 "China's 'heihazi' crisis")
ONE CHILD: THE STORY OF CHINA'S MOST RADICAL EXPERIMENT
Author: Mei Fong
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Price: Rs 599
Pages: 250
They have a name even if no official identity in Chinese society. Heihazi or "black child" is the term for children born 'illegally', that is Chinese-speak for those born outside the one-child policy that the country practised for close to three decades. Now finally abandoned, the policy has left such devastation in its wake that its perpetrators may well have been tried as war criminals if it were any other country or any other time in history.
Mei Fong's One Child is a gripping account of the horrors that people have been through; it rips off the mask of economic prosperity and orderly transition that passes for the China story in popular narratives. The book catches the reader by her throat and never lets go. The facts create the drama. Forced abortions carried out on women at near full-term, kidnappings of close relatives to force a woman pregnant with her second child to submit to the scalpel, the relentless pursuit of a legal identity by a second child and such other stories keep the pages turning.
At last count, (Census, 2010) there were 13 million Heihazi. But most experts say the number could well be double. Mei dissects the policy threadbare, inspecting its application, impact on lives and livelihoods, on parent-child relationships and on the people who had their children killed because they could not pay the steep fines levied by the state. It also looks at what it means for the generation of single children left behind to look after their ageing parents. It is an understatement to say the stories are disturbing.
In one instance, a 22-year-old factory worker, Feng Jianmei got pregnant with her second child. She believed that she qualified for an exemption because her first child was a girl (much like many parts of Asia, daughters are second-class citizens in China). The state levied a $6,000 fine on the family, which was impossible for her to cough up. So she went on the run when she was seven months pregnant, officials caught her and took her to a hospital where they pinned her down to the bed with a pillowcase over her head. They demanded an immediate payment of $16,000. Her husband put together some of the amount and wrote an IOU for the rest but the authorities would not relent. They forced Feng to sign her consent to the abortion and she tells the author, "I could feel the baby jumping around inside me all the time, but then she went still." It is impossible to let this statement rest on the page even after one has finished the book.
There are enough wars raging around the world to drive home the extent of cruelties that human beings can inflict upon one another. But the excesses of the one-child policy were carried out by friends, relatives and neighbours. As family planning officers, they all believed that they were carrying out their duty, but soon it all got too much for them. And they fled, living out their lives in exile in the US or remote parts of the country. Life for both the perpetrators and their victims is surely worse than any imagined hell.
Nothing brought the cruelty of the entire programme home better, says the author, than the earthquake that ripped through Sichuan in 2008. The area near the epicentre, Shifang, was the test district for the one-child policy. After the earthquake, 8,000-odd families in the country region lost their only children, according to official statistics - nearly two-thirds in Shifang. An entire generation was wiped out. This was the same year that China hosted the Olympics and the authorities went into overdrive to remove every trace of the tragedy from public view. People who questioned the government's intentions were pressured and then hounded till they fled or retreated to their insignificant corners in the social structure. It is these stories, the individual dramas behind the one-child policy that the author tries to track down.
It is not just the tragedy counted in lives lost or families destroyed that baffles the author. It is not even the mindlessness of the entire project, but the futility of it all. "The sad truth is, the harsh strictures put in place by the one child policy were unnecessary for economic prosperity," the author writes. Before imposing the ban on the second child, the Chinese government already had set in motion a plan to slow the growth of the country's population. The "later, longer, fewer" initiative had been rolled out a decade before the one-child policy and it had brought down the average number of children per family from six to three. And now that the policy has been lifted, the government may have to actually entice families to have more children.
Ikea's new ad playing on Chinese television does that. A young girl in pigtails invites audiences into her well-turned out home, accompanied by, what would have been unthinkable even a few years ago, her kid brother. The ideal family is being redefined once more, this time by the merchants of commerce, rather than the state.
