極速前進：一胎化

 

Chapter 4One Child

The pursuit of population control forged the essence of China’s modern engineering state. Through the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping and the leadership in Beijing decided that promoting engineers into the central government was a counterstroke against Mao’s misrule. They were gripped, however, by a misbegotten scientism, which used straight-line projections to predict catastrophe if China did not diminish its population. The engineering state’s pursuit of the one-child policy produced more social pain than any of its other policies over the last half century. And as the state attempts to reverse its effects, it is once more employing the tools of social engineering.

In the fall of 2013, Xi Jinping gathered the leadership of the All-China Women’s Federation around him at the Communist Party’s headquarters in Beijing. Xi had ascended to China’s highest office a year before. Looking relaxed and genial, wearing the party’s standard working uniform of a zipped-up windbreaker, he told the party-linked organization that officially represents women’s issues that China’s economic development depends on equality between sexes. Achieving it would enable “hundreds of millions of women to shoulder greater responsibilities.” The leadership of the women’s federation listened intently while taking notes as they sat around him.

Ten years later, Xi addressed a new round of the federation’s leadership. He’d lost a bit of weight, and his hair was grayer, but much else was the same: Xi wore the same workwear and sat in the same room, in which listeners intently took notes. Though he still wore his genial smile, his speech carried a steelier undertone. Rather than encouraging women to seek self-realization in economic development, he advised them to build families.

The vision Xi laid out to the women seated around him in 2023 sounds rather traditionalist. A woman’s role is to keep the husband happy and the elders cared for; most important of all, she should have kids. “We should,” Xi said, “cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbirth.” That means imposing the party’s doctrine on “how young people should view love and marriage, having children, and building a family.” The Economist’s headline on the meeting was frank: “China wants women to stay home and bear children.”

Earlier in 2023, China announced its first population decline since 1960 (the year millions starved from Mao’s Great Leap Forward). The population drop was slight. But it was the start of a dip that will yawn larger each year for decades. By 2100, China’s population is projected to halve to seven hundred million. Childbearing is collapsing in China. The country’s official (and certainly overstated) number of new births has undershot even the most pessimistic projections. In 2019, China had fifteen million births; four years later, it fell to nine million. The number was below what the United Nations described as a “low-fertility scenario” only a few years before. Six million Chinese married in 2024, half the level of a decade ago. Chinese families now have a lifetime average of 1.0 children, far below the 2.1 children needed for a stable population.

In May 2023, Xi has shoved aside political convention to hang on as China’s top leader for a third term. While doing so, he wrecked another norm: excluding women from the top leadership of the Communist Party. For decades, the Politburo has had at least one woman serving in the twenty-five-member group. She was often given the party’s toughest tasks: Wu Yi managed negotiations for acceding to the World Trade Negotiation and handled the 2003 SARS outbreak; Sun Chunlan oversaw the enforcement of lockdowns related to Covid. Both Wu and Sun stood out for their abilities in a field of sometimes mediocre men. For his third term, Xi shrank the Politburo to twenty-four members, dropping the one space that had been given to a woman. By locking women out of China’s political leadership, Xi might well have been trying to set an example.

The female body is now a fixation of the Politburo’s all-male political gaze. Xi’s administration has overseen a crackdown on homosexuality in China in addition to his campaign to impose traditionalism on childbearing. It’s not the first time that fertility was politicized: Mao Zedong promoted births because he believed it would deter imperialist invasion. It’s not the second time either: Deng Xiaoping implemented an infernal system of population control. Population engineering has now seesawed a third time, back to birth promotion under Xi.

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Mao Zedong was not an engineer. He was a librarian at Peking University who then helped found the Communist Party, after which he became a warlord. After he established the People’s Republic in 1949, Mao’s stature became nearly godlike. He spent much of his time reading literature and philosophy, leaving the details of running the state to technocratic deputies like Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Chen Yun. Mao’s gifts in military leadership as well as poetry collided in a folksy slogan he was fond of repeating: Ren duo, li liang da. With people come power.

In 1949, China was the world’s most populous nation. After decades of warfare, the new state didn’t know how many people were within its borders. Officials guessed that China’s population might be around five hundred million people. When the 1953 census counted nearly six hundred million, it was mostly a cause for celebration.

Mao viewed a big population as a source of strength. He had spent nearly half his life as a military leader fighting Nationalists and Japanese. Only a year after proclaiming the new communist state, he sent troops into Korea, mostly to fight US forces who were newly armed with nuclear weapons. Various world leaders were taken aback by his serene attitude toward atomic attack. In 1954, Mao boasted to Jawaharlal Nehru that he did not fear a nuclear strike by the United States. The imperialists, he declared, simply wouldn’t have enough bombs to annihilate the hardy Chinese people. Three years later, he told a stunned Nikita Khrushchev, “We shouldn’t be afraid of atomic missiles. No matter what sort of war breaks out, conventional or thermonuclear, we’ll win.” Mao declared he was ready to lose half of the population to fight imperialists. “The years will pass, and we’ll get to work producing more babies than ever before.” Khrushchev later cut off Soviet support to China’s nuclear program, in part out of alarm for Mao’s casualness toward apocalypse.

Karl Marx had criticized Thomas Malthus’s work on overpopulation. Mao, following Marx’s lead, thought it was absurd that a country could have too many people. “It is a very good thing that China has a big population,” he wrote in 1949. “Even if China’s population multiplies many times, it is fully capable of finding a solution. That solution is production. The absurd argument of Western bourgeois economists like Thomas Malthus that increases in food cannot keep pace with increases in population was not only thoroughly refuted in theory by Marxists long ago but has also been completely exploded by the realities in the Soviet Union and China.”

Not all the other state leaders agreed. While Mao pondered literature and philosophy, Deng Xiaoping had an economy to centrally plan. Deng and other state leaders decided that five-year plans were too difficult to execute if the state could not control population. They were able to prevail on Mao to accept a few family planning policies. Through the 1970s, Mao authorized a birth control policy that included a series of incentives and fines, promoting later marriage and greater contraceptive access.

But Mao was also temperamental. Sometimes he listened to others; other times, he writhed against their restraints. Before Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, China’s population surpassed seven hundred million. The continuous agitation that Mao set in motion wrought a decade of political convulsion. At the Cultural Revolution’s peak, groups of workers battled over leftist doctrine, mobs pummeled people they declared to be counterrevolutionaries in mass rallies, and most schooling and work ceased so that people could heed Mao’s calls to revolution. The turmoil ended after Mao’s death in 1976. By then, the country was in shambles.

Among the victims were the preponderance of basic government functions. The Cultural Revolution had made a mockery of anything that could be as organized as a national census. Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun (the most senior official on economic policymaking), and other top leaders knew that China’s population was large, but they were in the dark about actual numbers. The leadership guessed that the population might have surpassed nine hundred million. When statistical authorities estimated that the population numbered nearly one billion people at the end of 1978, the leadership reacted with shock. No longer was a big population a cause of celebration. So many hungry mouths threatened to overrun Deng’s modernizations.

One of China’s most remarkable engineers offered a solution that sounded supremely rational. Song Jian was a missile scientist who spoke the language of mathematics and control theory. His proposed remedy was the one-child policy.

Song Jian was a man of considerable girth, his bulbous nose framed by full jowls under a combover. At academic conferences, in which Song often gave the keynote, he spoke with a high-pitched lisp, his remarks punctuated by smiles and energetic sweeps of his meaty hands. If Song looked smug, he had reason to feel self-satisfied: Few other scientists have had their arguments embraced by China’s top leaders. In political influence, Song Jian might be comparable to Albert Einstein, whose letter to the White House inspired the United States’ pursuit of the atomic bomb.

Song was born in 1931 to a rural family in Shandong, a northern province that is China’s second most populous. During Song’s childhood, the Imperial Japanese Army landed in Shandong, which would suffer some of the worst devastation of the war. Song grew up in an occupied zone and joined the Communist Eighth Route Army as a teen, serving by day and attending school at night. Song was the only person in his high school who was able to earn a spot to university. In 1953, he earned an even rarer opportunity—to study in the Soviet Union.

At Moscow State University, Song was exposed to the thrilling new field of cybernetics. This mathematical discipline was one of several new fields, including operations research and computing, that grew from research produced during World War II. Norbert Wiener’s 1948 book Cybernetics became a hit, not because it was filled with equations but because of its intoxicating subtitle: Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine. Its central idea was to develop the mathematics to control complex systems by feeding the system’s outputs back into its algorithms as a continuous optimization. It is the study of regulation and control of technological or biological systems. Cybernetics has occupied an intellectual sweet spot: electrifying in its premise—attracting subordinate terms like “machine intelligence” and “systems analysis” that are irresistible in themselves—and constructed with an inherent vagueness that affords it the theoretical space to wriggle out of refutation. It is a concept that might go dormant but never completely falls out of fashion. The 1956 Dartmouth Conference coined the term artificial intelligence partly in reaction to cybernetics; Martin Heidegger claimed that philosophy was dying, and cybernetics would be its successor.

After Soviet and Chinese relations fell apart, Song returned to Beijing in 1960. He remained fascinated with cybernetics for the rest of his life. In Beijing, Song was appointed one of the chief scientists at the Seventh Ministry of Machine Building, the state agency in charge of rockets, where he helped to develop China’s submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

Song wasn’t just a gifted scientist; he also possessed a keen sense of how to maneuver for political influence. Song fell under the tutelage of Qian Xuesen, the country’s best-known scientist, who was expelled from the United States and then helped to develop China’s nuclear weapons. Song worked on missile guidance systems by day and on a textbook with Qian called Engineering Cybernetics by night. He was well known enough to have his home ransacked during the Cultural Revolution. When students accused Song of espionage (due to his occasional exchanges with foreign scientists), an alarmed Zhou Enlai packed him and other elite scientists off to China’s satellite launching base in the Gobi Desert for their protection.

Military scientists like Song Jian constituted a politically privileged class under the socialist regime. Rather than being forced to make revolution, the state empowered them to build bombs and missiles. The Communist Party treated military scientists with greater deference than social scientists, whose pronouncements on economics or sociology frequently ran afoul of Mao. Over the 1950s, the chairman had bullied without mercy an economist who advocated for population control. Military scientists were also politically better connected than most university professors, who couldn’t count on being heard by top party leaders. Song’s privileges included engaging in scholarly exchange with parts of the outside world, as well as access to one of China’s few advanced computers. He and other military scientists had political license to stomp into whichever intellectual realm pleased them.

At that moment, the world was gripped by anxieties over environmental doom. Natural scientists like Paul Ehrlich (coauthor of The Population Bomb, 1968) and organizations like the Club of Rome (which published The Limits to Growth in 1972) explained that as the global population exceeded the planet’s “carrying capacity,” humanity was on track to experience something between the gradual decline of living standards and the total extinction of human life. Western scientists fretted in particular about China and India, which were populous and poor. Song was still designing missiles when Mao’s death cleared the way for discussion of population controls.

An overseas trip to hear from environmental doomers convinced Song that China needed radical measures to control population. In 1978, he flew from Beijing to Helsinki to take part in a cybernetics conference, where he listened to the fashionable views of natural scientists who warned of catastrophe, including presentations to determine which year the apocalypse would descend. Song later wrote that he grew “extremely excited” as he listened to these remarks.

When he returned to Beijing, he rustled up a few other scientists from the missile ministry to study population. It was a challenge because China’s previous census was completed in 1964, and nobody had any real idea how large the population was. They had to rely on imprecise demographic extrapolations, eventually landing on two determinations:

• First, that if China’s population growth was left unchecked (at the rate of 3.0 children per woman), then the country would have three billion people by 2050 and over four billion by 2080.

• Second, China’s natural resources implied an optimal population size. Song had plugged different variables into his systems analysis calculations: acreages of China’s arable land; the amount of water; long-term trends in the expected growth of agriculture, industry, and services. The model’s results concluded that China’s optimal population was no more than seven hundred million.

Today, these propositions read as bunk. Everything about them was flawed. Song wrote, “China’s population by the second half of the next century would go up to 4.5 billion, equaling the total world population today. And it would continue to grow forever.” Only an engineer might have believed in this sort of straight-line analysis, as if population can grow at an unvarying rate. Song had no awareness that fertility rates might fall as economic growth and educational levels rise—as neighboring East Asian countries had already realized. He presumed that China had a fixed stock of resources, leaving no room for the possibility that technological change, or Deng’s pivot away from the planned economy, could increase agricultural productivity. Ironically, this mechanistic thinking made Song a bad cybernetician because his model failed to be dynamic to feedback.

In any other setting, these calculations might have been brushed aside as an unserious exercise. But the time was the 1970s, when China’s top leadership didn’t need foreigners to tell them that the country was facing economic stresses. The place was Beijing, where Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun imagined that the Four Modernizations would save China, if only it followed the science. And the scientist was Song Jian, who was known and trusted by the political establishment. When Song assured China’s leadership that population trajectories could be as firmly controlled as missile trajectories, they listened.

The anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh traced Song’s influence on the one-child policy in her remarkable book Just One Child. During policy conferences, Song and his team of elite scientists made their case with calculations from China’s most sophisticated computers. Skeptics of a one-child policy were making population projections with the aid of an abacus or a handheld calculator. Song Jian presented his group’s projections in precise, machine-generated lines on graph paper; other groups drew uneven squiggles by hand. It was never a fair fight. The military scientists outclassed their intellectual opponents in every possible way.

China would probably have imposed radical population controls with or without Song Jian. At the end of the 1970s, its leaders thought some form of control was necessary. Song made the scientific case that China could permit couples to have no more than one child. A few groups had murmured objections: local party secretaries who understood it would be intolerable to rural folks; social scientists who pointed out how it would create problems for retirement; and the army, which worried about recruitment.

They lost. On Song’s side was the formidable Chen Yun, who pushed hard for a one-child policy. The rest of the leadership mostly agreed as well. Only a few policymakers wondered whether it might not be better to permit two children per couple and whether education and greater contraceptive access might not be sufficient. Deng Xiaoping’s decisive voice weighed in favor of only one child. He and Chen Yun were seasoned administrators who had an intuitive understanding that targeting one child provided simplicity to the millions of local officials responsible for enforcing the rule. Song Jian pushed on an open door. His projections allowed them to believe that the crudest goal was also the most necessary.

Beijing adopted the one-child policy in 1980.

Song’s authority fit with Deng’s goals to cast his new policies as a modernizing, scientific force, with the precisely drawn graphs to prove it. Deng and Chen Yun were starting to think about China’s growth in per-capita terms, which pushed them into the faulty line of thinking that resources per person were higher when there were fewer people. Years later, Song gloated about how much smarter natural scientists were than social scientists. His strategy, if he were ever attacked, was to “withdraw into the sanctuary with the high prestige of natural science.” Song never stopped congratulating himself. In a 1988 book, Population Systems Control, he and a coauthor wrote, “Using statistical and quantitative research methodologies, population studies have been freed from the interference of human emotions and the damaging effect of popular ethics.”

The Communist Party, however, could not fully ignore human emotions and popular ethics. It knew that the people would react to this policy with incredulity. In an approach almost without precedent, the Communist Party published an open letter addressed to all members, asking them to set the example of having only one child. According to Greenhalgh, the propaganda authorities gave Song Jian the honor of writing the first draft. The result went as well as could be expected. Song was too arrogant to address the people with tactfulness, so officials threw out his draft and gave the task to propaganda professionals.

The open letter of 1,600 words was published in the People’s Daily that September. “In order to keep China’s population below 1.2 billion by the end of this century,” it began, “the State Council has issued a call to the people of the whole country, advocating that each couple should have only one child. This is a major measure related to the Four Modernizations, to the health and happiness of future generations, and to the long-term and present interests of all the people. The Central Committee requires all Communist Party members to take the lead . . . to actively, responsibly, patiently, and meticulously carry out publicity and education to the masses.”

This letter adopted a plaintive tone. It “advocated” for couples to have only one child. It took pains to sound reasonable, citing the stagnation of living standards and the stress that the population was putting on farmland. Even today, the name of the policy barely evokes the violence involved with its implementation, in which posses of enforcers reached their hands into a woman’s most intimate parts in order to carry out, at times, forced sterilizations and abortions. Enactment of the one-child policy meant forcing a mostly rural people to change deeply ingrained habits. It was social and population engineering at scale.

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The one-child policy began as a shock campaign and matured into a labyrinthine administrative apparatus. Over the thirty-five years of the policy’s existence, it left few Chinese families untouched. By 1990, in order to have a first child, a woman needed up to twelve documents from her workplace and various party officials and a consent form agreeing to contraceptive measures after birth. The less fortunate were caught in the mass sterilization and abortion campaigns that swept through the countryside. For rural families describing what it was like to live through those times, “wrenching” becomes the descriptor of first resort.

Beijing designated Qian Xinzhong, a former general of the People’s Liberation Army, to be the head of the State Family Planning Commission. Qian planned the opening phase of the enforcement as carefully as a military campaign. He called on roving teams of family planning officers to be “shock brigades” who must implement “man-on-man tactics” in the great battle for family planning. Crucial in his conception was the “shock attack,” a term from socialist campaigns emphasizing political mobilization to achieve decisive results. These teams consisted of state and party cadres, local enforcers, and a medical team that would traverse villages. Hospitals had to be prepared to carry out the “four procedures”: IUD insertions, tubal ligations, vasectomies, and abortions.

Qian threw these shock troops against the bewildered masses of China’s rural folk. When the one-child policy started in 1980, urban fertility rates were already trending toward 1.0 child per couple, while rural fertility was closer to 2.5. For the four-fifths of Chinese who lived in the countryside, having several children was the basis of economic security. Without multiple children, and ideally sons, a farmer couldn’t count on having enough work and old-age support.

In 1982, China was finally organized enough to undertake its first census since 1964. Deng and Chen regarded the results with glumness. China’s population increased by three hundred million in those eighteen years, becoming the first country ever to surpass one billion people. The leadership felt even more convinced of the need for population control. The Communist Party had declared family planning a “foundational national policy” and wrote it into the constitution, removing it from the realm of debate and empowering Qian’s most ruthless instincts.

In 1983, Qian mobilized party and state offices at every level for a big push. That year, the state sterilized sixteen million women and carried out fourteen million abortions. By comparison, in the pre-policy year of 1975, the state performed only three million sterilizations and five million abortions.

Hitting these numbers required escalating coercive tactics. The first measure in the official toolbox was browbeating. Local officials would visit pregnant women as part of “persuasion groups.” This posse of up to ten men seldom appeared as sweet-tongued advocates. One American academic witnessed a group of women in Guangdong separated from their husbands and sent to the village hall. There, they were given unceasing lectures to give up their pregnancy for the good of the country, and then were called upon one by one to give their consent to an abortion while being prohibited from returning home until they had done so. A 1982 New York Times report quoted a family planning official from Guangdong saying, “On average, each person takes 10 times to be persuaded. The most difficult person can take up to 100 times.” The piece also cites women hauled before mass rallies and harangued into consenting to an abortion.

Slogans exhorted cadres not to slacken their work. “Any method that reduces fertility is a good method,” said one. “Take all measures and overcome difficulties with creativity,” said another. These were tantamount to offering open license to take any means necessary to terminate a woman’s pregnancy. The browbeating often worked: Few families could endure up to a hundred visits by a rotating cast of officials with ever more insistent demands. But if the tactics still were ineffective, the officials could threaten firing or fines worth up to several years of wages. They could detain the woman or a family member, which required paying for one’s food each day without being able to contact the outside world. Sometimes they carted off furniture or sewing machines, seized cattle and other livestock, or sent a bulldozer to tear the roof off their home. A family that thought it had the means to support an additional child then had to ponder whether it still could do so.

Nothing was more important than hitting numerical quotas. Local officials received cash bonuses and good reviews if they met their sterilization and abortion quotas; if they did not, they saw their pay docked and were demoted. Enforcing family planning was part of an official’s personnel evaluation. Nicholas Kristof, then a reporter based in China, wrote about a woman who was seven months pregnant when officials demanded that she give birth right away. These officials formed a shock brigade to round up all third-trimester women because they had some birth quotas left in the year, while they weren’t sure whether they would have many next year. Against the objections of the woman’s doctors, they induced an early birth. Kristof described how she nearly hemorrhaged to death during the birth. Her child died. And this mother-to-be was left physically disabled.

If a woman was still not persuaded, then officials might carry out a forced abortion. Often, they operated in the third trimester because the woman could no longer conceal her big belly. In some cases, a baby came out alive. Michael Weisskopf, who reported on the one-child policy in a series of pieces for the Washington Post in 1985, wrote that doctors sometimes injected formaldehyde into a baby’s head or crushed the skull with forceps. More typically, doctors would smother the newborn or leave it to die of exposure.

Song Jian’s home province of Shandong experienced the most notorious incident of strict enforcement. Zeng Zhaoqi, newly appointed party secretary of Guan County, was humiliated that it ranked last in the province for family planning. So he summoned the twenty-two most senior party officials one day in April, berating them for their failings and shouting that their measures must be more extraordinary. He demanded there be zero births in the county between May 1 to August 10. In reports now censored, residents said that every woman was forced to have an abortion, no matter how far she was into her pregnancy or whether it had been authorized. Zeng found toughs from other counties—since locals were reluctant to hurt their own—to halt births.

This incident in Guan County is known by two names: the “childless hundred days” as well as the “slaughter of the lambs,” since 1991 was the year of the sheep in the Chinese zodiac. The slaughter ended well for Zeng. He was rewarded with successively more desirable promotions in Shandong. His superiors didn’t seem to have a sense of irony when they appointed him later to be the deputy head of the provincial committee on Caring for Future Generations.

Though Qian Xinzhong didn’t hesitate to order late-term abortions, his preferred tool was sterilization. Abortions were messy and traumatic for all; sterilization was simpler to carry out and could represent a decisive solution. Doctors might automatically implant an IUD immediately after a birth, sometimes without bothering to inform the patient. Since women attempted to remove these implanted rings, Qian preferred tubal ligation—an irreversible procedure. He advocated for universal sterilization of couples who already had two children. That wasn’t implemented everywhere, although there are reports of maternity wards sterilizing mothers immediately after a second birth. Automatic sterilization was a step that provoked unease in Beijing. Since infant mortality was still high, rural families feared the permanent loss of the ability to have a child. But by 1999, China’s health ministry statistics show that 35 percent of married women of reproductive age had been sterilized.

The campaign produced agony for rural folks. They fumed that the state was treating them exactly as they dealt with their own livestock. Wives and daughters were being sterilized in much the same way that farmers spayed their pigs. It didn’t help that the abortion posses sometimes literally carted women off in hog cages. Weisskopf wrote in the Washington Post, “Expectant mothers, including many in their last trimester, were trussed, handcuffed, herded into hog cages and delivered by the truckload to the operating tables of rural clinics.” The toll on women’s bodies was enormous. The stainless-steel IUD rings inserted after births created long-term physical problems, provoked menstrual bleeding, and tended to wear out after two years. Abortions and invasive tubal ligations were often done in a hurry and en masse, sometimes without anesthetic. Men could have volunteered for vasectomies. But typically, four women received a tubal ligation for every vasectomy.

The one-child policy didn’t create so much difficulty in urban areas. Many people in cities were able to navigate the situation. They were also more likely to have the means to travel abroad to have a second birth. And the party trod cautiously in restive minority regions, since problems associated with overpopulation were caused by the majority Han settlers in Tibet or Xinjiang, not by the locals. Sometimes, villagers were able to pay the fine for an additional child and get on with their lives. A bribe could do the trick. Local officials had an interest, after all, in concealment, protecting both themselves and their villagers.

When people needed to resist the onslaught, they wielded what James C. Scott called weapons of the weak. The most straightforward means of resistance was to escape to a different village. A mother might return with a newborn and hope for leniency with a fait accompli. But it was a risky strategy to produce an out-of-plan child. Many jurisdictions did not allow them to have the schooling or medical benefits available to an authorized birth. It meant they might miss early inoculations, be barred from school enrollment, and experience forfeiture of their land rights. They were essentially second- or third-class citizens whose most likely fate was to become unskilled migrants.

Women tried to time their pregnancies so that they would give birth in winter, when they could bury their growing belly under layers of heavier clothing. Officials knew they were not detecting all the pregnancies, so they offered financial rewards for neighbors to snitch. Since China’s minority groups enjoyed some leniency to have more than one child, people discovered Tibetan, Dai, Miao, or some other such ancestry that they had previously forgotten to disclose to authorities. After Beijing loosened the policy permitting families to have a second child if their first was disabled, the writer Peter Hessler discussed the story of a family that rented a disabled child they claimed was theirs in their application for a second birth permit (which was successful).

Confronting birth-planning officials was a tactic of last resort. Rural folks said these officials were after only three things: your money (through fines), your grain, or your life. Enraged villagers sometimes retaliated against officials by destroying their homes or livestock. Kidnapping the children of shock brigade leaders became a common fantasy, sometimes executed. Arson was such a common revenge that cadres developed a phobia of fire: Ten days after one person was promoted a “tubal ligation team leader,” his home was razed to the ground. Attacks against birth-planning officials became so frequent that some areas drew up laws specifically to prohibit retaliation: Shaanxi, for example, passed a law against “insulting, injuring, or slandering birth planning personnel or their families.” The government eventually came up with a special insurance scheme for covering accidents and damage to the homes of birth-planning officers.

They became some of the most hated people in Chinese officialdom, but these enforcers had little autonomy and few privileges. Only half had completed high school, and only one in eight received any medical training, even though many of them were thrown into doing invasive procedures. Most were poorly paid and developed poor morale from being treated with contempt by other officials while they implemented the one-child policy. In three separate state surveys, more than half of birth-planning officials expressed a desire to quit their work.

The zenith of the one-child policy was Qian’s big push of 1983. Later that year, he lost his job. Beijing then loosened the policy slightly, releasing new guidelines to repudiate shock tactics and permitting more couples to have a second child, especially people in rural areas. The brutality, however, continued. China’s health yearbooks reveal another high tide of sterilizations and abortions in 1991, the year of the mass slaughter in Shandong’s Guan County, as a large cohort of women entered childbearing age. After that, however, the one-child policy became less confrontational, although sterilizations and abortions remained at high levels.

For more than a decade, the one-child policy produced a campaign of rural terror. Local officials had to convince people they were serious about changing birth habits. Documentation from that time, occasionally surfacing even in state media, reports forced sterilizations and abortions, as well as public incidents of drowning newborns to make people realize that the state and its one-child policy meant business. The state was trying to enact compliance by changing cultural attitudes.

One of the notorious legacies of the one-child policy was the high rate of female infanticide. Rural families tended to have two preferences: to have multiple children, and that at least one should be a boy. The one-child policy collapsed these desires into a preference for sons. Reports of female infanticide poured into government offices. Baby girls were being smothered, drowned, poisoned, or left in trash heaps as soon as they were born. “At present, the phenomena of butchering, drowning and leaving to die female infants and maltreating women who have given birth to female infants have been very serious,” state media forlornly admitted. “It has become a grave social problem.” By the early 1990s, ultrasound machines were in widespread use, permitting parents to engage in sex-selective abortions. That meant fewer killings after birth. But it didn’t stop China’s official sex ratio at birth to reach 120 boys born for every 100 girls in 1999. That ratio has since declined to 111 boys to 100 girls. In the intervening decades, however, demographers estimate that around forty million women are “missing.”

Not every family had the heart to give up their newborn daughters. Kay Ann Johnson was a professor from Massachusetts doing fieldwork in northern China when she adopted a three-month-old girl. Two decades later, she wrote a moving book, China’s Hidden Children, in part, as she put it, to help Chinese children who were adopted abroad understand the impossible circumstances of their birth parents. It dawns on some out-of-plan or adopted children to say, as early as age three, “I should never have been born” when they learn of their own legal discrimination or abandonment. In scores of interviews, Johnson found that rural families, including the father, experienced lasting emotional scars from anguish and rage that they could not keep their child. They felt that they had no choice in the matter. But they also suffered a deep sense of loss and personal failure.

When birth parents abandoned (almost invariably) their baby girl, they tried to find a good adoptive family, usually a childless couple or a family already with multiple boys. After depositing the girl at the doorstep, they might set off some firecrackers for attention. Anyone emerging out of their doorway would glance down at a newborn and immediately understand the task asked of them. If birth parents couldn’t identify a good family, they might abandon the girl in the city, reluctantly, since they had little idea who might pick up their child. It became a common story for city folks to hear a baby’s cries from inside a cardboard box or by a trash heap.

The one-child policy increased child abandonments and child abductions. Trafficking rings stepped up to mediate between families who could not keep their child and families who wanted another. Sometimes, they abducted girls to fulfill demand for future brides; most of the time, they abducted boys because more families wanted sons. Child smuggling became an interprovincial venture. In 2004, twenty-four baby girls in tote bags were found on a long-distance bus, drugged to keep them quiet, bound for adoptive families. That led to the bust of a large baby-trafficking ring whose leaders were sentenced to death. Police raids to rescue trafficked children continued for much of the 2000s.

Johnson recounted several instances of forcible seizure of children by the state. In one account, seven men descended from several directions on the home of a family with an out-of-plan child: “The government had taken their baby, stripped them of their parental rights, and left them heartbroken and powerless to do anything about it,” Johnson wrote. “It had been nothing short of a kidnapping by the government, leaving them no recourse.”

State-enacted kidnapping was one of the perverse consequences of the one-child policy. China started sending children abroad starting in the early 1990s. Adoption agencies sprang up for American families who went to China to bring home a child. Though the process of vetting foreign parents was rigorous, the procedures for making babies available to them was not always transparent. Orphanages didn’t always treat children well: One American on an adoption trip to Wuhan wrote that a family on his trip received two successive notices that their designated adoptee had died. International conventions agreed to by Beijing required adoptive parents to offer a donation. The size of the required donation was between $3,000 and $5,500, which was an enormous sum for any Chinese orphanage. That created a perception that orphanages were in the business of selling children abroad. This label was often not fair. Unfortunately, local governments sometimes really sought to benefit from these big payments.

Hunan, Mao’s birthplace and the province where many of the worst abuses of the one-child policy have been reported, distinguished itself on excess. Parents in rural Longhui County reportedly grabbed their babies to find hiding places whenever family planning officers showed up. Officers snatched at least sixteen children who didn’t have proper papers and placed them in orphanages. Eventually, a few ended up in the United States, Poland, and Holland. Longhui residents have accused the government of abducting their children for revenue, raising the horrifying possibility that American adoptive families may have taken in children who weren’t actually abandoned.

The one-child policy persisted into the era of online virality. In 2012, Feng Jianmei, a twenty-three-year-old mother in rural Shaanxi, was pregnant with a second child. When she failed to pay a fine demanded by birth-planning officials, they shoved her into a van, blindfolded her, made her sign a document she could not see, and gave her shots to induce a stillbirth. That in itself might not have been remarkable. What was unusual was that Feng’s husband uploaded a photo of her—exhausted and with her bloody, stillborn fetus lying beside her—on China’s nascent social media platforms. When the post blew up, younger people reacted with outrage. One commenter stated that the family planning system has been “openly killing people for years in the name of national policy.”

Beijing took too long to end the one-child policy in large part due to bureaucratic inertia. The State Family Planning Commission had over 500,000 workers, 1.2 million local enforcers, and 6 million village officials engaged in enforcement. It collected $200 billion in fines over its lifetime, according to state media. For the millions of people given jobs by this bureaucracy, it was worthwhile to keep the policy from expiring. And the commission kept finding evidence that families were hiding their out-of-plan children. It wasn’t until the 2010 census conclusively proved the fertility rate had collapsed that the central government dissolved the commission.

China ended the one-child policy in a desultory process, formally terminating it after the bureaucracy stopped putting up a fight. The one-child policy became a two-child policy in 2015, then a three-child policy in 2021. Over the thirty-five years of the one-child era, China performed a total of 321 million abortions (not far off from the present population of the United States) and sterilized 108 million women and 26 million men. In 2024, Beijing announced that it would end international adoptions. By that time, more than 150,000 children had been sent abroad (around half to the United States), almost all girls.

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As I was writing this chapter in 2024, my wife, Silvia, suffered a miscarriage. It was in the first trimester of our first pregnancy. As we grieved, I returned to writing about these mass sterilization and abortion campaigns. If anything, it became more difficult to imagine how the state dragged away so many women to forced abortions in their third trimester. Meanwhile, women in the United States were fretting about curtailments over their reproductive rights. Neither forced nor prohibited abortions are humane, Silvia and I felt, which means the state should leave families, and especially women, with a choice.

I was born in 1992. When I spoke to my mom about the one-child era, she remembers the bureaucracy more than anything else. She needed to fill out a lot of forms to have me, including committing to contraceptive measures after my birth. She was surprised when I told her that China recorded the second-highest number of abortions the year before my birth (fourteen million, a few hundred thousand shy of the peak enforcement year of 1983). Since my parents were urban residents, they didn’t feel the brunt of this enforcement, which fell on the countryside. They also had the fertility preferences of urban folk, which tended toward one child. My parents discussed having a second child after we moved to Canada when I was age seven. But they didn’t feel strongly about it, so they didn’t.

The one-child policy left subtle imprints among urban folks. Chinese people my age rarely ask each other whether we have siblings; it becomes quite curious if someone does have any. I have three cousins, and my family encourages me to refer to them as sisters in order to create closeness.

Time has worn away some of the memories of the traumas. But they are still there for rural folks. Foreigners curious about the one-child policy will probably not hear vivid stories from the Chinese they speak to, who tend to be relatively privileged people from cities. It is rare for rural folks to be able to study and live abroad. They sometimes have a hard time even moving to cities, given the restrictions of the hukou system—another social engineering project—meant to restrict internal migration. The one-child policy is another reminder of a phrase that resonates a great deal for me: “Chinese peasants, your name is misery.” It was coined by Sun Dawu, a rural entrepreneur now jailed for his advocacy.

The one-child policy could only have been formulated by the engineering state. No other country would have let a missile scientist anywhere near the design of demographic policy. Its roots lie partly in the control tendencies of Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun, who wanted to engineer the population so that they could engineer the economy. Partly in reaction to Mao, partly using language given to them by Song Jian, they viewed themselves to be acting on a science that was detached from popular passions, based on Western ecological concerns, and formulated in terms of control theory. They understood themselves to be acting as technocrats.

The lawyerly society debated the one-child policy and rejected it. The United States and other Western countries also considered implementing strict population controls in reaction to The Population Bomb. Social scientists, especially economists, were quick to criticize the flaws in these linear projections. But in China, social scientists had become meek from Mao’s bullying. At this critical moment, the country lacked the intellectual antibodies to resist the policy’s adoption. Chinese leaders were just enough exposed to the West to absorb this neo-Malthusian doomerism, without being exposed enough to the Western pushback against it.

And the one-child policy could only have been implemented in the engineering state. While the state possessed a bureaucracy to enforce controls of such extraordinary scale, there wasn’t a sufficiently developed civil society to fight for legal protection against it. The Communist Party is built to implement campaigns of this sort. That is what Leninist parties, which are hierarchical and mobilization oriented, do. When it put someone as savage as the general Qian Xinzhong in charge, it was able to achieve astonishing numbers of sterilizations and abortions.

The one-child policy is one of the searing indictments of the engineering state. It represents what can go wrong when a country views members of its population as aggregates that can be manipulated rather than individuals who have desires, goals, or rights.

Susan Greenhalgh related the story of Liang Zhongtang, who was one of the few vocal opponents of the one-child policy inside the party. He was, however, only a professor in the backwater of Shanxi province, making him far removed from actual policymaking. Liang attempted to make China’s leadership see villagers as people, whose childbearing desires were embedded in a network of cultural values and economic needs. He handily lost the battle to the cybernetics faction led by Song, who viewed rural folks as a variable to be controlled as the state saw fit. “The size of a family is too important to be left to the personal decision of a couple,” Qian Xinzhong said. “Births are a matter of state planning, just like other economic and social activities, because they are a matter of strategic concern.”

For my parents, it was apparent that China was facing shortages when they grew up. They needed ration tickets for everything: rice, eggs, cooking oil, bicycles, an apartment. Obtaining almost anything was difficult. My mom and dad were among a handful of students able to earn a spot at university. When I asked my dad whether the one-child policy made sense to him, he replied, ren tai duo. Too many people! It’s a common refrain. Anyone taking the subway during rush hour or touring scenic spots over national holidays might hear it muttered still today.

There’s no question that Chinese people experienced severe shortages of everything prior to the adoption of the one-child policy in 1980. But these shortages were the result of the socialist planned economy. This system was characterized by agricultural collectivization, an emphasis on heavy industry, and lavish spending on national defense, leaving little left for consumer production. Consumer shortages eased when Deng moved China away from socialism. It’s unclear if Deng was aware of the irony that he was attempting to impose planning on the population while he was trying to dismantle planning for the economy.

While China’s population has increased by 40 percent since the start of the one-child policy—with Beijing doubling in size and Shanghai quadrupling—Chinese are living better than they ever have. They are rich in material possessions and can more easily access the finer things in life. That shift was chiefly produced by ceding economic freedom and allowing people to trade with the rest of the world. And though Mao’s economic policies caused famine and destitution, it’s hard not to agree with his remark from 1949: “Even if China’s population multiplies many times, it is fully capable of finding a solution. That solution is production.”

Rather than acknowledge that it could not deliver the goods, the Communist Party decided instead to blame the people. It was their “overpopulation” that was the problem, not the inadequate economic system that the leadership insisted on.

After people accommodated the one-child policy by resorting to female infanticide, Beijing felt some embarrassment over the ensuing headlines. Rather than acknowledge the impossible choices it had forced people into, the Communist Party once again blamed the people. Cadres declared female infanticide a symptom of “feudal practices” and a “peasant mentality.” Any efforts to actually address the problem were half-hearted, consisting of exhortation and an educational campaign. Population control was still China’s primary problem. Millions of missing girls were a distantly secondary concern.

The Communist Party invoked the environment to justify the one-child policy. Shortly after implementing it, China began its great industrialization, which lifted economic growth while ruining much of the country’s ecology: polluting its lakes, pushing heavy metals into its soils, and delivering coal smoke into its air. It wasn’t overpopulation that destroyed Shenzhen’s oyster ecosystems; it was state-directed industrialization. The one-child policy occurred in parallel with China’s wanton devastation of its environment. Perhaps the policy even offered policymakers moral license to justify environmental devastation.

How will the one-child policy be remembered? At its conclusion in 2015, a trio of demographers offered an assessment in the journal Studies in Family Planning: “Future generations will likely look back at China’s one-child policy with bewilderment and disbelief. To many it will be incomprehensible why, of all countries that faced the challenge of rapid population growth in the second half of the twentieth century, only China went to such an extreme; incomprehensible why in a society based on respect for the family, kin, and filial piety, the government enforced a policy that effectively terminated many kin ties for at least a generation; incomprehensible why China instituted such a policy after the country had already experienced substantial fertility decline; and incomprehensible why China waited so long to end such a harmful policy.”

Of all the critiques of the one-child policy, perhaps the most poignant is that it was not necessary to reduce China’s fertility rate. That was already falling due to earlier, less coercive family planning policies. China’s fertility rate was around 6.0 per woman at the start of 1970; a decade later, when the state implemented the one-child policy, the fertility rate had already fallen to 2.7. Professional demographers still debate the extent of the fertility decline that the one-child policy produced. Official state media have claimed that family planning measures over four decades prevented four hundred million births. That figure is marred, however, by the same sort of linear assumptions embedded in the projections by Song Jian. Any effort to determine the number of births prevented by the one-child policy is made difficult by patchy data released by the government.

Demographers give credit to Deng Xiaoping for driving down fertility not through the one-child policy but through economic reopening. Higher rates of urbanization, educational attainment, and, most of all, economic growth have been the best contraceptive measures devised by modernity. These were factors that drove neighboring Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to lower their fertility rate too.

The true legacies of the one-child policy are psychological scars, sometimes physical scars for the mothers, gender inequity, and a rapidly aging population. An aging population was always a predictable concern with the one-child policy. In fact, it was acknowledged by the Communist Party’s open letter in 1980. The letter brushed aside concerns that a future child would have to support four grandparents, saying instead that the policy would secure such national prosperity that the state would be able to afford generous pensions for all. Propaganda authorities asked people to trust the government, before switching to tell them to stop burdening the government. Whereas one of the former propaganda slogans read, “Have one child, it will be enough; the state will care for you when you’re old and tough,” a new slogan now reads, “Have three children so you won’t have to seek state-supported elder care.”

Neither Song Jian nor Qian Xinzhong appeared to have much regret about their roles in the one-child policy. Qian was given a curious honor in 1983, when the United Nations Fund for Population awarded him (along with Indira Gandhi, who presided over a campaign of forced sterilizations in India) its inaugural Population Award. He never held another office after running the family planning commission, dying in 2009 at the age of ninety-eight.

Song Jian is still around. After 1980, he held a dazzling array of high positions: president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, minister for science and technology, state councilor, and membership in the Communist Party’s Central Committee for twenty years. He was a natural politician. When China’s population did not explode, he was able to declare victory anyway for defusing China’s population bomb. Song never lost his enthusiasm for cybernetics. In an ambitious article written in 1984, he advocated for a strong leader, supported by teams of technical cadres, to employ cybernetics to manage the entire society.

Before Song retired in 2002, his final project involved chronology. After visiting Egypt, he grew embarrassed that China apparently lacked a detailed chronology of its ancient civilization. Though China claims 5,000 years of continuous history, the first few thousand are a bit hazy. Song established that Chinese civilization was 1,400 years more ancient than previously recorded. Another great feat! There’s nothing that many Chinese love to hear more than the idea that the nation’s past glories were even more glorious than anyone had grasped.

It was the last example of how Song applied his brilliant mind along with an amateur’s enthusiasm to serve state ends. His work in historical chronology might be harmless, but his involvement in fashioning the one-child policy produced so much trauma. Perhaps I was wrong to compare Song Jian to Albert Einstein in terms of their influence after pressing scientific analysis into the hands of senior leaders. The more apt comparison for Song might be to Trofim Lysenko, the agronomist who aligned himself with Soviet orthodoxy and helped perpetuate famines in the Soviet Union.

Song’s example is one reason that I’ve become suspicious of anyone who advocates “following the science.” We have to get quite worried if anyone in power starts saying that science alone is an object to be pursued rather than having to situate it in a social and ethical context. There is still truth, I think, to Winston Churchill’s quip that scientists should be “on tap, not on top.”

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By the year 2100, China’s population is on track to decrease to seven hundred million people. As it turns out, that was the optimal population size calculated by Song Jian.

Far from celebrating this decline, Xi Jinping and the rest of China’s leadership are trying to reverse it. Each year after 2022 will see slightly fewer people powering the Communist Party’s great odyssey toward national rejuvenation. Maternity wards are starting to shut down in several provinces since there are fewer newborns. In 2025, adult diapers are expected to outsell baby diapers. China has already grown old before it grew rich: When Japan’s population started to decline (fourteen years before China’s), it was more than twice as rich.

Was there ever a country that exerted so much effort to deplete its own population? Mao would be astonished by the one-child policy, as would almost any other world leader before him. With people comes power. Political leaders have universally tended to want more of both. Demographic decline will entail a slow grinding down of China’s actual capabilities to achieve geopolitical preeminence.

China’s low birth rate worries Xi Jinping and the rest of the Communist Party. In the 2023 meeting with the women’s federation, Xi vowed that over his third term his administration “will improve and implement pro-fertility policies.” The shift to the two-child policy in 2016 and the three-child policy in 2021 did not produce many more births. China’s fertility rate of 1.0 is now lower than Japan’s and keeps falling short of even recent low-fertility projections.

So the party has grown more vocal in blaming one final group: women.

It’s hard to be a woman in China today. Many of them did not survive the one-child policy: There are approximately forty million more Chinese men than women. Though the country has plenty of successful female entrepreneurs and billionaires, Xi has shoved women out of the top echelon of the Chinese government. His primary message is that women must become docile promoters of family harmony, which means bearing more children. That theme is also being echoed by the rest of society. Rather than being joyful, Lunar New Year is an irksome time for younger Chinese women. They must face dozens of relatives, from whom they expect only one question: “When will you marry?” to the single woman, and “When will you have kids?” to the married.

The journalist and sociologist Leta Hong Fincher has documented the brazen insults that women have to endure, especially from state media. In her book Leftover Women, she chronicles how women tend to be discarded (often in contempt) once they’ve reached unmarriageable age, which state media considers to be twenty-seven years old. She documented how women must endure all manner of insulting headlines lamenting their case: “Eight Simple Moves to Escape the Leftover Women Trap,” and the column posted shortly after Women’s Day, “Do Leftover Women Really Deserve Our Sympathy?” The aim of stigmatizing singlehood, Hong Fincher writes, is to stop urban women from delaying marriage and childbirth much further.

Even if a woman is married, state media is unkind. A Xinhua news editorial urged women not to make a fuss if they discover marital infidelity: “When you find out that he is having an affair, you may be in a towering rage. But you must know that if you make a fuss, you are denying the man ‘face.’ Try changing your hairstyle or your fashion.” The Women’s Federation is often the amplifier of these messages. Since it is the state’s designated organization on women’s issues, it is often in the position of enforcing state policies. One former employee of the Women’s Federation told the Wall Street Journal that her office in Guangzhou spends more of its budget to give to social media companies to censor gender-related topics than on women’s advocacy.

As China shifts away from birth control under Deng (and several successors) to birth promotion under Xi, it is relying once again on the tools of the engineering state. But the state is starting to see that this dial cannot be turned back. Although the state has had many tools to prevent births, it can’t seem to find the right tools to encourage copulation.

State media has become increasingly desperate to urge births. In 2018, two academics proposed the establishment of a “birth fund,” to which all workers under the age of forty must contribute, while couples who have more than one child could apply for subsidies from the fund. Decried as a tax on the childless, that proposal went nowhere.

In 2021, an unsigned commentary appeared in a state media paper demanding that all members of the Communist Party have three children, in unusually vehement terms. “That would not only be good for the family,” the editorial said, “but also national development needs. It must be every party member’s responsibility to have three children! They can’t offer wimpy reasons not to marry, and to have just one or two kids.” This editorial was deleted after an online outcry. Demanding a politically loyal cadre to have many children is not new. I think Heinrich Himmler, however, said it better when he exhorted SS officers to have more than four children: “Think of Bach! He was the thirteenth child in his family! After the fifth or sixth, or even the twelfth child, if Mama Bach had said ‘that’s enough now,’ which would have been understandable, the works of Bach would never have been written.”

Three decades of persuasion in favor of one child has worked too well. All women of childbearing age grew up in a China insisting that the best number of kids was one or zero. In response to social and government pressures to have more kids, women retort on social media with pictures of slogans that used to be plastered all over the countryside urging families to reduce fertility. Half of all Chinese women born after 1995 told the Chinese general social survey of 2021 that they desire one or zero children. The bullying they have to endure from the Women’s Federation and state media hasn’t made them enthusiastic about childrearing. When a southeastern city offered incentives for leftover women to marry rural, unemployed men, women reacted with incredulity. Why should a woman leave a city job to marry a man she regards as a deadbeat? Marriage has become even less appealing since Chinese judges are increasingly reluctant to grant a divorce: 70 percent of divorce applications were granted in the mid-2000s, a rate that fell to 40 percent a decade later.

The one-child policy persisted for one and a half generations. Its effects will echo far longer. I am skeptical that the engineering state will be successful in producing a surge of births. There have been pronatalist policies in other countries (Hungary, Israel, and many others), with little evidence that they could structurally push up birth rates for long. China is catching up with other countries in these fertility policies, held back both by technology as well as social attitudes. The country has only six hundred hospitals officially authorized to offer in vitro fertilization services. And the state makes it illegal for unmarried women to freeze their eggs. To preserve their fertility, single women have been forced to travel to Taiwan or Thailand in order to find egg-freezing services.

It is possible that China will be able to implement profertility policies, as Xi has promised, more successfully than anyone else through tactics of the engineering state. So far, however, women of childbearing age haven’t been interested. Perhaps the state will invent a technological solution to produce more Chinese children. At the moment, the efforts are low tech. Women in urban cities are reporting that they are regularly getting calls from neighborhood officials asking when they plan to have children. These officials are inquisitive, asking when a woman has had her last period, and argumentative, insisting that owning a cat can be no substitute for a child. Most of all, they are nagging. One woman posted, “Government officials have asked me five or six times when I plan to have a child, while my parents have asked me only once.” She goes on to say, “These officials call only to rush me, not to offer any support.”

Rather than being totally fixated on women, the engineering state is now also thinking about men. State media has started to fret about leftover men too. The tens of millions of Chinese men who will never be able to find wives may become a threat to public safety, who could, in the words of one university researcher, “be driven to kidnap women or become addicted to pornography.” Men have also taken to social media to complain that it’s getting too difficult to obtain a vasectomy. Some hospitals turn men away from vasectomy unless they can prove they already have children. National health yearbooks reveal a breathtaking collapse in vasectomies performed in China. They fell from 181,000 in 2014 (the start of Xi’s rule) to fewer than 5,000 in 2019. In the new era, men are getting a taste of birth planning too.

The one-child policy is a rebuke to the idea that the population can be so easily engineered. Social engineering in this case has produced a spiritual defeatism manifesting in broad exhaustion throughout society. Exactly four decades after China began the one-child policy, it would enact an even more ambitious social program: from controlling people’s bodies to engineering their souls, this time with the aid of digital surveillance.