Free One Child by Mei Fong Page B

extreme.
    A team of mathematicians from Xian Jiao Tong University presented a paper demonstrating that the government’s goal of zero population growth by 2000 could not be reached. It was not what authorities wanted to hear, and the paper disappeared from view.Liang got worse treatment when he voiced concerns over the one-child proposal. Li Xiuzhen, director of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, dismissed his viewpoint, saying, “It’s unlikely that problems are really that serious.
    “Chinese people have long been used to listening to one voice atone time,” said Liang. “When they suddenly hear something different and critical, it’s like oil blasts in the pot.”
    Liang was unusually courageous in his candor, for there were many China scholars who suffered adverse consequences for voicing opinions contrary to the Communist Party’s. Two decades before, Peking University president Ma Yinchu had killed his career that way. Ironically, Ma, who argued for population curbs in 1959, is now credited as the father of the one-child policy. Unfortunately, Ma’s ideas were contrary to those of Chairman Mao. His erratic stance on population control would vacillate between “More is merrier” and “Less is more.” Ma had the bad luck of pushing for curbs at a time when the Great Helmsman was in the “More is merrier” camp. Ma was summarily removed from his position as head of one of China’s top universities.It would be twenty long years before he was politically rehabilitated, around the time Liang unveiled
his
objections to population curbs.
    At Chengdu, Liang would clash with the rocketmen, who impressed the crowd with their complex calculations, making Liang’s projections seem like caveman scribbles in contrast.
    Li Guangyuan represented Song’s team at the conference. He was in his mid-thirties, a talented speaker and a graduate of the well-regarded Chinese University of Science and Technology. Li spoke of his team’s use of cybernetics—the science of control and communications in complex machine systems—to make calculations of China’s future population. For the scholars—many of whom didn’t even have access to personal computers at the time—this was “something so mysterious and unheard-of to most people,” remembered Liang, “the atmosphere at the whole conference was kindled.”
    China’s rocket scientists argued that even with a two- or three-children-per-family quota the population would continue to balloon.According to their projections, even with “the most drastic policy measure, one child per couple, the population would keep expanding for a full quarter century,” wrote Susan Greenhalgh.
    Soon after the conference, Liang remembers Li Guangyun asking him, “How did you calculate the population numbers in the next twenty years?”
    “With my pen,” said Liang.
    “That’s so slow! It’s much easier if you use the computer.For example, it takes less than an hour to calculate the population statistics in the next century, and it’s absolutely correct!” cried Li, according to Liang.
    A few months later, Song’s group’s findings began to make their way into mainstream media. At the same time, in many internal conferences the one-child policy was interpreted as the only solution to China’s population problems.
    On September 25 that year, the Communist Party published an open letter to its members asking them to voluntarily limit their family size to one child. Thus began China’s most radical and longest-running social experiment.
    Liang returned from Chengdu disappointed and depressed.He bitterly resented what he saw as the arrogance of these scientists, “asking more than 700 million people of China to use their lives to practice their inadequate calculations, in a condescending gesture.” He raged at how scholars, “using science as a disguise to stoke the fire,” became cheerleaders for the central government’s plan.
    It would be twenty more