China’s Hidden Children: Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Cost of the One-Child Policy

Abstract

The world in the twentieth century witnessed quite a few gargantuan social engineering projects, from forced massive collectivization in the Soviet Union, compulsory villagization in Africa, to planned economies in a large number of socialist countries following the Second World War. Aimed at transforming societies and modeling human lives, such projects demonstrated the might of the state power, not infrequently with terrifying horror and human tragedies of massive scales. A particular and extreme example was the birth control campaign in the People’s Republic of China, the world’s most populous country. In the context of a global fear of population explosion in the latter half of the century and with a trade-mark known as the one-child policy, China’s birth control campaign came after most of its fertility decline had already been achieved. In three-and-half long decades, enforcement of the policy deprived Chinese families and individuals of their reproductive rights, resulted in tens of millions of sterilizations, IUD insertions, and induced abortions, almost all born by women, and forcefully altered the family and kin network of hundreds of millions of Chinese families. Kay Ann Johnson’s book, China’s Hidden Children, offers a penetrating political analysis of this social engineering project, interweaved with gut-wrenching stories of parents and children, who were the victims of this unprecedented and extreme birth control policy.