YANG Ruonan has big, dark shining
eyes and a smattering of black hair. She gives a little coo as her
mother pats her head. She was born on New Year's Eve last year, and like
most five-month-old babies, she is gorgeous.
But Ruonan is a non-person in Hu Jintao's China - the second child
in a one-child state. As a non-person, she cannot get hukou papers -
China's household registration system, which allows holders to get state
services in the area where they are born and registered. This means she
cannot get an identity card. She is not eligible for state education,
she cannot get public health services - such as they are - and is not
permitted a state marriage.
When Ruonan's parents found out her
mother, Chen Hong, was pregnant, they went ahead with her birth anyway,
despite knowing this. The result was that her father, Yang Zhizhu, was
sacked from his job as a law teacher at Beijing's China Youth Politics
University - an early training ground for party officials.
In China's system, many unions that cover employees have rules that
having an extra child results in dismissal. Yang could pay a fine of
between three and 10 times his salary for clearance, but refused.
"The
government has no right to have control over our bodies," he said. "The
idea of a fine for a life is ridiculous: rich people can pay, but
peasants can't."
Yang, 43, has always been an activist - the
authorities would say dissident - since studying Communist Party history
at Remin University and law at Beijing University. He was sacked from
his university in 1999 for complaining about work conditions and
reinstated in 2002. In 2001, he set up a blog to publicise problems in
China and advocate liberalism.
"It published full articles that
had been censored, using the work of over 100 academics critical of the
government," he said "It was also focused after 2003 on calls for the
government to investigate its poor response to the SARS virus. It
survived for three years before the authorities shut it down."
Since
2007, after the birth of his first daughter, Ruoyi, Yang has focused on
the issue of birth control, including forced abortion.
Birth
planning was a policy of Mao Zedong. By the middle of the 1950s, Mao had
tasted the apparent sweetness of the planned economy and was feeling
the pressure of an increasing population.
Mao liked to reveal his
important ideas to foreign guests, a habit formed when he was besieged
by the Kuomintang in Yanan during the Chinese civil war, and he put his
idea to US journalists.
According to Liang Zhongtang, a researcher
at the Shanghai Academy of Social Science, who has studied family
planning and birth control for years, Mao first raised the issue in
October 1956.
But the one-child policy was not implemented until
two years after Mao's death in 1978, one of the first decisive acts by
Deng Xiaoping as part of his plan to resurrect China's economy.
China's
family planning policy can be translated as "birth control", a term
Yang prefers. It encourages marriages and childbearing later in life,
and limits most urban couples to one child and most rural couples to
two. Ethnic minorities, which make up less than 10 per cent of the
population get some exemptions.
Couples breaking the policy face a
fine that varies across the country, but which in Beijing amounts to
between three and 10 times the couple's annual income, Yang says. The
fines are decided by the Family Planning Commission, which has a staff
of half a million.
Writing in the Far Eastern Economic Review last
year, Nicolas Erbstadt, who holds the Henry Wendt chair in political
economy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, said the
one-child policy might become Deng's cultural revolution.
"China's
explosive economic growth between 1979 and 2008 was historically
unprecedented in pace, duration, and scale," Dr Erbstadt said.
"A
repeat performance over the coming generation is most unlikely for one
simple reason: the demographic inputs that facilitated this amazing
first act are no longer available.
"Over the 1980-2005 generation,
China's working-age population - defined as the 15- to 64-year-old
group - grew by about 2 per cent per annum. Yet over the coming
generation, China's prospective manpower growth rate is zero. By the
medium-variant projections of the UN Population Division, the 15- to
64-year-old group will be roughly 25 million persons smaller in 2035
than it is today, and by 2035 it would be dropping at a tempo of about
0.7 per cent per year.
"In fact, by the US Census Bureau's
reckonings, China's conventionally defined manpower will peak by 2016
and will thereafter commence an accelerating decline. Though these
forecasts concern events far in the future, they are more than mere
conjecture; virtually everyone who will be part of China's 15- to
64-year-old-group in the year 2024 is alive today . . . By the UNPD's
reckoning, each new generation will be at least 20 per cent smaller than
the one before it."
There is increasing concern among China's
policymakers and party officials about the effect of the one-child
policy.
Cai Fang, director of the Institute of Population and
Labour Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, says the
Chinese economy has already reached a turning point where the seemingly
unlimited reserves of rural labour have been exhausted and the demand
for labour will be met by increasing wages in coming years.
The
biggest attempt at change in recent years was made in 2007, when 29
party members spoke out against the policy at the annual Chinese
People's Political Consultative Conference.
Yang says seven or
eight proposals were presented this year by delegates to the annual
parliamentary meeting of the CPPCC and National People's Congress in
March, but they did not have the chance to be reviewed or discussed by
the delegates.
As well as economic pressure, the one-child policy
is placing increasing stress on China's social system, as extended
family units have traditionally supplied many social services that
Western social democracies take for granted. The effects trickle down to
China's business environment, with thinning family numbers watering
down trusted business networks.
Like much in China these days,
there is one rule for the rich - who can afford the fines for having one
or more extra child - and the rural poor and struggling urban middle
classes. Yang says that for the moment he can afford not to work and can
live on his savings for one or two years. He owns his small
three-roomed apartment beside the university campus and plans to pick up
publishing fees by writing for some of the country's liberal media
outlets such as Guangdong's Southern Group.
"I will devote myself
to having this policy changed and will not work again until it is," he
says.
Later this year, China's government will conduct its sixth
census and the first since 2000, when the population was recorded at 1.3
billion. The government has signalled it is reviewing the hukou system
and is experimenting with change in a few test cities.
"The
population condition has undergone great changes since 2000. New
findings from the 2010 census will provide accurate and scientific
information for the government to map out plans for economic and social
development," the government notice of the census said.
But either
by corruption, Yang's in-your-face activism or by simple deception,
many Chinese couples have taken child-bearing decisions into their own
hands and the census may not give a full picture.
Yang is betting
that the figures it throws up will force a change in policy. "I believe
the information that comes from the census will have to change the
policy within two years," he says.
His daughter, Ruonan, must hope
they will.
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