China Eases Rule Limiting Rural Couples to 1 Child

China is gradually retreating from its avowed commitment to a population control policy of one child per family in rural areas in the face of widespread protests and resistance from peasants.

Over the last year, many of China’s provincial governments have adopted new rules allowing couples living in the countryside to have a second child under special conditions.

An official of China’s State Family Planning Commission said in a recent interview that after five years of experience, authorities in Peking have decided to relax the one-child limit in rural areas in order “to make our policies more rational and acceptable to our people.”

“We are only advocating the one-child family in the cities,” said Shen Guoxiang, deputy director of the commission. “In the rural areas, where people have been found to have difficulties, they can have a second child.”

The definition of “difficulties” will vary from province to province and from locality to locality. But Shen said that in some areas peasant couples will be permitted a second child “if the first child is a girl.”

“Until the turn of the century, there must be some people who can have only one child, and those families will be mainly in the cities,” Shen said.

He emphasized that China is not in any way abandoning the fundamental goal of its birth-control campaign--to limit the population to 1.2 billion in the year 2000. In its 1982 census, China counted 1 billion people.

Shen said that Peking will continue to fix quotas for the number of births allowed in each of China’s 29 provinces and regions, which then pass on similar numerical limits to cities and villages.

He did not explain how the government can relax its policy in the countryside, where four-fifths of the people live, and still meet its population target.

But one foreign population-control expert here said he believes that China has some leeway in population control in rural areas because its economic policies, such as the rapid development of cities along the coast and towns in the interior, will produce a migration of peasants from the countryside to urban areas.

Prod A. Laquian, deputy representative of the U.N. Fund for Population Activities, said: “The annual growth rate in the rural areas will become less, in which case there will be some slack in the quotas.”

The numerical limits on population growth for each province and locality have prompted officials to resort to Draconian measures to prevent new births. Since China began trying to limit each family to a single child in 1979, there have been many instances of forced abortion and sterilization.

According to the census figures, 77.6% of China’s population lives in the countryside, and it is here that opposition to the one-child limit has been the strongest.

Peasants have forged sterilization certificates, fled to remote areas or had intrauterine devices removed in order to evade the limit. There have been continuing reports of infanticide in cases where the first-born child was a girl. One visitor to a town in Sichuan province was horrified recently to find a dead baby girl abandoned in a public restroom.

Prompted in part by foreign news accounts about forced abortion and infanticide, the White House recently asked Congress to withhold $10 million in funds for the U.N. Family Planning Agency. That sum represents the amount the agency spends in China each year. Shen, the Family Planning Commission official, said China considers its population control program to be a matter of “sovereignty” and will not be swayed by the threatened cutoff of U.N. money, which he called “a very small sum.”

“We won’t be affected by foreign opinions,” he said.

But he said China is “perfecting” the rules on how many children each couple can have in response to the views of its own people.

“We have to listen to the opinions of the broad masses,” he said. “This principle is applicable to our family planning policies as well as other policies.”

Most of China’s cities embraced the “one-family, one-child” policy six years ago. Couples who signed pledges to have just one child were given monthly bonuses and other financial incentives.

In 1980, then-Premier Hua Guofeng announced that the Chinese regime “deems it necessary” to enforce the one-child limit on a nationwide basis. Shen maintained that China has not really altered its policy, because a 1980 directive from the Communist Party Central Committee to local cadres said that “where people have practical problems . . . they may be allowed two children, but no more.”

However, that directive indicated that the one-child policy was nationwide and did not draw a distinction between urban and rural areas. The People’s Daily urged in a 1982 editorial that the one-child limit be imposed throughout China, particularly in the countryside.

“China risks losing control of its population growth because liberalism regarding births continues to spread rapidly in the countryside,” the newspaper said at the time.

By most accounts, the government made its most concerted efforts to enforce the one-child limit in the countryside in 1982 and 1983. It was in this period that the Chinese press began to acknowledge the existence of widespread problems with female infanticide and abortion.

The peasants have a number of reasons for objecting to the rule more vehemently than do city people.

In economic terms, peasants profit from having extra hands to help with the work. This has been particularly true in the past five years. Under market reforms fostered by the national leadership of Deng Xiaoping, peasants have been allowed to engage in a form of private enterprise and to increase their income by raising output, so they have a powerful financial incentive to have more children.

Also, the peasants’ level of education is below that of urban residents, and traditional attitudes like the preference for male heirs are stronger in the countryside.

Family-planning officials, among them Laquian, the U.N. official, note that people in China’s crowded cities worry much more than the peasants about whether there will be enough housing space and food for an additional child.

“In the rural areas,” Laquian said, “they can more easily absorb them.”

Chinese officials also have found that the one-child limit, like many other government policies, is more difficult to enforce in rural areas.

In the cities, the government has established networks of family-planning officials, reaching into neighborhoods and factories, to keep watch over women of childbearing age. These officials, usually older women, keep track of whether contraceptives are being used and even whether menstrual periods occur on schedule.

In the countryside, it is far more difficult for such officials to scrutinize the daily activities of the population. It is also generally harder to persuade peasants to be satisfied with a single child.

Shen hinted that local officials in rural areas have complained about how hard it is to enforce a strict one-child limit, and that some have refused to carry out the policy.

As a result of the flexibility in allowing peasants to have a second child, “now cadres (in rural areas) will abide by the central government’s policies,” Shen said. “If they can allow a certain percentage of people to have another child, this will ease their difficulties.”

There were signs last summer that the one-child rule was being relaxed in rural areas. In July, state family-planning officials listed six conditions under which couples in the countryside might be allowed to have a second child--if, for example, the father was an only child, or a fisherman whose first child was a girl.

Provincial authorities then began publishing their own detailed regulations granting exceptions to the one-child policy. These rules sought to take into account the myriad intricacies of Chinese family life.

The province of Jilin in the northeast, for example, announced last August that peasants could have a second child if they fell into any of the following categories:

“A husband whose family has had only one son for two successive generations or more, and who has only one daughter; a couple wherein one is the sole descendant of his or her family, and which has only one daughter; a couple wherein one is disabled due to non-congenital factors and cannot work, and which has only one daughter; certain disabled army men; a husband who is the only person with child-bearing ability among his brothers.”

In addition to exceptions such as these, Chinese couples, whether rural or urban, have for several years been permitted to have a second child if the first child is handicapped.

Last February, Li Jieping, a family planning official in Shanghai, acknowledged to the Reuters news agency that the term handicapped was being construed much more loosely in rural areas than in Chinese cities.

Shen told The Times: “At the beginning stage, we lacked experience in implementing the policy. It takes time to make our policies more rational and acceptable to our people.”

Figures compiled by the Family Planning Commission show that despite its intense campaign, China has never succeeded in enforcing the one-child policy throughout the nation.

Roughly 96 million children were born in China from 1979 through 1983, but only 24 million couples have applied for the one-child certificates in which they pledge to stop having children. Such certificates entitle a couple to financial subsidies and preferential treatment for housing, medical care and education for the child.

According to Shen, approximately 60% of all newborn babies in China now are first children; 20% are the third or beyond.

He suggested that while the authorities will be more lenient toward couples having a second child, they will at the same time try to be more strict with couples trying to have families of three or more children.

“The fertility rate in 1984 was 2.07 children for every Chinese woman of childbearing age,” he said. “If we can reduce that to 1.7, we can fulfill the population target of 1.2 billion by the year 2000. If we could persuade those couples having three children or more to have fewer children, we could reduce the fertility rate to 1.7. Once that is achieved, we could begin to allow each married couple to have two children.”

Shen said there will be no uniform nationwide rule to specify when peasants will be allowed to have a second child.

“It varies from place to place according to economic conditions, population density and people’s willingness to give birth,” he said.

He said the central government hopes to experiment with different rules and policies in different areas. In Mian county in Shaanxi province, for example, the policy varies with the terrain. In the valleys, married couples are generally allowed only one child. In hilly areas, they are allowed to have a second child if the first is a girl. In the mountains, all couples are allowed two children.

Since the start of the one-child policy in 1979, the authorities have insisted that they intended to have the limit enforced through “education and persuasion,” not by force. The official position is that where compulsion has been used, it is the fault of overly zealous local officials.

“I don’t want to deny the fact that in past years there have been some deviations by local cadres,” Shen said. “The quality of our cadres differs from area to area. This (use of force) happened in the past. It is possible it is going on now, and it may in the future as well. But on the whole, I think our work can be made better year after year.”

Asked how many local officials have been punished for compelling women to have abortions or sterilizations, he answered, “A very small number.”

Shen said that local officials are punished in cases where abuse was deliberate. However, he said, in instances where they made mistakes because of a misunderstanding of the policy, then the local officials are merely given “education,” not punished.

Ironically, by refraining from adopting a nationwide policy, and leaving it up to each jurisdiction to set the rules on who may have a second child, the central government may increase the power of local officials over family planning policy.

Shen conceded the possibility that these local officials may in some instances favor their friends, family and business associates in deciding who may have a second child. But if this happens, he said, “it is an unhealthy tendency that must be corrected.”