ChinaFile Recommends
10.20.16China Worked Its Way into the Debate on the Topic of Abortion
Quartz
Clinton's “Like they used to do in China” line might lead some to think the state no longer interferes with family planning--but it still does
Books
12.16.15![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/books/system/mei-fong-one-child.jpg?itok=tmI8nG4C)
![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/assets/images/books/covers/one_child.jpg)
One Child
When Communist Party leaders adopted the one-child policy in 1980, they hoped curbing birth-rates would help lift China’s poorest and increase the country’s global stature. But at what cost? Now, as China closes the book on the policy after more than three decades, it faces a population grown too old and too male, with a vastly diminished supply of young workers.Mei Fong has spent years documenting the policy’s repercussions on every sector of Chinese society. In One Child, she explores its true human impact, traveling across China to meet the people who live with its consequences. Their stories reveal a dystopian reality: unauthorized second children ignored by the state, only-children supporting aging parents and grandparents on their own, villages teeming with ineligible bachelors, and an ungoverned adoption market stretching across the globe. Fong tackles questions that have major implications for China’s future: whether its “Little Emperor” cohort will make for an entitled or risk-averse generation; how China will manage to support itself when one in every four people is over sixty-five years old; and above all, how much the one-child policy may end up hindering China’s growth.Weaving in Fong’s reflections on striving to become a mother herself, One Child offers a nuanced and candid report from the extremes of family planning. —Houghton Mifflin Harcourt{chop}
ChinaFile Recommends
10.04.13Population Control Is Called Big Revenue Source in China
New York Times
Nineteen province-level governments in China collected a total of $2.7 billion in fines last year from parents who had violated family planning laws, which usually limit couples to one child, a lawyer who had requested the data said.
Conversation
03.15.13![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/153103302.jpg?itok=HuYP_r7B)
Is the One Child Policy Finished—And Was It a Failure?
Dorinda Elliott:China’s recent decision to phase out the agency that oversees the one-child policy has raised questions about whether the policy itself will be dropped—and whether it was a success or a failure.Aside from the...
Media
08.30.12![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/woman-forced-to-induced-labor-7-month-old-fetus-dead-3-600x378.jpg?itok=4L7e0n1W)
Chinese “Traitors” and the Foreign Press
{vertical_photo_right}On June 2nd, local family planning officials forced Feng Jianmei, a twenty-two-year-old Shaanxi woman pregnant with her second daughter, to undergo an abortion, as a consequence of China’s One Child...
Caixin Media
06.14.12![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/20120615000008.jpg?itok=aIo92wet)
Uproar over Aborted Fetus Photo
{vertical_photo_right}A Shaanxi Province woman provoked an uproar with an online posting of a photo showing her with her seven-month-old fetus after what she said was a forced abortion.The gruesome photo was reposted across the Internet in China,...
The NYRB China Archive
05.30.91The Myth of Mao’s China
from New York Review of Books
In China Misperceived Steven Mosher strikes back at the profession, clan, or family of China watchers that cast him out. The official reasons have never been made public, although his university, Stanford, hinted at academic misconduct when it...