Choosing Daughters

Family Change in Rural China

Lihong Shi

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781503603004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

China's patrilineal and patriarchal tradition has encouraged a long-standing preference for male heirs within families. Coupled with China's birth-planning policy, this has led to a severe gender imbalance. But a counterpattern is emerging in rural China where a noticeable proportion of young couples have willingly accepted having a single daughter. They are doing so even as birth-planning policies are being relaxed and having a second child, and the opportunity of having a son, is a new possibility.

Choosing Daughters explores this critical, yet largely overlooked, reproductive pattern emerging in China's demographic landscape. Lihong Shi delves into the social, economic, and cultural forces behind the complex decision-making process of these couples to unravel their life goals and childrearing aspirations, the changing family dynamics and gender relations, and the intimate parent–daughter ties that have engendered this drastic transformation of reproductive choice. She reveals a leading-edge social force that fosters China's recent fertility decline, namely pursuit of a modern family and successful childrearing achieved through having a small family. Through this discussion, Shi refutes the conventional understanding of a universal preference for sons and discrimination against daughters in China and counters claims of continuing resistance against China's population control program.

1

The Birth-Planning Campaign

Local Experience of Population Control

CONTROL OVER POPULATION SIZE has been central to China’s population politics since the founding the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The massive birth-planning policy to limit family size was strengthened in the 1970s when the Chinese state designed strict measures to enforce the birth limit. Since its implementation, the policy has drawn considerable academic attention as well as heated political controversy in the international community. Although many Western observers have severely criticized the draconian policy for state intrusion into private personal affairs and the coercive measures of policy enforcement, the Chinese government has claimed the policy’s success as measured by a declining birth rate. How then has such a pervasive and invasive social engineering project been carried out among the Chinese populace? How has the policy been received by the Chinese populace?

This chapter focuses on the birth-planning campaign in Lijia Village from the 1970s to 2010, offering a local account of the practice and the experience of China’s population control campaign. While unfolding the ways in which the pervasive policy was implemented and received on the local level for more than three decades, this chapter reveals that as the policy was adjusted and relaxed and implementation measures modified, the reactions of the villagers toward the policy were transformed. More strikingly, with an increasing number of peasant couples accepting the policy starting in the 1990s, a new reproductive pattern emerged, in which couples willingly embraced a singleton daughter rather than take advantage of the relaxed policy that allowed them to have a second child.

Policy Formulation and Revisions

During the early years of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese leadership considered a large population to be a valuable labor force for socialist economic development and nation-building and continued its earlier pronatalist policy in the 1930s and 1940s to encourage childbearing (Tang 2005, 53–54; White 2006, 20). Like the Soviet policy that honored women who gave birth to a large number of children with the title “Mother Heroine” and monetary rewards (Mitsuyoshi 2012), the Chinese government encouraged women to aspire to this motherhood ideal. Women who produced a large number of children were praised and rewarded. In Lijia Village, several elderly villagers recalled that at a township meeting, government officials gave high praise to a Lijia woman for having nine children and even rewarded her with some cloth to make clothes for her large family.

The pronatalist population policy was short lived, however. In the mid-1950s, with rapid population growth, tight food supplies, and an ambitious economic development plan, the government formally took a step to promote birth control to slow down population growth (White 2006, 26–32). Since then, the Chinese leadership has enforced an antinatalist birth policy in varying degrees of intensity, with short periods of interruption during two radical political movements in the 1950s and 1960s, i.e., the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005; Scharping 2003).

In the countryside, birth-planning work began in the mid-1960s and was intensified in the 1970s (Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005; White 2006). In the early 1970s, a nationwide “later, longer, fewer” (wan, xi, shao) campaign was launched, in which couples were urged to marry late (twenty-three years of age for females and twenty-five for males in rural areas) to delay childbearing, wait longer between births, and have fewer children (Tang 2005, 111–25; White 2006, 59). The 1970s witnessed the strengthening of the birth-planning campaign as the birth quota was further restricted. The tightened policy allowed each couple to have only two children, spaced several years apart. Lijia villagers who had experienced the birth-planning campaign during that time could still recall the well-known slogan on the birth limit: “two children per couple, four or five years apart” (yidui fufu yiduihai, lianghai xiangge siwunian). Meanwhile, policy enforcement was intensified. Couples who had two or more children were required to undergo sterilization surgery.

Toward the end of the 1970s, a national one-child policy was taking shape, and in 1979–80 the one-child limit became official state policy (Greenhalgh 2008), enforced on the majority of Chinese families, with exceptions applied to families under certain circumstances (Shi 2017).¹ Since its initiation, the one-child policy has been modified and relaxed a few times. In 1984, in response to strong peasant resistance, the central government adjusted the birth limit in rural areas by opening a “small hole” (kai xiaokou) to allow couples under certain conditions to have a second child (Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005, 113–16; Scharping 2003, 58–63). In Lijia Village, two couples were granted a second-child permit under this policy adjustment. In one case, the wife’s widowed mother had four daughters and no sons. The relaxed policy allowed the couple to have a second child because the couple was committed to support the elderly mother. The husband in this type of arrangement was officially referred to as yanglao nuxu, meaning a son-in-law providing old-age support for his parents-in-law. In the other case, in which a couple was allowed to have a second child, the husband’s only brother was a childless bachelor in his forties.

In 1986, the birth limit was further relaxed in some provinces, including Liaoning Province, to allow rural couples whose first child was a girl to have a second child (Zeng 1989).² A couple needed to meet the requirements for spacing between the two births and a minimum age for the mother. When the policy was first initiated in the township in 1986, a couple was allowed a second child when the first child had reached the age of three and the mother was at least thirty-one years old. In 1986, the minimum age for the mother was modified to twenty-nine. In 2003, the age limit was further relaxed to twenty-six, and the spacing requirement was abolished. A couple was required to apply for a second-birth permit through the women’s leader, who delivered the required form to the couple and instructed the couple to submit the form to the county Bureau of Population and Family Planning. When the application was approved, the wife could go to the birth-planning clinic at the county seat to have her IUD removed.

Toward the turn of the century, China’s total fertility rate had declined well below the replacement level (roughly 2.1 births per woman). Meanwhile, the demographic consequences of the birth-planning policy were looming large. With a growing aging population that depends on family for support and a skewed sex ratio at birth, further relaxation of the birth limit seemed inevitable. Thus, in 2003, the Chinese government took a further step to allow a couple to have two children if both spouses were singletons themselves. In 2013, the policy was further relaxed to allow couples to have two children if one spouse was a singleton.³ These policy revisions eventually led to a nationwide two-child policy for all couples, announced in late 2015, thus ending the decadeslong one-child birth limit.

Policy Implementation: From Education to Coercion

To ensure that the strict and often unpopular birth-planning policy is successfully enforced among Chinese families, the Chinese government has designed and implemented a series of measures for policy enforcement, covering various aspects affecting reproductive decision making and behavior, such as promoting the use of contraceptives, providing education aimed at changing childbearing preferences, and exerting control over the economic and social well-being of a family. Correspondingly, the severity of enforcement measures ranges from propaganda to the most violent forms of coercion.

The Creation of a Birth-Planning Bureaucracy

When the policy was designed, an ad hoc multilevel birth-planning bureaucracy was established for policy enforcement. At the top tier of this state agency, the National Population and Family Planning Commission was assigned major administrative tasks, including formulating population targets, setting policy implementation guidelines, and training birth-planning personnel (Huang and Yang 2004).⁴ Below the state level, birth-planning offices were established at each government level—province, city, county, township, and village (or district, street, and residential committee in urban areas)—with each level holding its subordinate offices responsible for meeting the population targets set by their superiors through a set of specific measures.

In Lijia Village, the Communist Party secretary and the village head are in charge of the overall enforcement of the policy. In addition, the women’s leader is responsible for enforcing the policy according to the guidelines from the township authority.⁵ She is assigned two assistants to help her implement the policy.⁶ The major responsibilities of the women’s leader includes informing villagers of the birth policy, assisting the township office with contraceptive service delivery, facilitating villagers’ applications for a birth permit or a one-child certificate, and monitoring women of reproductive age (15–49) to make sure that they do not have an unauthorized birth. During the early years of the policy enforcement, the township government organized short-term campaigns and recruited local activists to help with birth-planning work, such as searching for couples who had run away to avoid sterilization or abortion. Working at the very bottom level of China’s massive hierarchical birth-planning network, these grassroots cadres and activists formed the backbone of the pervasive birth-planning campaign. Because they were often long-time and active members of their village communities, they were well aware of the reproductive preferences, financial conditions, and extended family and social networks of their fellow villagers. Their familiarity with the reproductive preferences and the social and economic well-being of their fellow villagers enabled them to tacitly engage with targeted villagers for policy enforcement.

Beyond the village, there is a family-planning office in the township. Its administrative responsibilities include collecting demographic data from the villages, informing women’s leaders of policies and implementation measures, and delivering contraceptive services through a birth-planning clinic located at the township government headquarters. In the county, the Bureau of Population and Family Planning oversees the enforcement of the policy in the county area and offers a wider range of services through its birth-planning clinic.

To hold local birth-planning officials accountable for policy enforcement, the birth-planning bureaucracy established an evaluation system that imposed administrative and financial punishment on officials who failed to meet the birth-planning target and rewarded those who successfully enforced the policy. This evaluation system was later developed into a nationwide “one-vote veto” (yipiao foujue) system that included an appraisal of enforcement of the birth-planning policy into the evaluation of the overall job performance of an official, even setting it as the primary criteria (Greenhalgh 2010, 50; Huang and Yang 2004; Shi 2014; Weiguo Zhang 2002, 51). Officials who failed to meet the designated birth-planning targets might severely jeopardize their career, making them ineligible for promotion and bonuses, and might even lead to job loss. For example, according to a township government document issued in 1985, for one unauthorized second birth in a village, the birth-planning personnel would each be fined 150 yuan. They would each be rewarded with fifty yuan, however, if there were no unauthorized births and no coercive abortions in the village. In 1993 the fine was increased to five hundred for two unauthorized births and the village party secretary had to resign for failing to enforce the policy.

Delivery of Contraceptive Services

Once a birth-planning bureaucracy has been established, one of its major tasks is to deliver contraceptive services. In each township, a birth-planning clinic was set up to offer free contraceptives. Available contraceptive methods for women include IUDs, tubal ligation, oral and injectable contraceptives, Norplant, and spermicide; condoms and vasectomy are available for men. The birth-planning clinic at the county offers services such as abortions for unauthorized pregnancies and free IUD removal for women who have been granted permission to have a second child.

During my fieldwork, married couples of reproductive age who had one child or more were required to use some type of contraceptive method. Among the majority of couples, the wives took responsibility for birth control. Before 1998, when sterilization was required for couples who had given birth to two or more children, in almost all cases the wife had tubal ligation surgery. No vasectomies were performed in Lijia Village. I heard of only one case from a neighboring village in which the husband had undergone a vasectomy. Women who had only one child were required to have an IUD inserted. Newly married women were not required to use birth control. After a woman gave birth to her first child, however, the women’s leader was required to remind the woman to have an IUD inserted three months after a vaginal birth and six months following a cesarean delivery.

Education, Persuasion, and Inspection

In addition to offering contraceptive services, another major task of the birth-planning bureaucracy is to enforce the birth limit through education on the policy and to maintain surveillance of women of reproductive age. Broadcasting and slogans are used to educate villagers. Many Lijia villagers recall that during campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s, trucks with loudspeakers patrolled the village to propagate the policy and promote enforcement. In addition, birth-planning slogans were painted on the walls of village government buildings and walls around villagers’ yards. The slogans closely associated childbearing with the well-being of a family and the development of a nation. One slogan painted on the wall surrounding the township government building in 2001 was still recognizable in 2007: “Have fewer and higher quality births to benefit the country and the people” (shaosheng yousheng, liguo limin) (fig. 1). Another slogan painted on the wall around a family’s yard in a neighboring village said: “We strongly encourage each couple to have only one child” (dali tichang yidui fufu zhishengyu yige haizi) (fig. 2). Similar slogans, such as “For the prosperity of the country and the happiness of the family, please plan your births” (weile guojia fuqiang, jiating xingfu, qingnin jihua shengyu), could also be found on the walls along the highway bordering the village (fig. 3).

Figure 1. Birth-planning slogan painted on the wall of the township government, 2007. The slogan says, “Having fewer and higher quality births to benefit the country and the people.”

While information about the policy was publicized in the village through propaganda, education meetings became a more powerful way to deliver the policy to each family. Organizing education meetings was more frequent in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, when birth regulations were intensified. All couples who had expressed a desire for more children and women who were targeted for sterilization surgery were required to attend the meetings. When a meeting was scheduled, loudspeakers in the village announced the names of women required to attend the meeting. The women’s leader in Lijia Village during the time told me that she and other officials from the village and the township would read government documents to the attendees at the meetings and explain their responsibility to abide by the policy. She would reiterate the significance and the inviolability of the state policy and would try to persuade the women to...