Loophole Lets More Chinese Have 2 Children

There are two words spoken in the Liang household that rarely have been uttered by a whole generation of Chinese. They are “brother” and “sister”--and they are about to be reclaimed by the people who never had one.

China’s strict one-child policy, which was instituted nationally in the late 1970s, limited most urban Chinese to one child per family, meaning that millions of children like Liang and his wife grew up without siblings. But a little-known loophole in China’s family planning rules made it possible for their 5-year-old boy to have a baby sister--and put the Liangs at the forefront of what could be a major demographic change in China.

In most of China’s major cities, the loophole allows single children who marry to have two children. As the hundreds of millions of people born under the one-child policy in the last two decades come of age, they will have something their parents didn’t: a choice.

Their adulthood marks the unofficial end to the rigid controls that successfully curbed China’s population but provoked the condemnation of religious and human rights activists, and became one of the most hated elements of the government’s involvement in people’s lives.

“By 2005, nearly every couple will be eligible to have two kids,” said Peng Xizhe, a demographer at Shanghai’s Fudan University. “Along with all the exceptions in the countryside, the one-child policy as we know it will be over.”

Loneliness of a Life Sans Siblings

Liang’s wife, Li, a doctor, described her own lonely childhood and her delight at having two children. “When I was young, I had to go to my classmates’ homes to play,” she said. “I wished I had a sister.”

She said her kids can help take care of each other--and that when she is old, they can take care of her too. “I am traditional,” Li said. “I would rather have two kids.”

Although it is now legal, and even encouraged in some areas, for couples like the Liangs to have a second child, she is reluctant to trumpet her decision. Remembering the years of hearing the message that “one child is best”--and that message’s sometimes draconian enforcement, including forced abortions and sterilizations--she asked that her and her husband’s first names not be used.

The government is not dismantling its birth controls. China’s population of 1.2 billion--more than one-fifth of the world’s people--is too large to let grow unrestricted, officials say. But with Beijing’s approval, each province can amend the one-child policy “according to its needs,” said an official from the State Family Planning Commission in Beijing, and the 1979 policy is dotted with exceptions.

Rural areas have long allowed farmers, fishermen and ethnic minorities--along with a dozen other special cases--to have two or three children. Cities have traditionally been stricter, although the “two-child” rule has been in place, albeit unadvertised, in Guangdong, China’s southernmost mainland province, since 1980, in Beijing since 1982 and in Shanghai since 1990 to quietly balance slowing growth in the cities. In the past, too few people knew about it or qualified for it to make much of a difference.

It is only now, as the single children born since the one-child policy was created nearly 20 years ago prepare to start families of their own, that the loophole suddenly takes on a new relevance: Soon the exception will become the rule.

Even so, demographers don’t fear a huge population boom. Cities are quickly reaching negative population growth, and research has found that in China, as in other countries, people have less desire and time for large families as they become wealthier and better educated.

“The authorities haven’t been promoting this policy, but they haven’t been opposing it,” said Xiao Zili, the director of the State Council-funded China Population Information and Research Center in Beijing, adding that the loophole is unlikely to be closed in the future. “We believe that the trends will balance each other out.”

At a population conference in Beijing last week, Chinese officials said that even with the two-child exceptions, they are still on target to contain the population at 1.3 billion by the end of the century.

But other imbalances that are the legacy of the one-child policy loom: There are significantly more males in China than females--because of sex-selected abortions of female fetuses and infanticide--more elderly than young people, and an impending labor shortage in the fast-developing cities as the population shrinks. Exceptions have been built into the regulations to remedy distortions in China’s social structure, but not everything could be planned for.

“Some of us think we should not have had a one-child policy at all,” said Tu Ping, a demographer and marketing professor at Beijing University. “We should have had a two-child policy to begin with,” because the sudden and turbulent population shifts were bound to create long-term problems. “It makes policy planning much more difficult.”

In the early 1970s, Shanghai was one of the first to intensify its birth-control programs, so its only children are already marrying, and the city is the first to feel the old policy’s ripple effects.

One result is negative population growth for the last four years, with three people dying each year for every two who are born in the city. Although Shanghai hosts nearly 4 million migrant workers from rural areas to fill jobs, the “floating population” isn’t included in the city census, isn’t expected to stay and doesn’t help with the city’s other problem: a growing elderly population.

Too Busy to Help Aging Parents

In the 1950s, Chairman Mao Tse-tung urged Chinese to have more children to make the country stronger, despite demographers’ warnings that it would strain China’s resources. The resulting baby boom sparked the one-child policy in 1979. But now, as Mao’s baby boomers prepare to retire, they have fewer offspring to take care of them, as is the tradition in China, where there is little social security.

Li, the doctor, said she sees many elderly patients at the Shanghai hospital where she works whose only children are too busy or overstretched financially to help care for them. That was part of the reason she wanted to have two children of her own.

“If I have only one child, you see, one day he must take care of six old people--me and my husband and our parents. If he marries another single child, they will have to take care of 12,” she says. “It’s such a heavy burden.”

Despite the opportunity to have two children--a chance much envied by their parents--many young professionals are choosing not to have any babies at all.

“My parents are very angry about our decision, but there are a lot of reasons we don’t want to have children,” said Yu Huijin, 31, an energetic woman who works at Shanghai’s futures exchange.

“There are already too many people in China. Having children is very tiring and a lot of responsibility, and I want to focus on my career.” She added a lesson she’s learned from her job: “The future is full of risk. You never know what will happen.”

Yu and her husband, who works at an advertising agency, can well afford to have a child or two. In fact, many newly wealthy couples in China choose to have a second child whether they are eligible or not, and simply pay a fine--up to three years’ salary--that used to be a crippling disincentive before the days of free enterprise. But more often, money is the reason people give for not having two children--or even one.

“Right now, there’s a window of opportunity to make a lot of money,” said Wong Xin, an entrepreneur who owns a clothing shop on one of Shanghai’s bustling boulevards. “Who knows when the rules will change, or the economy will slow down? It’s very expensive to raise a child in Shanghai, and rather than staying at home to care for a baby, we can both work harder.”

After years of forcing couples to forgo a second child, officials find themselves in the awkward position of encouraging couples to have more babies. Last year, only about 4,000 couples in Shanghai, a city of 14 million people, had a sanctioned second child. In the Jing An district in central Shanghai, the local family planning committee knocked on the doors of nearly 2,600 couples who hadn’t had any children to ask them why not.

“It’s difficult to stop people from having babies,” said Jin Xuegong, a senior official at the Shanghai Municipal Planning Commission, “but perhaps it’s even more difficult to make people have them.”

For family planning workers in cities, it means a welcome shift from forced abortions to a focus on health education.

Lin Aiyi, a family planning official who likes to be called “Auntie,” used to hate her job. She once had to force one of her own relatives to have a late-term abortion. People routinely avoided her on the street, she said, or cursed her to her face. But she said her work has gotten a lot easier in the past few years as people became convinced that more children meant less money. In her town south of Shanghai, there hasn’t been a second child born in a family for 10 years.

“It’s a combination of successful propaganda and economic development that have caused a change in attitudes,” Lin said, nursing a cup of green tea. “We tell people: ‘One child can have one apple. Two kids only get half an apple. And then what’s left for you?’ ”

Peng, the Fudan University professor, who measures the costs and benefits of the population policy, noted that its success has brought back freedoms that it originally took away.

“In the past, everyone’s fate was decided when they were born,” Peng said. “Now people have a choice; they have a chance to shape their lives.”

*

Times researcher Bao Lei contributed to this report.