Free One Child by Mei Fong Page A

reaching for one loaf of bread.
    This was the world into which China emerged after a decade of isolation following the Cultural Revolution. It was in a unique position. While places like India and Indonesia also imposed population curbs, only China had both the authoritarian political structure and the social and cultural readiness to push through these ideas on a grand scale. While Western scientists like the Club of Rome were expounding theories of population control as intellectual exercises, Chinese scientists were prepared to put these ideas into practice on a
real
population, with few to no fail-safe mechanisms.
    The country had been so beaten and demoralized, its intellectual capital so sapped by the Cultural Revolution, the idea of rationing children, in the same way coal and grain were rationed, made sense.
    There was also no adequate political mechanism for those affected to signal their outrage when the full brunt of the one-child campaign kicked in—unlike in India, for example. China also had no deep-seated religious beliefs on birth control or abortion to root out.
    In retrospect, the country was fertile ground for reducing fertility.
    There is evidence that some Western ideas on population reduction found root in Chinese soil. In 1975, Song Jian joined a Chinese delegation to the Netherlands, where he met a young Dutch mathematician called Geert Jan Olsder. “He seemed like a regular guy, very friendly,” recalled Olsder, who is still bemused, years later, by his inadvertent role in China’s population movement.Over beers that day, Olsder told Song about a paper he’d cowritten
.
It laid out a problem: how to prevent overpopulation on a fictional island. Olsder and his colleagues had come up with “an elegant mathematical solution,” which he recounted to Song.
    “In hindsight, he seemed to perk up at this point,” said Olsder. “His eyes lit up.”
    Olsder thought he was talking to a fellow academic. He had no idea Song was one of China’s super-scientists, an elite band whose military work had protected them during the Cultural Revolution, when all other intellectuals had suffered greatly. After the Revolution, they were virtually the only technocrats who emerged with their intellectual and social capital intact.
    The Russian-trained Song was a ballistics missile specialist and a special protégé of Qian Xuesen, the brilliant cofounder of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, who had quit the United States in disgust after several humiliations during the McCarthyite Communist witch-hunts. Qian, of course, was welcomed by China with open arms. He went on to lead China’s rocket program and mentor acolytes like Song, who would play a major role in the one-child policy rollout.
    Through Qian’s patronage, Song was given access to top-level political-military leaders. Over the next few years, he and colleagues Li Guangyuan, Yu Jingyuan, and Tian Xueyuan would use Olsder’s and other European scholars’ research as a basis for creating a formula for controlling China’s birthrate.Unlike Olsder, they did not view this merely as an intellectual problem. They sought real-world application.
    Song and company’s mathematical formulas would clash with Liang’s human-centric proposals at the 1979 population control symposium in Chengdu.
     
     
    III
     
    The Chengdu conference was a milestone, for this was when various academics unveiled their proposals for how to curb China’s masses. It’s unclear at this point how it shaped the events that followed. While some historians believe the conference marked a turning point that weighed decisively in favor of the missile scientists’ radical one-child proposal, others believe Communist leaders had already locked in their decision at this point, and Chengdu was just so much scholastic sound and fury. But the discussions at Chengdu showed that alternative points of view existed. The one-child policy was not the only solution on the table, though it was the most