Across town, at the Beijing Normal University, Xiao Fei, a professor specializing in the mentally handicapped, takes a different view. China, he argues, simply can’t afford a Western-style social safety net. Not with 4.2 million children disabled by congenital illness – and only 250 specialized schools like the Wisdom Center and programs for just 100,000 handicapped kids at regular schools. ““If we can limit the number of these people,’’ says Xiao, ““the country will shed some of its burden.''
Some might call it radical surgery. China, the world’s most populous nation, has decided to weed out ““inferior’’ births. The new Maternal and Infant Health Care Law, effective June 1, 1995, bans marriages between those ““with certain genetic diseases of a serious nature’’ – unless they agree to sterilization or long-term contraception. The measure also requires doctors to ““advise’’ a couple to abort if they detect a hereditary disease or an abnormality. In theory, women can refuse the procedure. But in a country with a single-child policy – and a history of coercive abortions – the medical system is skewed more toward terminating pregnancies than promoting reproductive choice. The Politburo sees the law as a logical economic decision. ““They’re trying to achieve an $800 per capita income by the turn of the century,’’ says Susan Greenhalgh, a China expert at the University of California, Irvine. ““And that’s what’s driving their population policy. The state treats people like commodities – like refrigerators.''
Freezing the population – or, at least, stabilizing it – is key to China’s prosperity, say Beijing’s leaders. They point to the often losing battle, centuries old, between its people and its resources; China holds 23 percent of the world’s population, but only 7 percent of its arable land. They also argue that unlike the West, in which the middle class tends to have fewer children, China can’t control its birthrate through economic development alone. That’s why they imposed the draconian – and highly unpopular – demographic target of one child per couple in 1979, the same year Deng Xiaoping launched market reforms.
The one-child policy has had astonish-ing success – women now bear an average of 1.8 children, down from 4.8 in 1970 (chart) – and some unintended consequences. Stories abound of women forced to terminate second pregnancies. Because of a nearly universal preference for boys, millions of Chinese have used ultrasound tests to screen for males and to abort females. Many baby girls have been put up for adoption or sent to orphanages. Today, China has a lopsided ratio of girls to boys that may cause significant, if unknowable, social dislocation in the next century. Beijing has tried to clamp down by outlawing sex screening via ultrasound. But avoiding the restriction is no more difficult than a prearranged wink. The threat of long prison sentences hasn’t deterred many doctors from trying to supplement monthly salaries often as low as $50.
China experimented with eugenics laws earlier in 1988, in Gansu province. Cretinism is reportedly so severe there that broad areas are composed of ““idiot villages’’ in which half the inhabitants suffer from retardation. Regional legislation took shaky aim at the problem by banning childbirth by the mentally retarded ““to improve the quality of the population and speed the pace of eradicating poverty.’’ But local officials apparently got it backward: the disability was caused by poverty, brought on by insufficient consumption of iodine, common in the poorest provinces. This form of retardation was environmental, not hereditary; stopping it doesn’t require forced sterilization and abortion.
Last December, China tentatively floated an ambitious attempt at genetic engineering. A national draft law, On Eugenics and Health Protection, sought to control the reproduction of people with mental illness, venereal disease, hepatitis and other afflictions. Human-rights organizations responded with outrage, blasting the measure’s moral and scientific bases. ““Syphilis and hepatitis have nothing to do with genetics,’’ insists David Rothman, professor of social medicine at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. ““The state is blaming the individual citizen for the problem instead of providing appropriate public-health resources.''
This time round, China kept details of the renamed law deliberately vague. It targets genetic diseases that ““may totally or partially deprive the victim of the ability to live independently,’’ said Health Minister Chen Minzhang. Beijing tried to head off Western censure of the single-child policy with a PR blitz in the English-language press, playing up an existing ban on sex screening.
The eugenics law hasn’t drawn much criticism in China – even by those most directly affected. Li Zeming, an employee in a Beijing hotel, spends an hour each evening teaching his mentally and physically disabled 10-year-old son, Li Lei, how to hold a pen. ““He used to clutch it in his fist,’’ he explains. ““Now he can manage it between his fingers.’’ Li never had a chance to use ultrasound to detect his son’s disability; had it been available, he would have chosen abortion. ““My son is not a good contribution to the country or society,’’ he says matter-of-factly.
Can coercion solve China’s population problem? Scale poses a major challenge: a combined 190 million undocumented migrants living in cities, and residents of the poorest provinces often escape Beijing’s control. Tougher laws will undoubtedly win some compliance – and spur other people to find ingenious ways around them.
