Desperate to raise the immense sum needed to purchase official identity for her nine-year-old son, Little Jie, Lu Cuiping (shown above with her son) tried to sell a kidney, but was told she was too old. ‘I have thought about robbing a bank,’ she says. ‘But I don’t have those kinds of skills.’ (Adam Dean for The Globe and Mail)
THE GHOST CHILDREN
OF CHINA
In 1980, China introduced the one-child policy. In the process, it created a lost generation – second and third children who went unregistered, couldn’t go to school, and who continue to live in the shadows. Nathan VanderKlippe explores the human and economic costs of one of the biggest social experiments in history
Little Jie, in a yellow cap and grey hoodie, darts out the doors of his school and across the road to where his mother is waiting to pick him up for lunch. He jumps up and down in excitement. “My favourite food is French fries,” the nine-year-old says. His favourite period at school is xiake, when class is dismissed. “Because after xiake, you can have fun outside.”
While his mother, Lu Cuiping, steams vegetables inside their small apartment on the outskirts of Beijing, he brings out a Lego navy frigate, which in his hands becomes a Chinese vessel mounting assaults on the enemy. “I want to be a military expert,” he says, “researching naval weapons.”
“He’s very patriotic,” Ms. Lu says. Usually, “the enemy is Japan. … But sometimes he will aim at the family-planning committee.”
For most Chinese, a child who dreams of attacking the state would be horrifying. But Little Jie is not Chinese – at least not according to the country in which he was born and lives. To China, he is no one. A ghost.
Forty-five years ago, China inaugurated an era of population control, amid fears that too many people would bring catastrophe. In 1980, it officially announced a national one-child policy, forcibly limiting the size of families. But there have been, inevitably, second (and, rarely, third and fourth) children: children who go unrecognized by the government, have no official identity – who are left to live outside the institutions of regulated society. Little Jie is one of them.
Chinese data show the dramatic spike in abortions, sterilizations and intrauterine-device insertions following the introduction of the one-child policy in 1980. SOURCE: CHALLENGING MYTHS ABOUT CHINA¹S ONE-CHILD POLICY - THE CHINA JOURNAL, NO. 74 (Trish McAlaster / The Globe and Mail)
Since 1971, China has seen a total of 336 million abortions, completed 196 million sterilizations, and inserted 403 million intrauterine devices.
More difficult to count are the ghosts: the ones who were born, but have no official status. China’s 2010 census estimated that there were 13 million people without official documentation – a population almost the size of Ontario’s.
China’s one-child policy has been called the “most spectacular demographic experiment in history,” and “one of the most draconian examples of government social engineering ever seen.” It has also been, according to the best available evidence, a failure even on its own terms.
It did little to alter birth rates – much of the decline had come earlier, under a 1970s-era two-child policy. Meanwhile, the most significant purported economic benefit of the one-child rule – that women who bear fewer children would be better able to join the work force and boost national productivity – is being offset by the mess China faces today, due to its vast forgone population.
While population restrictions fundamentally reshaped China, the one-child policy itself, which coincided with a time of growing wealth that brought natural declines in birth rates, didn’t do China much good. Instead, by artificially cutting families to just one child, it brought decades of pain — and the millions of ghosts it has created are still without official home or respite.
LIFE AS A GHOST
The foundation of Chinese civic life is the hukou, a maroon-and-gold household-registration document. It is a form of identity used to control people’s movements inside the country, set up by the Communist regime, and similar to systems used in Soviet Russia and imperial China. With it, a person can secure a national-identification card, attend school, access basic medical services, find a place to live, board a bus or train, open a bank account, get a job, and secure a passport. Without it, each of those things becomes difficult and, for those with too little money or too few connections, often impossible.
A hukou, or household-registration document, a form of identity used to control people’s movements inside China. (Adam Dean for The Globe and Mail)
There is, for those with fat enough wallets, a way around it. Although families are limited to one child, Chinese authorities allow them to simply pay a fine – that, if unpaid, grows over time – for any extra offspring; the wealthy, in other words, can buy for themselves as many children as they please. Pay the fine, and your child gets a hukou, becoming indistinguishable from any other child. Those with more modest salaries, meanwhile, struggle with sums so punitive that they are effectively impossible to pay.
The last time Ms. Lu checked, in 2012, her fine was at 333,466 yuan (about $67,500). Before Ms. Lu lost her job recently, she earned 2,000 yuan a month (about $400). It would take 166 months – nearly 14 years – of her entire salary to pay off the fine.
She lost that job, in part because she turned down her boss’s request to move to a new location, a neighbourhood where she knew she would not find a school with a sympathetic administrator – the only way Little Jie (the name his mother calls him) is able to attend elementary school right now. Even if they stay put, his education won’t last: Little Jie won’t be allowed to write the standardized exam that provides entry to middle school.
Ms. Lu, who is 42, has grown consumed by a desperation that she has cursed her child merely by giving birth to him. She tried to sell a kidney to raise money to pay the government fine, but was told she was too old. “I have thought about robbing a bank,” she says. “But I don’t have those kinds of skills.”
For the most part, she hides her feelings from Little Jie, but he already feels his situation keenly. When he found out about bird flu, he stopped eating chicken, afraid it would make him sick and that a hospital wouldn’t help him without proper documentation. For his last birthday, he begged his mother not to get presents or a cake. At the grocery store, he tells her not to buy anything unless it’s on sale. He wants her to save money in hopes of paying the fine.
Over a lunch of shredded potato with chili peppers, bok choi and dry tofu, Little Jie suggests another solution. “Maybe you can marry a big official, so he can kill Mr. Ji,” he says, with childlike naïveté. In Chinese, “ji” is the first syllable in “family-planning office.”
None of this was supposed to happen.
In 1993, Ms. Lu had her first child, a daughter. Six years later, she divorced; her husband got custody of their child. Then, she fell in love again, and although they didn’t marry, she became pregnant. She was thrilled – a new child might help assuage the pain from the girl she had lost. Fears of violating the one-child policy did not enter her mind; she has Mongolian ancestry, and minorities are largely exempt from birth restrictions. Besides, her first child had already been taken away.
But after Little Jie was born, she was asked to show marriage credentials. She didn’t have any. A court eventually deemed her legally married to Little Jie’s father, who himself had lost custody of another child from a previous marriage. “So the family-planning office judged that [Little Jie] is my third kid,” Ms. Lu says.
She is so crushed by the thought that she has ruined her son’s life, she is willing to give him up if it can give him a better one. “Find me some family to adopt him, so he can go to school,” she says. “Otherwise, I’m going to destroy him.”
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