China’s one-child policy hangover: Scarred women dismiss Beijing’s pro-birth agenda

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“What are your parents’ names?”

Fang, then a third grader, hemmed and hawed at the simple question as her teacher waited impatiently, unaware the 9-year-old was caught in a dilemma.

Since preschool, Fang had been officially registered as the daughter of her eldest uncle – an attempt by her birth parents to circumvent harsh penalties for having a second baby under China’s controversial one-child policy that was enforced from 1980 to 2015.

“I really had no idea which parents I was supposed to name,” Fang told CNN years later, using a pseudonym for privacy reasons.

Since then, Beijing has gradually lifted the birth caps from one to two children, then to three in 2021, in a bid to arrest a looming demographic crisis.

The one-child rules have gone, but the wounds of the past cast long shadows. A new generation of women like Fang, haunted by their parents’ struggles and their own sacrifices as children under the one-child policy, now eye parenthood with reluctance – making Beijing’s current pro-birth push a tough sell.

Fang was born in the 1990s – when the one-child limit was at its strictest – and became a big sister just a year later, when her mother “illegally” became pregnant again. To avoid punishment, the family sent Fang to live with extended family members, while her mother pretended her second pregnancy was her first.

Fang, now 30 and married, doesn’t want children at all.

“All the fears, drifts and insecurity felt throughout my own childhood have, more or less, played a part in my current call,” she said.

Sacrifices of eldest daughters

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