China's birth control program failing

By Eva Cheng In the 40 years after 1949, China's population doubled. The additional 540 million was four times the population increase in the 110 years to 1949. Now China's rate of population growth is about to increase sharply as people born during the 1962-75 "baby boom" attain child-bearing age. The government's coercive birth control program — applauded by Dr Paul Ehrlich and others — is proving ineffective, especially in the countryside. A slight slowing of population growth in the last few years was not enough to stabilise China's population which hit 1.2 billion in February and is projected by Beijing to reach 1.3 billion in five years. China's corrupt and unaccountable Communist Party rulers — who significantly worsened the population problem in the 1950s and '60s under their "the more people the better" policy — have actually undermined their own population policy. They fostered the new jump in birth rates by massively shifting production to individual peasant households in the 1980s, under pro-capitalist reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping. Chinese farmers (who account for 80% of the total population) once again became keen to produce more offspring — especially sons — to farm their land and to provide security in old age as pensions are almost non-existent in rural China. Fines and other financial penalties for breaching the "one-child" policy, a 1980 creation, have become not only more affordable, but economically sensible to incur. Birth rates rose from 17.5 per 1000 in 1984 to 21 per 1000 in the late '80s. This reversed a drop in the rate in the 1970s. There is now a net growth rate (after subtracting deaths) of about 15 per 1000, far higher than the 9.5 per 1000 that Beijing projected in 1978. A sharp drop in the average child-bearing rate, from 5.8 in 1970 to 2.3 in 1990, as well as other intermittent "successes" in birth control in China were only achieved at huge human cost. Coercion, sometimes brutal, was widely practiced despite Beijing's assurance that there were only isolated violations by over-zealous local cadres. Tight controls are imposed primarily on women through their work places which have sweeping powers to cut the pay of and deprive essential entitlements to women (and their husbands) who breach the "one-child policy". The neighbourhood committees, to which personal matters or decisions must be reported and from which elaborate approvals must be obtained, take main responsibility for penalising the violators. For example, the Hong Kong magazine Dong Xian reported in July 1992 how a woman escaping birth control persecution had the roof of her house destroyed, and her family threatened with further damage unless the woman surrendered. In his book A Mother's Ordeal, Steve Mosher reported a Chinese nurse's account of how she locked women in a woodshed until they submitted and were dragged screaming to the operating table for an abortion. Steven Kosher of the Asian Studies Centre of California's Claremont Institute witnessed a case in Zhuhai, south China, where a woman pregnant with a non-approved second child was hunted down and dragged from her hiding place, locked against her will for two months until she "agreed" to a poison shot, in her ninth month of pregnancy, to induce a still birth. State family planning minister Peng Peiyun told the German daily Handelsblatt in 1993 that, "We in China consider it to be persuasion and reasoning until [the mother] agrees". Beijing Review admitted in May this year that some birth control practices have been "crude and severe" but said that they were not the usual procedure.