The Rise and Fall of China’s One-Child Policy. 4. Collateral Damage

The policy had catastrophic negative effects. Now it has been officially abolished, but damages will continue for decades.

By Massimo Introvigne

April 4, 2025

Article 4 of 4. Read article 1, article 2 and article 3.

*A paper presented at the conference “Giornata della vita nascente” (Day of the Nascent Life), organized by UNEBA (National Union of Social Assistance Institutions and Initiatives), Pisa, and by the Fondazione Madonna del Soccorso, Fauglia—Ponsacco, Italy, March 25, 2025.

Posters tried to persuade Chinese that “giving birth to a boy or to a girl, it’s all the same.” They did not work. Source: chineseposters.net.

What is clear is that the one child policy and its predecessor “later, longer, and fewer” campaign had dramatic side effects nobody had predicted and that created enormous problems for Chinese society. I will list four of them.

First, the most studied phenomenon is what has been called “gendercide.” It is not a phenomenon invented by critics of China. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women has repeatedly called the attention on it. Simply put, a vast majority of Chinese citizens believe that it is more honorable and economically convenient to have a son rather than a daughter. When they were compelled to have one or two children only, they massively aborted, killed after birth, or abandoned the girls and kept the boys. 

As depicted in the movie “One Child Nation,” again in Marco Respinti’s summary, “Children who were not aborted, were abandoned by their parents and relatives to die. This tragedy also touched director Nanfu Wang’s family, as she discovered lately. Mr. Shihua Wang, her uncle from her mother’s side, abandoned his baby to her fate at the local market where he worked. In a few days, the baby was found dead, bitten by insects everywhere. And Ms.

Guijiao Wang, director Wang’s aunt from her father’s side, delivered her baby to human traffickers. The one-child policy produced in fact thousands of ‘orphans,’ sold to traffickers by parents and relatives (this was especially true for females.) Indeed, it was also a profitable industry, and one that the government fueled willingly. Human traffickers paid the equivalent of some US $200.00 per child, then sold them to state-run ‘orphanages,’ and these facilities in turn put babies up for international adoption (officialized in China in 1992), reinvesting the money in more human trafficking. Sometimes, babies were directly abducted. Some 130,000 children have been put up for international adoptions” before these were limited in the 21st century.

Nanfu Wang. Credits.

There were three main features of the gendercide. First, abortion and infanticide. Note that gender selection often requires a late-term abortion. When the authorities tried to prevent it by forbidding ultrasound scans, many simply switched from abortion to infanticide. Second, “black” undocumented girls. Mothers gave birth to them clandestinely and did not register them with the authorities. This meant that without registration, they had no access to education or health care. They also became easy prey for trafficking, child pornography, and forced prostitution, since legally they did not exist. Third, families who didn’t have the heart to kill their newborn baby girls, abandoned them. Many died, as depicted in the “One Child Nation” film, or ended up in the hands of human traffickers. A particularly moving set of incidents happened in Xinjiang, where infant girls abandoned by their Chinese Han parents were rescued and taken care of, often secretly, by Uyghur families.

The second side effect of China’s birth control policy, also connected with the gendercide, is the imbalance between the male and female population. Scholars of population know that at birth the natural ratio is 105 males to 100 females. This evens out over time due to higher early mortality rates in males. 

When in 2014 Howden and Yang published their study, they noted that according to “the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the ratio currently stands at 118 males for every 100 females, leaving many young Chinese men lonely (perhaps hopelessly so) as they enter their marriageable years. As of 2010 this imbalanced sex ratio has created a surplus of 40 million males unable to find an appropriately aged Chinese woman to marry.” 

An interesting paper by a graduate student at the University of Padova, Mehmet Ogün Öztunca, published in 2022, concluded that “China is the world leader in gender imbalance.” “In the period between 2030–2045, there will not be potential wives in China for 20% of the country’s men. Moreover, gangs are kidnapping women in Vietnam, North Korea, Mongolia, and Russia and bringing them to China, where they are sold once again to husbands in ‘bachelor villages.’” This is not organized by criminal gangs only. When I was still traveling to China (something I do not do any longer after “Bitter Winter” started in 2018 for security reasons), I remember witnessing the arrival at Beijing airport of a plane with hundreds of North Koreans brides-to-be, The organized cheerful welcome at the airport proved that the operation was not secret or clandestine. North Korea does not have much to export, except soldiers (as we see in the Ukrainian war) and brides. Many of these brides do not speak Chinese and some who escaped China reported being treated like slaves by their husbands.

North Korean girls at work. Some will end up being trafficked as brides for Chinese men. Credits.

The third side effect of Chinese birth control is the main cause (recently, together with the idiosyncratic management of COVID) of China’s economic problems. It is a phenomenon affecting many industrialized countries; however, in China, at least until 2021 it has been encouraged rather than curbed by the government. 

By the end of 2023, China had nearly 300 million people over 60. By 2035, this number is expected to reach 400 million, surpassing the U.S. population. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicts the public pension fund will be depleted by then. Researchers use a metric called the dependency ratio, which compares the number of people over the age of 65 to the number of workers under 65. In 2022, this ratio in China was 21.8 percent, according to government statistics, indicating that approximately five workers support one retiree. This is still better than Italy, where the dependency ratio is above 35  percent, or Japan, where it is approaching 50 percent. However, the index in China is growing quickly and Chinese economy was not accustomed to the phenomenon. Since policies to increase births failed, in 2024 China announced that it was raising the retirement age. Obviously, there are limits to what can be achieved through these means too.

The fourth side effect is cultural, and is the destruction of the traditional Chinese family structure. Notwithstanding communism, Chinese largely maintained their attitude of respect for the elders. Today, however, they are confronted with what they call the “4-2-1” phenomenon, meaning that the average family includes four grandparents, husband and wife, and one child. This means that caring for old grandparents becomes increasingly cumbersome, while in the past teenagers and unmarried young adults offered their help. The number of grandparents placed in retirement homes is dramatically increasing, and in general the care of the elderly is being switched from the families to the state, which is both expensive for the government and socially disruptive. China also witnesses the progressive disappearance of siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins, all important parts of the traditional Chinese extended family. 

The result is more social anomie, and higher rates of suicide among the elderly. Scholars suspect that China in its reports to the World Health Organization deliberately under-estimates suicides. Still, even according to official statistics, China has higher rates of suicides per 100,000 population than most other countries among those older than 85 (71.9), between 75 and 84 (38.4), and between 65 and 74 (19.1). By comparison, among these three age cohorts suicides per 100,000 population in Italy are respectively 15.8, 13.4, and 9.3. One may object that suicides of the elderly are even higher in South Korea, but this is a country where, for different reasons, the fertility rate also decreased dramatically.

Retirees in China. Their number is constantly growing. Credits.

Another consequence of the collapse of the traditional Chinese family is the phenomenon of the “bereaved single-child families” (shidu jiating), which has been studied by both Western and Chinese scholars. These are families whose single child died. In the 21st century, Chinese authorities realized that there were at least two million such families where parents were often destitute and with mental health problems. In a country with weak social security, as noted by German scholar Björn Alpermann and his Chinese colleague Yang Weiyue in 2020, “many shidu families came to financial ruin because of high health care costs spent to save their dying child, as well as for themselves due to deteriorating health after their loss.” 

The government tried to solve the problem by offering to the shidu families a small monthly allowance and then increasing it, but the shidu situation was not about money only. According to Alpermann and Yang, “in Chinese society there is a stigma attached to losing one’s only child since this not only implies that the family line will be discontinued (duanzi juesun 断子绝孙)—a failing from a Confucian viewpoint—but from a Buddhist perspective may even be construed as being the result of a moral failing of the parents in a previous life. While such attitudes are likely stronger in more traditional rural communities, they are not absent in urban China either. For instance, in their qualitative study of shidu in five first- and second-tier cities, Wang and Ning find that their respondents are stigmatized as ‘unlucky persons’ who have to be avoided to prevent transferring ‘bad luck,’ and shidu even internalize this self-abasing view. This is also reflected in shidu couples’ behavior: to avoid being identified as shidu by neighbors and acquaintances many move to areas where they are not well known, in effect withdrawing ‘voluntarily,’ or at least proactively, from society.”

Another consequence of the prevalence of one-child families that several scholars have studied is the phenomenon Chinese call of the “little emperor.” Many report that the new generation of young Chinese is more spoiled, arrogant, and lazy than the one of their parents, although of course this is a general comment that should not be generalized.

However, the question is broad enough to have generated sociological studies. Parents of single children often shower them with more care and attention that would be pedagogically appropriate. A study by Australian scholar Lisa Cameron and her colleagues on the “little emperors” showed that they may have good academics achievements but may not put them to good use due to their lack of social empathy. They may be “less trusting, less trustworthy, more risk-averse, less competitive, more pessimistic, and less conscientious individuals” with respect to the general population.

“Practicing birth control is good for the health and prosperity of our people,” the poster said. Really? Source: chineseposters.net.

Summing up, the Chinese birth control policy, contrary to a propaganda many in the West came to believe, did not achieve any significant positive result. It did not determine China’s economic growth nor the reduction of poverty. Similar results were achieved by other comparable countries without resorting to enforced birth control. One spectacular example is India. It has already surpassed China for number of inhabitants but its real strength is its elderly dependency ratio, i.e., the comparison of the number of people over the age of 65 to the number of workers under 65. At 9.8%, India’s dependency ratio is just above half the Chinese one of 18%, making for a much healthier economy and one some predict may one day surpass China. 

China’s one child policy also had dramatic human rights, social, economic, and cultural costs. It was adopted for political reasons, both intrinsic to China and derived from misguided Western ideologies, including the pseudo-scientific theories of the Club of Rome, whose proponents have a part of responsibility for the Chinese tragedy.

In the end, China’s birth control policies were part of its basic Marxist and totalitarian ideology. Everything should be planned and controlled by the state, including births. In 2007, Ye Tingfang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, predicted that, “The one-child limit is too extreme. It violates nature’s law. And in the long run, this will lead to mother nature’s revenge.” This is exactly what happened. Other countries should learn from this misguided social experiment and its tragic failure.

Source: bitterwinter.org