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In 1980, the Chinese government instituted what became known as the “one child” policy, forbidding families from having two or more children without special permission from the government. The government in Beijing feared what they described as an impending “demographic disaster” if the nation’s population continued to grow at the current rate seen during that time. It was a brutal approach to what was being seen as an intractable problem. The rules were enforced vigorously, with many women being forced to have abortions or be sterilized. At first, the policy appeared to be having the intended effect and the country’s population growth slowed down measurably. But human nature has a way of thwarting the will of the most authoritarian government and by the time the country finally repealed the policy 36 years later, the damage had been done. Now they are facing an entirely different set of daunting challenges, all of which were wholly preventable in retrospect. The Wall Street Journal has an excellent review of how things reached their current state and the new challenge of China not having enough single women of childbearing age. (Subscription required)
Ricki Mudd was born in 1993 in China during the one-child policy era. She remembers her early childhood only in fragments, but has been told she had spent some of it hidden in a bag.
At age 5, she was adopted from a Chinese orphanage, one of the more than 150,000 children China sent overseas. Most were girls. In the West, they were one of the most visible consequences of the one-child policy, which ended in 2016.
