When China announced on May 31 that it would for the first time allow couples to have a third child , I thought of Yang Zhizhu.
Exactly 10 years ago, I had met Yang in Beijing while researching a story on China’s one-child policy. Back then, most Chinese couples were allowed to have only one child under the family planning policy that came into existence in 1979. The only exceptions were if you were a family living in rural China whose first child was a daughter, or if both parents were only children. The Yangs fit neither description. They lived in Beijing, where Zhizhu was a professor of constitutional law at the China Youth University for Political Sciences.
Editorial | When two is too little: On China's three child policy
Their lives, like the lives of so many others in China, had been turned upside down when his wife became pregnant for the second time. What should have been a moment of joy became one of a complicated mix of emotions. Having the child, under the policy, would have meant paying extraordinary fines that the family couldn’t afford.
“God gave us the child,” was how the Yangs explained their decision to me. Their second daughter was born on December 21, 2009. Zhizhu had to pay a fine of 2,40,000 Yuan (then around $37,000). Without doing so, he would not be able to get his daughter’s household registration certificate, which is needed for everything in China, starting with getting into school. The fee was 10 times the average disposable income in Beijing. He decided not to pay it. That cost him his job.
He made a second decision: to take the case to court. In doing so, he triggered a broader debate in China and garnered so much public sympathy that the university reinstated his job subsequently, even if he was not allowed to resume teaching. He ultimately lost the case after a two-year battle and had his bank accounts frozen until he paid the amount.
Another conversation came to mind this week, of hearing a friend tell me about her “many brothers and sisters”. Noticing how surprised I was, she explained, “That’s how those of us born in the 1980s refer to our cousins.” It was that rare for many in that generation to have their own sibling. In her case, two years after she was born, her mother was forced to have an abortion to keep her job in the government-run factory where she was working. This was early 1980s China, where you couldn’t simply walk away from your state-given job and your work unit that had such a hold over every aspect of your life. Her father worked in the same factory too, and the only kindergarten she had access to was the one linked to the same work unit. Fighting the policy was not an option.
In 2015, China announced a two-child policy. After that failed to boost birth rates, the three-child policy was introduced on May 31. The latest change was explained in news reports with a flood of numbers. Twelve million — the number of babies born last year, according to the May 11 Census, the lowest since 1961 (some experts believe the latest Census prompted the change). Or 264 million — the 60 and above population in China, up 5.44% in the last year. Or 300 million — the number of births, according to the Chinese government which still strongly defends the one-child policy, that family planning had prevented.
Statistics are what demographers and governments go by. But we forget that behind each of these numbers lie stories of invisible lives impacted in unimaginable ways.
