One for all

Mei Fong tells the routine story of a girl who managed to conceal an illegal pregnancy until the baby was almost due, when family planning officials surrounded her hiding place at night. ‘She ran and ran and ran until she came to a pond. Then she ran in, until the water was at her neck. She stood there and began to cry.’

Through her tears she explained that she needed the baby to stop her husband and his parents abusing her for not producing a son. This was the mid 1990s, but the same thing could have happened in rural China at any point in the past 1,000 years, except for the dénouement. Officials dragged the girl from the water, and hauled her off to hospital where the baby was killed. Even if it had been a boy, the only way the family could have kept him would have been by paying a fine of between two and ten times their annual income.

If it was a girl, she would have been strangled at birth in the traditional way. Mei Fong herself was born in Malaysia to Chinese parents who already had four unwanted daughters. ‘Be glad you’re not in the old country,’ her family told her as a child: ‘You’d never have been born.’ Sons are essential to carry on the family name as well as to support ageing parents, and bury them when they die. Infanticide, always a standard solution to the problem of surplus girls, meant that the one-child policy was skewed by gender imbalance from the moment it became law in 1980.

It originated with military planners specialising in rocket science, the only body of government technical advisers to survive Mao’s purges intact. Their recommendation appealed precisely because its drastic simplicity took no account of human behaviour or feelings: ‘The country had been so beaten and demoralised, its intellectual capital so sapped by the Cultural Revolution, the idea of rationing children, in the same way as coal and grain were rationed, made sense.’