The Rise and Fall of China’s One-Child Policy. 2. From “Later, Longer, and Fewer” to “One Child”
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Before the policy was adopted in 1979, brutal birth control directives had already been enforced in the previous decade.
April 2, 2025
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*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.
The campaign “later, longer, and fewer” (wan, xi, shao), initiated in 1970, aimed to regulate marriage and childbirth. “Later” referred to encouraging later marriages—at least after age 25 for brides and 27 or 28 for grooms in urban areas, and after age 23 for brides and 25 for grooms in rural areas. “Longer” involved promoting greater intervals between births—at least four years. “Fewer” set limits on the number of children—no more than two for urban families and three for rural families, with penalties for non-compliance.
According to a study published in 2015 by Harvard sociologist Martin King Whyte and two colleagues, “The post-1970 campaign in no way relied simply upon persuasion or voluntary compliance. Many of the coercive enforcement techniques that became notorious after the one-child policy was launched in 1980 actually date from this ‘later, longer, fewer’ campaign of the 1970s.”
State bureaucrats enforced birth control, overseeing workers in each village and urban unit. They kept detailed records on women of child-bearing age, including births, contraceptive usage, and menstrual cycles. In some factories, quotas were set for reproduction, and women without a birth allotment were not supposed to get pregnant. Pregnant women without permission faced harassment to get an abortion, with pressure also on their families. Rural women who had a third child were pressured to get sterilized or have IUDs inserted, while urban women had to use contraception and underwent regular menstrual checks. Families were threatened that if they had over-quota births, the baby would be denied household registration, affecting access to essential benefits.
Whyte noted that by 1979, when it was announced that the one child policy will be implemented in 1980, “Female sterilizations more than doubled, from 2.51 to 5.29 million, and induced abortions rose from 5.39 to 7.86 million. These drastic increases in birth-control operations can hardly be construed as indicative of voluntary birth planning.”
In his 1983 book “Broken Earth: The Rural Chinese” (New York: The Free Press), Steven W. Mosher reported that dozens of “over-quota” pregnant women in Guangdong were ordered confined in the brigade headquarters, not able to go home for days, if not weeks, while being pressured to consent to abortions. Some were submitted to third trimester “Caesarean abortions,” all this before the one child policy was officially implemented.
The story of Mosher’s book is interesting in itself. It should have been his doctoral dissertation at Stanford but he was expelled from the university’s PhD program after he wrote an article about his research and published it in Taiwan. While the university quoted deontological problems in putting his informants at risk, it came out that Stanford had been pressured to expel Mosher by China, which threatened to cease academic cooperation.
All this proves that through brutal methods China had already achieved a decline of fertility rate—in fact, from 6 in 1970 to 2.75 in 1980—before the one child policy went into effect. This is not to deny that under the one child policy human rights violations became even worse. However, the question remains. Why was the one child policy enacted at a time when the fertility rate was already comparatively low?
Scholars have offered two explanations for this. First, they documented that the Chinese leaders who succeeded Mao were avid readers of the neo-Malthusian publications of the Club of Rome and were heavily influenced by them. As Whyte writes, studies of China’s population produced at the end of the 1970s were largely based on “pseudo-scientific claims and projections, based upon ideas that have since been widely criticized and largely discredited in the West.”
Second, at that time China measured its economic progress and presented it to the world based on one single statistical index, per capita economic growth. This is an index that takes into account the whole population, including children. A way to manipulate it is to reduce the number of children. A simple example may explain how it was done. Assume that the income of a family including a mother, a father, and one child had a growth of 3,000 euros in a given year. The per capita growth of the family would be 3,000 divided by three, so, 1,000 euros. But if the mother gave birth to twins during the year, the family grew from three to five members. Thus, the per capita growth would be 3,000 divided by five, thus 600 euros. Increasing the number of children diminishes the per capita growth. This is equally true at the small scale of a family and at the large scale of a country. One way of increasing the per capita growth is generating real growth. Another is reducing the number of children.
Consequently, the one child policy adopted in 1979 and enforced since 1980 continued the “later, longer, and fewer” campaign of the 1970s, only even more brutally. For instance in one single year in 1983 China performed 14.4 million abortions, 20.7 million sterilizations and 17.8 million IUD insertions.
In the film “One Child Nation,” directed by Wang Nanfu, as reported by Marco Respinti in “Bitter Winter,” the story of one midwife during the one child policy years is told. It is a symbol of the whole one child craze. “Ms. Huaru Yuan worked as a midwife for 20 years. She practiced between 50,000 and 60,000 abortions and infanticides. Sometimes, she induced babies only to kill them soon after they were born. ‘I was an executioner,’ she says. She retired some 28 years ago to treat infertility, following the advice of a 108-year-old monk, who told her that by treating couples for the lowest price possible she would repair 100 of her past killings with every new birth she would facilitate with her therapy. ‘I want to atone for my sins,’ she explains.”
Again, there was nothing voluntary in these practices. According to a research by scholars David Howden and Yang Zhou published in “Economic Affairs” in 2014, “Parents who violate the one child policy face punitive and pecuniary penalties. Giving birth to a second child brings a monetary fine (via a social support or compensation fee), which can range from 3 to 6 times the average annual income of each parent, since both are responsible for the birth of the additional child. Besides these pecuniary punishments, violations to the policy also invoke political ire. The extended family can be disadvantaged in its search for politically appointed positions, and suffer obstacles and discrimination when dealing with administrative formalities. This guilt-by-association method implicates the whole family when only one person violates the policy. Local officials who ignore infractions also face punishment.”
In some cases, “women who have been pregnant for several months in violation of the one child policy have been forced to abort their child.” For example, according to Howden and Yang, “on 11 November 2011, a young mother in the Hunan province was forced to abort her seven-month-old fetus by injection of an abortifacient.”
Source: bitterwinter.org
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