Forbidden Children: China's One-Child Policy
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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it. I want to start this episode out with a huge thank you. This is the first new episode since I launched the podcast in mid-September, and I cannot tell you how surprised and honored I've been by the enthusiasm for the show.

People from four continents have responded to this content and it's been a humbling and encouraging experience to receive such an outpouring of interest and support. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you, truly. And without further ado, welcome to episode six, Forbidden Children. 1993 was the worst year of Wang Xiaolan's life. It was the year her second daughter was born.

Xiaolan lived with her husband in a village in central China, and like many rural Chinese at the time, they were poor and often struggled to make ends meet. Their first daughter had only been born a little more than a year earlier, and they'd never intended to have another child so soon. But sometimes, as we know, passions run hot and accidents happen.

As the months went by and her belly got bigger and bigger, Xiaolan's mind swirled with a potent mix of hope, excitement, fear, and dread. She and her husband had flipped a coin, and the way it landed would have far-reaching consequences for everyone involved. In the fall of that year, Xiaolan went into labor. Surrounded by her husband and extended family, she strained and screamed, bringing a new life into the world.

And when the dust settled, the midwife held a perfectly healthy, beautiful baby girl. But there was no rejoicing, no smiles, and no hugging. The mood was grim, and Xiaolan immediately burst into tears. She couldn't even bear to look at her newborn daughter, because the natural love she felt for her child was being smothered under the crushing weight of reality and expectation.

Shortly after, she began breastfeeding the child. And according to researcher Kay Ann Johnson, when Xiaolan dared to glance down at her little daughter, she saw that, quote, she was perfect, with a beautiful face and tiny fingers that grasped my hand, end quote. But there was no denying an unassailable fact. Xiaolan and her husband had broken the law. In fact, they had broken the law the very second they had agreed to bring the child to term.

So hours after the baby girl was born, Xiaolan's in-laws physically pried the child out of her arms. They wrapped the baby girl in a quilt and they took her into the city. They left the crying baby on the steps of a police station, hoping that either the authorities or a good Samaritan would find her and give her a good home. But they couldn't wait around to know for sure.

The child's grandparents were literally carrying contraband, a package that could have landed them in prison if the government discovered the truth of the child's birth. And as they watched from a distance, they got scared, and they left before they had seen anyone pick up the child. In the quilt the baby girl had been wrapped in, its mother, Xiaolan, left a note. The note said, quote, We wanted to keep this child alive.

but could not raise her because of the birth planning policy. We hope a kind-hearted person will adopt her and love her." Today, that baby girl would be a 26-year-old woman, but Xiaolan never found out what happened to her daughter, a child who never had a name or even a birth certificate. She just vanished that night in 1993, melting away with the snow into a mysterious and dangerous future.

Wang Xiaolan's story is a heartbreaking one, but it is just one of millions of similar stories that have emerged from the Chinese heartland since 1980, the year in which the Communist Party of China enacted its infamous One Child Policy.

In the subsequent four decades, that draconian set of birth planning laws has radically transformed the demographic landscape of the most populous nation on planet Earth. And the unintended consequences of those laws will continue to haunt China and reshape the entire world for the next century, at least.

The official stance of the Communist Party of China is that the one-child policy was ultimately a resounding success. According to party records, the policy prevented 400 million births. And if that seems like an odd accomplishment to tout, the Chinese government emphatically asserts that its systematic suppression of human reproduction has made an indelible contribution to the fight against climate change, overpopulation, and global resource depletion.

According to China, the world owes it a great debt, one that can never truly be repaid. Like most of the topics we discuss on this show, it is a heavy one. Today's episode is a complex tale of horror, hope, and heartbreak, of ordinary people pushed to the unimaginable brinks of the human condition by a government hell-bent on making a better future no matter how much it costs the people in the present.

Not unlike the previous episode on Israel, Palestine, and the Six-Day War, this topic has touched millions of people still living and breathing in the world today. Some of them are just kids, teenagers, or young adults, people who will spend their entire lives grappling with the factors that whisk them away to distant shores and unknown futures.

Some are parents who faced an impossible choice, who question every day whether the path they chose was the right one. It's a story of victims, grifters, saints, and traffickers. A topic that demands respect, sensitivity, and care. And I've done my very best to do that. But the very existence of the one-child policy raises a huge blinking red light of a question.

What could drive one of the largest countries in the world to such a radical, invasive policy? What could spur a nation to try and police the reproductive rights of 1 billion people? Basically, whose bright idea was this anyway? Well, 13 years before Wang Xiaolan would be forced to abandon her newborn daughter, the greatest minds of communist China met for a conference at a place called Chengdu.

Now, Greatest Minds deserves a bit of a caveat. China's intellectual class had been eviscerated by the reforms and purges of the infamous Mao Zedong, the communist strongman who'd seized power and put the country through a meat grinder of repression, poverty, starvation, and violence after his successful revolution in 1949.

As a result, the scientists and academics that remained were Communist Party loyalists, whose background was mainly in military technology and geopolitical strategy. But these rocket scientists and Soviet-educated experts had a pressing problem on their hands, one that threatened to undermine all that had been sacrificed on the dripping red altar of Mao Zedong's communist ideology. As many Chinese said at the time, Ren Tai-Duo,

Too. Many. People. After World War II, population growth had exploded all over the globe, largely due to advances in medicine, nutrition, and vaccinations. Many saw this as a welcome boon, a new era of prosperity, higher life expectancy, and untapped human potential. Others saw a darker, borderline apocalyptic vision of the future.

Fears about overpopulation began to worm their way into international discourse, and Western academics unleashed a tidal wave of doom and gloom literature, prophesying a crowded, catastrophic future in which millions of people across the world would die as a result of overpopulation. In his 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich wrote, "...hundreds of millions of people will starve to death."

And this scholarly hysteria penetrated the minds of the Chinese military scientists as well. And they began to believe that the key issue standing between China and a prosperous economy was the simple fact that there wasn't enough wealth, food, or resources to go around. To lift itself out of the poverty that had plagued it for centuries, China would have to take a drastic step back.

To give birth to a new China, the communists would have to prevent the births of hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens. As the government prepared to launch this radical new policy in earnest, a few Chinese intellectuals dared to criticize the idea. One of them, an economics instructor named Liang Zhongtang, warned them that the policy would be, quote, a terrible tragedy, resulting in a breathless, lifeless society without a future, end quote.

Remember that movie The Day After Tomorrow? The one where the world ends with an overnight ice age and tidal waves and feral wolves and all that good stuff? Where you've got Dennis Quaid pleading, begging the leaders of the world to realize that impending disaster is coming and if they would only just listen to him, we could stop it before it's too late. Well, Liang Zhongtang is a little bit like the Dennis Quaid character in that movie. He kind of had it all figured out.

His main critique of the looming one-child policy came in the form of a simple equation, an equation he called the 4-2-1 problem. Liang believed that many years after the policy was enacted, Chinese families would begin to experience an acute financial burden caused by the single-child system. As these only children grew up, they'd eventually find themselves supporting two parents and four grandparents financially all by themselves.

If they got married, they would have to support that child plus all of their in-laws. Ultimately, two sets of parents and four sets of grandparents. With each subsequent generation, the problem would only continue to compound. Four grandparents, two parents, one child. The 4-2-1 problem.

To Liang Zhongtang, this lopsided metric would cause an alarming issue. A shrinking younger population suddenly struggling to care for and support a rapidly expanding older population. That withering, financially beleaguered workforce would not be able to compete in a global economy. And that meant that on a long enough timeline, China's economic boom would be reversed and the nation would slide back into poverty.

Liang believed the mathematical flaw in the one-child policy was clear as day. But just like Dennis Quaid in The Day After Tomorrow, Liang was completely ignored. He was laughed out of the room. Decades later, Liang would say of his efforts to persuade the authorities, quote, I don't think it meant anything. It was a waste of time.

On September 25th, 1979, the Communist Party of China sent a letter to all of its members urging them to limit their families to a single child. Within a few years, the policy soon became more than just a polite suggestion, and the one-child policy became law of the land, from remote mountain villages to smog-choked apartment blocks.

Walking through the streets of China in the mid-80s, you would have seen propaganda posters clinging to every surface in sight. Posters featuring smiling, well-dressed mothers triumphantly cradling a single, rosy-cheeked baby. And in the background of the illustrations, there was often a golden, shining city. A brief glimpse at the future that awaited their country, if they could only keep it in their pants for a generation or two.

These posters had slogans like, quote, Another one was, And finally, the very catchy, But no amount of propaganda in the world could change the reproductive habits of a 3,000-year-old society.

Chinese families were used to having as many children as they could feed and clothe. More children meant more people to take care of you in your old age, and it wasn't uncommon to have four or five, even six kids. But like the mighty Yangtze River that flows through central China, this was a force of nature that had to be artificially warped, twisted, and controlled to serve the purposes of the state.

One of the first things the government did was raise the age at which couples could get legally married. Age 22 for men, age 20 for women. The thinking was that if they could delay marriage, they could delay the creation of children. Anyone with a functioning set of junk knows just how unrealistic that sounds.

Also, beginning in the early 80s, if you were a woman who wanted to have a child, you needed to have what was called a Sheng Yu Zhang, or birth permission paper. You would need to obtain this paper before you got pregnant, or at least before you were starting to show. And what that meant was riding a bike or taking a bus or walking down to a local family planning office, and once there, you'd have to wait all day in line or be told to come back on a different day.

You'd be required to present all the relevant personal documents, if you even had them. And all of this was to acquire what was basically a license to breed. Naturally, your average person found this very difficult, intrusive, and inconvenient. Life happens, people bang, and the second the government starts poking its nose into the bedroom, the results are very rarely good.

But the People's Republic of China had a glorious future to forge, and they would do so by any means necessary. To achieve the radical aims of the one-child policy, radical enforcement was necessary. The Communist Party decided that the best deterrent against unauthorized children was a system of harsh, ruinous punishments.

The most common of these punishments were fines. If you had an unauthorized second child, the legalese for that situation being, quote, an out-of-plan child, you were subject to enormous fines and charges. The amounts were often obscene. According to journalist May Fong, quote, parents of children born out of plan would be hit with fines between five and ten times their annual disposable income.

And if you couldn't pay, the collectors wouldn't just hand you a bill and go home. They would ransack your house for valuables, carrying off precious items like TVs, washing machines, and bicycles. Sometimes entire dwellings, walls and all, would be torn to the ground, leaving the owners homeless. As one of these enforcers described later in life, quote,

If they couldn't pay, then you would confiscate some things of value in their home, but they were never such expensive things because villagers were so poor. Just things like grain or homespun cloth. Sometimes we would climb up the roofs and make a hole just to show them we meant business or knock down some windows." And if there was nothing of value to destroy or steal, the collectors had other ways of putting pressure on parents of illegal children.

There are many reports of local authorities jailing the extended family members of out-of-plan parents and holding them as hostages until the criminals turn themselves in. Once the out-of-plan children were seized, the babies were often whisked away to state-run orphanages, virtually guaranteeing that the new parents would never see their child again. Another extremely common punishment for having an out-of-plan child was forced sterilization.

According to Mayfong, in 1983 alone, China sterilized upwards of 20 million people. Men were given compulsory vasectomies. Women had IUDs installed that could not be removed. These procedures were often painful and irreversible. And it's worth noting that this practice in China isn't just a relic from the distant age we call the 1980s. In 2010,

10,000 people were sterilized in a city in southern China, many of them under duress. And to facilitate this nightmarish buffet of draconian measures, a vast network of 85 million part-time employees worked for the Chinese government spying on their neighbors, identifying out-of-plan births, and performing sterilizations. And they were everywhere.

One example mentions that in a village of only 500 people, there were 15 birth planning officials whose sole job it was to find and root out violators of the policy. One of these employees was a woman named Gao. Today, she lives on the west coast of the United States, and she had managed to flee China with her husband in the late 80s, and she brought with her horrific memories of her time working for the birth planning authorities.

The journalist and author of the book One Child, May Fong, who we've mentioned before, interviewed this woman. I was a monster in the daytime, Gao said, wiping away tears. For many years, Gao had been an accomplice to arguably the most ghoulish facet of the one-child policy, a widespread practice of mandatory, state-enforced abortions.

If a woman who was pregnant with an out-of-plan child couldn't pay the fines, bribe the officials, or hide her condition, she would be hauled down to the local clinic and forced to terminate the pregnancy, whether she was nine weeks or nine months along. This monstrous theft of bodily autonomy and the right to choose was extremely widespread, particularly in the 80s and 90s.

And the tearful former official Gao couldn't forget the icy efficiency with which the government doctors and nurses had done their work. One particular procedure had never stopped haunting her. Quote, End quote.

To make matters worse, Gao said, there was a system of quotas and bonuses incorporated into the enforcement process. Simply put, the more illegally pregnant women you uncovered, sterilized, or coerced into an abortion, the higher your paycheck. Quote, That's why everyone is so keen to arrest people. The more you arrest, the more bonus you earn. Some girls were forced to get surgeries even though they weren't pregnant at all. End quote.

Gao estimated that she had personally overseen 1,500 coerced abortions. That assembly line of death had left a toll on her conscience that eventually became unbearable, and she explained how she tried to save a few of them who had somehow managed to survive the toxins which were injected into their mother's bellies. Quote,

Over the next several decades, China would ultimately carry out 336 million of these compulsory abortions.

As this was happening all across China, new parents whose children fell outside of the parameters of the birth planning laws were going to every length imaginable to protect their babies and find ways of securing their safety, even if it meant giving them up to complete strangers. One couple, just hours after their daughter was born, wrapped her in a blanket and took her in the middle of the night to the home of a childless but financially secure couple.

They left her on the doorstep and lit a small string of firecrackers to wake the homeowners up. And then they watched from a distance to make sure the baby was taken inside. A few weeks later, the parents were relieved to hear through acquaintances that the wealthy couple had decided to keep and raise the mystery child. But for many desperate parents, there wasn't a wealthy, childless couple around every corner. And sometimes a little more creativity was required to evade the government enforcers.

In one case, a boy and a girl born just 11 months apart to the same couple were passed off as twins, which was one of the rare situations that exempted you from the harsh punishments of the single-child rule. The ruse worked, and the family avoided fines and harassment from local officials.

In another instance, a couple gave their second baby to one of the parents' siblings, who had no children to raise. And the boy grew up never knowing the truth, that the woman he called his aunt was actually his birth mother. Amidst this avalanche of impromptu adoptions, abandonments, and family shuffling, there was a lot of secrecy. But some Chinese parents chose to share the truth with their adopted children.

One day, an adoptive mother, a woman named Shu Ji, decided to tell her daughter the truth about her origins. The little girl, who was only five years old, had been hearing some rumors around the village, like mean taunts from other kids, who said she wasn't really a part of her own family. Her mother decided to rip the band-aid off, and to quote a passage from researcher K. Ann Johnson's book, Hidden Children, quote, As soon as she had the chance, she told her the truth.

The child started to cry and pounded on her mother with her little fist, saying, No, no, don't say that. Shuji held her and said, It doesn't matter. You are the same to me as your brothers. You belong to this family, just like them. A few days later, the child came to Shuji and said, Mama, it doesn't matter. You are the same to me as my real mother. Shuji smiled as she recalled this touching exchange with her young daughter. End quote.

Other adoptive mothers felt quite the opposite. They never wanted the child to know the truth of where they came from. One said, quote, Why would I tell her we found her abandoned in the street? Why would I make her feel she is different than her sister? She is not different in our minds. She has been with us since the first hour of her life. End quote. Sometimes, when they were older, adopted children would notice small scars on their bodies. A little nick of scar tissue here or there on their hand or foot or leg.

Birth parents who were forced to abandon their children would occasionally mark their babies with a small cut or a superficial nick to leave an identifying feature. The hope was that later in life, the parents might be able to pick out their son or daughter in a crowd by that specific scar that they had left behind. That they might be able to take some small amount of comfort in knowing that their babies had lived through childhood and grown up, even if the parents could never say a word to them.

The one-child policy was tearing the social fabric of China to shreds. But in spite of it all, people were finding ways to stitch loving families together during this period of intense hardship. And as the birth planning laws churned on throughout the decades, a set of unintended consequences began to ripple across Chinese society. Disastrous side effects that the Communist Party had utterly failed to foresee. ♪

I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option.

I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week wherever you get your podcasts. So as we've been exploring some of these different stories, you might have started to notice a specific pattern.

The children that seemed to be most adversely affected by the one-child policy were girls. Well, you're not imagining things. There is a very particular reason that the one-child policy negatively affected female children way more than male children. Very briefly, we're going to zoom backward into the mists of time. Before the 1980s, before communist China, before the invention of the plane or electricity, hell, before the dawn of the Roman Empire.

We're going all the way back to the 6th century BC, when a Chinese man by the name of Confucius was alive. Now, raise your hand if you've heard that name before, unless you're driving or something. Odds are you know that name. Confucius and his teachings loom large in the modern day, although very few people in the West know much about him, beyond the fact that he was a philosopher who lived a very long time ago, and he seemed to be a pretty smart dude.

Well, Confucian philosophy forms a crucial building block of Chinese culture. It has fundamentally shaped Chinese values, specifically the way that they approach family relationships and social hierarchy. See, Confucius lived during a time of extreme political upheaval and civil war. Seeing all of that stuff had a profound effect on him, and he soon began to believe that stability, order, and respect for authority figures were critical for a successful society.

Confucius was a big believer in the importance of sticking to your role, adhering to the norms and traditions of the station you were born into. If everyone played their role and respected the authority of those over them, life would be good, simple, and happy. A lot of people agreed with that, and his teachings gained a huge following, one that only continued to grow after his death. Out of these basic Confucian values developed a concept called filial piety.

Filial piety is all about respect for the people above you, specifically fathers, elder brothers, and the male members of your family. In most societies throughout history, power and authority has usually flowed through the male gender, but it was especially pronounced in Chinese culture. And as a result, there was a big premium placed on male children because only they were capable of making sure a family name stayed alive generation after generation.

I mean, we kind of have this concept in Western culture too. How many times have we heard parents joke about wanting grandsons to continue the family name and all that? It's a tongue-in-cheek joke for us, but this was a big deal in China. And it still is a big deal. Two common Chinese expressions really sum this up, and I'm probably going to butcher these, so forgive me. But the first one goes, 多子多福, which means the more sons, the more fortune.

And the second one, yang er fang lao, which means raise a son for support in old age. Naturally, this reverence for male children had a flip side. Female children were regarded as inferior, and this affected their quality of life in a huge way. As Karen Evans wrote in her book, The Lost Daughters of China, quote, A daughter was frequently regarded as just an extra mouth to feed until she married and joined her husband's household.

Once there, her only hope of respect was to produce a son to carry on the family name for her husband and in-laws. If she failed in this mission, she could simply be cast aside and another woman invited into the family to take her place. Among the numerous reasons that gave a family the right to take a concubine or to divorce his spouse was a wife's failure to produce a son."

In fact, so prized a commodity were male children that boys were sometimes given girls' names when very little, quote, to fool the deities into thinking the child was of no consequence, not worth taking back, end quote. So let's zoom back forward to the 1980s, the People's Republic, and the one-child policy. Even in the modern era, this fundamental preference for male children has never really gone away.

And now it was only compounding the suffering and anxiety being wrought by the birth planning laws. When births were restricted, every pregnancy became a coin flip. If your one shot at a child ended up being a girl, well, poof. There goes the family future and your retirement plan because boys were expected to support their parents financially in old age, whereas women were, quote, lost to other families once they married.

The Communist Party of China completely failed to anticipate how this simple millennia-old dynamic would quickly twist the cold arithmetic of the birth planning laws into something very ugly very quickly. While many of the parents we've talked about so far went to incredible lengths to keep their out-of-plan daughters safe, hidden, or adopted into another family, many others were less sentimental in their pursuit of a legal male child.

A Chinese poet in the 3rd century once wrote, quote, How sad to be a woman. Nothing on earth is held so cheap. End quote. Baby girls were abandoned to die in significant numbers. And with the advent of ultrasound technology, selective abortion was often practiced purely on the factor of gender. A report from the 1980s calculated that 97.5% of Chinese abortions, coerced or otherwise, were of female fetuses.

And perhaps most disturbingly, infanticide became very, very commonplace during the toughest years of the one-child policy, especially in poor rural areas. Now, like we've talked about already, many Chinese mothers did everything they could to preserve the lives of their out-of-plan children.

But as we know, humanity falls on a moral spectrum, and some parents found it more pragmatic to simply treat their inconvenient daughters as misfires to be left on the side of the road, drowned in the river, or smothered behind the house. A common refrain from these parents was that they simply had no choice.

Caught in a web of fines, potential sterilization, family pressures, and the looming specter of poverty, they killed or left their daughters for dead in the hopes of trying for a boy next time. One Chinese man in the 1990s who had been brought up on charges of killing his two tiny daughters so that he and his wife could start fresh and try for a boy tried to explain himself. Quote, I was unable to continue the family line of my ancestors. End quote.

That, he felt, would be the real sin.

And the most chilling story I dug up on this facet of the one-child policy comes from a Chinese radio journalist named Xinran. In 1989, she was in a country village doing research for a story, staying as a guest in a family's house. And the young wife who lived there had just gone into labor. And the family was all waiting anxiously in the kitchen, listening to the screams coming from the back room. Eventually, the baby was born. But all Xinran could hear was soft sobbing from the mother.

At first, she worried it might have been a stillbirth, but then she saw the midwife walk out from the back room, holding a newborn baby girl by the ankle. The midwife walked over to the slop bucket in the corner and dropped the baby girl headfirst into the liquid. The journalist, Zhenran, could see the baby girl's foot sticking out of the water, still moving, and she rushed to pull the baby out before she drowned, but the family physically restrained her.

and she watched in horror as the foot slowly stopped twitching. She went outside for air, shaking and trembling, and an older family member went up to her to console her. She said to her, quote, "'Killing a baby girl is not a big thing around here. You city folk are shocked the first time you see it, right?' Jinran angrily replied, "'That is a living child.' "'It's not a child,' the woman said. "'What do you mean it's not a child? I saw it.' The old woman tried to explain."

It's not a child. If it was, we'd be looking after it, wouldn't we? It's a baby girl, and we can't keep it. Around these parts, you can't get by without a son. You have no one to burn incense at the ancestor's shrine, but it's not just that. You don't get the extra land given to you. If your children just eat and don't earn, and you have no land and no grain, then you might as well starve. The officials in charge don't give us any extra land when a girl is born, and there's so little arable land that the girls will starve to death anyway.

That journalist, Xin Ran, met many parents across China who felt that they had no other choice but to kill their newborn baby girls. She met one woman whose mother-in-law had killed four of her daughters before finally giving birth to a son, all in the course of just six years. But it's not like Chinese women enjoyed doing this or even wanted to.

Many were under indescribable pressure from their husbands and in-laws to produce a son, threatened with homelessness and divorce. Many of them truly believed that they had no other choice, and that resulted in emotional scar tissue that stayed with them for the rest of their lives. One woman, named Koumei, had been forced to drown her newborn daughter with her own hands. And then to top it all off, her asshole husband left her, furious that she couldn't give him a son.

So she went into the city to find work and got a job in a small restaurant. One day, she was cleaning up and she saw a family celebrating their young daughter's birthday. The little girl had a nice dress on and was blowing candles out on a big cake. And Kume looks at this little girl and all she can see is the daughter she murdered. The life and childhood that she might have had. Racked with guilt and grief, Kume tried to kill herself twice before her employers got her some help.

Koumei later said, Now, if you're like me and you're grappling with reconciling how people could actually do this to their own children, you're not alone. That Chinese journalist, Zhenran, couldn't understand it either. She said, quote,

I cannot and will not believe that outdated customs combined with government policy can really force human beings to renounce that most beautiful and basic of feelings, the parental instinct. It should not be possible, but it is. While all of this chaos and misery was unfolding from Sichuan to Shanghai, the world was beginning to take notice.

There was political condemnation, outrage from human rights watchdogs, and anger about the toll this was taking on the Chinese civilian population. Little girls languishing in orphanages across China may not have been wanted in their own country, but people all across the globe began to express a desire to adopt these abandoned children and to give them a real home and a family.

The Chinese government saw this as a win-win. They could charge huge processing fees and reap financial gain from these adopted parents, all while getting rid of the infant girls they didn't want. In 1992, China opened its orphanages to foreign adoptions. The demand was staggering, especially in the United States.

Hundreds of thousands of childless couples, unable to conceive a baby of their own or having suffered the premature death of a child, found a second chance in the forgotten daughters of China. Over the next two decades, 120,000 children were adopted from China, and approximately 80,000 of those went to new homes in the United States. From Brooklyn to Atlanta, San Francisco to Portland, thousands of little girls found new homes and opportunities half a world away from the country of their birth.

But the process was not an easy one. It was a complex, laborious journey that could take several years and thousands of dollars. Prospective parents had to navigate a labyrinth of red tape, paperwork, and a dense bureaucracy in order to be approved to adopt one of these orphaned Chinese girls. In her book, The Lost Daughters of China, journalist Karen Evans gives us a window into the rigorous, emotionally demanding process of adopting a baby girl from China.

Quote, The road between us and the baby I held in my heart quickly became littered with forms and demands for more forms. Unlike the vast majority of the population who require no one's permission to conceive a new life, parents who are matched with their children through adoption must first prove themselves worthy, according to private agencies, state laws, foreign governments, and U.S. immigration law.

Their motivations are scrutinized, their backgrounds checked, their bank balances added up, their living quarters surveyed, and their psyches probed. End quote. And worst of all, there was very little guarantee that the countless hours spent calling, complying, and compiling would result in a daughter at all.

Karen Evans continues, quote, Are you ready to place the decision about whether you'll be able to have a child and who that child will be in the hands of strangers? Are you willing to pay hefty sums of money to people you've never met in order to make it all happen? Are you willing to open your lives to government agencies, domestic and foreign, and to jump countless hurdles to document just about every aspect of your life and to go through the agonies of waiting far longer than you thought with very little assurance about anything?

But for parents who were fortunate enough to be paired with a little girl, fly to China, finalize the paperwork, and bring them home, it was worth it. For them, no amount of hardship, fees, or anxiety could eclipse the miraculous feeling of having a child of their very own. Karen Evans, who herself went through this process, finally united with her new baby girl, and she remembered, quote,

Kelly Xiaoyu and I spent our first full afternoon together at the hotel, rolling around on the bed, making friends. She climbed me like a mountain, crawling up and over, grabbing handfuls of my clothes to boost herself, and she'd fall off the other side, giggling and start over. We laughed and played with each other's fingers and noses. We were getting to know each other on some primal level. And when I hugged her, she felt full and warm and necessary in my arms.

as if she were settling into a dent in my chest that I hadn't realized was so cavernous." But adoptive parents like Karen have had to grapple with an uncomfortable counterweight to their joy, because the details surrounding where exactly these children came from are often pretty murky, if not downright shady. That nagging sensation of never truly knowing how their child came to that orphanage, who the birth parents were, and why they gave up their baby

hangs like a cloud over many of these adoptions. And while many adoptive parents take comfort in believing that they had saved or rescued their new baby from a bleak future in China, there were sometimes darker forces at work to ensure that perfect Chinese baby found a home in American arms. As foreign adoptions of Chinese babies gained steam, it quickly became clear just how much these parents were willing to pay to navigate the process.

often as much as $20,000 over the course of a few years. The Chinese government even required a mandatory donation of $5,000 to whichever orphanage the child came from. Unfortunately, all of this foreign money was driving a lucrative shadow industry of kidnappings and child trafficking.

In 2005, six orphanages in central China were found to have engaged in a widespread practice of buying babies like cattle, with little regard as to how they were obtained. These infants were often bought for as much as 500 bucks a head. In 2003, Chinese law enforcement pulled over a bus for a traffic violation. In the back, they found 28 drugged infants stuffed into nylon bags for transport.

One of the babies had died of suffocation. The traffickers were sentenced to death and executed. In 2009, it was discovered that some family planning officials had kidnapped out-of-plan babies from their birth parents and sold them to orphanages for hefty finder's fees. According to a few sources, it's believed that a handful of these children had ended up in American homes.

It's been estimated that as many as 20,000 children are abducted every year in China. The majority are sold to orphanages for adoptions, others to gangs or sex traffickers. Many of these adopted children start new lives in distant provinces or foreign countries and grow up completely unaware that they had not been abandoned at all, but have birth parents somewhere out there who are still searching for them and very much wanted to keep them.

And while thousands of children have vanished into the pitiless machinery of an underground black market, millions more have become legally invisible. Under the Chinese birth planning laws, after you had your baby, you would have to apply for a document called a hukou. A hukou essentially gave your child legal legitimacy and Chinese citizenship.

If you were an out-of-plan child, it was virtually impossible to secure this document. Without a hukou, you can't work, get married, see a doctor, or even go to school. Right now, there are somewhere between 6 and 13 million young adults in China born in violation of the one-child policy who were never able to get that document that grants them citizenship. One of these unregistered young people, a 27-year-old woman named Li Shui, is angry about her situation. Quote,

If you are born in this country, you should be a citizen of this country. Li Shui was a second child, and her mother had been immediately fired from her job for giving birth to her in the early 90s. Li Shui's older sister, Li Bing, is a registered citizen because she was born first and consequently in plan. She feels guilty about the opportunity she was given and her sister was not. I could go to school and she couldn't.

She was upset. She was jealous that I had participated in school events and had classmates to hang out with. Now that I have a job and a salary and hang out with colleagues, she's even more jealous. She wants to work too, but no one will hire her." Li Shui can't even do something as simple as take the train. She said, "...sometimes I want to travel, but I don't have an ID, so I can't. I can't even buy tickets."

Li Shui is just one of an underclass of millions, people who legally do not exist, imprisoned in a cage that no one can see and no one can touch.

Hello, we have this superb podcast called We Didn't Start the Fire, the only podcast started by Billy Joel. It is the most original, fascinating, and random way to learn the story of the 20th century. Oh, pretty darned random. And we are joined by some pretty incredible guests. I only wrote stuff that I wanted to hear. If it turned out to be a hit, it was pure dumb luck. With me, Katie Puckrick. And me, Tom Fordyce. This is We Didn't Start the Fire, the only podcast started by me, Billy Joel.

In 2015, the one-child policy was officially abolished. Yeah, that's right. The same year that Drake released Hotline Bling and Jon Snow got stabbed to death on Game of Thrones, spoiler, China finally got around to ending its 40-year reproductive nightmare. Over the years, the laws had been watered down and rolled back, reinterpreted and defanged, but the reverberations and consequences of the birth planning initiative have been catastrophic.

The policy may be gone, but the demographic impact it has caused will be felt for generations to come. In fact, many experts believe that these problems have the potential to seriously stunt or even reverse China's recent economic boom. So in the final stretch of this episode, we're going to talk about how the brutal past of the one-child policy will likely shape China's future, mainly through the lens of some specific phenomena that have emerged as side effects of the laws.

The first and arguably most troubling problem facing China in the wake of the one-child policy becomes obvious almost immediately as you walk through any Chinese city. Basically, lotta dudes. The ubiquitous, systematic preference for male babies has devastated the gender ratio of the country, resulting in a massive shortage of women.

I hate to even use the term shortage because it implies women are a commodity like food or water, but when a population's gender balance is that skewed, it creates a ton of problems. As May Fong puts it, quote, By 2020, China will have 30 to 40 million surplus men. The country's population of single men will equal or surpass the number of Canadians or Saudi Arabians in the world.

Ten years later, one in four men in China will be a low-skilled bachelor." As of this year, it's projected that for every 100 women in China, there are 115 men. Now, that may not sound like a lot, but extrapolate that across a population approaching 1.5 billion, and you start to get an idea of just how jacked up the situation is. An entire generation of women has vanished from China thanks to the one-child policy.

And the generation of men who would have been their counterparts has been plunged into an inhospitable landscape in which their chances of building a family, starting a relationship, or even getting a date is pretty bleak. There's actually a slang term for this hopeless generation of bachelors. They're called guangyun, which means bare branches. The term is a nod to the fact that their family trees will end with them, since they're unlikely to find a woman to marry and have children with.

This has, in turn, sparked an inflation of housing prices in China as bachelors and their parents feverishly pour life savings into acquiring homes with which they can attract would-be brides. Long story short, by all accounts, the dating scene in China pretty much sucks. So next time you're mourning the state of your love life, just know that it gets worse. So what's going to happen with these guangyun, these bear branches?

The scale of the problem is unprecedented in human history, so we don't really know what the next century is going to hold for the men of China. Some cultural anthropologists have made some predictions, guessing that a generation of idle men will result in a rise in crime or even a more aggressive, warlike national character. It's hard to say, but that's the scary part. We have no historical precedent to compare this against.

As these men get older, they will join a demographic that constitutes the second big problem facing China right now. A huge, rapidly aging population. Remember the 4-2-1 problem? Remember our one rational scientist, our Dennis Quaid type guy, who said that the one-child policy would end in catastrophe? Well, he turned out to be absolutely right.

As life expectancy continued to skyrocket in the 20th century, population growth was stunted by the one-child policy. That resulted in another kind of lopsided demographic situation. To put it bluntly, China has too many old people and too few young people. To quote Mayfong again, quote, "...by the mid-2020s, China will be adding 10 million elders to its population each year, but losing 7 million working adults."

And that means that by 2050, one in every three people in China will be over 60. She then quotes another writer. Ted Fishman, author of Shock of Gray, notes, quote, If they were their own country, China's senior citizens would be the third largest country in the world, behind only India and China itself.

This phenomenon isn't just limited to China. The entire world's population is getting older, life expectancy is soaring, and fertility is steadily going down. Japan is currently struggling with this, Europe is to some degree as well. Even the United States will eventually begin to confront this problem as time goes on. But only in China has the problem been so heavily accelerated and exacerbated by a self-inflicted wound.

Many experts, from economists to cultural anthropologists, say that China will soon begin to buckle under the weight of its aging population, unable to produce enough young people to sustain its economic growth and support its elderly, non-working population. And what does China think of all this?

Well, since the abolition of the one-child policy in 2015, the Communist Party has ironically ramped up initiatives to encourage bigger families in a scramble to jumpstart population growth. But the damage has been done. The one-child policy and its enforcers did their work very well. But the population that they have to be asking themselves is, was any of this worth it? Did four decades of crushing birth planning laws yield anything positive at all?

Well, the official party line of Communist China, as I've mentioned before, is an unequivocal yes. They're very proud of that 400 million prevented birth statistic, even though many in the international community believe it's wildly over-exaggerated. And as mentioned before, they frequently tout the policy as a powerful blow against overpopulation, resource depletion, and climate change. But the smoggy skies and ravaged lungs in Chinese cities have a very different story to tell on that last point.

And the sudden scramble to stimulate population growth betrays their anxiety about what the one-child policy has done.

For the Chinese people, not the government, but the ordinary everyday citizens, the answer is a little more complex. And while many have suffered, some have also thrived as a result of the one-child policy. Despite the brutal toll the birth planning laws took on women and female children, the skewed gender ratio has actually created new opportunities and enhanced prosperity for many women in China today.

Just take journalist Yuan Ren, who wrote an article about the opportunities she received by being an only child and having no male siblings to compete with. Quote, As a single child born in China myself in the late 1980s, my own father, who back then was less than ecstatic at the news of a daughter, has no less strived to provide educational opportunities for me that beat what most boys of my age and background received. Something that could have easily been shifted to a male sibling if I'd had one.

Even as female children were being abandoned, killed, aborted, and adopted in vast numbers, the ones who remained have been the beneficiaries of a general shift towards gender parity. Although China still remains a deeply patriarchal society, the one-child policy has arguably smashed through barriers for women that would have remained firmly in place had the law never existed. As Yuan Ren summarized, quote,

The one-child policy in China has had a liberating impact on the lives of millions of women who are better educated and more independent than ever before. And the confidence and self-assurance is evident in those who have grown up in highly nurturing environments out of the shadows of male siblings. So once again, we come back to the question, was it worth it?

If you stepped into a time machine and went back to 1979, the year that they had their conference with the rocket scientists and the communist party honchos and the Dennis Quaid guy that no one would listen to, if you stepped into that room with a chart, one that showed China's meteoric economic trajectory over the next four decades, a chart that showed the massive explosion of wealth, the rising GDP, the industrial boom, the expanding middle class, if you had that chart in one hand,

And in the other hand, you had a chart that showed the immense loss of life and the sheer havoc waged on China's civilians as a result of the policy. I guarantee you they'd start high-fiving each other, clapping themselves on the back and doing shots. Mission accomplished. Approached purely from the perspective of economic stimulation, the one-child policy was a success. And the People's Republic of China is not exactly known for its sentimentality or humanism.

Now, I can't confirm my hunch with any certainty because one, I'm not an expert, and two, I don't have a time machine, but communist China has never had any qualms with watering the soil of progress with the blood of its own people. That's just how they roll. And if you interrupted this celebratory communist rager with the news that by 2050, one in every three people in China will be over the age of 60, you're going to be a communist.

or that an entire generation of men will live and die without ever getting within a mile of a date, much less a wedding chapel, their enthusiasm might cool just a little bit. But for better or worse, China is a changed place in the wake of the one-child policy, and we will all be bearing witness to the consequences of it for the rest of our natural lives.

It's a tragic, cautionary tale of what can happen when a government attempts to interfere in the bodily autonomy and reproductive choices of its citizens. And frankly, it's difficult to compress all of this into a digestible narrative. But the closest I've seen someone come is the final chapter of the book One Child by Mei Feng.

She'd immigrated to America in the 2000s and given birth to twin boys and was grappling with how she'd explain China's one-child policy to them when they got older. She said, quote,

of how a great sadness came over the land and how people gave away their children or stole other people's or sought the help of magicians to make their single precious child the strongest and brightest they could, and how it came to pass that there were fewer and fewer babies born into the land and it became a country of the old. This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.

Hello everyone, my name is Matt Neglia and I am the host of the Next Best Picture podcast, part of the Film Entertainment Awards website, nextbestpicture.com. On our show, we explore all year long what is possibly going to win Best Picture at the Oscars. We do this by conducting interviews with people within the film industry, holding weekly reviews of the latest theatrical releases, and on our main show, where we dive into various different topics, answer your fan questions, and

and also do our best to explore Oscar history's past in hopes that it will tell us something new for this upcoming award season race. We hope that you will join us on all the various podcasting networks. We look forward to seeing you over at nextbestpicture.com.