One-Child Policy and the Loss of the Only Child

In the 1980s, China began to exercise the One-Child Policy, in attempt to alleviate the

conflict between the economic development and population growth. Couples are only allowed to

have one child regardless of their profession, wealth and status. The policy has caused Chinese

families to restructure. This restructuring process is a symbol of China's modernization. However

in the meantime, it also generates issues that I find to be melodramatic. Ben Singer argues that

melodrama is "a product of modernity" (131) and it reflects the sense of insecurity generated in

the modern world. The One-Child Policy originated exactly out of the eager expectation for a

well-structured economic and social system in China.

According to Linda Williams, melodrama consists of weaved of pathos and actions(30).

With the rapid pace of modernization, the Chinese families are also forced to suffer the

consequences. Elsaesser notes that melodramas like Birth of a Nation "tailor[s] ideological

conflicts into emotionally charged family situations." (354) This is exactly what happens to

Chinese families as well. The villainous aspects of the one-child policy are most evident in these

smallest units of society.

By conducting observational experiments among kindergartens mainly consisting of only

children in China, C.C. Ching concludes that the kids are raised up to be the center of the family

and are selfish in the sense of using inappropriate means to satisfy their own wishes. Hemminki,

Wu, Cao and Viisainen collected statistics showing that the number of abortions increased

drastically since the one-child policy first came out. According to them, forced abortions, which

are inhumane disregards of human right, are prevalent for an "illegal" pregnancy, that is,

pregnancy after the mother has already given birth to a child. Settles, Sheng, Zang and Zhao

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compared the growth rate of the number of elderly people for France, Sweden, Great Britain and

China, and it appears that China has the fastest growth rate. In other words, China has become an

aging society.

One other serious problem arising from the one-child policy considers the people who

have lost their only child. The scene in Birth of a Nation in which the families lose their sons in

war reminds me of this issue. In modern China, lots of parents lose their only children who has

demised by accident or under high working pressure, which means that they are losing their only

offspring and "hope". These people will have to face their old age alone and will probably lack

financial support. They are a special group of people who arouses great sympathy from the

public. They even have an assigned name in Chinese: "失独者(Shiduzhe)“ - people who have

lost their only child.

There has been a great amount of media report on the miserable lives of the Shiduzhe.

China Daily established an online project called “Life after Loss: when families lose their only

child.” By saying that the employers would threaten to fire the employees if they have a second

child and therefore most of them obeyed the government’s order and take on a risk of becoming

childless in the future, the project explained to the audience how powerful the One-Child Policy

is. The project also displayed the miserable feelings of parents who lost their only child. “We can

never escape this state of mind. Families that haven’t experienced this can never feel our pain.

We try to put on fake smiles and pretend to be happy when meeting others, but that is not how

we really feel”, says Zhenlong Zhou, a now childless father.

This project also mentions that the families who have lost their only child contribute a lot

to the function of the one-child policy. According to how this project focuses on the sufferings of

the family, it seems that it is blaming the policy for making the families fall apart. The project

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makes use of a melodramatic approach to emphasize the villainy side of the One-Child Policy,

and it succeeds in making the audience believe that the Shiduzhe is pitiful because of the policy.

However, as I think deeper about this problem, I came to question whether the policy is the true

villain here. In this essay, I attempt to examine what truly makes the Shiduzhe appear so helpless

in the society and what should be done to reduce the loss of only child tragedies.

From the ancient times, the Chinese families have been very concerned about the

cultivation of their children. Cultivation, as explained in “Shuo Wen Jie Zi,” an ancient Chinese

book explaining the meaning of words, means that the parents should give their children proper

education for them to do good. There is a famous story about the childhood of the great ancient

philosopher Mencius, “Meng Mu San Qian,” which is spread from generation to generation. It is

said that when Mencius was little, he lived pretty close to a cemetery and used to play around the

tombs, learning a lot about funerals and worship of spirits. His mother thought that this is not a

good place for Mencius to live and therefore moved to where the market was located. Mencius

then became interested in doing businesses. His mother found it also not a suitable place for her

son’s education and moved again. This time they moved a place very close to the school.

Mencius therefore learned a lot about the manners on the imperial court. His mother was very

pleased and finally settled down. In this story, Mencius’ mother moved twice solely for the cause

of her son – she wanted to find a best environment for Mencius to grow up in. It is pretty

apparent how important the education and cultivation of children is in the ancient family. The

child is the center of the family and every other thing, including the location of their home,

revolves around the wellbeing of the child.

The ancient child-cultivation view has passed from generation to generation and

nowadays children are still placed at the center of the family. Especially, when it comes to

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education, the parents would do anything in order for their children to achieve a good grade. For

example, when I was little, my parents used to do some family chores including washing dishes

and mopping the floor. However, if I said that I had a lot of homework to do, my mom would

always say, “Go to do your homework; leave the chores for me.” This is very common among

the Chinese families. The children’s study placed at the most important position in family life.

This is because in China, education is the only way to change one’s life. Besides those who

become successful by chance, for most people, the college entrance exam, known as “Gao Kao,”

is a life-changing event. The child can ace in the Gao Kao, enter the best universities and become

successful and wealthy, but he or she can also fail the Gao Kao and spend the rest of his or her

life earning little wage. Some people, when failing the Gao Kao, would spend years retesting, for

the hope of possibly enter a good college and change their lives. Parents, especially those who

struggle for their lives, eagerly hope that their children could go to a good university and become

wealthy. Thus, they would devote all their effort to the cultivation of their children and sacrifice

anything for their children’s study.

In order to fully understand why education is so important in China requires us to look at

the economic and social situation. In 1960s and 1970s, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural

Revolution caused the economy in China to stagnate. During those years, there was great chaos

in the society. The Great Leap Forward movement aimed to immediately improve the economic

condition through rapid industrialization and collectivization. However, because of the lack of

knowledge of the production capacity, the movement led to huge economic regression. The

Cultural Revolution’s goal was to enforce communism and get rid of the bourgeois element in

the society. In the ten years of revolution, a great number of senior officials were tortured and

imprisoned for taking the “capitalist road”. The Revolution also caused an enormous setback to

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China’s economy. Because of these two events, the economy shrank a lot and could not support

the great population which occurred because of Chairman Mao Zedong’s call for families to give

birth to as many children as they can. All of a sudden, the number of people in poverty increased

tremendously. However, not all people have the chance to earn enough money for their living

because the employers cannot hire everyone in the giant population. The employers started to

only choose from those who attended high school. Then they started to eliminate those who did

not attend college. Education soon became the key criteria for whether the person can be

employed. Therefore, if a person wants to change his or her life, he or she needs to be well

educated.

Through the analysis, it is obvious that through suffering poverty, families in China put

great emphasis on the education of their children, hoping to change their lives if the children

could go to a good university and be employed by a good company. There is a saying “Yang Er

Fang Lao” in China, which means that by bringing up a child, the parent’s old age would be

supported. Parents take care of children partially for the reason of being supported by their

children when they are old. By dedicating great effort in the children’s cultivation, the parents

would easily develop dependence on the children. They would soon get used to the child-

centered life and lose sense of how they should live their own lives. When parents of different

families get together, what they usually talk about are what supplementary classes and

extracurricular activities should their children attend, how to cook nutritious meal for their

children, etc. They concentrate so much on their children that they no longer have their original

passion and interest for life. Thus, once they lose their child, especially if the child is their only

child, they would feel as if they have lost everything.

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Another factor that leads to the tragic feeling of parents who lost their only children is the

lack of social welfare. Because of the huge population and the long-term not so wealthy

economic situation, China is not able to give enough support to every member of the society

needing help. Thus, once parents lose their only child, they are not only deprived of the financial

support that their children should be able to provide for them when they are old, but they are also

isolated in the society because the government has almost nothing to give to them. The immature

social welfare system renders them helpless.

The melodramatic approach that the media uses to reveal the tragedy of the Shiduzhe has

led the audience to condemn the “villainy” One-Child Policy. However, in my opinion, it is the

child-centered parenting idea and the immature social welfare that are the true villains.

Disregarding melodrama’s misleading effect, I believe that melodrama could be used to a

positive function. By displaying the miserable lives of the Shiduzhe, melodrama would succeed

in persuading the audience to pay more attention to the special group of people and take

appropriate actions. It is time for the Chinese parenting idea to make a change: the center of the

family should gradually shift from the child to the wellbeing of every family member. The social

welfare system should also be updated: the government should establish a special policy for the

families who have lost the only child because they have contributed a lot to the uphold of the

One-Child Policy, which has helped speed up the country’s economic growth.

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Bibliography

Cao, Guiying, et al. “Illegal Births and Legal Abortions – the Case of China.” Reproductive

Health. 11 Aug. 2005. Web. 6 Oct. 2014.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1215519/

Ching, C.C. "The One-Child Family in China: The Need for Psychosocial Research." Studies in

Family Planning. 13.6/7(1982): 208-212. JSTOR. Web. 22 Sep. 2013.

Elsaesser, Thomas. "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama." Film

Genre Reader II. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Print.

Settles, Barbara H. “The One Child Policy and Its Impact on Chinese Families.”

http://www.hdfs.udel.edu/files/pdf/OneChildPolicy.pdf

Life After Loss. China Daily Multimedia, 2013. Web. 6 Oct. 2014.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/html/feature/lifeafterloss_v/Singer, Ben. “Melodrama and

the Consequences of Capitalism.” Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema

and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Print.

Williams, Linda. “Introduction: Playing the Race Card.” Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of

Black and White From Uncle Tom to O.J.Simpson. Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2001. Print.

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