The China Model

In addition to the use of women as a political front, elements of the China population control model have found a home within the cultures and state policies of other countries. In this article, China specialist, John Aird, examines the transferable components of the coercive program in China.

In April 1991, Nafis Sadik, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), told a Chinese reporter that “China has every reason to feel proud of and pleased with its remarkable achievements made in its family planning policy and control of its population growth over the past ten years.” She added that the UNFPA was going to “popularize China's experiences in population growth control and family planning” in other countries.1 Despite abundant evidence that the Chinese program is coercive — and UNFPA's nominal commitment to support only voluntary programs — Sadik gave it the blessing of her organization and proposed to make it a model for other countries to follow.

Although Sadik was not to know it until two years later, in the same month in which she endorsed the Chinese model, a new crackdown on family planning was ordered by the Party leaders, making the program more coercive than ever. Within two years the Chinese fertility rate was forced down well below replacement level, surprising even the Chinese authorities and embarrassing their foreign supporters. When the news of these developments broke in April 1993, Sadik talked grim1y about possibly withdrawing UNFPA support from China,2 but when the Clinton Administration agreed to resume funding of the UNFPA in spite of its continued involvement in China, talk of withdrawal was dropped. Sadik, who had always denied that the Chinese program was coercive, now promises to monitor its tactics and exert a moderating influence.3

Foreign endorsements of the Chinese program

Since the 1970s the UNFPA and other family planning advocates had frequently commended the Chinese program, acclaimed its achievements, and expressed approval of some of its methods. In 1982 one advocate said the program was one that “'the world should copy.”4 In 1983, the year of the previous peak in coercion, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) declared the goals of the Chinese program consistent with its own and welcomed the Chinese Family Planning Association to full membership in the IPPF.5 Those who proposed the Chinese program as a model for other countries seldom acknowledged that it was coercive, that it disregarded traditional values and human rights, and that it roused such strong popular opposition that it could only be implemented by a totalitarian government.

Apologists for the Chinese program also tend to avoid mention of the tactics that make it compulsory. They rarely refer to the mass “mobilizations” in which women are rounded up against their will to have IUDs inserted, undergo abortions, or be sterilized or the severe punishments for those who evade the mandatory “surgeries” and bear children without government permission. Some say the Chinese authorities “have no choice” but to adopt extreme measures because of the severity of their “population problem.” Some warn darkly that other countries will soon have to adopt the Chinese model if they cannot get their birth rates down by voluntary means. Some point to certain countries they think need to adopt compulsory family planning immediately. But they virtually never acknowledge the political implications of what they are advocating or its possible cost in other important human values.

In fact, few countries in the world today would be politically capable of implementing the Chinese model in its totality. Only North Korea and possibly Vietnam would presently have sufficient central control for the purpose. However, components of the Chinese model, particular propaganda ploys and strategies, methods of organization, and promotional tactics can be adopted and implemented effectively enough to result in coercion even in countries lacking a high degree of control. All that is required is a politically inert, uneducated, impoverished population and an established pattern of bureaucratic authoritarianism. Quite a few countries in the Third World possess these qualifications.

Target setting

What are the coercive elements in the Chinese program that are relatively transferable? One of the most important is the practice of setting national targets for population control, rewarding officials who fulfill them, and punishing those who do not. In China the targets include population totals, birth rates or absolute numbers of births, natural increase rates or absolute population increments, attaining specified numbers or percentages of women of childbearing age using contraceptives, and reducing to specified levels the numbers or percentages of births of the third or higher birth order.

Some of these targets, notably the population totals and natural increase rates, are first established by the central authorities for the country as a whole and then allocated to the provinces, which are expected to re-allocate them to lower levels. In June 1979, then-Premier Hua Guofeng demanded that the national natural increase rate be reduced to 10 per thousand population in that year and 5 per thousand by l985.6 Later in 1979 Vice-Premier Chen Muhua, the official then in charge of family planning work, added the objective of reaching a zero population increase rate by the year 2000.7 In 1980 Hua officially adopted the goal of not exceeding a total of 1.2 billion people before the year 2000,8 on the basis of which annual and year 2000 target population totals were set for all the provinces. These targets, and especially the target natural increase rates, were hopelessly unrealistic and had to be abandoned by the late 1980s, but they have since been replaced by the goals of not letting the average natural increase rate exceed 1.25 percent for the rest of this century,9 keeping the population total below 1.3 billion until the year 2000,10 and reaching zero population growth by the year 2050!11 Central propaganda currently insists that failure to meet these targets will mean social and economic disaster for the whole country.

International agencies promoting family planning often encourage the managers of country programs to set goals and targets as a means of stimulating action on the part of family planning field workers, but, as in China, they show little interest in measures to prevent the stimulation from getting out of hand. In the field, target attainment and the personal recognition accorded to family planning workers who achieve it, can cause them to resort to coercion and other unethical promotional tactics unless such actions are strongly discouraged and field workers are closely supervised. Often the enthusiasm of program managers for positive results precludes such supervision.

Incentives-disincentives: family planning officials

In China, because of what is called the “responsibility system,” a method of monitoring the performance of officials at all levels by those at the next higher level, local officials have run a considerable risk if they ignore the demands from above for target fulfillment. Those who meet their targets are eligible for public commendation, special awards and career advancement. Those who fail are subject to public reprimands, fines, loss of awards and opportunities for advancement, demotions, and sometimes loss of Party membership and dismissal from their posts. Under these pressures, local officials who encounter popular resistance are strongly tempted to make use of their administrative powers to force compliance, particularly when the central authorities hint strongly that assigned targets are to be attained by whatever means necessary, as has happened both in China and India. This approach has led local officials in both countries to use denial of food rations, salary forfeitures, threats, and physical force to compel submission.

Even targets and goals that are ostensibly only hortatory can lead to compulsory measures when local administrators are commended and given awards for their achievement, as has happened also in Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam.12 In Indonesia in the 1980s, for example, target numbers of contraceptive acceptors were set by regional and village leaders and other local officials were held responsible for maintaining them.13 The pressures generated at the grass-roots level may be all the greater when international aid organizations such as the World Bank and U.S. Agency for International Development make continued assistance to Third World countries contingent on their attainment of family planning targets.14

Incentives-disincentives: individual families

Incentives and disincentives for individual families are another Chinese tactic that can have coercive force when what is at stake is critical for family welfare. In China they are incorporated into provincial and local family planning regulations that lend them the force of law. Among the incentives are preferential access to inoculations, education, and employment for children in one-child families and welfare services. Noncompliant families are denied such benefits and in addition subjected to heavy fines which have been escalating over the years. In October 1993, Jilin Province imposed new regulations explicitly stating that married couples “cannot voluntarily have children unless they obtain a child-bearing license” and charging fines of 1,000 to 5,000 yuan for the first unauthorized birth, 5,000 to 30,000 yuan for the second and 10,000 to 60,000 yuan for the third and subsequent.15 In Beijing Municipality, according to regulations adopted in 1991, the penalties were 5,000 to 50,000 yuan for an unauthorized second and 20,000 to 100,000 yuan for an unauthorized third chi1d.16 In a country in which annual family income in rural areas is often no more than a few hundred yuan, fines of such magnitude mean permanent indebtedness and poverty.

Less powerful governments may not have as many options in imposing heavy fines as the Chinese government, but similar effects may be achieved with other kinds of economic penalties or by threats and bullying. In 1973 Singapore charged higher maternity fees for higher parity births, gave priority to small families applying for public housing, eliminated paid maternity leave for third and subsequent births, and reduced income tax deductions for couples with four or more children,17 penalties which, incidentally, adversely affected the welfare of the children. In the 1980s Balinese Hindus who refused to use birth control were threatened with expulsion from their villages, and in India a decade earlier some government officials were able to fill their sterilization quotas by browbeating beggars into submitting to sterilization.18

Even incentives can have the force of compulsion if they relate to vital necessities, e.g., when an impoverished woman in Bangladesh is told that to qualify for free food she must be sterilized19 and other women are required to do the same to receive health care.20 In Egypt in the early 1970s some women were obliged to buy contraceptive pills if they wanted other kinds of medical treatment, a ploy devised by local family planning workers because they received payoffs from the sale of contraceptives as an incentive scheme.21 In India in the mid-1970s some workers were offered employment only if they agreed to be sterilized.22 If such practices can occur, as in the foregoing instances, without a prior Chinese model to follow, how much more readily if the Chinese example is held up as one to be emulated, as, for example, happened in Bangladesh in 1991.23

Collective incentives-disincentives

Another tactic of the Chinese program that may be applicable elsewhere is the use of collective incentives and disincentives to generate hostile public opinion against those who do not comply with program demands. This is sometimes called “peer pressure,” but that term usually connotes spontaneous social pressures; the pressures generated by government-imposed collective punishments for individual infractions are a very different matter. One form of this tactic was a policy adopted by the central authorities in 1984 to enlarge slightly the list of circumstances under which rural couples might be allowed to have a second child but make such authorizations contingent in any local community on the elimination of all unauthorized births. The purpose of this stratagem was to enlist the help of those couples who could qualify for second births in pressuring other couples to stop at one. Of course, not many couples could qualify for second births — only 10 percent (later increased to 20 percent) according to the rules approved by the central authorities in 198424 — which meant that this device could not generate a great deal of “peer pressure.” In the end it proved unenforceable. Other measures of this kind were reportedly more successful. In 1988 Heilongjiang Province instituted a policy that allowed rural couples whose first child was a girl to have a second child only in villages that had no unauthorized births.25 The central authorities, who commended the policy for imitation throughout the country, saw it as a means of tightening up on family planning implementation.26 Liaoning Province adopted a variant of the Heilongjiang policy requiring that a village have no unauthorized births, all of its women of childbearing age practicing birth control, and an effective system of population control before it could qualify for second births. If one couple in a qualifying village had an unauthorized birth, the whole village could lose the option of second births for one year. The policy was said to have “strengthened group awareness” among Liaoning's peasants!27

A similar policy in force in urban areas in China denies bonuses, awards, expansion plans, and other benefits to the entire work force of a factory or department if one of its employees has an unauthorized child. The alienation and ostracism, instigated by these measures, is intended to and apparently does put enormous pressure on couples who get pregnant or have a child without official permission.28 As a result, in urban China compliance with the one-child rule is almost total. The use of collective incentives and disincentives has also been reported from India where some villages were allowed irrigation water at subsidized prices only if they came up with the required number of sterilizations.29

Long-term contraceptives

Another feature of the Chinese program that is easily transferable elsewhere is the effort to shift the emphasis from contraceptives that require the repeated initiative of the user to “permanent” contraceptive measures—intrauterine devices, sterilization, and the new long-term injectables and implants. For voluntary contraceptive users these methods offer greater convenience, but in a compulsory program encountering strong public resistance the convenience is largely on the side of the program managers. They no longer have to maintain constant surveillance over women of childbearing age to make sure that they are not trying to start an unauthorized pregnancy or concealing one. Women pressured into adopting “permanent” measures may change their minds later, but there is often little they can do about it, especially if the family planning clinics refuse to reverse the sterilization or remove the IUD or the implant or charge exorbitant fees for doing so. In China the government-run clinics will only remove an IUD on request if it is causing severe side-effects. For a woman to remove her own is defined as a criminal act. Those who wish to do so must rely on illegal operations that often involve dangerous methods and unsanitary conditions. In Bangladesh, women suffering acute side-effects from Norplant implants accepted as part of an “experimental” program were reportedly told tl1e device could not be removed.30

Use of “non-government” organizations

A third readily transferable feature of the Chinese program that enhances the effectiveness of its coercive measures is the use of “volunteers” to monitor individual couples, “persuade” them to practice birth control, and report them to the authorities if they do not. These are organized through what are called “mass organizations,” such as the Chinese Family Planning Association (CFPA) and the All-China Women's Federation, ostensibly non-government organizations which are established at the prompting of the government to give the appearance of widespread popular support for official policies. In fact they are completely controlled by Party and government leaders and are therefore virtually equivalent to government agencies.

The CFPA was set up in May 1930, as the UNFPA was beginning its first program of assistance to family planning in China.31 CFPA members were said to be “senior civil servants, retired workers, medical staffs, [and] representatives of [other] mass organizations .…”32 How they were recruited is not indicated, but the numbers of local associations and their members have increased sharply during the current drive, reaching 900,000 local associations with 50 million members by January 1993.33 It is also unclear how the president of the CFPA is selected, but, significantly, the current president, Song Ping, is a member of the central Politburo and the State Council and thus has direct ties to the highest authority in the land. Even more significantly, the role of the CFPA, as defined in a letter addressed to it by Premier Li Peng and Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin and made public in May 1990, is to “help the Government mobilize the broad masses to take part in family planning.”34 The CFPA is clearly an instrument of state policy and its assistance helps to make compulsory family planning in China difficult to evade. Similar institutions can be set up in other countries to strengthen government control even in remote areas, and they may at times act even more aggressively than the government itself, as happened in South Korea in 1982.35

Promotional propaganda

Another exportable component of the Chinese program is the fact that the government-controlled media present, without challenge, only the official rationale for control of population growth. Dissenting voices are not heard. In January 1994, for example, two Chinese newspapers were reportedly punished for printing articles favoring second births and “opposing family planning.”36 China's controlled media tell the people that the country faces a population crisis, that its demographic situation is “grim,” that economic progress is imperiled, and that even the food supply is in danger because of excessive population growth.37 Some Chinese scho1ars disagree with the official line, but they are not allowed to press their views through the media. In Chinese terms one-sided propaganda constitutes “persuasion,” but it does not meet international standards for “freedom of information” and would not even if the contraceptive decisions of individual Chinese couples were entirely voluntary.

One-sided propaganda does not require the controlled press of a dictatorship. Even in democratic countries, including the United States, media discussions of population problems usually present only the views of population control advocates. Especially now, on the eve of the Cairo world population conference, the assertion that the world faces a “population crisis,” a belief which has long been part of the “received wisdom” in U.S. intellectual circles, is seldom seriously challenged in the mass media. Among “opinion makers,” few seem to be aware that the “crisis” idea lacks a firm empirical foundation. One can understand the usefulness of alarmist family planning propaganda to population control advocates in an era when many other alarms, all ostensibly serving humanitarian causes, are competing for limited public and private funding, but false, unfounded, or exaggerated claims succeed in raising money by means of false claims which violate the principle of “informed consent” as it applies to the donors of funds. In the long run such tactics and the groups who use them are likely to be discredited along with the causes they serve, and in the meantime alarmist rhetoric is deceptive and fundamentally unethical. Aside from specific features of the Chinese program that may be emulated by other countries, perhaps the main significance of holding up the Chinese program as a model is the message implicitly conveyed that coercive measures are warranted by the urgency of world population problems and will be viewed with tolerance if not approval by international agencies providing development assistance. Lauding the Chinese model creates a permissive atmosphere for the violation of human rights in family planning by implying that such rights should be curbed in the interests of the greater good of society. It implies that in family planning programs the end justifies the means. It also demonstrates the insincerity of claims by the UNFPA and other international family planning organizations that they approve only voluntary programs and respect human rights. Worse still, it tends to weaken the moral force of human rights in the world community by implying that they are not to be taken seriously, that their essential function is not to constrain inhumane actions but to provide cover for them.

Moreover, international agencies operating in China that applaud and recommend the China model should be aware that doing so invites serious political risks. The current crackdown on family planning in China has once again resulted in such a strong backlash that the central authorities have, as in previous escalations, felt obliged to caution lower levels against the extreme forms of coercion.38 In May 1993 there were peasant riots in Sichuan Province, China's leading province in birth control work, which were said to have been caused in part by “erroneous measures…formulated in the past by the central authorities” which caused local authorities to use “compulsory measures” to implement family planning. Among the measures was a notice sent to judicial departments suggesting that they refuse to hear complaints from peasants about coercive actions by family planning workers, which reportedly led family planning workers to believe they could use whatever means they thought necessary. The popular reaction was so violent that the central authorities reportedly became “panicky and worried” and feared that a single spark could start a “prairie fire” that might destabilize the whole country.39

If this report is accurate, it may be that the days of coercive family planning are numbered even in China. Either a disintegration of central authority or a change of leadership could result in a general abandonment or repudiation of unpopular policies as a new authority strove to enlist popular support. Even voluntary family planning would probably be rejected at least for a time. Deprived of the support and protection of the government, Chinese family planning workers, who have for years been subject to occasional reprisals from those they coerced, would probably suffer a more violent and sweeping backlash, and foreign agencies that supported China's coercive program might no longer be welcome there under a truly populist government. In any case, this is surely not a good time for foreign family planning advocates to be extolling the Chinese model.

John Aird is a China specialist, now retired from the US. Census Bureau where he served from 1957-1985. He has written numerous monographs and articles on population issues and population policy in China. This work was also presented at the Population Research Institute Conference in New York City, 14-15 April 1994.