On a recent visit to China, I was exchanging personal details with my translator, a woman in her early 20s who lives on her own in Shanghai. When I mentioned my brother and sister, she looked wistful and said, "I wish I had brothers and sisters."
Then it struck me: No one does. At least in the cities, where the government's one-child policy is enforced, a whole generation is growing up without siblings. Tens of millions of people have come of age without ever rocking a newborn sibling, playing tag with a brother or quarrelling and making up with a sister. They will never have nieces and nephews. They may never be grandparents either, with only one offspring, if they're lucky, to produce a grandchild.
The Chinese extended family, with its network of brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, uncles and aunties, brothers and sisters ranked by age, cousins always underfoot, is on its way to extinction. An institution that was a societal bedrock for millennia has been shattered.
That is only one of the ills to spring from the one-child policy, a brutal transgression on individual freedom that is now doing widespread harm to Chinese society.
From the archives
Revered leader Deng Xiaoping brought in the policy in 1979, at the beginning of China's era of economic reform. He believed that to make the reforms work and improve living standards, China had to limit the growth of its huge population.
Instead of doing like other developing countries and urging people to use birth control, Beijing effectively decreed it. Most Chinese who live in cities are limited to one child. Those in the countryside can often have two, especially if the first is a girl or disabled.
Rights groups say authorities have used coerced abortions and sterilization to enforce the policy. Couples that have more than their allotted number of children can be fined, forced out of their jobs or expelled from the Communist Party. No regime anywhere has interfered so widely and heavily in the intensely personal and private choice of how many children a couple will bear.
Because of the traditional and persistent Asian preference for male offspring, the one-child policy has had a disastrous effect on Chinese girls. If couples can have only one or two children, they want to make sure they get a boy. Countless girls are abandoned at birth by couples who plan to try again for a boy. This explains why foreign couples who adopt children from China almost always get girls; the orphanages are filled with them.
Countless other girls are simply never born. The rise of ultrasound machines has allowed couples to determine the gender of a fetus - and abort if it is a female. A recent study in the British Medical Journal found that China has 32 million more boys under the age of 20 than girls. In 2005, there were 120 boys born for every 100 girls. The imbalance is creating what the study called "an imminent generation of excess men."
Many will be unable to find wives. Some Chinese men already effectively buy themselves a spouse, leading to a big rise in human trafficking. Another, even more abhorrent side effect of the one-child policy is kidnapping. Such is the desire for male children that kidnappers have turned to snatching boys and selling them to couples who have not managed to have one of their own, and are prevented by government decree from trying again.
Even if the one-child policy had not had such cruel side effects, there would be good reason for abandoning it. Once a young society, China is aging fast. Demographers say it is the first country to grow old before growing rich.
The policy has reduced the number of births from three per woman in 1979 to about 1.7 today. Authorities say it has averted 300 million to 400 million births, a brilliant success if you accept the questionable thesis that a rising population is always a burden. But with so many fewer children being born, and people living longer lives, the number of Chinese over the age of 65 is expected to more than double by 2030. Who will take care of them in their old age, in a country of one- or two-child families and only a rudimentary pension and health-care system?
Even more serious, who will do all the work? China's spectacular rise has depended on a sea of younger workers willing to work long hours for little pay in the country's teeming factories. Over the next few decades, the under-50 working population will shrink. One recent study says the decline will cut 0.7 per cent a year off the annual growth of the economy by 2030.
The irony is that a policy intended to aid China's rise as an economic power may end up strangling its growth instead.
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