(Image by Ferdinand from Pixabay)

One of the most extreme abortion regimes in history was China’s one-child policy, implemented between 1979 and 2015. Earlier this year, the Minimise Project spoke to Chen (a pseudonym), who was born during this period, about his experiences. 

‘The problem is that my family is very special’, begins Chen. ‘Both of my parents, they divorced with their original family and both of my parents have a girl. When they united the family, they have two children, my two elder sisters.’ Chen’s parents went on to have a child together: him. 

When he was born, Chen’s parents worried about registering his birth as it would exceed the permitted ‘quota’. The price of having Chen was two sanctions. One was a fine, which they finally finished paying off when Chen was in secondary school. The other was on their career: ‘they had no chance to be promoted’ (they both worked for a state company). In secondary school, Chen remembers being jealous of his schoolfellows’ parents, who worked for the same company and who could afford to send their children to study abroad, something out of reach of Chen’s family. ‘I was so jealous. I complained about my family. I didn’t understand [until] later the influence of the one-child policy. It influenced my life. It influenced my parents’ career.’

But on the other hand, ‘I didn’t feel lonely. I had two bigger sisters.’ At the weekend he would spend time with his sisters and their friends. Chen contrasts this with the experience of other children his age. During the summer holidays, when their parents had to go out to work, they were left at home on their own all day. ‘And they say they are so lonely, they have no things to do, they just watch the TV. They are so lonely.’ As a child, Chen didn’t realise just how different his family life was to that of most of his contemporaries. 

The consistent message from the Party was that ‘we should sacrifice our own self for the motherland, China. We should reduce their burden by sacrificing ourselves’. Chen thinks this attitude is difficult for westerners to understand because of the greater emphasis on the nuclear family and the individual. The collectivist philosophy was consistently taught in school: ‘We should sacrifice our own life for the honour of the group’. ‘We accepted that policy’. For Chen, understanding this attitude is key to understanding why Chinese people accepted the one-child policy. 

When Chen first heard rumours about the harsh implementation of the one-child policy he was reluctant to investigate them. ‘I was brainwashed’, he explains, ‘I was worried’. He remembers seeing newspaper headlines critical of the government but he avoided reading the articles. ‘The government give you a better lifestyle, life condition. Why should you critique the government?’ His schoolfellows had the same attitude. Similarly, in secondary school Chen began to hear rumours about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre ‘but people were very afraid to mention’ it. He could find no mention of it on the internet. It was only after living abroad for five years that he looked into it in earnest, and watched a BBC documentary about the massacre. ‘Man! It shocked my mind!’ 

Chen remembers his initial reaction when he started properly looking into the one-child policy. ‘I thought, I was so lucky – I was alive!’ He takes out his phone and reads us some Party campaign slogans from the period. ‘Zero child in 100 days’, he translates one. That was a campaign run in one county in 1991. In that 100-day period, Chen explains, if you gave birth to a child, the authorities would seize the child and effectively demand a ransom. If you couldn’t pay, you wouldn’t get your child back. If the authorities discovered you were pregnant, you would be subjected to a forced abortion. Chen suspects that in some cases, children were given up for adoption outside the country had been seized from their parents. He reads us another public slogan, which roughly translates as, ‘Whoever has more than one baby, let them go bankrupt. Whoever has more than one baby, let their family die and break’. ‘I was astounded when I started to check all this’, he says.

In 2016, the one-child policy was changed to a two-child one. According to Chen, one of main legacies of the period is the normalisation of abortion. Sex-selective abortion is normal and is exacerbated by still-prevalent attitudes which place greater value on sons than daughters. Disability-selective abortion is also ‘very normal’. Chen also maintains that the narrative of children-as-burden has become ingrained and has created a more selfish culture, particularly among his generation.

When Chen tells westerners about China’s abortion regime, their reaction is that ‘it’s very dystopian, it’s very surreal’ – ‘but it’s really happened’, he emphasises. He sees it as his duty to tell people about the reality of abortion in China, during the one-child policy and today. ‘I think it’s my mission to do something’, he says simply.