Secrets and Siblings

The Vanished Lives of Chinas One Child Policy

Mari Manninen

• Editorial: Zed Books
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786997340
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Sociology

Thirty-two years ago Mrs Li and Mr Wu from Zhejiang abandoned their second baby daughter at a marketplace. Mrs Wang Maochen from Beijing has seven children, but six of them are illegal so they could not go to university, could not take a job, go to the doctor, or marry, or even buy a train ticket. Zhao Min from Guangzhou first learned about the concept of a sibling at university, in her town there were no sisters or brothers. With the Chinese government now adapting to a two child policy, Secrets and Siblings outlines the scale of its tragic consequences, showing how Chinese family and society has been forever changed. In doing so it also challenges many of our misconceptions about family life in China, arguing that it is the state, rather than popular prejudice, that has hindered the adoption of girls within China. At once brutal and beautifully hopeful, Secrets and Siblings asks what the state and its children will do now that they are becoming adults.

1

UNDOCUMENTED

Mrs Wang had too many children. Now her children can’t get a job, get married, or even board a train.

Seven children!

In the Chinese context, a family with seven children sounds so incredible that it’s hard for me to believe the story. My driver can hardly believe it either.

“Seven children! My goodness!” my driver keeps saying over and over again. “That can’t possibly be true.”

How could it be possible for a family to trick local family planning officials so many times? And why would a couple want to do something that would surely cause major problems for themselves and their children?

“Do all of the seven children have hukou?” the driver asks.

That’s a self-evident question for the Chinese.

Hukou, China’s official household registration record, is a citizen’s most important piece of identification. Without it, one officially does not exist. People with no hukou are not allowed in hospitals, they can’t get married, go to work, or even board a train. To buy train tickets, citizens must show their identity cards, and it’s very difficult to get one without hukou. The Chinese call people without hukou “black children,” and there are millions of them. Many unpermitted additional children are undocumented citizens. This is one of the consequences of the one-child policy. What is it like to live your life as someone who doesn’t officially exist?

The question is so intriguing that I travel to the village of Zaolinzhuang in October 2015 to see if the rumors about Mr Zhang Bozeng’s large family are true. The village lies on the outskirts of Beijing, a one-and-a-half-hour ride by subway and taxi from downtown Beijing.

Skyscrapers haven’t managed to spread to this corner of the capital. The taxi drives through open fields, along a paved but pockmarked road. Zaolinzhuang, a genuine Chinese village, sits at the end of the road. It looks more like a densely populated community, because the gray and white brick homes, shops, kiosks, and simple restaurants are all packed in close together along the intersecting streets.

My taxi driver drops me off on the main road in the village, and I start asking passersby if they know where Mr Zhang lives. A man on a bicycle shakes his head, but I am lucky with the next person. A woman carrying two heavy pails covered with lids points around the corner. Over there.

The house is large, with a big, red front door. Long, traditional red paper streamers hang from either side of the entrance. They are covered in Chinese characters, wishing for a happy new year to come. The streamers were hung up months ago during Chinese New Year, so they look rather tattered now.

I knock on the door.

The door opens, and two school-age girls are the first to tumble out the door. A man who is almost toothless and looks to be in his sixties stands on the threshold in a sweater and quilted jacket. This is Mr Zhang. A tall teenage boy peers over one of his shoulders.

“Mr Zhang, is it true you have seven children?”

“Yes, it is,” he replies.

* * *

There are three sofas in the large living room, all with enough room to seat at least three people. Chairman Mao glows like a god from a poster on one of the walls, and in another poster, fish are spouting a fountain of colors. Fish are believed to bring luck and prosperity to a home.

The sofas are soon filled with people, because Mr Zhang Bozeng and Mrs Wang Maochen’s five youngest children still live at home. No one can remember the exact ages of all of the children, so Mr Zhang looks for a paper at the bottom of a box that indicates their birth years. Thus we are able to determine everyone’s ages:

• Songtao, 31

• Zejin, 29

• Zelong, 23

• Jinxin, 21

• Zedong, 18

• Xiaomin, 11

• Xiaoman, 9

The youngest girls, Xiaomin and Xiaoman, sit down to watch cartoons on TV, and Zelong and Zedong, two tall and thin young men, offer hot tea from small glasses, which one should carefully pick up from the top of the glass using two fingers. Mr Zhang and Zelong then go into the dining room to eat the cabbage stir fry Mrs Wang has prepared, the family’s staple meal. The family has a plot of land located at the edge of the village, and Mr Zhang and his son will return to the field after lunch.

In the 1970s, large families such as these were still common in China, and people over 40 often have many siblings. Mr Zhang and Mrs Wang’s gaggle of children is of course a rarity from the time of the one-child policy.

“This is my revenge,” Mrs Wang says. “As an ordinary citizen and a woman, I had no other way to rebel than to have children.”

Initially, Mr Zhang and Mrs Wang had planned to have three children. Even though that was a serious offense, Chinese families with three children aren’t exceptionally rare. Especially in rural areas, many families have continued to have children until the awaited boy child was born. But no one actually knows how many families there are like these, because unpermitted children were often hidden from the authorities.

On the other hand, families with two children were normal in rural areas. The most significant exception granted by officials under the one-child policy usually allowed rural families to have a second child if the first child was a girl.

In the case of Mr Zhang and Mrs Wang, it wasn’t about trying to have a boy or a girl – their first child was a girl, the second a boy – but rather that they liked children so much.

Their plan was the following: Mrs Wang hid at home during her second and third pregnancies. The family planned to save and pay the fines for the additional children and then receive the hukous for their children.

In theory, all children were to be given hukous automatically, but in practice, authorities across China withheld hukous until families had paid the fines for their unpermitted children. Officials were thus able to ensure that those who broke the law received their due punishment, and local officials received the money owed them.

It was possible to bypass the one-child policy with money for quite some time. Couples had to pay a fine known as a “social compensation fee,” usually equivalent to a few years of income, for unpermitted children. Consequently, wealthy and frugal families were able to afford larger families, especially as the fines were often at least partly calculated according to the average earnings in the area. The wealthy simply had additional children and paid for them.

Zhang Yimou, a famous Chinese movie director, was given an enormous fine of about one million euros for unpermitted children in 2014. Rumors circulating on social media asserted that Zhang had as many as seven children with different women. Zhang finally admitted that he had three children with his current wife. He also had another child from a previous marriage.

These fines have been a significant source of income for local government coffers in the poorest corners of China. As the one-child policy was winding down, money-grabbing local officials were caught red-handed trying to pressure families into having unpermitted children. In 2012 alone, over 20 billion yuan, or 3 billion euros, were collected in fines for unpermitted children.

Mrs Wang successfully hid her pregnancies and gave birth to her children at home, but she and her husband couldn’t pay the fines they owed, no matter how hard they tried.

According to the family, the local family planning officials refused to give the children their hukou, because they did not want to be caught allowing too many children to be born in the district. This is a credible claim, because in the Chinese planned economy, no one could fail to fulfill, or in this case exceed, the mandated quota without suffering the consequences.

The couple was surprised and horrified. Because they couldn’t officially register their children, the children were threatened with the possibility of not being able to go to school, find a partner, go to work, or receive social services.

Often families wanted to hide their children for fear of fines or other types of punishment. In addition to receiving a fine, a government worker – whether a professor or a worker in a government factory on an assembly line – could lose their jobs for an unpermitted child. In rural villages, officials often confiscated family valuables such as TVs, and sometimes they even bulldozed houses to the ground.

It’s impossible to know the exact number of unpermitted children, because there is no trustworthy record of them anywhere. According to Liang Zhongtang, a population researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, there could be as many as 25 million undocumented Chinese. This figure is much higher than the estimate of 13 million used by China and the Western Media and contains other undocumented persons, not just the so-called black children.

Every Chinese person understands the importance of hukou, because it directs their lives in so many ways. Not all hukous are of the same value either: A hukou indicating the right to reside in Beijing or Shanghai is envied and highly desirable, while a hukou for a rural village is far less attractive. The purpose of the hukou system has been to control migration to the cities, but it is often called the Chinese version of apartheid that discriminates against rural Chinese.

Even if a Chinese person moves to a city, their schools, health care, and many other public benefits are tied to their hometown. And even if their children are born in the city, they inherit the rural status of their parents, and consequently, they often cannot enjoy the superior public services cities have to offer. Especially in the biggest cities, it is still hard for people from rural areas to change their official status to that of a city dweller, even though restrictions have been significantly loosened in recent years and increasing numbers of migrant workers are now able to access some city-based services.

Mrs Wang’s fourth pregnancy was an accident, and she went to the family planning officials to ask for an abortion, as honorable citizens were supposed to do. The office was empty; apparently everyone was on a business trip. Time passed, and Mrs Wang became attached to the child she was carrying. She decided to keep that baby, too.

Family planning officials came to see Mrs Wang for a home visit when she was in the last stages of her pregnancy, and they noticed her round belly.

“They forced me to go to the hospital. I didn’t want an abortion, but they asked me what I wanted in exchange for having an abortion. I demanded hukous for my second and third children, and they promised me my children would get them.”

During lunchtime, the doctors stuck a needle in the head of the baby in Mrs Wang’s womb. The next day Mrs Wang gave birth to a dead baby. She saw the body, and the sight haunted her.

“She was a perfect little girl. I was very sad for a long time.”

She couldn’t eat or sleep, and when she was finally able to sleep, she had nightmares about the baby. Sometimes she thought she was going crazy. Months went by, and she still wasn’t given the hukous she had been promised for her second and third children. Her sorrow turned to rage.

“The officials demanded that I be sterilized. I asked them if they thought sterilizing fellow citizens made them good communists.”

Throughout its existence, the Chinese Communist Party has used propaganda to glorify party members and officials as good members of society who help and serve the people.

“I wanted to kill the people who forced me to have an abortion,” Mrs Wang says, her round cheeks flaming. The anger in her voice is clear.

Mrs Wang molded her murderous thoughts into revenge. She refused to be sterilized and instead planned to have as many children as she possibly could. And so she gave birth to four more children.

The fourth and fifth children were born at home, but she went to the hospital to give birth to the sixth and seventh children, because she was concerned about their health. She waited until the last minute to go to the hospital to ensure the local officials couldn’t intervene in the pregnancies. She also entered the hospital using a false name.

Now Mr Zhang and Mrs Wang had seven children, but only Songtao, their lawful firstborn, had hukou. Mrs Wang’s sacrifice, the abortion of her daughter, did not legalize the status of any of her other children, despite the promises she had been given. The future for her six other children looked bleak, nonexistent as a matter of fact.

* * *

The family’s home is quite large. In addition to the living room, they have a kitchen, a dining room, a spacious foyer, and five bedrooms. Each bedroom has a bed, but no closets. As is common in China, clothes are stacked here and there in the corners of the bedrooms. A washing machine hums away in the foyer’s doorway.

The family enjoys their own company inside these four walls. The villagers eye them suspiciously, and even little children make fun of the...

Índice

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• In the Beginning
• 1 Undocumented
• 2 Unborn
• 3 No Family
• 4 No Discipline
• 5 No Brothers
• 6 No Wives
• 7 No Children
• 8 No Mercy
• 9 The Usual Story
• How Is Everyone Doing Now?
• Key Sources, Recommended Reading, and References