Free One Child by Mei Fong

original $1,000 mark. Even so, authorities continued to stress the need for maintaining population controls.“Economic development is like a cake,” said the head of the National Population and Family Planning Commission. “We need to slow down the growth of the number of people eating the cake.”
    Liang was not the only one to foresee the kinds of problems the one-child policy would lead to: aging, son preference, a vastly diminished work force over time. But those bent on pushing the policy brushed these issues off as things that could be easily fixed. Song Jian, a scientist whose calculations were instrumental in the one-child policy’s implementation, publicly dismissed these concerns.In a 1980 article he made vague reference to scientific developments that could easily avert the aging issue before it became a serious problem “in thedistant future” and suggested authorities could “adjust women’s average fertility rate in advance” to keep population growth stable.
    If Song’s prognostications on the human condition seem incredible—aging and fertility dialed up or down, like levers on a machine—perhaps it is because his area of expertise
was
machines. Specifically, rockets.
    How did a rocketman become involved in determining how many babies women in China could have? To answer that, we have to look at the peculiar set of circumstances that birthed the policy, both within and without the Middle Kingdom.
     
     
    II
     
    Born in haste, dragging on past its sell-by date, China’s one-child policy was never meant to last forever. When it was launched in 1980, China’s leaders promised these painful family restrictions would be temporary.“In thirty years, when our current extreme population growth eases, we can then adopt a different population policy,” read the announcement from the Communist Party Central Committee.
    In fairness, Chinese leaders were not alone in their fears of a population time bomb. It was an idea du jour of the 1960s and 1970s, like bell-bottoms and est therapy. After World War II, population numbers had crept up everywhere, not just in China. People made love, not war, and babies, predictably enough, followed. Conservationists and ecologists began sounding the famine alarm.
    In 1968, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich’s unlikely bestseller,
The Population Bomb
, dramatically proclaimed that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over,” and “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” No preventive measures would avert “a substantial increase in the world death rate,” wrote Ehrlich.
    In 1969, the United Nations launched the UNFPA, or Fund for Population Activities (renamed the United Nations PopulationFund in 1987), with the objective of curbing population growth in third-world countries.
    In 1972, the Club of Rome, an organization of prominent academics and politicians, published
The Limits to Growth
, which, like
The Population Bomb
, argued that economic growth was ecologically unsustainable. Using Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer simulations, the Club of Rome came up with several scenarios gaming out the distribution of global resources among the world’s hypothetical population. Most predictions were gloomy, and some expected global collapse around the mid- to end of the twenty-first century.
    The battle to control global population—particularly those darker-skinned bits of it—kicked into high gear, with a significant amount of Western aid funneled to population control activities.
    For a brief period, India had a forced sterilization program, an unpopular move that led to Indira Gandhi’s ouster (though she later regained power); South Korea had a “Two’s Too Much” campaign, and near me, even the tiny island nation of Singapore—whose population today is smaller than New York City’s—had a “Stop at Two” campaign. As a child, I grew up with stories of those propaganda drives.One poster, I remember, featured many hands