China’s missing babies re-emerge: is this the beginning of the end for the one-child policy?

Chinese demographer Liang Zhongtang has recently revealed that something like 3 million Chinese babies a year may be unregistered at their birth, as a means of circumventing the country’s one-child family policy. The evidence seems fairly compelling: census returns record 23 million births in 1990 and 26 million ten-year-olds in 2000, figures which don’t really allow of any other conclusion. So is the one-child policy fraying at the edges, and could another Chinese population explosion be on the horizon?

First, a couple of words of caution regarding the stats. They relate to births in 1990, which by my arithmetic is twenty years ago. By then the universal one-child policy had only been in operation for ten years, and was still being fairly rigidly enforced, at least in the cities. This has since changed. For one thing, the state no longer has all the enforcement methods at its disposal that it had in 1990. Then, your job, your housing, and your access to healthcare and education were all provided by state entities; people who didn’t conform could be deprived of any or all of them. Now that the state has withdrawn from so many of these areas it doesn’t have the leverage; provided you can pay for these things yourself – and you probably have to do so anyway – you don’t need to worry about official regulations so much, though people are generally careful not to flout them too openly. Party spies have disappeared, but nosy and mean-spirited neighbours haven’t.

Secondly, with the remarkable economic growth of the past thirty years, the one-child policy has largely institutionalised itself, at least in the cities. The new bourgeois, who have the money to thumb their noses at the State if they wished to, now exercise voluntary restraint. Everyone is busy, nearly all mothers work, larger flats and houses are expensive, the best education costs a fortune; who wants extra kids? Access to abortion (entirely without moral stigma in China) is easy in case of accidents. The economic boomers regard a single child as perfectly natural, not to mention extremely convenient. Nor do the urban middle classes get hung up about gender as their peasant contemporaries do: small wonder, as China really is an equal opportunity society and a girl has every bit as much chance of being successful as a boy (rather more, in my experience).

So it may be that the one-child policy has done its job and had its day. After all, running such a policy for thirty years – one generation – cannot but have a lasting effect on population growth, as the current generation of child-begetters are far less numerous than their predecessors were. The Chinese population problem really arose in the fifties and sixties, when Mao called upon his people to keep cranking them out, in order to give China a better chance of surviving nuclear war than its putative opponents. Now it would seem that vigilance can be relaxed a little; especially as a huge demographic time bomb is going to hit China in about twenty years’ time, when Mao’s mass-produced battery chickens qualify for their non-existent old age pensions, and somebody will need to keep the fires burning….