China: Stolen Children and a Booming Economy

Last week, the New York Times reported that between 1999 and 2006, hundreds of babies and children in the Hunan Province were seized by Chinese officials enforcing the controversial One-Child Policy. A progressive Chinese news source, Caixin, originally broke the story back in June, detailing personal accounts of poor families whose babies had been systematically removed because they either exceeded policy guidelines (one child) or because their families didn’t otherwise pass muster. For example, one couple’s child was taken because they didn’t have a legally registered marriage.

Credit: The Economist

As word has begun to leak out globally, Chinese officials are thinking fast. Just a few weeks ago, police say they rescued almost 90 babies from child traffickers. Thrust in the global spotlight, fingers are pointing every which way. The ugly legacy of China’s One-Child Policy is no secret, but the more we learn the uglier it gets. This latest revelation comes at a unique moment in history, when China’s momentum as an economic and all-around global power is undeniable, and as the US teeters on the edge of economic destruction.

It’s a fitting economic backdrop for considering a harmful policy that isn’t just a reproductive rights issue, but a class issue tied up with deep economic inequities. Like many restrictive reproductive health policies, the One-Child Policy favors the rich and privileged. Back in 2007, the Telegraph reported that nearly 10% of China’s highest earners will have three or more children, a family size that connotes wealth, status, and happiness. Families who can afford to pay the fines incurred by having two or more children, or who possess enough money to make themselves (and officials) think they’re above the law, do so.

The babies reportedly taken from the Hunan Province over the last decade were done so after their families, all of them poor, were unable to pay fines of around $1,000 or five times an average family’s yearly take-home. Taken from families who could not afford fines or bribes, Caixin reports, many of the babies were then sent to lucrative, foreign adoption agencies and then perhaps adopted by a loving but oblivious American couple.

The success of the One-Child Policy seems to depend almost wholly on the ability of officials to exploit deeply entrenched class and economic inequities. Further insulation comes from continued restrictions on free press. The Chinese journalist who finally broke this story actually wrote it back in 2007, yet was unable to find an editor willing to publish it. The subject was just too taboo. “Family planning is basic national policy in China. Hands off,” he says they told him.

But in fact, it’s not “family planning” that is the national policy in China, but the perversion of it. It’s a heavy-handed top-down approach that relies on the ends to justify the means. Indeed, to validate the One-Child Policy, Chinese officials have pointed to a dramatic drop in fertility countrywide and have estimated that without such restrictions, an estimated 400 million people would have been born. But as the Economist put it well in a recent article, “that is patent nonsense.”

Global demographic trends suggest that fertility would have dropped anyway, as it has steadily in other industrialized countries. Instead, an over-zealous policy coupled with a preference for boys has resulted in a sorely skewed population in China, facing some serious repercussions.

Now that this information has been made global, what should be US officials’ response? China has upbraided the US for our addiction to debt, we might question the value of China’s economic prosperity at the continued expense of reproductive freedom , and on the backs of entrenched inequities . As Americans ponder nervously what the recent downgrade and looming economic recession will mean, we can be grateful that we still have (some semblance) of reproductive freedom. As the development economics thinker William Easterly Tweeted, “China: I’d rather have debt and individual liberty than your version of forced saving and massive rights violations.”

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