Here are a couple of contrasting articles on China’s
one child policy: Ma Jian gives it the full totalitarian nightmare treatment. By
contrast Leslie Chang draws a picture of a law slowly dying a natural death
through the willingness of ever larger numbers of people to ignore it.
I think the problem with the Chang piece is a sort of
dippy-libertarian sense that if enough people ignore the state it will just
sort of wither away. Nonetheless the picture of contentious politics it
presents strikes me as more accurate. One of the ways in which you can place people in China is in understanding the latitude they have to disobey particular laws, and why. OTOH, without getting into nitpicking, some of
the details presented by Ma in his full-totalitarian thesis seem to be pushing the envelope a bit:
When a black plastic bag floated past, my
fellow passengers would point at it and mutter under their breath:
"Another dead baby."
What, every black plastic bag? Most of them?
Returning to the two articles, which of these
paras is right? Leslie Chang:
Before getting pregnant with her second child, Lu
Qingmin went to the family-planning office to apply for a birth permit.
Officials in her husband’s Hunan
village where she was living turned her down, but she had the baby anyway. She
may eventually be fined $1,600—about what she makes in two months in her
purchasing job at a Guangdong
paint factory. “Everyone told me to hide so the family-planning people wouldn’t
find me, but I went around everywhere,” she told me. “In the past, that place
had very strict family planning, but now the policy has loosened. The cadres
worry that there are too many only children here.” I asked her if government
policy had factored into her decision to have a second child. “It was never a
consideration,” she said.
Ma Jian:
In a small village in remote Guangdong, a
contact took me to her local family planning centre, and told the director that
I was a state reporter from Beijing.
He took me to his office and we talked for hours. Backlit by a dusty window, he
leaned over his desk and showed me the record book that meticulously charted
the menstrual cycles and pelvic examination results of every woman of
childbearing age in the village. He said 98% of the 280 women were fitted with
IUDs. Every three months, he broadcasts an announcement through the village
summoning every woman for a mandatory ultrasound to check that her IUD is still
in place.
I think Ma may be pushing the envelope here as
well a bit. How many villages still broadcast propaganda announcements over the
tannoy, Totalitarian Butlins style? And why does the official have a record
book rather than a computer? When was this information obtained, and what has
changed since?
Still, the answer is probably that both of
these extracts are true. Hunan is
a labour exporting province; local officials need to keep the remittances up
and keep at least a modicum of economic life in the villages. Guangdong
receives a huge number of incomers, making localized population pressure – at the
level where it’s measured – all the more acute. Or maybe the latitude local
officials have allows site-specific misogyny full rein.
To reiterate, I think the Leslie Chang piece is probably
closer to the overall picture than Ma Jian’s. In which case it's worth repeating this from her article:
A friend of mine in Shanghai had
two abortions in the years following the birth of her daughter. “A lot of
entrepreneurs, including some of my friends, have two children,” she told me.
“But we both work for government units, so we can’t.”
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