China’s parents have begun to rebel

Brendan O’Neill says that the state’s cruel and antiquated one-child policy is being propped up by British environmentalists with an agenda — but the Chinese are striking back

Professor Yang Zhizhu is a brave man. In flagrant defiance of China’s womb-policing one-child policy, he and his wife have chosen to become outlaws by having two children and flat out refusing to pay the second-child fine (around £18,000). ‘Why should I pay money for having my own kid?’ asked Professor Yang in an interview last month. ‘It’s our right as citizens.’ For the crime of starting a two-child family, Professor Yang was fired from his job at the Beijing Youth Politics College and now faces an uncertain future.

Yet at the same time as this Beijing-based academic is taking huge risks to become, in his words, ‘a nail in the coffin of China’s one-child policy’, some British academics — of the miserabilist, misanthropic variety — are providing the Chinese state with new arguments for keeping the one-child policy. A Chinese teacher is trying to topple it, while British researchers are helping to prop it up.

It all started when Yang’s wife, Chen Hong, gave birth to their second child on 21 December last year. They were immediately slapped with the hefty state fine. After Professor Yang refused to pay — not, he says, because he couldn’t afford it, but because the one-child policy is ‘ridiculous’ — he was turfed out of his cushy job last month and will now live on ‘subsistence allowances’. As an illegal second child, his daughter, Ruonan, will not get the Beijing hukou, the permanent residency document that recognises her as a citizen. This means she won’t have access to public services such as education, medical facilities and, later in life, Beijing-based jobs.