This morning, while I was reading my usual
newspaper, I made a surprising discovery: the one-child policy was finally removed
last October in China. In “Courrier International”, a French weekly newspaper, whose
objective is to translate and give you access to articles written by newspapers
from around the world, I found a special investigation dedicated to this
subject. One article, translated from the daily Chinese newspaper called Gongren
Ribao, especially caught my attention, highlighting the “children above the
allowed quota of 1 child per family” condemned to live without a legal identity,
usually called “the people of the shadows”. According the 6th national census
of 2010, there are more than 13 million people not on the births, deaths and marriages
register. This represents 1% of Chinese. 7,8 million of them are supernumerary children.
Li Xue, a young woman of 22 is one of them. Her parents couldn’t afford to pay
the 5000 yuan that are required to pay for a second child “paying 5000 yuan
would have forced us to stop eating during 3 years” said her mother to the
journalist. Therefore, her daughter never had any legal papers to prove her
existence, no possibility to go to school, to take the train, and has no social
security number. Today she has difficulties finding a job, and she will never be
able to start a family. How could people still live without an identity in our
modern world?
I
started to ask myself what the aim of this law was. Why was it created and what
was its objective? I found my answer in an article written by “le Monde” explaining
that China introduced birth control at the end of the 1970s, under Deng Xiaoping,
to slow down its galloping demography. It has effectively avoided 400 million
births, and has probably been a key factor in the success of the Chinese
economic boom. However, this policy has also created side effects on China’s demography:
as the population could only have one child per family, they preferred to have
a boy for cultural reasons, so many women aborted their baby girls. As a consequence,
the number of men exceeds the number of women by several million. It has
created a huge lack of women in China’s population. In order to reduce this
problem, the government has adapted new rules, first authorizing the couples, in
rural regions, to have a second child if the first one was a girl. In 2013, they
implemented the following right: couples being themselves single children were
to be allowed to have two children.
Next question I asked myself: if this policy
was economically successful, why did China decide to end it? An article in the “Nouvel
Observateur” gave me some explanations: firstly, this law gave rise to strong
opposition, and secondly because of the aging population in China (mostly due
to the high rate of abortions). According to other newspapers, it seems that aging
in China is a real problem: one of the most famous demography specialists, Cai
Yong, has even said, in “Le monde”, that “this measure arrives a decade late”.
Sources:
Article from “Courrier International” dated
February 2016
http://www.leparisien.fr/societe/chine-fin-officielle-de-la-politique-de-l-enfant-unique-27-12-2015-5404281.php#xtref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.fr%2F
Salomé NICLOT wants to work in international relations.
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