Chinese county reins in birth-rate – without a one-child limit
Yicheng's birthrate is lower than China's national average, but without the unpopular population-control policy in place.
from the February 27, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 4
From his post as a teacher at the Communist Party school in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi, Professor Liang quickly rallied local family planning workers to his cause.
"People were just ignoring the policy and the government had to punish them" with fines and confiscations, recalls An Dousheng, an old man in Mao cap and collar, who headed Yicheng's family-planning unit in the 1980s. "It was difficult work. Ordinary people did not welcome the policy and did not cooperate. Our work was called 'the hardest job under the heavens.' "
"We were delighted by the new policy" when it was introduced in 1985, says Duan Chunmao. the Communist Party secretary in Ren Wang. "People felt it was more appropriate to their situation, and it helped cement links between the people and the party" that had been strained.
Twenty years on, its fruits are clear. Yicheng's fertility rate is below 9 per 1,000; the national average is 12 per 1,000. Yicheng's gender ratio at birth is 106 to 100, showing no distortion. Even more remarkably, large numbers of couples today choose to have only one child. Almost half the families in Ren Wang, for example, have only one child (though some may have a second later.)
"Nowadays, people don't want big families" says Ms. Yang. "It's very expensive – with fewer [kids] you can get richer faster."
Lü Yueping, a village shopkeeper, says she would have liked a grandson but both her daughters have had girls and neither is planning a second child. "My elder daughter is an accountant," she explains. "She is really busy."
"Mind-sets have changed a lot," says Cheng Fakui, former vice mayor of Yicheng in charge of family planning in the '80s. "A lot of people want to live for themselves, not just for their children."
China's economic development – reinforced by the one-child policy – has spread this mind-set across the countryside; children are expensive to educate, no longer so necessary for fieldwork, and increasingly unwilling to care for their aged parents – a prime motivation for having children.
The average Chinese couple now has 1.7 children, according to estimates by Renmin University's Population Studies Institute. That is only marginally more than the average number of children – 1.6 - allowed by current policy.
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