t the easiest groom to market either. “Thirty years ago he would have been very desirable, a quiet and honorable man with his feet on the ground, but now the requirements have changed. You have to be talkative and romantic. The crazier the man seems to be, the more women today like him,” Mr Zhou says.

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In the end, Mr Zhou couldn’t think of anything else to do except to send his son to Vietnam. A brokerage firm had put up posters on electricity poles in the village. They promised Vietnamese wives with a 100 percent guarantee and a marriage license in the bargain. There are dozens of wives from Vietnam in the local villages, as well as a few from Myanmar. Southeast Asian wives are common across southern China. There aren’t any statistics about the exact numbers of foreign wives. Many end up staying in China illegally, and not all of the relationships are made official. The International Organization for Migration estimates that 18,000 Vietnamese women alone go abroad to marry every year. China is one of the largest receiving countries. Mail order brides are technically illegal in China, but there are plenty of brokerage firms that facilitate the practice. People can order brides to their home, or men can go on package trips to interview potential candidates. The internet advertises “beautiful, young, cheap, and fun Vietnamese women,” and companies go so far as to include insurance as part of the package tour, in case the bride decides to escape. * * * We start to hear the sound of exploding fireworks. We go outside and walk between houses towards the source of the sound and arrive at a dammed pond. Twenty or so people are marching down the road in a funeral procession on the other side of the pond. Eight men are carrying a coffin on a covered platform. A brass band leads the procession, and drums and cymbals keep the beat.

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Chinese men need to marry for other reasons as well. If the family line doesn’t continue – and in the conservative rural tradition the family line only continues through sons – no one will be left to make sacrifices for the deceased. Ancestors need food and money on the other side, and these offerings must be made many times a year. This custom is alive and well in rural areas. People also buy special sacrificial presents made of paper, like small model homes, cell phones, cars, even wine bottles and solar panels – everything and anything the ancestors may value. Then the paper artifacts are burned either in a big immolation trough at a temple or in bonfires lit by the graves. Mr Zhou says he doesn’t think he will need ritual offerings when he is gone. But he is bothered by the idea that no one might come to clean his grave and make ritual offerings on Tomb-Sweeping Day. “Maybe the other graves will be swept, but not mine or my wife’s. It’s a sign that indicates which of the deceased are valued and cared for.” Fundamentally this practice is concerned with saving face and preserving honor, even after death. Even today, the Chinese continue to do things out of a sense of obligation to their family and their community. Remaining single and not having children also brings shame. Even though the number of bachelors continues to grow, bachelors are considered oddities, and even people to be laughed at. “In rural areas, people look down on bachelors. Not having children, and especially not having a boy, is the biggest

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possible insult to your parents. Maybe not everyone in the city wants children, but here where we live, we don’t understand that kind of attitude.” The fact that his son is still a bachelor is also a personal shame to Mr Zhou. “Others say that I haven’t fulfilled my responsibilities as a father and procured a wife for my son.” Actually Mr Zhou is his son’s stepfather, but since his son’s biological father has passed away, he has assumed this responsibility. In China, marriage is not simply a couple’s affair, but one which involves the entire family. Parents and relatives often arrange dates for their younger relatives. While parents no longer directly choose their children’s partners, a marriage will usually fall apart if the parents refuse their future son- or daughter-in-law. And that is why I am interviewing Mr Zhou, and not his son. Mr Zhou has more say over his child’s marriage than Wu Dong himself does. Does his son even want to get married again? Mr Zhou finds the question surprising. He shows me his son’s profile picture on WeChat, the Chinese version of Facebook. The young man’s WeChat name – Deng Dai You Yuan Ren, or Waiting for the Right One, suggests he is longing for marriage. * * * After I return to Beijing, I call Waiting for the Right One. What does he think about all of this? And what exactly happened to his Vietnamese wife?

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In the wedding video Mr Zhou paid for, I see a young man with round cheeks and broad shoulders. He smiles charmingly and blushes easily. The bride attaches a flower to the groom’s suit, and then the groom clumsily attempts to attach his own flower to the bride’s dress. His fumbling seems to irritate her. The video was shot in December 2013. Wu Dong’s face is tense, but there is also joy or maybe pride. He and his parents have worked so hard for this moment, to find him a wife and save money for his future. The video camera also pans over the new car and every new piece of furniture in the home, the bed, the sofa, the TV. Two years later, there is a resigned 27-year-old man on the phone. Wu works in a university cafeteria in the province of Hunan, and he seldom visits his hometown. He regrets his trip to Vietnam. At first he found his father’s idea odd, but he still went to the brokerage firm close to his village. There he met a Vietnamese woman who seemed nice, and then she came to Wu’s home for four days. “I think I fell in love with her, and I think she fell in love with me, too.” It was quite a feeling. Wu had never had a girlfriend before, or even been out on a date. The woman was in China illegally, so they agreed that she would return to Vietnam to get a visa so they could then get married. They heard nothing from the woman for a long time, so Wu went to Vietnam to fetch her. The brokerage firm sent a few other Chinese bachelors along with him. The trip cost 7,000 euros.

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“The fee also included blind dates with other women in Vietnam, but I didn’t think I would need them.” The agency arranged for Wu to meet the object of his affection. She told him that she couldn’t move to China, because she had crossed the border too many times with false papers. The Chinese police had put her on their blacklist. The agency immediately promised to arrange dates with four other women. “I was very disappointed.” Wu went on the blind dates anyway, because he felt he had to find a wife on this trip that his family had paid so much for. It felt impossible to return home empty-handed, and it wasn’t even something Wu considered. First Wu met the candidates one at a time in a hotel room. An interpreter was on hand to interpret their conversations. Then he met each of the women one-on-one in a café. They basically just smiled at each other, because they had no language in common. Wu gave the women gifts worth more than a 1,000 euros. “My wife was the first woman I met. I actually didn’t like her, but she told me she liked me and that she wanted to come to China. I didn’t know what to do. I had paid so much for the trip, and all of the other men had already found wives. And so I chose her.” Wu left for Vietnam to bring back the woman he thought he loved, but instead, he brought home a wife he said he didn’t even like, but did so out of family and financial pressure. It’s an oppressive and exploitative situation, for both of them.

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As soon as the couple arrived from Vietnam, the family immediately began planning the wedding held a few months later. Living together was not easy for Wu and his wife. Although she learned a little Chinese, they couldn’t have any proper conversations and he didn’t learn Vietnamese. It seems they were able to argue, however. They often stubbornly quarreled about who would sleep on the left side of the bed. “My wife was lazy. My mother didn’t wake her up until lunchtime. My wife wasn’t really ever happy, and if I didn’t do things the way she wanted me to, she only grew angrier,” Wu remembers. Mr Zhou and his wife also tell me that they never asked their daughter-in-law to do any housework. They catered to her and gave her meat to eat, which is still highly valued in rural areas. When she wanted a particular kind of coffee, Mr Zhou took his motorcycle to the city to fetch her some. If she asked for money to go shopping or to send to her family, Mr Zhou took out his wallet. “My parents treated her like a princess, and I didn’t mistreat her either,” Wu swears. I can’t ask for his wife’s point of view, because no one knows where she went. In the video from their wedding, I can see that she is irritated or at least confused. She casts quick glances at her groom, and often presses her lips together. Or could it be that someone used to the warm weather in Vietnam just felt cold in an unheated Chinese house in winter? She shivers in the video, and the groom drapes an ordinary winter coat over her wedding dress.

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The bride only seems happy during the wedding luncheon in the village restaurant. Dozens of guests sit at round tables, and they use their chopsticks to snap up the new dishes the servers constantly bring round. The married couple winds their way from table to table, sharing toasts with everyone out of small glasses filled with clear liquor. Four months after the marriage, Wu’s wife ran away with another married Vietnamese woman living in the same village. Mr Zhou was able to keep track of his daughter-in-law via the pictures she posted on WeChat as she fled. Mr Zhou shared the photos with people he knew, and they recognized a hotel in one of the nearby cities. Then the brokerage firm called to tell him that the police had apprehended his daughter-in-law, because she did not have her papers with her. Mr Zhou and his neighbors set off to fetch the two women who had escaped. Mr Zhou claims that unlike his neighbors, he didn’t beat his daughter-in-law after her escape attempt. But the family certainly became very suspicious of her. Mr Zhou confiscated her passport and the jewelry he had bought for her. He wanted to prevent another escape and forcefully tie her to the family. The family was also suspicious of what she said. When she said she was pregnant soon after her return, the family was sure she was lying. “We didn’t believe her, so we took her in for a check-up. And sure enough, she actually really was pregnant. My family and I were thrilled,” Wu says. But that same afternoon, his wife escaped again, this time for good.

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“I have no idea why. I tried to ask her after she escaped the first time, but she refused to talk about it.” Wu says that he doesn’t miss his wife at all, but his father says that his son refuses to throw the wedding pictures away. * * * A few years ago I would have been shocked by this kind of bride-ordering business. But now that I have been following Chinese news for some time, I no longer find it so. People use horrifying methods to compensate for the lack of wives. Human traffickers tempt women with false promises about work from inside China and abroad, in countries like Vietnam. Instead, they are sold as wives whom their husbands can rape and beat behind locked doors. Women are also kidnapped to meet the demand. The US magazine, Latterly, ran a story featuring interviews with young woman from a Vietnamese border town who had been kidnapped but escaped and returned home. Kidnappers often appear to be friendly young men who tempt women to go on a motorcycle ride with them. The kidnappers drive the women over the border and sell them as brides to Chinese men. The women are closely monitored by their husbands and mothers-in-law, but often families are not even afraid they will try to escape. They are far away from their homes, they don’t speak the language, and they have no money – and they don’t always know where they are. Chinese bachelors also take North Korean defectors and the victims of human trafficking as their wives close to the border

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with North Korea. Female defectors often have little choice other than to become wives, because they must hide from the Chinese authorities. No one know how many of these wives there are; there could be tens of thousands of them in Northern China. Some of them have escaped and gone elsewhere in China or on to South Korea, or the police have found them and returned them home. In this context, the service Mr Zhou bought from the brokerage firm doesn’t seem so strange. Chinese men can either choose a package trip to get a wife or live with the stigma of being a bachelor. It seems that at least some of the Vietnamese women know that they will be leaving their homes to become wives, and they can choose between the men presented to them, as was the case on Wu’s trip to Vietnam. As it is, it is common to make a decision about marriage in the rural areas of both countries after just a few meetings. But the Vietnamese women who come to China are far from their families and friends if things don’t go as planned. Many of these brides often escape in China, and they like to flee with other women wed in the same area. The largest group escape occurred at the end of 2014 when 100 Vietnamese women all disappeared at the same time from the surrounding villages of the city of Handan in the province of Hebei. The woman who brought them from Vietnam disappeared, too, and many believe that they all returned to Vietnam. Mr Zhou assures me that some of the brides brought over from Vietnam are very satisfied with their lives, and he takes me to visit a neighbor to prove it. The road winds between

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small old huts built of stone and large new three-story houses built of concrete. “No one really needs a three-story house, but nowadays everyone has to show their wealth that way,” Mr Zhou tells me. He has a three-story house himself. Even though the area downstairs looks like a storage area and the third floor is still unfinished, the house looks handsome from the outside. As we continue walking, I see a slogan that someone has painted in red characters on the fence by the side of the road. It says: “One is enough, two is too many.” The one-child policy has been an inexhaustible source of inspiration for propaganda artists. Posters and slogans posted on walls all across China sing the praises of “Fewer children, a better life,” and they encourage: “Have fewer children, but more pigs.” Or they try to intimidate with signs like: “If you have an overquota child, your family will be destroyed.” We enter a yard where a pouting toddler wearing split pants is crouching on the ground. She has diarrhea. Her grandmother is standing next to her, waiting, and when the toddler stands up, she cleans the child and fetches some sawdust from a bucket with a little shovel. We tell the woman that we would like to talk to her Vietnamese daughter-in-law, but she is suspicious. What’s so special about my daughter-in-law, she asks, but eventually she invites us inside. She refuses to tell us her name or that of her daughter-in-law. Her daughter-in-law is sitting on the sofa and wearing a long thick pair of long johns and a woolen sweater. She is

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soothing a baby boy in her arms, her second child. The baby is wrapped in a thick blanket. Only his face peaks out from the middle of the bundle. She tells us that she came to the village through a brokerage firm two years ago. A friend of hers who had married into a Chinese family told her that people were more prosperous in China than in rural Vietnam. “And it’s true,” she concurs. Her mother-in-law rushes in with the older child, and her daughter-in-law politely stops talking. “Vietnam is like China was in the 1980s. So poor,” the talkative grandmother explains. “She is a good daughter-in-law. She is just like us. Obedient. When we forbade her from keeping in touch with another wife who escaped, she ended their friendship right then and there. She already speaks Chinese pretty well, too. I treat her like my own daughter.” The grandmother looks satisfied. It’s hard to tell if her daughter-in-law feels that way. * * * Mr Zhou has set out delicacies in honor of my visit. They present me with an entire fish, some tofu, stir-fry made out of their own pig and vegetables from their garden. We sit down at the low table on low stools and enjoy the food. A hen and her chicks wander around our feet, picking at crumbs. A puppy begs by the table, even though it shies away from the hen.

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Mr Zhou is talking about how hard it is to find a new wife for his son. They are in the process of formalizing his son’s divorce from his first wife, but where will they find the money for a second one? “Perhaps my wife and I did something wrong in our previous lives, and now we’re being punished for it.” They also have another son who is a few years younger than Wu. It’s not clear how the family managed to have two sons when the one-child policy was being more strictly enforced. Maybe they had connections to the local officials, because Mr Zhou’s wife vaguely implies that they paid a fine equivalent to a few dozen euros. But now their problem is doubled, because they must save money for two wives. And many women will not choose a man who has a brother since brothers share their parents’ inheritance. They have limited options. Wu plans to try to find a partner on a dating site online. That’s where his younger brother found his previous girlfriend, even though she turned out to be a con artist. She enticed him to invest all of his money in a pyramid scheme. Now he’s dating a Chinese woman he was introduced to by a relative online. She lives in Myanmar. I carefully ask if the boys would consider sharing the same wife. Mr Zhou’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise. My cheeks burning, I explain the proposal put forward by Professor Xie Zuoshi: Men in rural China should have wives in common, one wife for every two men. Xie Zuoshi is a professor of economics at the University of Zhejiang, and he bases his radical idea on

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the fact that poor men will otherwise have no opportunity to marry. He claims that there are already brothers in rural areas who share a wife in common. “I’ve never heard of such a thing! That’s impossible! What a horrifying thought!” Mr Zhou exclaims. It’s essentially the same reaction that Professor Xie received in public as well. As the BBC reported, women were enraged on social media. “If women are only meant to produce heirs and are forced to mate with any man just to solve the problem of population growth, how does this make us any different from animals?” someone with the online name Superelfjunior asked. Before Professor Xie understood it was time to get out of the limelight, he tried to defend his proposal further by saying that unmarried men are more likely to be guilty of violent crimes than married men. It’s possible this has already come to pass, because crime has gone up in China, and many researchers blame single men as part of the problem. The Communist Party is also worried about this surplus of single men, because unmarried men are more susceptible to all kinds of rebellion. Mr Zhou continues eating, lost in thought. He has pulled a pair of cotton detachable sleeves over his wool sweater. There’s less laundry that way. Mr Zhou still remains hopeful about one thing. He wants his grandchild. No one in the family has ever seen the child, but Mr Zhou knows that the child is a girl. His daughter-inlaw has sent them pictures, because she wants money to help raise the child. Mr Zhou refuses to send her any. In the pictures, a one-year-old girl leans against a column, her head cocked to the side. An unknown man stands next to

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her. Based on the pictures, Mr Zhou guesses that his daughterin-law has a new husband and mother-in-law. She lives somewhere in the province of Guangxi, many hundreds of kilometers away. Mr Zhou knows that is where she lives since he tried to visit her there once. She agreed to come back with her daughter for 3,000 euros, but she never showed up at the bus station where they had agreed to meet. In truth, Mr Zhou does not want his daughterin-law back. He just wants his granddaughter. But other relatives and members of the family don’t want the child either. Wu is afraid that the girl’s step-father won’t take good care of his daughter, but he also knows that it would be even more difficult for him to get a new wife if there is a child in the bargain. “If I manage to buy my grandchild, I think we have an 80 percent chance of keeping her,” Mr Zhou estimates his chances against the family. “If the child were a boy, the whole family would want him back.” * * * Zhou Fugen: I didn’t understand the one-child policy. Why did they suddenly start to regulate the number of children? My parents could have as many children as they liked. Maybe the leaders had good reasons for what they did, but now after so many years, we see the results. Now my sons can’t find wives. I didn’t like the one-child policy.

7

NO CHILDREN Mrs Guo’s only child died, so she tried to get pregnant again and had twins at the age of 56.

Five-year-old Ren Jiayi is standing on a stool while his sister Ren Jiabin is poking his toe and giggling. Both are chewing on big marshmallows. Jiayi jumps on the bed I am sitting on and thrusts his head on top of my notebook. Jiabin grabs a pen from the table and starts drawing in my notebook, a big smile on her face. “Stop that! Let go of the notebook!” a gray-haired Mrs Guo Min yells from the kitchen in the corner of their studio apartment. She is kneeling and peeling potatoes with a big Chinese chef’s knife, and a wok is bubbling on the stove. There is a strong smell of gas in the small apartment. Every now and then she stands up as she tells me her family’s story, and especially how she tries to survive on such a small income. She takes a few steps towards me, her mouth is moving, and her hands knead the air in front of my face. She almost presses her head up against my forehead. I could still hear her clearly even if she stood further away.

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Mrs Guo is a woman who has stood up for herself all of her life. She is a thin woman, and she is persistent, direct, and even a little frightening when she is worked up. I wouldn’t want to get into an argument with her. When 61-year-old Guo Min is out with the five-year-old twins, people walking by admire her chubby, sassy, and energetic grandchildren. What luck to have twins in a family, and both a boy and a girl! It’s like hitting the jackpot, especially during the era of the one-child policy. Boy and girl twins are called dragons and phoenixes in China, the symbols of luck. Dragons and phoenixes also served as the mascots of the emperors and their empresses. Mrs Guo enjoys the attention, because she also thinks she has had an incredible stroke of luck. And especially because she is not their grandmother, but their mother. Some passersby recognize Mrs Guo and her children. She became somewhat of a celebrity when she was interviewed by journalists and even appeared on TV. After all, it’s rare for a woman to have children at the age of 56. When Mrs Guo had her twins, 60-year-old Sheng Hailin also gave birth to twins through in vitro fertilization. She is a fairly well-to-do businesswoman who uses her twins to make money by giving lectures and selling interviews about them. Mrs Guo doesn’t ask for any payment from her interviews, and she lives on a shoestring. But both of these women had twins for the same reason. Their only children both died as adults. These women are known as shidu, those who have lost their only children.

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Estimates suggest that there are well over a million shidu parents in China. Some of them hope for the kind of luck Mrs Guo and Mrs Sheng have had with their twins. As I was looking for people who had lost their only children to interview for this book, I found many Chinese women over the age of 50 who were trying to get pregnant again after the loss of their only child. The death of an only child is an awful thing for parents to bear. In China, parents’ grief is coupled with shame, because people look down on those without children, especially in rural areas. In some places those who are childless face outright discrimination. Lonely elders complain that it’s difficult to reserve a spot in a retirement home or a burial plot in a cemetery, because people are afraid they’ll run out of money. If a resident in a retirement home doesn’t have any children, who will pay for their care? Neighbors also avoid aging and childless couples for fear that that they might be asked to help them when they are in need. * * * Mrs Guo’s 24-year-old daughter Liu Linghui died in a car accident in 2005. Mrs Guo only knows that a truck drove over her daughter. Her relatives have spared her from the specific details. Now Mrs Guo quickly reviews what happened ten years ago. I can tell she has told the same story many times before. “I was told that my daughter was taken to the emergency room, and she died two hours later. My aunt called me the

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next day and told me she had died. I fainted and ended up in the hospital. In three days my hair turned gray.” It may seem cruel and uncaring to wait to share news of a death, but in China it is common to protect loved ones from bad news as long as possible. People often demand that doctors lie to their terminally ill loved ones, and ask doctors to tell their loved ones that they will get better. Liu Linghui lived in her home province of Jiangxi and was studying financial administration. She had lived with her relatives in Jiangxi for a large part of her childhood and youth. Mrs Guo worked as a bookkeeper at a steel factory in another province, and after the factory closed, she worked as a freelance bookkeeper for a number of firms in Beijing. Parents from rural areas often work far away in the cities and rarely see their children, and the children often live with their grandparents. As a young adult, Liu lived with her mother for a year in Beijing and also worked as a bookkeeper while she was there. In 2003, SARS struck Chinese cities, and in a few months 350 people died. City dwellers were terrified they would get the disease, and many fled to the countryside. “My daughter demanded that I let her go back to our home province. Now I regret letting her go.” Mrs Guo wasn’t afraid of SARS, but she had been planning to move back home for good. After all, she was only working in the city to save money for her child’s education and future needs. So she thought she would soon be joining her daughter. Liu’s death took away Mrs Guo’s purpose in life, and it literally knocked her off her feet. She lay in bed for half a year.

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“I almost cried myself blind. I hardly ate or drank anything. I didn’t want to live.” Now Mrs Guo prepares her stir-fry and talks about her daughter’s death without shedding a tear. She’s shared the story so many times before that it no longer makes her cry. “My husband took care of me. He told me that since my daughter has gone to the other side, she won’t come back no matter what I do.” According to Mrs Guo, her husband wasn’t as devastated, because he wasn’t the father of her daughter. Mrs Guo had divorced her first husband many years ago. Her current husband has his own grown son from a previous marriage. The twins don’t seem concerned about what their mother is saying and continue playing. They draw at the table, then crouch under it, wander over to the door, and fetch treats from the refrigerator. Their mother yells at them from the kitchen. Stop that! Close the fridge door! Quiet! But the twins do stop to listen when their mother mentions their dead sister. Ren Jiabin brings me a framed photograph. In the picture, Liu is wearing a qipao, a long, traditional dress, and holding a sunshade. She looks slim and ethereal. “My twins aren’t nearly as beautiful as she was. But the beautiful ones don’t last long,” Mrs Guo says. After grieving for her daughter for half a year, she read about a Japanese woman who had a child at the age of 60. “At the time I was younger than the Japanese woman was.” The article got Mrs Guo out of bed. She decided to live and try to have another daughter. She specifically wanted to

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have a daughter, because she thought she could only love a daughter as much as she had loved her first one. Mrs Guo went to a Chinese hospital to see a general practitioner, and she was lucky, because the doctor felt sorry for her and introduced her to a doctor who specialized in fertility treatments. “When I met the doctor for the first time, I bent down on my knees in front of him and bowed my head to the floor three times, begging him to help.” Bowing three times is a traditional way of showing respect and obedience in China, but it’s rare for people to bow to doctors or bank managers. But during Chinese New Year, for example, many adult children bow their heads to the floor in front of their parents. Again Mrs Guo was lucky. The doctor was known for helping parents who had lost their only children, and his heart softened, despite Mrs Guo’s age. Of course the clinic was also paid for their services. The ultrasound showed that Mrs Guo’s uterus was in good shape. She still menstruated as well, and her husband’s sperm was healthy. The treatment worked, but her first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. Her second pregnancy started well, and as often happens with fertility treatments, there was more than one child growing in her womb. Mrs Guo and her husband were going to have twins. Because the one-child policy did allow twins, and because twins are a possible outcome from fertility treatments, fertility clinics have had many young and wealthy women as clients.

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Many of them could have gotten pregnant without any help, but they were hoping to hit a double jackpot. In her book One Child, Mei Fong states that there are currently over 200 licensed fertility clinics in China, and an untold number of unofficial ones. At the beginning of the 2000s, there were only five licensed clinics. For a long time, the Chinese government had no interest in fertility treatments. Many Chinese also go to Western clinics for fertility treatments to try to have twins. The number of twins born in China has doubled in ten years. However, statistics on the number of twins are distorted by families who have registered their second child born a year later as a twin to avoid being fined for an over-quota child. In 2000, researchers in the province of Yunnan discovered that there were at least 700 false cases of twins in 300 villages. I also have a Chinese friend who is a “twin,” even though she is actually a year older than her sister. She doesn’t think there’s anything odd about it. It’s just not something openly shared with strangers. At first Mrs Guo wasn’t happy about the news. Her husband demanded that she abort one of the fetuses if it was a boy. He already had a son from a previous marriage, and he was afraid he would also have to save money for a second son’s home. “But when we were at the hospital, they couldn’t tell for sure what the gender of the fetuses was, and both of them could have been girls. My mother demanded that I keep them both. She called them a gift from heaven.” A mother’s opinion always carries weight in China, but this time her opinion was especially critical. The fertility treatments

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had cost over 10,000 euros, some of which Mrs Guo had borrowed from her mother. “I argued with my husband until it was too late to safely have an abortion. My husband finally gave in.” Her twins were born via Caesarean section on April 6, 2010. Mrs Guo’s life had purpose and meaning once more: She had children to love. She was thankful. “I know that many people who have lost their children have committed suicide or gone mad.” * * * There are a few benches arranged to the side close to the ticket counters at the Beijing South railway station. The benches are never empty, someone is always sleeping or dozing there. Some are eating their lunches, others are chatting together. They aren’t on their way anywhere, they just live at the station for a few days. These people have come from all around China to lodge complaints against local officials. One women was forced to have an abortion. One man had his fields taken away from him without compensation. Another man has not received his pension, even though he feels he is entitled to it. A woman I’m calling Mrs Hua is also sitting on the bench, wearing a long brown coat and scarf. It’s winter, and the large station is drafty. Mrs Hua has lost her only child, like many of the other people here. They would like to adopt a child, or receive some kind of compensation or old age security pension. Currently parents who have lost their children receive – or at least they should receive – a few dozen euros

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per month in compensation. Mrs Hua is upset, because she has received no compensation at all. I quickly arrange to meet her at one of the nearby restaurants in a quarter of an hour. I don’t want to be seen openly conversing with her at the station. Officials in civilian clothes keep an eye on the people here, and they don’t look kindly on foreign journalists. In the restaurant, Mrs Hua quickly gobbles up the jiaozi, or steamed dumplings, I’ve ordered. She snaps them up briskly with her chopsticks. Occasionally she sips some of the broth that comes with the dumplings. She also asks for a bottle of the restaurant’s most expensive juice. Mrs Hua is a doctor with her own clinic in her home province of Hubei, but she has neglected her practice to pursue her complaints. She has little money, as she comes to Beijing about once a month. “My second marriage fell apart because of my complaints. My husband thought that I didn’t care about him at all. My mental health was cracking, I had nightmares, and I screamed in my sleep. I lived among my dead son’s things.” Mrs Hua’s appearance fits my idea of what a doctor should look like. She is thin, her hair is neatly combed, and she wears glasses with thin frames perched on her nose. But I still sense that something is broken in her. Her eyes nervously dart around, and she laughs in odd places a few times. I’m not sure I would dare to make an appointment with Mrs Hua. She digs a bundle of papers out of her bag. They include transcripts from judicial proceedings, her dead son’s identity

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card, and pictures of Mrs Hua hugging a smiling young man in a tracksuit. These are the items Mrs Hua is trying to show different officials in Beijing. She wants the central government to order the local police to reopen the case into her son’s death six years ago. She is convinced that her son did not commit suicide and jump out of his high school dormitory window as the police claim. She believes her son was murdered. And she knows who the murderer is: her first husband, the father of her dead son, who had a lover and succumbed to mental illness. As her accusations seem rather tenuous and farfetched, and especially harsh towards her former husband, I am not using her real name to protect her family. “When I come to Beijing, I sleep at the railway station for four or five nights at a time. The others here at the station give me good tips about where I should go to meet with officials.” It is a stretch to describe Mrs Hua’s encounters with the officials in Beijing as meetings. She has met with officials in the Ministry of Public Security, but apparently they were irritable and told her that the statute of limitations has passed. She continues to go there anyway. Mrs Hua isn’t allowed into the Supreme Court at all. When she tried to force her way into the heart of China’s power in Zhongnanhai with several others from the station, they were all immediately detained. Zhongnanhai is a closed area close to the Forbidden City where the Chinese leadership lives and conducts their

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business. It truly is the heart of Chinese power, and ordinary citizens have no business there. Generally petitioners gather at the gates of various official buildings, holding up handwritten signs or flyers describing their complaints. It is a futile venture, and the police periodically come by to round up the crowds of people. Mrs Hua has herself been detained fairly frequently; in 2015, she was detained three times. On two occasions, she was held for ten days, and on another occasion, she was detained for five days. First she was sent to a detention center in Beijing, and from there she was immediately sent back to her home province. Sometimes she was put in a passenger car, sometimes in a delivery van, depending on how many people from the same area had been detained. In her hometown, Mrs Hua was held in a cell with a few other women. “We were given food, though it wasn’t much, and we were able to sleep. But we couldn’t shower. There was nothing to do, sometimes we walked outside in the yard. There’s no heating in winter, and last time my nose got frostbite. It still hurts.” Despite these arrests, Mrs Hua’s faith in the central government remains unshaken. “The country’s politics are fine, but our local government is bad. At least the local government has to pay for what they did to me. Every time the police bring me back home, the local government has to pay a huge fee. I’m sure the provinces hate all of us who have complaints.” Many Chinese feel the same way. People have essentially believed that rulers are good and village officials are bad since

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the reign of the emperors in China. Hopeful people continue to stream to Beijing, even though they can almost always expect to get the cold shoulder. But now the officials in Mrs Hua’s home district have suggested they could arrange a small payment for the death of her son, if she stops going to Beijing. “I probably won’t agree to such an arrangement.” Mrs Hua doesn’t know what else to do with her life other than to continue to plead her case. “A family is a harbor you can go to after years of work. But I no longer have a destination. I’m like a drifting leaf.” “I used to stay in touch with my relatives, but they didn’t help me. They were just afraid that I’d go crazy. I’m a burden to them, and they look down on me. If my son were still alive, they wouldn’t treat me this way.” Many Chinese feel immensely sorry for shidu parents. People began talking about them in earnest after the earthquake in Sichuan province in 2008. Tens of thousands of people died, and many poorly constructed schools collapsed. The schools were even called tofu-schools, because the schools fell apart just like crumbly blocks of tofu. According to Mei Fong, in one area close to the epicenter of the quake, almost all of the families had been convinced to have only one child in an experiment in the 1970s, before the start of the one-child policy. It’s possible that the quake wiped out almost an entire generation of young people in some of those villages. According to Chinese news, 8,000 families lost their only child, and some of those children were already adults.

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Chinese parents live in great fear for the life and health of their only children. This fear partially explains why only children are coddled. If someone can come up with a gimmicky product that supposedly furthers the well-being and safety of children, it will sell well, guaranteed. Grocery stores carry cheese and milk packaged as snacks for children. Many parents would like to buy expensive milk from abroad for their children, because the reputation of Chinese milk has suffered from a poison scandal in which a dozen or so children died. * * * Mrs Guo also singles out the milk her twins drink as a separate expense when she lists her monthly expenditures for me in her loud voice, still waving her hands: preschool, rent, vegetables, milk, her daughter’s dance class, and other necessities. She is just able to scrape enough money together to cover these expenses from her pension and bookkeeper salary. But the preschool fees are going up, and soon she may no longer be able to balance the equation. Mrs Guo doesn’t know what to do. She puts green vegetables, potatoes, fried eggs and tomatoes, fish, and rice on the table. “Time to eat!” Mrs Guo yells, and the twins immediately sit down at the table. It’s Saturday, so the children will get to eat more than just noodles for their main meal. During the week, the children eat lunch at their preschool. It’s very close to their apartment, in

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one of the most northerly neighborhoods in Beijing home to many migrant workers. Mrs Guo works from home. When she had her twins five years ago, her future looked manageable. The combined pension she and her husband received was sufficient to cover the costs of raising a family. Mrs Guo did need to work a little, even though Chinese women usually retire at the age of 55 at the latest. Her husband helped with the housework. But then her husband suddenly became ill. He was diagnosed with a difficult case of diabetes, and then he had a stroke. The couple was forced to rearrange their lives since it was impossible for her sick husband and energetic children to live together under one roof. All three of them also needed someone to take care of them. They decided to rent two apartments. Her husband lives in one apartment with his grown son who takes care of his father, but there is no money left for the twins, especially as her husband’s medication is very expensive. Mrs Guo lives in the other apartment with her children. The family gets together once a month when Mrs Guo takes the children to see their father. So Mrs Guo can no longer rely on monetary or mental support from her husband for the children’s upbringing, and Mrs Guo is essentially a single mother. Still, she doesn’t complain. “I was the one who wanted to have more children.” Mrs Guo’s stance is typical in China. When life hands them lemons, the Chinese tend not to dwell on their problems. They

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try to forget the past and fight through their difficulties. The Chinese are also fond of saying that they are good at swallowing bitterness. In other words, they can handle the blows that life deals them. This is a trait I highly regard in the Chinese. Yet it does seem to bother Mrs Guo a little that her husband doesn’t help her at all. “My husband has a good pension, and now his adult son lives on it,” she says acidly. Mrs Guo is giving interviews about her current financial situation, and her contact information is often included at the end of the story. Sometimes readers do send her donations; one person gave her almost 3,000 euros, and another gave her 1,500 euros. Lately she has been getting small donations, at most 20 or so euros, but she gratefully accepts them all. “I was especially moved by a student who gave me 2 yuan (less than 30 cents) from his own small savings.” When a TV station in Shanghai invited Mrs Guo to their studio to talk about her life, the station covered the train tickets for her and her children and also sent someone to assist her. Mrs Guo was delighted. It’s hard for her to take her children anywhere from where she lives at the outskirts of Beijing. Her neighbors also help by leaving empty bottles and cardboard boxes behind her door. She earns about 3 euros per week for bringing the items to bottle and cardboard collectors. People bring the family clothes, food, and other items. A shelf in the apartment is overflowing with stacks of plastic bags filled with secondhand children’s clothing and toys.

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A pile of Barbies sits on the table, and picture books are stacked underneath. A cardboard box filled with apples and a stack of pots occupies one corner. Canned food and dried mushrooms are perched on top of a bag of clothes. Mrs Guo has to turn sideways to fit in through the door to her apartment. Admiring all of the things Mrs Guo has bothers her. It’s clear she has conflicting emotions about being the object of charity. She says that she is grateful for the help, but soon after she says she’d rather not accept any money at all. “I don’t want to beg, I’d like to be as self-sufficient as possible. When the children start going to elementary school, I will stop doing interviews. It won’t be good for them if their classmates find out that they get help from others,” Mrs Guo says sternly. Her hands cut through the air again. Maybe they won’t need the extra help then, because going to school is much cheaper than daycare. “Life is tough; other people my age are enjoying their retirement. But I am used to hard work, and I don’t regret my decision. Having the twins was the right thing to do, no matter how tired I may be now. I am happy whenever I look at them.” Mrs Guo is very energetic herself and oozes an almost masculine power, but she also radiates the fatigue of a person who can never stop to rest. She keeps on going like a robot, as if she might fall over if she were to stop for so much as a second. Mrs Guo will need to work at least 10–15 more years, depending on how long the twins wish to study. Maybe at the age of 75 she will be able to enjoy having her children take care of her at last.

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But she does regret not trying to have more children earlier. Raising her voice, she says: “If there had never been a onechild policy, I would have had three children. Soon after my daughter was born, I accidentally became pregnant. I had an abortion when I was three months pregnant.” “The next year I accidentally became pregnant again. My ex-husband and I would have liked to have kept the child, but I would have been fired from the government firm where I was working. The abortions were a hard decision.” Mrs Guo sighs so loudly it sounds like a croak. “But now when I think about it, so what if I had been fired? It wouldn’t have been a big deal at all.” * * * Guo Min: I obeyed the one-child policy, that’s why I had the abortions. And I wasn’t against the policy by any means. But I think the change to the two-child policy should have come sooner. There are so many people in China who have lost their only children.

8

NO MERCY Mrs Dong monitored her neighbors’ menstrual cycles and pressured them to have abortions. And she’s proud of it.

When teacher Dong Mei’s job changed 20 years ago, her whole life was turned upside down. “As a teacher I had been respected in my village. Then suddenly people didn’t say hello to me anymore. People avoided me, and no one came to visit anymore. My husband and my relatives disapproved of my new job.” And Mrs Dong didn’t wonder at their behavior. “I became a person who was against the other people in the village, in a way.” The village leaders had ordered Mrs Dong to take on China’s most hated task – she became the person responsible for regulating births in the village, the lowest cog in the state family planning machine. This thankless task was often given to some locally respected woman party member. Family planning authorities represent the iron fist of the state that has poked its fingers into every Chinese bedroom over the years, deciding how many children families could

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have, scraping unpermitted fetuses out of wombs, and even tearing newborns from their parents’ arms. The machine is enormous. There are altogether over half a million people working for the family planning authority in the central government in Beijing and in the cities and provinces across China. More than a million additional part-time assistants work in the villages, like Mrs Dong. The low regard for the job is apparent in the way that many family planning aids refused my requests for an interview. Mrs Dong, too, agreed to be interviewed only on the condition that I not use her real name or reveal her village. I can tell you that it is in western China, in Henan province, and that it is inhabited by farmers. Mrs Dong’s request for anonymity is not, however, due to shame, but rather to the fact that she hadn’t asked her superiors for permission to give the interview. In fact she doesn’t feel a drop of shame for her work, and she hasn’t felt any since she realized the positive side of birth regulations, and thus of her work. An important part of her job has been to go to each house in the village and spread propaganda. Mrs Dong has done so gladly. “The women understood that if they had fewer children, their lives would be better. Once I realized this, I started to be proud of my work. I was improving women’s lives.” Mrs Dong also distributed money to the families who contented themselves with one child, which was another way that the state paved the way for smaller families. Nowadays the idea of a small family has become so deep-rooted in the

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village that even the current two-child policy hasn’t produced an increase in the number of children. Mrs Dong also claims that girl children are valued just as much as boys in her village. “There’s no difference between them anymore. So people no longer try to have more children than they’re allowed. That’s partly due to my efforts, because I’ve gone house to house and talked a lot about the equal value of girls and boys.” It is Mrs Dong’s job to make sure that the villagers obey the birth regulations set down by the state. Since the beginning of 2016, all couples have been allowed to have two children. The one-child policy not only meant that a couple could have only one child, or two at most; they also had to conceive their children within a certain prescribed period of time. As recently as 2015 it worked like this in this village: “When a couple wanted a child, the husband and wife would come to my house, and we would fill out an application that is processed in the city family planning office. If permission for a child was granted, the woman had one year to get pregnant. If she didn’t, couples were usually given an additional year’s extension.” Applying for permission definitely required Mrs Dong’s help, because the bureaucracy was formidable. The application had to include a certificate of marriage – only married couples could have children; the couple’s certificates of residency, their hukou; personal identification; and a photograph. In cities, couples were also required to provide an employer’s

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certificate attesting that the applicant did not have any unpermitted children. Such permission had to be requested before getting pregnant. Originally, this rule was very important, because each village was allotted a quota of just a few children per year. A couple might have to wait for a long time to be granted permission to have a child. And permission couldn’t be granted after getting pregnant – because the village quota would have already been filled for that year. But what if someone became pregnant by accident? “The woman would have to have an abortion,” Mrs Dong says. “There might be a quota already set at ten babies per year, and there was nothing we could do about it.” Changes in the state policy were even reflected in Mrs Dong’s small village. In the 2000s, village quotas were discontinued. Parents still had to apply for prior permission for each of their children, but now it was easier to get it. A village could have as many children as it wanted, as long as each individual couple had no more than the one allowed child – or two, if the first child was a girl. In reality, many couples did apply for permission and were granted it after a pregnancy had begun, but Mrs Dong doesn’t like to talk about those sorts of tricks. That was against the rules, at least in this part of China. If a couple’s first child was a girl, they could apply for permission to have another child, but not until four years after their first child was born. This was another rule that was loosened in many places over the years, though not in this village.

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And what if a woman became pregnant before four years had passed? “She had to have an abortion.” One can only imagine the level of stress and anxiety couples must have felt as they first diligently tried to avoid pregnancy, and then suddenly tried to get pregnant as soon as they were granted permission. When the two-child policy began, the stress diminished considerably. Couples no longer needed to take a break between the first and second child anywhere in China, and they could have children whenever they liked. In 2016, even nominal permission requirements were abandoned across China. Now, couples are only required to register on the internet or at the family planning office when a pregnancy begins. Although Mrs Dong claims otherwise, her work has been lightened by the advent of the two-child policy. She doesn’t even record the village women’s menstrual cycles in her notebook anymore. In the past, married women had to report to her when they had their periods – also this “tradition” was carried out here longer than in most places. In some places women had to do pregnancy tests regularly. In the spring of 2016, the BBC claimed that there were still some women in Shaanxi province who were being given quarterly health exams – including a check to make sure they weren’t pregnant. Mrs Dong searches for the notebook that she once used to record the village women’s menstrual cycles. She digs through boxes in the living room, then pops into the bedroom. Her

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office is in her home. Villagers come to this living room, with its television and sofa, to conduct their business. She doesn’t manage to find the menstruation notebook, but she does find a notebook full of notations. It contains the name of each villager, and the date of each child’s birth. In addition, there is a note next to each family indicating whether the man or woman was sterilized and whether the woman had an IUD. Another notebook lists the couples who used condoms. Because contraceptives were distributed free by the state, the villagers come to Mrs Dong for their condoms. Each couple receives a package of 10–20 condoms per month. “Certainly it is enough for a month,” she assures me. In the cities, condoms can be obtained at neighborhood family planning offices. They’ve been available with an ID card at vending machines for years now, and unmarried people can also use them. In large cities, there have also been trials to allow people to order condoms over the internet. You can also get condoms in stores, and more and more people are buying their condoms themselves. There used to be strict rules around contraception in the countryside. “After the first child, the women were required to get an IUD. Until just last year, the city family planning staff would come around twice a year with an ultrasound to make sure that the IUD was in place.” “After the second child, either the man or the woman had to be sterilized. Usually it was the woman.”

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According to the World Health Organization, in 2005, half of the contraception in China was achieved through the use of IUDs, and a third through the sterilization of women. Since the turn of the millennium, people have been able to choose their own method of contraception in China, a policy in effect in Mrs Dong’s village since 2008. In this village it meant that one of the parents was no longer required to be sterilized after the second child; couples can instead choose some other form of long-term birth control, usually an IUD. “Some take pills, too, but most women are afraid of their health effects,” Mrs Dong says. Chinese women generally believe that birth control pills cause weight gain and could prevent them from getting pregnant later. According to Mrs Dong, the villagers are using condoms more frequently. “I still go for a visit after a couple gets married and ask if they want to have a child right away. If they do, I remind them to do the paperwork. If they don’t, I give them some condoms.” In spite of massive IUD usage, contraception did fail now and then in the 1980s and 1990s. One of the main reasons was the low quality of the IUDs. A particularly notorious IUD that caused accidental pregnancies is the steel ring; it was prone to partially or entirely popping out of the uterus. The quality of contraceptives later improved, but then the number of accidental pregnancies among unmarried women began to increase. This was something Mrs Dong noticed, too.

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“There are a lot of young women with accidental pregnancies in the village now. When that happens, there’s nothing they can do except get married quickly. If the woman is under the age of 20, she has to have an abortion.” The minimum legal age of marriage is 20 for women and 22 for men, and children are not allowed outside of marriage. In principle, a child conceived outside marriage doesn’t have to be aborted if the mother wishes to keep her baby. In those cases, she need only be prepared to pay significant fines. According to Mrs Dong, all the unpermitted children born in her village have been granted hukou papers. Of course there aren’t many of them, supposedly, because Mrs Dong is good at talking the women out of it. After a talk, even those who were reluctant to have an abortion usually come around. “They’re afraid of the large fines,” Mrs Dong says, elucidating her tactics. If an unpermitted child is born nevertheless, Mrs Dong takes the parents to the nearest family planning office to pay their fines. If the family can’t afford them, a monthly payment plan is arranged. * * * Does this sound unbelievable? Like systematic meddling in people’s intimate, private lives? An enormous bureaucracy, difficult rules, and harsh punishments? It gets more unbelievable. You can find countless stories about family planning authorities who punished families for having unpermitted

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children in villages across China in the Western press. The stories are often from the 1980s and 1990s, when the one-child policy was stricter. Mrs Dong says that in this village, too, such punishments were common – before she herself began working as a family planning aid. Sometimes a family would lose their bicycle, or their radio. They might have holes chopped in their roof. Often the family pig would be confiscated. In the worst cases, the disobedient family’s house would be razed to the ground. “During my time, these sorts of punishments weren’t used anymore,” Mrs Dong emphatically insists. I’m not quite sure if I believe her, because it feels too fitting that such tactics were dropped precisely at the time she assumed her role 20 years ago. “I don’t know why they gave up the punishments. Of course, if I had been ordered to take away a family’s pig, I would have done it. But the higher level family planning authorities never ordered me to do anything like that.” Forced abortions were performed in her village. Family planning officials would come from the city and take the pregnant women away with them. “Before my time it was common. During my time it rarely happened, and I haven’t had to participate in anything like that,” Mrs Dong assures me. Forced abortions have occurred in China in recent years as well, but seem to be rare – if forced abortion is defined as cases in which the woman is taken to an abortion clinic by force. The situation used to be different.

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In theory, under the one-child policy the Chinese leadership stressed education, propaganda, and fines. In practice, however, the central government, particularly in the first years of the policy, set such strict targets that local officials commonly performed forced sterilizations and abortions during the 1980s and 1990s. Rural women were sometimes treated like cattle. Sterilizations were performed without anesthesia, in conveyor belt fashion. For a sterilization, women might simply be laid side by side on the ground and the operation performed right there. The campaign years, when state and local officials were for various reasons panicked into action, were particularly awful. In 1983, the worst year of all, 20 million women were sterilized. This caused many physical problems for them, not to mention enormous personal trauma. Many lost their mental health in one way or another. They grew depressed and began to fear sex and childbirth. Sterilization and its aftereffects were suffered in silence. This coercive measure might have been one reason for the unfortunately common suicides among rural women. Men were sterilized, too, but much less often. Men believed that sterilization took away their masculine prowess and physical powers. Women, too, believed that their vitality was reduced by sterilization. In the cities, women were let off more easily. By the 1990s, people in the cities had adjusted to the one-child policy, quicker than those in the countryside.

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In the countryside, many pregnant women were able to hide their condition at a relative’s house or a neighboring village. Often the officials of another village wouldn’t care about a pregnant woman who was just visiting, because the child in question was outside of their record-keeping responsibilities. Mrs Dong told me that during her time in her role, women sometimes left the village to hide a pregnancy. By the end of the 1990s, the cruelest years of the one-child policy were over, even in the countryside. The country’s leaders seemed to be starting to curb local coercive practices in earnest. And there wasn’t really a need for them anymore, because rural people had begun to genuinely want just one or two children at most. So by the turn of the millennium, rural areas, too, had adjusted to the one-child policy. They had noticed that a small family made good economic sense. Mrs Dong no longer feels feared and hated. “The villagers have no reason to fear me. They like me.” The family planning machine’s big new problem now is that it could become obsolete. Although having three children is still not allowed, the workload of family planning has inevitably diminished with the less strict two-child policy regulations. What can then be done for these workers? It’s a big question in China, and it is partly for that reason that China waited so long to switch to a two-child policy. The family planning bureaucracy has a great deal of power in China, and it won’t give it up easily. It may hamper efforts to abandon mandatory childbirth regulations well into the future.

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In some areas, the fines for unpermitted children have also had a major economic impact. The bookkeeping has been so flimsy that it’s difficult to say how much money has been taken in and how it’s been used. The fines, and perhaps some bribes as well, may have slipped into the pockets of individual officials. In some parts of China, trials have started to train village childbirth monitors for various jobs in early childhood development. They measure children’s progress and instruct parents to play educational games with their children. They become, in a sense, child welfare workers. It may be that in a few years Mrs Dong will no longer be inducing women to have abortions but instead will be teaching them how to feed their children a healthy diet. * * * Dong Mei: The one-child policy was a good thing, because it improved women’s status. Having many children increases health risks, and families with many children are poor. Thanks to the one-child policy, girls are also valued more.

9

THE USUAL STORY Yang gave birth, then suffered through a month of bed rest and a year of her mother-in-law’s authority.

The one-child policy affected every Chinese person. However, now that the two-child policy is in effect, couples must still ensure that their two children are born within marriage. The everyday occurrences of abortions and the arbitrary actions taken by local officials against expecting mothers and unpermitted children is unlikely to end completely until governmental birth regulations are given up altogether. The Chinese have already had years to get used to planning their families according to the will of the state – or then their desire for children has been so diminished that the birth regulations no longer bother them. Many of the chapters in this book describe the tragic consequences of the 36-year one-child policy on ordinary people, but nowadays most people are content to have their children within the given restrictions. Women, for example, are more preoccupied with concerns like

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whether to breastfeed their children, producing enough milk, and learning to tolerate their mother-in-law’s interference. The life of an ordinary happy Chinese family with children is still surprising to a Finn. When I interviewed Yang Xiaoli in 2015 about her life with her newborn child, I found myself constantly amazed as I took my notes. * * * Even though Yang Xiaoli gave birth three weeks ago, she still hasn’t taken a shower. And she hasn’t left her home. It is customary for new mothers to avoid showers and going outside in China, and her mother-in-law watches Yang day and night to make sure she follows these rules. “I feel like I’m going crazy,” Yang tells me in English. She doesn’t want her mother-in-law, Zhang Shanzhen, to understand our conversation. It’s the end of March, and Mrs Zhang is walking around the two-bedroom apartment shushing baby Aili. Yang is sitting on the sofa in the living room in a men’s plaid flannel shirt and loose pants. Mrs Zhang has insisted that her clothes must be loose and warm. Yang isn’t wearing any make-up, and her hair is tied up in a loose topknot. Things are stacked in heaps next to the TV and the sofa: I see toys, a potty, a bottle sterilizer, and a box of knickknacks with a container of mangos on top. The room also contains a bed, a small dining table, and a shelf. The furnishings are contemporary, simple, and inexpensive, and similar to what you might see in a Finnish university

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dormitory. Thin paper streamers, left over from Chinese New Year, hang from the white, bare walls. Despite being cooped up inside, Yang is in a good mood. She dared to break the rules two days ago. “My head was itching as if I had lice. My husband helped me wash my hair in a bucket.” Mrs Zhang stared at them from the door of the bathroom, horrified, and told Yang’s parents about her insubordination. Yang’s parents, of course, rebuked their daughter. Her parents believe that if a new mother, weak from giving birth, goes outside or gets wet, she is susceptible to getting a cold. Yang is only rarely allowed to wipe herself with a washcloth dipped in warm water. On a hot and calm day, they did let her go out on the balcony. * * * When Chinese couples have their first and perhaps their only child, their lives change not just because of the baby. Well before the baby is born, it is customary for one of the grandmothers to move in with the family. Couples may have been living on their own for years. Thirty-two-year-old Yang has been living with her husband, 34, for four years. When her mother-in-law moved in with them five months before the baby’s birth, she took charge. In China, people generally respect their elderly relatives without complaint. “Even though my mother-in-law irritates me sometimes, I never say so. I hardly ever say anything to my parents, either,

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they’re not going to change anyway. Sometimes I do ask my husband to talk to his mother about things,” Yang says. Mrs Zhang only recently learned from her son that empty plastic bags and old food should be thrown out. And Mrs Zhang still doesn’t know that her daughter-in-law doesn’t like noodles, which she prepares every day. Yang hasn’t been able to watch her favorite TV shows since October. And after the baby was born, she’s been told not to strain her eyes, so she is forbidden to watch TV, use the computer, or read. Now Yang is holding a cell phone in her hand. “I read my messages in secret,” she whispers and giggles. The baby is sleeping in a bassinet in the bedroom, and Mrs Zhang is putting clean dishes back into the kitchen cabinets. Mrs Zhang brings a cup from the kitchen and pours hot water into it from an enormous thermos standing on the floor. She offers it to Yang. Yang is on a strict diet that is supposed to purify and strengthen her body, according to her mother-in-law’s traditional knowledge and information her husband finds on the internet. Her diet includes porridge, beef broth, date juice, and dark sugar. Nothing spicy or salty, no tea, and nothing cold – she can only eat fruit after it’s been dunked in hot water. But she can’t force herself to swallow seven eggs a day. Yang does believe that diet is very important when recovering from childbirth, but she is not taking showers only out of deference to her mother-in-law. Increasing numbers of Chinese mothers are demanding to be allowed to take showers after giving birth.

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“I could understand it if I wasn’t allowed to take a shower for just a week, but not being able to wash properly for so many weeks seems too long.” * * * In China, it is the grandmother’s right and responsibility to care for her grandchild and the child’s mother. These women have time to help, because Chinese women can retire around the age of 50. Their help is also needed, because the Chinese believe that new mothers must have bed rest for about a month. After a child’s birth, a woman’s bones and internal organs must return to their rightful place. If new mothers refuse bed rest, it is feared that women will become ill more easily and suffer from various aches and pains. “The first week I even ate in bed. Now I can get up and eat at the table,” Yang says. She’s already been sitting on the sofa for a good while, and she has to make sure she doesn’t sit there longer than the two hours she is allowed per day. Yang doesn’t know why she isn’t allowed to sit longer, and so she asks her mother-in-law, now holding the baby. “Sitting damages your tail bone,” Mrs Zhang replies. This period of bed rest after women give birth may sound quite exotic and even a bit amusing. But the Chinese are horrified at how quickly Western women return to their normal routines after giving birth. When a picture of Prince William’s wife Duchess Kate showed her standing with Prince George just a few days after his birth, Chinese social media was on

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fire: Kate is outside! She is standing! She is wearing ordinary clothes! Won’t she fall ill? Has she lost her mind? Aili starts crying in her grandmother’s arms. Yang returns to the bedroom and lies down on her side on the double bed. Mrs Zhang lays the baby next to Yang and folds a blanket under the head of the suckling child. Then she covers Yang’s back with a blanket. “A nursing mother can easily catch cold if her back isn’t covered,” Zhang explains. She leaves the bedroom and returns to the kitchen to chop vegetables. I hear Yang babbling to her child in the bedroom. Mrs Zhang sleeps on a mattress on the floor behind the bedroom door. Whenever the baby cries at night, she quickly gets up to help Yang nurse and changes the baby’s diaper. Yang’s husband sleeps in the guest bedroom so that he is well-rested enough to go to work. Mrs Zhang cleans, does the laundry, and makes breakfast and lunch. Yang’s husband makes dinner after he comes home from work around 7 o’clock. Yang is quite simply not allowed to do anything. She has only changed her baby’s diapers a few times. “I eat, sleep, and feed the baby. I’m nothing more than a milk bottle.” Still, Yang can’t imagine taking care of the baby herself during the first month, especially now that her husband’s two-week paternity leave is over; he works in human resources at a movie company. Yang herself runs a small language school and only plans to stay home for two months.

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It would be possible to take 14 weeks of maternity leave, but as a small business owner, she can’t afford that much time off. Chinese women are amazed by Western women who care for their children alone or only with their partners. Chinese women don’t understand how people manage. Caring for babies is often the most difficult part of parenting, and that is when relatives are expected to help in China. * * * If a family is well off, they can hire a nanny for a month or two instead of relying on a grandmother’s help. However, nannies who specialize in babies are so expensive that half of Yang and her husband’s monthly salary of 15,000 yuan, or about 2,000 euros, would go towards paying a nanny. Besides, Mrs Zhang is convinced that she can care for the baby and manage the household better than any domestic helper, because as a relative, she is completely committed to the baby’s care. Yang also praises her mother-in-law. “She’s a nice person and helps so much.” Often Yang also watches Mrs Zhang as she washes Aili and changes her clothes so she can learn how to care for Aili. Yang isn’t bothered by the fact that her mother-in-law spends more time with her daughter than she does. In China, children often become more attached to their grandmothers than their mothers. At least Yang doesn’t have to be separated from her daughter. Migrant working mothers often have to leave their one-month-old babies in the care of their parents in

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the countryside and return to the city to work. They see their children about once a year. Yang is worried about the future in another way. It looks like she will be living with relatives for the rest of her life. * * * Mrs Zhang will likely care for Aili until she turns three and enters daycare. But even then, Yang and her husband may need someone’s help to take Aili to daycare. Yang would ideally like to live with her mother-in-law for no more than a year, but she and her husband don’t have the savings for her to be a stay-at-home mom for three years. They still haven’t talked about this with Mrs Zhang. “This is a sensitive topic in China. First grandmothers come to help, and then suddenly families ask them to go away,” Yang says. Even though it has been three weeks since Aili’s birth, Yang’s father-in-law still hasn’t called to congratulate his son. “I don’t think he’s really happy, because the baby is a girl. It’s been easier for my parents, because it’s their daughter’s daughter,” Yang says. In the past, only sons helped their parents financially, but now daughters help out as well. The pension system is still being set up in China, so many elderly parents rely on the generosity of their children. Mrs Zhang, for instance, has no income at all as a retired farmer. Yang and her husband have assisted their parents ever since they started working.

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“We give our parents about 1,000 yuan (about 150 euros) a month. My mother-in-law only gets 200 yuan since she lives with us. Of course we give more at Chinese New Year.” Parents also often expect that their son and his wife will care for them when they are old. Now it looks like Yang and her husband will be caring for her parents as well. “My brothers’ wives can’t stand my parents,” Yang sighs. So Yang and her husband will likely move back to their home province of Shandong close to one set of parents. They plan to build two houses next to each other so that they can accommodate their own family and all four grandparents. * * * Five weeks have now passed since Aili’s birth, and Yang is lively and happy, in fact she’s positively giddy. Mrs Zhang is shushing a whining bundle in the living room, and Yang’s husband Wang Kexin is chopping vegetables for lunch in the kitchen. It’s Saturday, and it’s Wang’s day off. “I was allowed to take my first shower a few days ago. I stood there for an hour,” Yang says and cheers like an athlete who has just won an event. She’s even gone outside, and she reads her email and watches videos on the internet for a few hours every day. Yang plans to return to work in a few weeks and work part-time to start. Even though she has the energy to do much more, she is still only responsible for nursing Aili. “Do you need any help?” she asks her husband in the kitchen.

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“No, of course not,” Wang replies. Mrs Zhang changes Aili’s diaper in the bedroom. Then she places Aili at Yang’s breast. Wang rushes out of the kitchen to place a few Vitamin D drops on Yang’s nipple. Yang strokes Aili’s cheek and smiles. Sixty-three-year-old Mrs Zhang is tired from all of the night waking, even though she is used to caring for children and grandchildren. She has three children and four grandchildren. Before moving in with Yang, Mrs Zhang lived first with her daughter, taking care of her children for 11 years. When she lived with her daughter, the children were entirely in her care on occasions when her daughter and her daughter’s husband were working in the city. As someone who grew up in a rural village – though it was still a densely populated area – Mrs Zhang doesn’t like Beijing. Her friends are 400 kilometers away, and whenever she goes out in Beijing, she tends to get lost. “I would like to go home, but I will continue to fulfill my responsibility here. It’s good to be of use.” * * * In honor of the weekend, Wang sets the table with mushroom soup, scrambled eggs, buns, eggplant, noodle salad, and many other delicacies. The serving dishes barely fit on the table. Everyone uses their chopsticks to place the food they’d like to eat in their bowls. We are talking about celiac disease. It’s the first time Wang and Yang have heard of it.

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“Is it a Western disease, or is it common here in China, too?” Yang wonders. We talk about vegans, too, because the couple has known vegetarians for a long time. Mrs Zhang doesn’t say a word at the table. She only takes some mushroom soup and dips pieces of her roll in it. As a child in the 1950s, Mrs Zhang suffered from hunger, and many people died in her village. Tens of millions of people died all across China. “My generation isn’t as demanding as my children’s generation is. We don’t expect much from life except food and clothing,” Mrs Zhang says after lunch. The generation gap is enormous in China. The gap between Chinese in their thirties and forties and their parents is just as big as the gap between Europeans today and their forefathers from the 1800s. Mrs Zhang saw her first foreigner only a few years ago. She heard about disposable diapers a year ago, and now she is glad to be able to use them with Aili. She can read a little, but she can’t write at all. By contrast, her children have graduated from university and are constantly surfing the internet. Yang believes that the gap between herself and her daughter Aili won’t be nearly as large. Maybe she will be slightly betteroff than her parents, maybe she will spend more, and maybe she will even travel abroad. But Yang does hope that Aili’s generation will be far enough ahead of Yang’s own generation, because she wants Aili to be happy.

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“I spend so much time caring for others. I’m so stressed sometimes that I can’t even enjoy life.” It’s hardly likely that Aili will support and care for her parents, and Yang thinks that’s a good thing. “As a child of the new millennium, maybe she will get to be carefree and think more about herself. My parents have hardly any pension, but our pensions will be good enough not to expect her support.” * * * But will Aili be their only child? She was born during the last year of the one-child policy in 2015, and now her parents can have another child if they like. Before the change in policy, Yang and Wang were planning to have two children and were prepared to pay the fine of 100,000 yuan, or just under 15,000 euros. That’s how much the fine would have been in their home province of Shandong, since the fee is calculated according to their place of birth indicated on their hukou. What do they think now that they know what it is like to be parents? “When I had Aili, I realized how much work children are. I changed my mind. I don’t want another child anymore,” Yang says. Wang nods in agreement. “I don’t want another child either.” Yang laughs. “Actually he really does. But for women, having children is problematic. If you have two or three children, taking care of them takes ten years from your life.”

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As the two-child policy has come into effect, there have been news stories about employers who don’t want to employ young women. There is the danger that they may now have two children instead of just one. The family has calculated that daycare costs in Beijing will amount to about 1,000–3,000 yuan, or about 150–450 euros per month per child. Workplaces often used to offer affordable daycare on site, but nowadays most city dwellers rely on expensive private daycare. Maybe it would be better to have Mrs Zhang continue to live with them until Aili goes to school. Wang doesn’t believe that the change from the one-child to the two-child policy makes any difference. “Families used to save money to pay the fine if they wanted another child. The bigger issue is that there are lots of expenses associated with a second child as they are growing up,” Wang says. So is it impossible to raise the birthrate? Can China manage to right their toppling population pyramid? Will there be enough workers to pay for all of the pensioners and to fill all of the jobs in the future? People’s hopes were high after they heard the first news about the maternity wards after the two-child policy came into effect in 2016. Hospital maternity wards reported they had so many expecting mothers that beds were reserved well into the summer months. But this initial enthusiasm to have children doesn’t tell the whole truth. Many of the women eager to have children were almost 40 or older. They wanted to try their luck before it was too late to have children at all. The birthrate may also have

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been affected by the fact that 2016 was the year of the Monkey, and the Chinese believe that children born in that year will be smart and prosperous. The previous year was the year of the Sheep, and people consider children, and especially girls, born that year to be unlucky. Parents may even forbid their sons from marrying a woman born in the year of the Sheep. Consequently, many couples waited for the year of the Sheep to end before trying to have a child. Many Chinese wholeheartedly believe in the Chinese horoscope. Many population researchers are quite pessimistic. They don’t believe that a large number of Chinese will suddenly become enthusiastic about having more children than they have become used to. When China gave only children permission to have more children, surprisingly few families took advantage of the government’s offer. When I visited the Beijing Foreign Studies University to talk to Chinese students aged 19–21 studying Finnish, I asked them how many children they would like to have. I was completely taken by surprise by their answers. The students sat in the classroom at their desks, dressed in miniskirts, jeans, dresses, and baseball caps, looking very young and innocent to my eyes. But every single one of them had an answer ready for me. That’s how important the number of children is to the Chinese. Of the 24 students, most of them did want to have one or two children, but as many as eight students told me that they didn’t want any children at all. All eight of these students were women. They were pithy about their reasons: “I don’t

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like children.” “I don’t want to take care of children.” “Raising children is expensive.” “I’m not responsible enough to be a parent.” “I want to travel, and all your money would go towards your child.” “The status of women and children in Chinese families is insecure.” Various polls indicate the same: Increasing numbers of young people don’t want to have any children at all. Of course these students may yet change their minds many times over, and it’s another matter altogether whether they can hold their own against the Chinese family-centric culture. Even though parents’ influence on their adult children continues to wane, it still remains strong. * * * When I meet Yang later, now carrying a chubby one-year-old Aili in her arms, Yang tells me she has started to think about the possibility of having another child. “Maybe I don’t feel like I want another child right now, but I can’t be sure what I will think later on. Maybe I will want another child in a few years.” Her parents and in-laws are also steering her in that direction. It seems that a life without children is an acceptable choice for young people in the cities, and even an attractive alternative for many young women. At least they can’t easily be persuaded to have two children. China is rapidly growing more urban and prosperous, and as women become more educated as well, it’s hardly likely that the general interest in having children will suddenly increase.

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I wouldn’t be surprised if the Chinese government decides to end the two-child policy and birth regulations altogether after a few more years. Maybe we will yet have the opportunity to read propaganda posters with slogans like Two children are good, three children are even better. Maybe there will come a time when a woman like Mrs Wang, the woman from Chapter 1, can bring seven children into the world without any stigma or fear of penalty. * * * Yang Xiaoli: Maybe when you’re looking at the issue from the country’s point of view, the size of the population must be controlled, but the one-child policy was a problem for individual families. China’s pension and social security system still isn’t good enough for only children to survive the burden of caring for their parents.

HOW IS EVERYONE DOING NOW?

You must be kidding me! That’s what I said out loud to myself as I was sitting on my sofa back at home in Helsinki and starting to write an additional chapter for the paperback version of this book. The hardback version came out in Finland in September 2016, and in May 2017, I sent out emails or asked my interpreter to help me find out how the people I had interviewed were doing. I had interviewed most of the people for my book only a little over a year earlier. I didn’t have any particular expectations – how much could possibly happen to someone in a year? Apparently quite a bit. Two of my interviewee’s lives had taken a dramatic turn. * * * One email I received in May 2017 came from Hannah Dejong, the young woman who had been searching for her biological parents. “So much has happened since we last spoke. It may be hard for you to believe all of it. In fact, at first it was hard for me to understand what had happened, too.”

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Just a year earlier, I hadn’t been very hopeful about Hannah’s possibilities of finding her biological parents. While untold numbers of Chinese adopted abroad return to China to look for their biological parents, only a few ever manage to locate them. And Hannah, who had been left in a park when she was small, had been unable to find any clues about her biological parents. But it turns out Hannah was lucky. Hannah had managed to get her hands on a report from the official archives in Beijing that detailed the circumstances under which she had been found. The report describes the school boy who found baby Hannah crying in the Temple of Heaven Park. The document also provides the names of the park police who took Hannah into their care. One of the policeman was Hou Xiangwei. When Hannah visited the same park 22 years later in the summer of 2016, Hou Xiangwei was still working there. Both Hannah and Hou couldn’t believe they had found each other. Hou told Hannah how he had tried to find Hannah’s parents in the park and how he had even taken care of her himself for a short while. Hannah also discovered that her injured hand had actually not yet been operated on as she had previously believed. I learned this news before my book was published, but because it was already being printed, I didn’t get this bit of information into the hardback version. But I still believed that Hannah’s possibilities of finding her parents were slim, and actually even slimmer than they had been: After all, she had believed that she would be able to find them with the help of

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old hospital operation records. Because she hadn’t had any operations at that point, tracing her parents just became all the harder. But then fate intervened. And this time it was guided by China’s efficient government bureaucracy. A few weeks after meeting Hou in the park, Hannah received a phone call from the Beijing Police Public Relations Department. She was invited to meet high-ranking police officials, and they informed her that they wanted to help her find her parents. The search for Hannah’s parents suddenly took off. As Hannah told me in her email: “First they began by writing a song about my life, filmed a music video, produced a one-hour television special, and organized a press conference.” When I was in Finland in the autumn of 2016 to promote my newly released book, I didn’t know that Hannah’s story was being shared on TV, in the newspapers, and on the internet at the same time in China. The music video also helped spread her story. The music video is called Under the Cypress Tree, and it is beautiful and moving. It tells the story of a heroic policeman named Hou who tenderly cares for a child he finds under a cypress tree in the Temple of Heaven Park. In the video, an adult Hannah returns to China to search for her roots and meet Mr Hou. It’s unlikely that the Beijing police produced the video and pursued such professional publicity simply out of the goodness of their hearts. In recent years, propaganda campaigns emphasizing officials’ compassionate sense of

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justice and selfless service have become all the rage in China. Mr Hou’s and Hannah’s story suited this purpose perfectly. The campaign was incredibly effective. “My parents read online that their little girl was alive and had returned to China,” Hannah continues in her email. Her biological parents are poor people from a small mountain village about a thousand kilometers south of Beijing. Pictures of the village accompanying articles about Hannah show houses made of stone. “When [my parents] found out I was alive, they were overjoyed and immediately took the 12-hour train to Beijing and went to the police station to give their DNA.” But Hannah and her Chinese parents had to wait to meet each other until January 2017. Finding Hannah’s parents was such a huge public relations success for the Beijing police that they decided to share the unique meeting between Hannah and her parents with everyone in China. TV viewers saw Hannah standing on stage with Mr Hou. Mr Hou is in uniform, and Hannah is wearing a black and white dress. Then a couple dressed in plain clothes is led on stage. It’s clear that the people producing the show wanted viewers to immediately clue into to the fact that Hannah’s parents were poor country folk. The couple tries to bow down in front of Mr Hou, but the show hosts prevent them from doing so. Hannah and her mother tumble into each other’s arms and hold each other for a long time. Both are crying. Hannah’s father looks pale and shaken. Finally they all sit down on a bench that has been brought on stage, and they hold each other’s hands and whisper into each other’s ears. Music plays in the background.

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The police film crew then took Hannah to see her parents in their mountain village during Chinese New Year. “Officer Hou Xiangwei also came along and ‘officially’ returned me to my family on behalf of the Beijing Police.” “After the police left, I spent another week with my family. I met my aunts and uncles and a few cousins. It was wonderful. Thankfully, because I know Chinese now, I was able to talk to everyone I met.” Now Hannah also knows what happened to her hand. And why her parents abandoned her. “When I was almost one year old, right when I was beginning to walk, I stuck my hand in the kitchen stove when my mom had left me unattended for just two minutes. It was a serious, third-degree burn. My parents sold the few possessions they had and took me to the local clinic. Unfortunately, the clinic was not equipped to handle this type of injury.” Her hand didn’t get better on its own. After a month, her parents borrowed as much money as they could from relatives and acquaintances and took a train to Beijing to seek out appropriate care. They had about 50 euros with them, which was a large sum of money for rural folk in 1994. Her parents were farmers and basically lived in a natural economy. Later, Hannah’s mother became a part-time cleaner, and her father became a migrant worker at different construction sites around China. When her parents arrived in Beijing, they learned that operating on their daughter’s hand would cost ten times what they could afford.

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“After roaming around Beijing for five days, hungry, exhausted, and broke, my mom and dad found themselves at the Temple of Heaven where they saw many happy families with children. They figured, in their last act of desperation, that if they left me there, perhaps another family would find me and be able to provide the care they couldn’t.” So her parents put her under the cypress tree and returned home to their village. “They returned to the village absolutely heartbroken. My mother had nightmares for a long time, seeing me under the tree where she left me and then trying to reach for me, but in her dreams she was never able to.” Hannah describes her parents as unusually nice and considerate people. They are still burdened by the shame and sorrow of abandoning their child. Hannah has explained many times over that she isn’t angry and completely understands why they did what they did. But for some of the family, Hannah’s reappearance has been a more unpleasant surprise. “I have two brothers who both live in Beijing. The older brother is finding it very difficult to accept me into the family so he refuses to see me or speak with me. But I hope that with enough time, he will have a change of heart. My younger brother and I get along better. I just sent him a red envelope for his birthday, but he doesn’t want to upset his older brother so he is keeping me at a distance.” In TV interviews, Hannah has said that her life has changed completely. She sounds happy, but also bewildered.

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When I connect with Hannah again a year later towards the end of 2018, I learn that Hannah has moved back to the US to Houston, where she is working at a technology start-up. She still hopes to return to China to work, but she visits China often to see her biological parents. Hannah has slowly started to write a book about her life together with her adoptive father. She hopes to pick a title for the book that comes from the words in the music video Under the Cypress Tree. * * * Someone else’s life has also changed since the first Finnish edition of my book was published: Mr Zhou Fugen’s son Wu Dong married again. And that’s not all. The young couple has a baby daughter. When I visited Mr Zhou and listened to his sad story about how the family had used all of their savings to pay for a Vietnamese wife, I firmly believed that Wu Dong would remain a bachelor after the disappearance of his wife. He would be one of the tens of millions of men in China without a wife and family. But I was wrong. They quickly found Wu’s 26-year-old second wife through a local marriage broker. And she is even one of the few local women who grew up in the area. According to Mr Zhou, his daughter-in-law is obedient and very sweet, and she enjoys being at home. The secret to arranging the second marriage came down to the fact that Wu’s new wife was similarly divorced from her

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first partner. So both Wu and his wife were on their second round, and in local terms, not as desirable. Mr Zhou “only” had to pay about 15,000 euros for their marriage, including a monetary gift for the bride’s parents, a present for the bride at the couple’s first meeting, and clothes and furniture bought in honor of the wedding. Wu’s ex-wife has started to call the family again. According to Mr Zhou, she wants to come back, because her new life in Guangxi province is not that great. But she is not welcomed back. Mr Zhou hasn’t asked about his granddaughter anymore either. Mr Zhou isn’t even sure where she is. The Vietnamese wives in the village have gained a bad reputation as increasing numbers of them have fled their marriages. * * * In the beginning of 2017, I moved back to Helsinki from Beijing, and I toured schools, book fairs, and other events around Finland. People often asked me about how Aurora Xinyi was doing, the little girl adopted by Finnish Hanna and Hannu. Thanks for the question; 9-year-old girl is doing well. Although no one calls her Aurora anymore. Her name is Meimei, and Meikku is her nickname. Meimei is the name Aurora Xinyi chose for herself. She already called herself Meimei on the first days the family spent together in China. It means little sister. In Finland, she has never used her other names.

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Her Chinese foster family probably prepared her for her new Finnish family by telling her that she would be Arttu’s little sister. In China, it is common to call children big or little brother or sister inside the family. When Meimei was baptized in the autumn of 2013, her name officially became Meimei. Pictures show Meimei standing in front of the pastor in a red Chinese dress with her finger in her mouth. In another picture, big brother Arttu, who has become tired from the length of the ceremony, lies on his stomach on the altar railing in his red shirt. “It’s great that Meimei has chosen her name herself and in that way set her own path into our family. When we met her in China, she first took Arttu by the hand,” Hanna tells me. Meimei became Arttu’s little sister before anything else. Later, when Meimei was in preschool in Helsinki, she introduced herself by saying: “I’m Meimei, but my dad calls me princess.” Meimei often remembers the moment when she first met her Finnish family in China. She especially remembers being frightened by her new mother who approached her so eagerly. “The guide in China gave my mother the wrong advice, and so she took me on her lap right away. That was annoying. It took two weeks for me to sit on my mom’s lap again,” Meimei says. Hanna remembers it a little differently: It took up to two months before Meimei dared to approach her mother. “I couldn’t hold her on my lap, I couldn’t take her to the bathroom, I couldn’t even sleep with her in the same bed.

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Even our dog Onni was able to get in bed with Meimei before me.” The trip back to Finland was rough for other reasons as well. While the family was in China, their aquarium had broken and caused water damage in their apartment. So the first thing the family had to do upon their return was pack their things and move into another apartment for four months. In the spring of 2017, I met Meimei at her home. Meimei’s Mother’s Day gift was on the dining room table. She had made her mother a heart out of nails hammered onto a piece of wood and then woven with string to bring out the shape of the heart. Meimei and Arttu were eating the fish soup their mother had warmed up for them at the end of their school day. Hannu was working the evening shift and wasn’t home. Occasionally Meimei drank straight from the bowl. She is the only one in the family allowed to do so, as it is how she was used to eating soup as a small child in China. The whole family is enamored of Meimei’s appetite and eating habits. “They call me cracker mouse. And I like blue cheese and herring. And I know how to eat chicken legs quickly and neatly,” Meimei says proudly. Meimei is a happy, energetic, and talkative child. When she gets into an argument with Arttu, she stands her ground. She is persistent and doesn’t give up when she has to learn difficult things. “I like math. And P.E.,” Meimei says. She was in the second grade when I saw her, and she was thinking of picking up a hobby, like circus school or Tae

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Kwon Do. Later I found out that she started taking Tae Kwon Do lessons. Meimei learned Finnish quickly, but she has forgotten Chinese. She does have a Chinese lesson once a week, but she doesn’t remember many words even now. “Many adopted children forget Chinese. It probably isn’t just about the language, but their whole life. When the child opens a new door, they close another one,” Hanna opines. Meimei’s Chinese foster family and her Finnish family actively keep in touch. They send gifts back and forth. In the family’s apartment, there are Pikachu cups from China on the table. On their Skype calls, Hanna and Hannu can see all of the presents and pictures of Meimei they have sent on display on a bookshelf, including a baseball cap. Meimei’s Chinese teacher interprets and translates their Skype calls and letters. Meimei still remembers everyone in her foster family. “Yangzhou, mama, Yangzhou, baba, yeye, nainai,” Meimei lists her mother, father, grandfather, and grandmother in Chinese. She remembers those words well. Otherwise she doesn’t really like to talk much about her foster family or to look at their pictures. It’s still a sensitive subject. Hanna also still wonders why Meimei’s foster family had to give her up. Maybe they will find out when they all visit China together someday. In their letters, the family says they think about Meimei every day. China has become a part of the Hyväri-Aaltonen family through Meimei.

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“We’re a multicultural family now, a little Chinese,” Hanna says. “And a little Thai, too, since Arttu was adopted from Thailand.” * * * The lives of many of the people I interviewed continue on as they have before. At the end of 2018, the farmer couple Li Jincai and Wu Shouhui were still looking for the daughter they had abandoned at the market square in 1984. Yang Xiaoli has decided to try to have a second child after all. Her motherin-law still lives with her and helps with childcare. Zhang Xin, who experienced a traumatic forced abortion, and her husband are thinking of having a third child, even though that is still illegal. They would like to have a daughter this time. Cecily Huang has returned home from Australia and works in Beijing. She is no longer dating her Australian boyfriend. * * * So has China changed? The two-child policy has been in effect since the beginning of 2016. And as population researchers around the world have predicted, more children were born at the start of the new policy, but for the long-term, it seems that a large portion of the population is content with having only one child. Opinion polls and statistics on the numbers of births in the first three years of the new policy corroborate this observation. In 2016, 18.5 million children were born in China, over 10 percent more than the previous year. Almost half of the babies

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were the second child in their respective families; previously second children had been only under a third of babies born. Family planning officials presented these figures and immediately hailed the two-child policy as a success. China was finally getting the babies it so desperately needed. It was an optimistic assessment. Officials had estimated that for several years on average, three million more children would need to be born each year than the year before, but in 2016, only a little under two million more children were born than in 2015. In 2017, this figure began to drop, and in 2018 it took a noticeable plunge. It seems the government is never going to achieve its desired target. The government falsely assumed that they would see peak birth rates during many early years of the new policy. But the Chinese are happy about the two-child policy. Even though a family may not want a second child now, it’s almost as if the new policy lightens the burden of life. Now families have the option to have a second child, and an accidental pregnancy after the first child is no longer the kind of catastrophe it often was under the one-child policy. Certainly the Chinese’s government’s about-face and its current efforts to encourage two-child families have taken on some tragicomic characteristics. A September 2016 article in the New York Times describes the city of Yichang’s efforts to encourage reproduction in the province of Hubei. This city was infamous for its particularly strict enforcement of the one-child policy. After the two-child policy came into effect,

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the city suddenly published an official letter for Communist Party members and officials in which they were encouraged to have a second child. The long-winded and convoluted sentence that was so funny goes as follows: We require all party members and Communist Youth League members in city departments and companies, especially cadres at all levels, to stand at the forefront and take a high degree of responsibility for caring for the country’s happy future, the people’s welfare, and their own descendants to come, by thoroughly implementing the meaning of the “two-child policy” and using practical actions to lead the way in responding to the party’s call. And by way of further clarification: “Young comrades should start with themselves, and older comrades should educate and monitor their children.” In essence, members of the party were being bullied into having two children or pushing their own children to have two children. The letter sparked such an outcry of exasperation and mirth on social media that it quickly disappeared. China has also offered to remove women’s IUDs for free. In China, it has been common for women to use long-term IUDs which can only be removed through an operation. Because the IUDs had long been forced on women, many people were offended by the fact that the government wanted to interfere in the affairs of the uterus once again. In 2018, two Chinese researchers even suggested that all citizens under the age of 40 should be forced to pay a fee

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very much like a tax until they had two children. Once again, people quickly voiced their fury online. The government is anxiously trying to raise the birthrate and offering different kinds of incentives: In some provinces, families with children are being offered longer parental leave and more monetary aid. In other provinces, it has become harder to get a divorce or get an abortion. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem that authorities have stopped using pressure tactics when families would like to have a third or illegal child. The BBC conducted a survey using random sampling and called local officials all across China in 2016. The officials told the BBC about their fines for unpermitted children and warned that they would recommend women have abortions. Various punishments, however, like losing one’s job as a result of an unpermitted child, were slowly being phased out. The feared and all-powerful family planning organization was discontinued when it was absorbed into the new National Health Commission. In 2018, there have been some indications that China is planning to move either to a three-child policy or to stop birth regulations altogether. In 2019, the year of the Pig in the Chinese calendar, postage stamps show a pair of pigs with three piglets.

KEY SOURCES, RECOMMENDED READING, AND REFERENCES

Above all, my book tells the stories of ordinary Chinese and how the one-child policy affected them. I’ve gained much of my understanding of the political background and its national impact from source literature. Here you will find my most important sources, which I encourage you to read if you would like to deepen your understanding of the one-child policy from a particular point of view. As I dove into the history of the one-child policy, my most important sources were professor Susan Greenhalgh’s works, and especially her book Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (2005) which she wrote together with researcher Edwin Winckler. The most interesting information I learned from journalist Mei Fong’s book One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment (2016) came from her interviews about how the one-child policy came to exist. Interviews and articles by population researcher Yong Cai opened my eyes to the false assumptions about the onechild policy that exist in China and the rest of the world. I especially recommend the article “Challenging Myths about

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China’s One-Child Policy” which Yong Cai wrote together with researchers Martin King Whyte and Wang Feng; you can easily find it via Google. Population researcher Liang Zhongtang also helped me to understand the various large-scale impacts the birth regulations have had and will continue to have on China’s population. Professor Kay Ann Johnson revolutionized my thinking about the abandonment and adoption of Chinese children in her book China’s Hidden Children: Abandonment, Adoption and Human Cost of the One-Child Policy (2016). It’s rare for a researcher’s text to affect me as much as hers did. Professor Wu Shangchun, a family planning scholar, was an important informant, especially with regards to contraception in China. Scholar and journalist Leta Hong Fincher’s book Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (2014) helped me to understand the effects of the one-child policy on urban women and the marriage market. It offers a wonderfully succinct description of the challenges educated Chinese women face. Anthropologist Vanessa Fong’s book Only Hope: Coming of Age under China’s One-Child Policy (2004) contains interesting depictions of the expectations only children and their parents have for the future (though these are now a bit outdated). Chinese Nobel prize winner Mo Yan has written about birth regulations in the form of a novel titled Frog in English, and anyone who likes magical realism will enjoy it. I am indebted to many journalists for their articles and news stories that inspired me and provided so much information.

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A special thanks goes to The New York Times, The Economist, South China Morning Post, The Guardian, and the BBC. Four of the stories shared here have been published previously in Finnish newspapers in more or less the same form. Helsingin Sanomat published my story about the family with seven children in Chapter 1 on April 17, 2016; my story about the Finnish family’s trip to adopt a child in Chapter 3 was published on April 3, 2013. The weekly Finnish magazine Suomen Kuvalehti published my story about Chen, the school boy, on November 7, 2014, and the story about the family with the new baby in Chapter 9 on May 29, 2015. REFERENCES Ash, Lucy (2016) “Reinventing China’s Abortion Police,” BBC News, May 4. BBC (2015) “China Professor’s Wife-sharing Proposal Sparks Ire,” BBC News, October 23. Dandan, Ni, with Kay Ann Johnson (2014) “Chinese Parents Compete with Foreign Applicants to Adopt Healthy Babies,” Global Times, April 2. Fincher, Leta Hong (2014) Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China. Zed Books, London. Fong, Mei (2016) One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York. Fong, Vanessa (2006), Only Hope: Coming of Age under China’s One-Child Policy. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Greenhalgh, Susan and Edwin Winckler (2005) Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics. Stanford University Press, Redwood City, CA.

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Johnson, Kay Ann (2016) China’s Hidden Children: Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Costs of the OneChild Policy. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Junhong, Chu (2001) “Prenatal Sex Determination and SexSelective Abortion in Rural Central China,” Population and Development Review, vol. 27, no. 2 (June), pp. 259–281. King Whyte, Martin, Wang Feng and Yong Cai (2015) “Challenging Myths about China’s One-Child Policy,” The China Journal, vol. 74 (July), pp. 144–159. Sudworth, John (2016) “China’s Forbidden Babies Still an Issue,” BBC News, October 28. Tatlow, Didi Kirsten (2016) “Chinese City Urges Comrades to Do Their Part and Reproduce,” The New York Times, September 23. Xinran (2010) Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love. Translated by Nicky Harman. Chatto & Windus, London.