Recently I read a YA book that looked at how population control might be handled in a utopic society that no longer had any hunger, illness, or natural death, and that book decided that the means would be a sect of official killers called Scythes. Nothing was mentioned about trying to control population in any other way, like birth control or birth limits, etc, and thinking about that made me remember that I had picked up THIS book a couple years ago, and to move it up the queue.
As far as comparisons go, the theme of population control method is about the extent of it between these two books. That one was a completely ridiculous waste of time, and this wasn't. Granted, this wasn't exactly an entertaining read, because it is difficult material to think about, but it was still worth the time and effort to read it.
I work for a company based in China, and I have been to Shanghai several times. So, while I do not at ALL consider myself to be an expert on Chinese culture (I admittedly know very little), I still feel a little closer to this than I probably would have otherwise. I think many of us in the US, if we thought about it at all, considered the one child policy as a suggestion from the government to limit family size. That could not be farther from the truth of what this policy was. I had no ideas the human rights violations that this policy caused.
Enacted in the early 1980s based on modeled population forecasts done by a robotics engineer (?!?), China decreed that going forward, couples were limited to one child in order to drastically reduce the number of people being born and adding to China's population each year. The goal was to grow the economy by reproducing less, with the unsaid subtext being that fewer babies make better, more valuable workers later. You know, since the children that are born would have better opportunities and resources available to them.
What they didn't count on, or care about, apparently, were all of the ways that limiting families to single children would strain system and culture in all of these other areas later on. But, that's really no surprise, because if they were willing to go to the brutal lengths that they did to enforce the policy, (forced sterilizations, forced early and late term abortions, infanticide, coercion, and harsh punitive fines) then it seems unlikely that they would care much about the social ramifications that might show up a few decades in the future, especially if their economic goals were met. On paper, many of these practices were actually illegal. But considering that the enforcement of the policy was left up to local authorities, and it didn't seem to matter HOW they met their goal, of course those things would be done because... who was going to stop them? The government who made the policy?
Citizens in China had a lot of upheaval in their lives starting with Mao's Great Leap Forward, and then the Cultural Revolution just a short time later, and then a couple population control social changes, starting with the "Later, Longer, Fewer" program, which encouraged people to have children later, wait longer in between children, and have fewer of them. When that method wasn't sparking the drastic changes that they really wanted, the One Child policy was rolled out, and the repercussions of that are still ongoing, and will be for a long time to come.
It's great, in theory, to reduce the number of children being added to the population. We humans are resource hogs, and the world's resources are finite. I'm all for people breeding less, and I include myself in that. I think that it's very unlikely that my husband and I will have children, and for a while I felt a way about it, but now I'm at the point where I like my life and freedom, and I realize that I don't want to give that up for a kid.
That being said, our main objective as living beings is to carry on our genetic material. That's the imperative for living things... otherwise they don't live for very long, as a species. In China, it went a lot deeper than that. Their social construct is focused on the family unit. Adults, couples, must have children in order to ensure their own future. Elder care, as in retirement homes or hospices, are (or were) practically unheard of in China, because that was seen as a family's responsibility. For example, in the book it was mentioned that getting healthcare (in the time before the national insurance) was almost impossible for childless people, because if the patient died, who would pay? If the patient had children, then no problem, because it was understood that if the parent could not pay, the child would. Even funeral services were hard to get for people who were childless.
So, now add the OCP into this mix. You have parents who have one child - ALL of their futures are pinned in this one baby. That baby has a lot of responsibility on its little shoulders from the moment its born. To be smart, preferably not a girl (because ya gotta carry on the family name!), successful at school, and later work, so that you can provide for your own future family, and for your parents in their old age.
But if that single child dies... then parents are left not only grieving, but for all intents and purposes, they are ostracized too. Because now they are seen as a burden on the community. It's really so cruel in so many ways... and that's WITHOUT taking into account all of the inhuman methods used to ensure that "family planning" stopped with one.
The way that the policy worked was that each birth had to be certified, essentially. Like a birth certificate and Social Security number all wrapped up together - that certification ensured that the baby was legitimate. If a baby was unplanned, and the parents could not pay the fine to the government to pay for the second child, then the baby did not really exist in the eyes of China. They could not attend school, received no benefits, no health care, could not work, or marry, or bear legitimate children of their own. They were a non-person until their ransom was paid.
There were exceptions to the OCP, of course. If a couple's child died, they could "replace" him or her. (Seriously, the term "you can always have another baby" was apparently quite common, and it just seemed so callous to me how unimportant a citizen's life, or the life of their child, was to those enforcing the policy.) If the first child was a girl, then a couple could apply for permission to try for a boy. If both parents were only children, then they could, if they chose, legally have two. Twins counted as a single birth, and therefore women would opt for fertility treatments in the hopes of conceiving multiples. And there were certain zones where a "Two child" policy was enacted instead of one, as an experiment. Or, of course, you could work for the government, because it seemed that every single person that Mei Fong talked to that was involved in the policy had multiple children. Because of course they did.
This book goes into how corrupt local authorities were in determining fines for "violators". It goes into how different provinces would enforce the rule - with some going so far as to make women take twice weekly pregnancy tests, some others tracking and kidnapping pregnant women known to be in violation of the rule and forcing them to abort, others taking the live babies and basically selling them to Americans via adoption programs.
The book goes into the way that the fertility rates and demographics of China are changing, by all appearances permanently, or at least long term, due to this policy. People were already having fewer children due to the Later, Longer, Fewer policy, and then with the OCP, that ramped up big time. The gov't seemed to have no concerns about long term fertility rates, and kinda had a "if we tell people to breed, they'll breed" attitude about it. So they carried on with the program, and now 30 years later, experts say that that things have gone too far in the other direction, that there aren't enough babies being born to sustain the workforce that would be needed to sustain the economy, but younger people who were born into this are now choosing to only have one child - not out of population control ideals, but because with the added pressure of being the sole caregiver to both parents in their old age, it is too expensive to have more than one child of their own.
For being such a short book, it's less than 300 pages, there is a whole lot packed in. I haven't even touched on a lot of it. Yet it never feels too busy or scattered. It's very well written. I did not really like the reader, Janet Song, though. She sounded stilted and had a weird tone to me, as though she was trying to sound masculine all the time. I can't really describe it, but it did not really work for me. Otherwise, this is a really great book, though it deals with unpleasant (to put it mildly) subject matter. If you are interested in this topic at all - I'd give it a try. It's quite good!