A One-Child Time Bomb

Everywhere I turn, whether it is to trendy new magazines like Wired or Internet, or to the mesmerised users of the equipment at the latest hot spot in town, the Cybersmith, where access to state-of-the-art cyberspace technologies can be rented, or even while lurching along the Infobahn myself, I am bombarded with 'data' that proclaims the arrival of a new community in cyberspace.

Gone is the need for eye-to-eye contact, I am assured: rather, virtual reality is the new reality. However, as a traditionalist, not given to forsaking lightly person-to-person contact, nothing can replace the site of the real community where valuable information is exchanged - namely, the airplane. In unanticipated encounters over many years, I have learned much that is new to me and often something that advances my own research.

Such was the case on a recent flight to Chicago. In the course of a 15-minute exchange with someone whom I had not seen in many years, the fragments of a puzzle from a research trip to China almost a decade ago - what would be the consequences of population policies on child-rearing patterns? - were quickly assembled into a coherent picture. Information gleaned in-flight allowed me to understand how China's determined, and partially successful, efforts to slow its once-soaring population growth have begun to change the society in largely unanticipated ways. I do not think the Internet could have been half so informing.

Denis F. Simon, my fellow traveller on that trip, is an expert in science and technology transfer, particularly in China's weapons and industrial-technology policies. I asked him whether the rumours were true that more than two million Chinese were working inside Russia near the Manchurian border.

Searching for information about potential new routes for nuclear proliferation, I have been trying to ascertain whether this new mixing, which is reported to have created 'permeable boundaries', is facilitating the transfer from Russia to China of sophisticated military designs and equipment and also the movement of scientists and engineers, many with expertise in the theory and design of nuclear and conventional weapons. 'Yes, it's true,' he responded. 'And the Chinese are marrying Russian women.'

The light bulb flashed. Of course, they would be marrying Russian women. There are not enough nubile Chinese women available to marry the excess male children born after the government started to impose strict controls over pregnancies.

Begun in the early 1970s, the policy led in 1979 to the edict of one family-one child, the timing of which would be determined by a government representative in the residential district of the couple. Although the children from the pre-1979 policy have not moved into the marriage-age bracket, the group that preceded the more draconian edict has. Many of them are in Russia today, presaging the larger wave of excess bachelors in China.

Just how infant boys came to predominate over infant girls was not a subject Chinese officials or colleagues wanted to discuss in the 1980s. In polite urban society, the talk was of amniocentesis and, more recently, ultrasound, to determine the sex of an unborn child. If it revealed a girl, abortion could follow quickly.

More chilling were the tales from rural areas of the infanticide of girls by methods including drowning, abandonment, starvation, withholding of medicine, or just indifferent attention after birth.

Images of the 'little emperor', as the only-male child is described in China, flashed back immediately as Professor Simon talked about large-scale marriage at the border.

On Sundays in the crowded Chinese city parks, I had seen these handsome little boys, dressed magnificently, striding ahead of their flying wedge of proud parents - already aware of their special status. Uninterested in the chorus or the orchestra, when they arrived at school they wanted to be soloists. Is this the model personality a socialist-based, or even capitalist-led, society wants to cultivate?

Many older Chinese have been shocked by the consumption-oriented young adults who have emerged from this policy. In a recent study, anthropologist Jeanne Shea reported that middle-aged Chinese women were somewhat fearful of the future when they anticipated China's leadership being passed on to the new generation of 'spoiled', 'self-centred', and 'lazy', youth.

It is not the single-child policy alone that has contributed to the problems of the single-child society. The fast-growing economy, with its emphasis on free enterprise and the rapid accumulation of money - a far cry from Mao's Marxism - has dominated the recent cultural upheaval. At the same time, the control of population growth and the only-child phenomenon have had repercussions that were not anticipated when the seemingly rational policies were first imposed.

In fairness, the policy does have to be evaluated in the context of the alternative - a potentially disastrous leap in the population. Without any government action the population would have soared. With state intervention since the 1970s there has been a steady drop, from an annual growth rate of 2.4 per cent to the current 1.3 per cent.

Even with the single-child policy, the population has grown to more than 1 billion, seriously threatening the gains from the rapidly growing economy. Environmental pollution, already in evidence in many areas, could increase sharply under the oppressive demands for space, clean air, arable soil, water and energy. The economic miracle could come undone under these circumstances.

Obviously, policy decisions that reduce the birthrate but also protect human rights have to be carried out, but so does planning for the likely consequences of new initiatives. Social or developmental psychologists do not seem to have been central to drafting the drastic only-child policy. Rather, the programme bears the hallmarks of economic planning - the numbers took precedence. Fortunately, in this instance, 'permeable boundaries' have provided one partial resolution to the brideless society - the opportunity to marry abroad.

China and the world have to confront overpopulation. Between 1987 and the turn of the century, the global population will swell from five to six billion. To curb this potentially destructive global growth, more than the numbers have to be examined. Social scientists, scientists and engineers have to be contributors to planning the difficult decisions that should have been made long ago.

The ramifications are just becoming clear and merit serious investigation, because the next attempts at population control - beyond contraception and abortion - might be even less humane. A lottery - or even more authoritarian methods (and punishments) to determine not how many children each family or individual be allowed, but rather who out of a child-bearing age group might be permitted to reproduce, could tear apart even solidly democratic countries.