The universal principle that “evil begets evil” finds a haunting realization in the legacy of China’s family planning era. During Peng Peiyun’s decade-long tenure, when she headed the National Family Planning Commission from 1988 to 1998, a system was established that tore apart families with the most aggressive enforcement and commodified the lives of the unborn.
Tracing the history of China’s birth control policies reveals a shift from early encouragement of the pre-One-Child Era (1950s-1978) to extreme coercion through the mandatory One-Child Policy (1979-2015), and finally to a desperate attempt to reverse a shrinking population with the Policy Reversal in 2016.
Agony of the Shidi
According to official CCP statistics and scholars, the number of bereaved families who lost their only child in China is at least over 1 million, and is still increasing by 76,000 every year. This means that more than 2 million heartbroken parents (Shidi) are living in agony. At the time, many young Chinese people, in response to the CCP’s call for “Having one child is good, the state will provide for your old age, voluntarily opted for sterilization after the birth of their first child.
Unexpectedly, when people reach middle age or old age, their only child passes away unexpectedly. Chinese people value raising children to provide for old age and to carry on the family line, so losing one’s only child means losing both of these. Earlier reports in China described the lives of elderly people who had lost their only child. These elderly people were afraid to go to parks, fearing the sadness of seeing others with their grandchildren.
They dared not celebrate New Year’s Day because those days were the hardest for them; their house was cold and empty, with only black-and-white photos of children hanging on the walls. Some of these bereaved elderly people are bedridden, without even someone to bring them water. Due to the millions of families who have lost their only child, the CCP’s family planning policy has also caused another enormous negative consequence, which is a severe imbalance in the gender ratio of China’s population.
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