An official with the Jiangsu provincial family planning commission confirmed that Mr. Zhang was under investigation and said it was ongoing but gave no other details. “We don’t know yet how we will deal with it, if it turns out to be true,” said the official, who gave only his surname, Li.

[...]

News of the investigation comes at awkward time for the China’s family planning authorities. Beijing officially continues to defend the one-child policy, saying it has prevented 400 million births and helped lift the country out of poverty. But public anger over forced late-term abortions, anxiety over gender imbalances and shifting demographics have prompted increasing calls for the policy to be scrapped, or at least relaxed.

Shifting attitudes toward the one-child rule were evident online Thursday, as a number of Internet users rushed to defend Mr. Zhang.

“I applaud Zhang Yimou for having more than one child,” wrote one user of the Twitter-like Sina Weibo microblogging service. “Having children is a right bestowed on man by Heaven.” [Source]

As the Guardian reports, anger has centered around Zhang’s treatment for breaking the law as compared to the that of common citizens:

Disparity in the treatment of those who break the laws has fuelled public anger about inequality.

“It is just a policy for limiting the poor’s right to give birth,” one angry microblogger wrote in response to the news about Zhang.

Another asked: “Why doesn’t China have the world’s respect? Look at the rich and officials with flocks of wives and mistresses … If ordinary people had more children they would be punished or fined to death. He is fine.

“Zhang’s quality is worse than ordinary people. An unfair society can never receive respect.” [Source]

AP has more on the Internet reaction to the news:

Users of China’s lively social media lined up to criticize Zhang and drew distinctions between how the elite and ordinary people are treated.

“However many children a person has is their basic right, but in a twisted society, basic rights have become a privilege,” Beijing resident Liu Weiling, who works for a media company, wrote on Sina Weibo.

“Why is China unable to win the world’s respect?” asked author Christopher Jing. “Rich people with groups of mistresses, old celebrities changing wives, Zhang Yimou getting so many privileges. Four women and seven kids, if this was an ordinary person they would have killed you or fined you an unreasonable amount of money, but he is fine … he is no better than ordinary people, such an unfair world will never gain respect.” [Source]

Read more about the one-child policy and about Zhang Yimou via CDT.

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Although initially introduced as a “temporary measure”, more than 30 years later this barbaric experiment in social engineering is, astonishingly, still in force. China’s totalitarian government may have relaxed its control of the means of production, but it has maintained firm control of the means of reproduction, and continues to intrude into the most intimate aspects of an individual’s life, stunting relationships, destroying traditional family life and spreading fear. Two generations of children have grown up without siblings, uncles, aunts or cousins. Women have lost sovereignty of their bodies. The state owns their ovaries, fallopian tubes and wombs, and has become the silent, malevolent third participant in every act of love.

[…] In 2007, I read of riots breaking out in Bobai County in China’s south-western Guangxi province. Under pressure from higher authorities to meet birth targets, local officials had launched a vicious crackdown on family-planning violators. Squads had rounded up 17,000 women and subjected them to sterilisations and abortions and had extracted 7.8m yuan (£800,000) in fines for “illegal births”, ransacking the homes of families who refused to pay. Tens of thousands of peasants occupied Bobai County town and set fire to government buildings to protest against the crackdown. This was the largest outbreak of popular unrest since the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square.

Shortly after the Beijing Olympics of 2008, I travelled to Guangxi, where I had decided my new novel, The Dark Road, would open. Before I start work on a book, I often go on a journey. […] By the time I arrived in Bobai, almost a year after the riots, the burned government buildings had been repaired, but there was still anger in the air. […]

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A review of the The Dark Road from The Guardian gives a brief introduction to Ma and his previous work:

Although best known as an exiled dissident defined by his head-on opposition to virtually every aspect of mainstream Chinese politics, Ma Jian is a writer of rare originality whose work effortlessly combines a sense of the avant garde with uncomfortable humour, underpinned at all times by rage at the social changes that have affected China over the past 30 years. The brilliance of his 2008 masterpiece, Beijing Coma, was already anticipated in Red Dust, his atmospheric travel memoir, which recounted the young intellectual’s spiritual and political escape from the capital to the west of China in the 1980s. Subsequent fiction such as The Noodle Maker and Stick Out Your Tongue developed a style that blended internal landscapes with flashes of magic realism and surreal comedy.

The Dark Road is an angrier, more openly confrontational novel than its predecessors. Set in the river towns and vast waste sites that line the banks of the Yangtze in Guangdong province, it tackles the grim issue of forced abortions and sterilisations with a prolonged and unflinching gaze.[...]

The Telegraph’s review explains how Ma was able to gather research on the sensitive topics dealt with in The Dark Road:

[...]When researching The Dark Road, Ma posed as an official reporter to witness the forced sterilisations and abortions carried out by the government, and as a vagrant, living among the fugitives of China’s one-child policy.

And yet one does not need to read a biography to determine the authenticity of Ma’s writing, which sings out through in this translation (by his wife, the talented Flora Drew). The Dark Road is a long, explicit account of the depredations endured by both a people and a mother forced to flee from her home merely because of a second pregnancy.[...]

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Sun and other advocates of the One-Child policy say that’s why it should continue, to let China’s population shrink back down to a more sustainable level.

Wang Feng of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center has a different view.

“These assumptions about the maximum population China can sustain was based on the technology of the 1970s,” Wang says. “It’s advanced considerably since then. China now has 30 percent more people, but all of them are eating better, living better, and we’re producing more grain, more efficiently.”

Yes, there’s pollution, he says, but that has less to do with how many people there are than with China’s choice to use mostly coal and poorly refined diesel as sources of energy.

“Whether the population shrinks, and how you get there, is a moral question,” he says. “I don’t think it’s a goal that should be set by anyone other than members of society, responding to the happy effect of longevity, as a result of human progress. It shouldn’t be designed by scholars and implemented by government.”

Read more about the one-child policy in China, via CDT.

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In my kindergarten class of only children, we drew pictures of the things five-year-olds were supposed to know. China was a red flag with dots of yellow stars. Home was the cinderblock high-rises where we, children of the urban Army base, lived. A family was three stick figures: two big, one small. Even when chattering about our “sisters” and “brothers,” as we sometimes did in a flurry of familial intimacy, it was understood that we could only mean cousins.

[...] In the village elementary school where I enrolled for three months—semesters were divided according to the harvest season—I did not know how many of my classmates had siblings. Their questions were not about the fact that I was an only child so much as about the type of tricycle I had and the number of times per week that I ate meat.

[...] A more perceptive child might have noticed that there were fewer only children in the village—that there “brothers” might actually mean brothers—and that my two uncles and my father all went on to earn university degrees, take up residence in cities, and abide by their policy of single births, while all three of my aunts bore two sons each in the village of their birth. Not me.

Nor did I notice the strangely high ratio of boys to girls in the village. Sons have always been preferred, and baby girls are often aborted before birth—in my aunt’s generation, they were sold or sometimes killed. To me at the time, it just seemed advantageous: our teacher ranked grades according to our sexes, and I came in third over-all and first among the girls in my class (I only reported the latter to my mother).

See more on the one-child policy via CDT.

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[...]Yesterday [Tuesday] evening, the Chinese Consulate finally confirmed the identity of the third fatality: a Chinese national in her mid-twenties, who was attending graduate school at Boston University and majoring in statistics.

[...]Lu Lingzi was a native of Shenyang, a city in northeastern China about a hundred miles from the North Korean border. She attended Shenyang Northeastern High School, from which she graduated in 2008. She did well enough there to land a spot at the Beijing Institute of Technology, where she pursued a bachelor’s degree in international economics. In Boston, she had hoped to obtain her master’s.

On Monday afternoon, Lu joined the marathon-watchers with two other overseas Chinese friends, partaking in one of their first and more cacophonous of American traditions. Exploration seemed like a welcome pastime. On her Weibo photo album, Lu had already posted some of her favorite foreign forays: blueberry waffles, Godiva dark chocolate, a CD cover of an Itzhak Perlman violin concerto.

Near the finish line, the three girls may have stopped, craning their necks, immobile in a sea of flush, anxious faces. The sheer energy and anticipation, not two months after the Chinese Spring Festival, might have even reminded the recent émigrés of another holiday season, celebrated an ocean away.[...]

Fox News has more on Lü’s early life, family background, and educational career, noting her outstanding academic performance and social involvement while at BU:

Back home in the Chinese city of Shenyang — where residents are still bundled in heavy coats to fend off chilly temperatures and strong winds — Lu’s family home is an apartment on the grounds of a Communist Party training academy where her grandfather was a professor, neighbors said.

[...]Lu went to a nearby primary school before being admitted to a highly selective experimental public facility, Northeast Yucai School, where she studied from seventh through 12th grade. About 100 of the 600 graduates annually go to study abroad in countries including Australia, Singapore, Japan, France, Britain and the United States, and the rest usually go to top universities, often in Beijing. Local media say Lu scored the second highest in her class to go to Beijing Institute of Technology.

“It is such a pity. She was an excellent student and she got a chance to study abroad but didn’t finish her study,” Shenyang resident Zhang Zhuang said in an interview. “It is such a sad story. Her parents must be heartbroken.”

Lü’s parents, who were issued U.S. visas today, are indeed heartbroken by the tragic loss of their only daughter, as can be seen in a public statement that they released on the Boston University website. In a report connecting Lü’s story to ongoing policy-related news topics, the Wall Street Journal suggests that the one-child policy, and the solidarity of a nation living under it, may explain why the sentiment surrounding Lü’s death is resonating so far in China:

Mr. Lu’s death resonates with many in China because of its one-child policy, which was implemented in 1980 to slow China’s soaring population growth. As a result, many households put their hopes, dreams and fears behind their only child. Said one post on China’s Sina Weibo microblogging service widely repeated online: “An only child is the lifeblood of a family!”

Many parents rely on their children for care-taking and social security as they age, making losses such as Ms. Lu’s often painful both emotionally and economically, said Wang Feng, a population expert and director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing.

“With losses of only children, highlighted by cases like this, and those from other kinds of attention-getting tragedies, hundreds of millions of Chinese parents with only one child inevitably think about what they would do should such an utterly unfortunate thing happen to them,” Mr. Wang said.

As Chinese netizens light digital candles remembering a lost compatriot, Boston residents are mourning the unexpected atrocity. At an interfaith memorial service in Boston yesterday, President Barack Obama expressed the collective grief of the United States. In his speech, he extended his condolences directly to the Lü family, and to  all those affected by the bombing. From the New York Times:

Our prayers are with the Lu family of China, who sent their daughter, Lingzi, to BU so that she could experience all this city has to offer. She was a 23-year-old student, far from home. And in the heartache of her family and friends on both sides of a great ocean, we’re reminded of the humanity that we all share.

BU Today reports that a memorial scholarship fund will be established in Lü’s name:

“It’s a fitting tribute and the right thing to do,” says Kenneth Feld (SMG’70), a BU trustee who proposed the memorial scholarship Wednesday at a meeting of the executive committee of the Campaign for BU, which he chairs. Before the meeting adjourned, its seven members had committed $560,000 to the fund, created in accordance with the preferences of the LU family, who will be traveling to Boston this week from their home in Shenyang, China.

[...]“The scholarship fund will welcome all contributions, says Feld. “Every one has real meaning.”

For more on Lü Lingzi’s death at the Boston Marathon and how the Chinese microblog community reacted to it, see prior CDT coverage, or click through to read the full stories quoted above.

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Former State Councilors Song Jian and Peng Peiyun, who once ranked above cabinet ministers and remain influential, have been lobbying China’s top leaders, mainly behind closed doors: Song wants them to keep the policy while Peng urges them to phase it out, people familiar with the matter said.

[…] From 1988 to 1998 Peng, 83, was in charge of implementing the one-child policy as head of the Family Planning Commission. In the mid 1990s she became Beijing’s highest ranking woman, serving as state councilor, a position superior to a minister.

Like many scholars, she now believes it is time to relax the one-child policy. She first revealed publicly that her views had shifted at an academic conference in Beijing less than a year ago, a change rooted partly in economic concerns.

[…] Song became interested in the issue of population control during his years as a Moscow-trained missile scientist.

“When I was thinking about this, I took Malthus’s book to research the study of population,” Song said in a 2005 interview with China Youth Magazine, referring to the English writer Thomas Malthus, who predicted in the 18th century that population growth would outstrip food production.

Many Chinese are not subject to the one-child policy, while others are able to disregard it. Nevertheless, critics argue, it has created a socially corrosive gender gap, undermined the future of China’s economy, increased diabetes rates and produced “more pessimistic, nervous, less conscientious, less competitive and more risk averse” children. Meanwhile, cases like that of Feng Jianmei, forced to have an abortion at seven months, and a 13-month-old boy crushed to death by a family planning official’s car have sharpened moral outrage at heavy-handed enforcement. At South China Morning Post, Amy Li reports another recent case, of a Hubei woman pressured into undergoing sterilization against medical advice by incentives and threats from local officials.

Shen Hongxia, a mother of two, suffered from gynecological diseases. Doctors had warned her not to have the sterilisation operation because it would harm her, said her husband, Cheng Shixiong.

But family planning officials at Hubei’s Tongshan county, where the couple lived, kept pressuring her after they allegedly received a bad rating from provincial officials for failing to “crack down” on families with more than one child, said Cheng.

[…] Shen received the operation to be sterilised on the morning of March 19 after officials went to her home and threatened legal action if she didn’t comply, explained her husband.

She bled to death hours after the operation.

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Lu Qingmin, or Min, is typical of the migrant workers I met while researching a book in the factory city of Dongguan. Born in one place, working in another, and married into a third, they are as adept at moving between worlds as the frequent-flying global élite, with the difference that they have never left their home country. The Chinese government, which is good at transmitting edicts from Beijing down through the provinces to counties and villages, isn’t set up for people who don’t respect borders. Married migrant women are required to send home a certificate every year confirming that they are not pregnant; Min has never done this. Her older sister, who works in nearby Shenzhen, also has two children. The owner of an apartment that I rented in Dongguan from 2005 to 2006 had two children; so did a businessman who gave me a tour of the city’s karaoke bars. “Most of my friends have two children, except the ones who have three children,” Wu Chunming, a migrant who has lived in the city for nineteen years, told me. “In the villages now, having two children is standard.”

For so long a symbol of the authoritarian state at its most coercive, China’s policy limiting most families to one child is slipping into irrelevance. Last week, the government announced it would merge the National Population and Family Planning Commission, which has overseen the policy for three decades, into the Ministry of Health—a tacit admission that limiting births no longer requires the scrutiny and enforcement it once did. Most observers see this as a first step toward dismantling a policy that has already been rendered inconsequential by increased mobility, rising wealth, and the sense that stringent controls are no longer necessary. Wealthy Chinese can travel to the United States to give birth, which also confers the bonus of American citizenship on the child. Couples one step down the economic ladder may have a second child in Hong Kong, Macau, or Singapore. Families with two offspring are commonplace among the country’s millions of mobile entrepreneurs; an estimated 150 million rural migrants enjoy similar freedoms. Even in the countryside, where heavy penalties and forced abortions were more prevalent in the past, officials are loosening their grip. In my conversations with rural Chinese people over the past several years, it has become clear that fines that were once prohibitive are now just a nuisance—a couple of months’ wages, rather than a lifetime of savings.

China newz interviews Chang about her book and how things have changed for the migrant workers she portrayed in recent years:

china newz: Do you still keep in touch with Min and Chunming?

Leslie T Chang: Yes, I am in touch with both of them.

china newz: How have their lives changed since your book?

Leslie T Chang: They have both continued to pursue their own paths. Since the book came out, Min married a fellow migrant, had two daughters, and lived for a while in his family’s village with him. She and her husband subsequently returned to Dongguan on their own to work in a construction crane factory. They recently moved to Huizhou, another city in Guangdong province, where she works in the purchasing and finance department of a small cellphone factory. Now her husband, two daughters, and parents-in-law are all together in the city. Chunming has changed jobs five or six times since the book came out. She now works in sales and training for a chain of traditional-style tea houses. She is still unmarried and looking for love and a suitable husband. My book is actually being published in China this month, so they will finally be able to read the book in full. I am very curious to see what their responses will be.

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The Chinese have enacted more than a half-billion birth-control procedures, including 336 million abortions, since 1971. In addition, Chinese medical officials sterilized almost 200 million men and women since the policy was initiated. They have also inserted more than 400 million intra-uterine devices in women, sometimes by force.

[…] The Daily Telegraph reported that, according to Beijing government researchers, China records 13 million abortions annually, or 1,500 every hour.

[…] “This makes China’s population look more like a developed country than a developing one, which is a key disadvantage in labor-intensive industries,” Ken Peng, an economist with BNP Paribas, said, according to the Financial Times.

[…] “We need to find a new family-planning policy to fit with the times,” Huang Jiefu, a former vice minister at the Health Ministry, said. ”Where else in the world can you find a family-planning bureau? It was quite appropriate to fold it into the [Health] Ministry.”

There are also some analysts who suspect that there will be an evaluation of the success of the policy. For the Atlantic, journalists Dorinda Elliott and Alexa Olesen weigh in on the possible end of the one-child policy. Dorinda Elliott says:

One example: I had a chilling conversation on a recent trip to Zheijiang with a jolly, somewhat pudgy small-town propaganda official that made me think hard about the inherent cruelty of the One-Child Policy. In little more than one breath, he talked about his current work, which is to help build a “civilized society” (whatever that means), and then about his old job as a police officer, when he had to enforce the One-Child Policy.

I asked him what he did when someone didn’t want to have an abortion. “We did work,” he replied. And what does that mean, I asked. “Well,” he said reluctantly, clearly embarrassed, “we used force.”

Alexa Olesen comments on forced abortion:

I had a similar experience interviewing a clinic official about a forced abortion case in 2006. The mother had been within weeks of her due date. The official confirmed that they aborted her baby because “she hadn’t followed the rules.” This was her first child but she had gotten pregnant before applying for the necessary birth permit. It was a horrifying story. Unsurprisingly, the victim’s lawyer said he thought the real issue was an unpaid bribe.

I wanted to add something about whether this policy was in fact “a necessary evil.” This is the essential question and its answer will determine how the policy is painted in history books, either as a measure that helped lift millions out of poverty and fast-track China to prosperity, or a cruel and unnecessary restriction that caused immeasurable heartache and suffering … or, maddeningly, both those things.

See also How Many Fetuses Killed in 40 Years, via CDT.

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Caijing learned it is likely the new government will gradually implement a policy over the next few years in which couples are allowed to have two children if either spouse is an only child. The nation has already implemented a countrywide two-child policy in which couples can have two children if both spouses are only children.

An official from the National Population and Family Planning Commission who asked not to be named said the most likely scenario after the government restarts population policy adjustment will be for the newly-established national health and family planning commission to come up with an adjustment proposal. Upon approval by the State Council, the proposal will be voluntarily implemented step-by-step in various provinces. Due to concerns about population imbalances in rural areas, policy adjustments will focus first on areas with lower population pressure. Meanwhile, it is likely that the adjustment policy will be implemented last in mega cities like Beijing and Shanghai due to the immense population resources pressure in these areas as well as local authorities’ cautious approach towards population growth.

Bloomberg Businessweek’s Christina Larson writes that talk of reform is gaining momentum in Beijing even if official comments remain:

When asked point-blank what to expect next, the deputy head of China’s State Commission Office for Public Sector Reform told reporters not to anticipate immediate policy changes. Yet as Wang Feng, a sociologist and demography expert at the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing, points out in an e-mail interview, that rhetoric may be “purely political.” “The government wants to change but does not want to see total chaos,” he writes. “Insisting no change in policy [is forthcoming] is just lip service for now.”

Wang, however, believes change won’t be long in coming. “As much as the government would like to see a gradual process, the collapse of the policy will be swift,” he predicts. “This is so largely for two reasons: People in the bureaucratic organization of implementing the one-child policy all can see the writing on the wall and have to worry about their career and future, and the cost of implementing any transitional measure [such as the costs of tracking, identifying, and exempting more couples from the policy] would be prohibitive if not impossible with China’s migrating population and the unpopularity of the policy.”

See more on the one-child policy and China’s demographics via CDT.

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Sun Yunfan: James Palmer is very insightful in pointing out the “values gap” and “information gap” between the balinghou, or the post-80s generation, and their parents. Aside from being a whole generation of only children—due to the One Child Policy—balinghou kids belong to probably the first generation in Chinese history who collectively enjoyed a good education and relatively unlimited access to information. When they talk to their parents, they often find themselves trapped in a muddled swamp of language filled with fragments of autocratic, superstitious, Confucian, Maoist, and Social Darwinist beliefs—in other words, they don’t share a common ground with their parents on which to have any meaningful discussion.

However, many balinghou believe that this communication crisis that emerged in China in the 21st century is not that different from what the New Youth faced during the May Fourth movement 100 years ago. […]

Orville Schell: I loved reading Palmer’s piece, but as I pondered it, I realized that, as in most complex societies, there are a lot of different currents flowing at the same time. But, what is undeniable in China is that, having first cancelled traditional culture, then made serial efforts to re-invent itself in the guise of a mash-up of Chiang Kai-shekist politics, Confucianism and Christianity; Mao Zedongist proletarian/Marxism; Deng Xiaopingist “to get rich is glorious” market culture, there is now a heightened state of confusion over just what it is that Chinese should make of whatever strange sibuxiang 四不象 (neither fish nor fowl) trend they should take as their True North when it comes to culture and values.

The original article is reposted in condensed form at ChinaFile, but the full version at Aeon Magazine is highly recommended.

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She has been working on legalizing same-sex marriage and has sent letters to NPC deputies every year since 2003, but was either informed that those proposals could not be sent to the legislature because deputies could not get the required 30 signatures from other delegates, or she simply received no response.

“Even if the proposal gets sent to the NPC, it might be buried under a pile of proposals from other deputies,” Li Yinhe said.

[… S]kepticism remains, even among gay couples. “If gay marriage was one day allowed in China, I wouldn’t dare get married with my lover here, because I could not predict how people would look at me and I wouldn’t be sure whether my future career would be affected by this disclosure,” college student Zhou Lü, who is planning to get married in the UK, told the Global Times, adding that regardless of policies or influences from the West, he is skeptical China’s traditional culture will ever really accept gay people.

Another initiative to raise the issue at the NPC came in a petition from almost 200 parents of gays and lesbians organized by a Guangzhou-based rights group. From Kaijing Xiao at ABC News:

In the open letter, the parents wrote: “Some of our children have been with their same-sex partners for almost 10 years; they care for and love each other deeply, but they are unable to legally authorize medical treatment for their partners when they are ill and in need of an operation. As the parents of homosexuals, we are often worried, because they cannot legally marry, and this impacts to various degrees their ability to adopt; authorize necessary medical treatment; inherit their partner’s assets, or even buy an apartment.”

[…] “We have followed the government’s one-child-policy,” Wang said in a phone interview. “My son doesn’t have any siblings. I don’t depend on the government to take care me when I’m old, so how can I trust the government would take care of my son when he is old? He wouldn’t have anyone to authorize medical treatment for him after I die.

“My child and many other gay kids are wonderful people,” she insisted. “They should have the right to get married and adopt children.”

See more on gay marriage in China via CDT.

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Cai Fang, director of the Institute of Population and Labour Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, says birth control remains an important family planning policy and it makes no difference which government agency enacts it.

“Over the years, we have gradually transferred from a strict one-child policy to one-and-a-half children and then a two-children policy, but strict birth control will still be the family planning policy,” Cai said. “The only thing that might change is how different government agencies implement birth control.”

Scrapping the commission does not mean its family planning work is not important any more. “It has no impact on the family planning policy,” he said.

Cai says that part of the commission’s work dealing with family planning services overlaps with the health ministry’s activities, while its other work (to do with planning, controlling and drafting strategy) is more in line with the functions of the National Development and Reform Commission.

This restructuring is part of a larger reorganization of the government. Another South China Morning Post article says experts claim the axing of the Population and Family Planning Commission reflects economic and demographic changes:

“Social conditions changed, the economy changed, demographics changed,” said Huang Rongqing, a professor of population at the Capital University of Economics and Business.

“But what changed most was the administration’s understanding of the population issue, that it is an important factor, but not the most decisive factor of the social economy, and that birth control was no longer the most important thing.”

[…]By 2000, the number of people aged 60 or over had surpassed 10 per cent of the total population, and almost 7 per cent of the population were aged 65.

Reflecting the changing demographics, the commission was renamed the National Population and Family Planning Commission in 2003. Ten years on, the agency’s family-planning workload has declined and increasingly overlaps with that of health authorities, Huang said.

CDT previously reported on the shrinking workforce and its implications for China’s economy. Dan Steinbock, the research director of international business at the India, China, and America Institute and a visiting fellow at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies, has also weighed in on China’s changing demographics. From China Daily:

There is a heated debate about whether the family planning policy is bringing China’s demographic dividend to an end. Recently, the National Bureau of Statistics said that China’s working-age population – people aged from 15 to 59 – registered a decline in 2012, dropping by 3.45 million to 937 million. This means that the proportion in the total population shrank by 0.6 percentage points to 69.2 percent. The bureau expects the trend to continue until 2030.

Historically, all the countries that have successfully industrialized have benefited from their demographic dividend. This window of opportunity makes faster economic growth possible. However, the emergence of a demographic dividend is not automatic, it is predicated on effective policies and markets. In East Asia, the demographic dividend has contributed significantly to the expansion of the labor pool and economic growth. In much of the Middle East, demographic changes have generated huge “youth bulges” in the population, but without accompanying job opportunities there has been no demographic dividend.

China is moving from one stage of growth to another. This transition is not new in kind. As advanced economies industrialized and moved from cost efficiencies to innovation, they had to cope with comparable challenges. But what makes the Chinese transition so distinctive and so challenging is its size.

But what if the current demographic trends are allowed to prevail? China’s population size would peak at 1,395 million in 2025. In the next quarter of a century, it would decline by 100 million, to 1,296 million. As a result, the working-age population would drop to 53 percent, or 680 million (a loss of some 240 million in just 35 years). The old-age dependency ratio would soar.

Amid claims that China would uphold the One Child Policy, Laurie Burkitt at The Wall Street Journal talked to Wang Feng, a population expert, about the implications of the reorganization of the Population and Family Planning commission:

What the government is doing is a major political move and they cannot make or announce all the policy changes that go along with it in one day. They know they can’t dismantle everything all at once. It’s going to take some time.

It will not take long, however, for change to come. Leaders are aware of the changing demographics. The one-child policy has taken a toll on the labor force and has jeopardized the future economy.

My reading is that will mean that population control targets will be weaker and weaker over time. And we will see that the one-child policy era is over.

Yet this is incredibly political. The family planning commission employs more than 500,000 people and it will be difficult to change this bureaucracy and what it has done for so many years. The people employed within the system are going to be redundant and many of them will likely leave, enabling a shifting of resources to the Ministry of Health. Those resources can be used to invest in reproductive health.

© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: aging populaion, family planning, health, one-child policy, population, workforce
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According to the plan, the Ministry of Railways, which has long been at the center of controversy for being both a railway service provider and a railway industry watchdog, will be broken up into administrative and commercial arms.

[…] Other ministries and commissions to see a reshuffle are the Health Ministry and the National Population and Family Planning Commission, which will be merged into a new National Health and Family Planning Commission.

The status of the existing State Food and Drug Administration will be elevated to a general administration in order to improve food and drug safety.

The country’s top oceanic administration will be restructured to bring its maritime law enforcement forces, currently scattered throughout different ministries and departments, under the unified management of a single administration.

The National Energy Administration will be restructured to streamline the administrative and regulatory systems of the energy sector.

Two media regulators, the General Administration of Press and Publication and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, will be merged into a single entity to oversee the country’s press, publication, radio, film and television sectors.

At the Associated Press, Louise Watt outlined the reasoning behind the changes:

This time, the streamlining plan includes guidelines to restrict and better define the central government’s responsibilities, limiting its issuing of permits for projects, the setting of standards and other policies that have slowed decision-making.

“Departments of the State Council are now focusing too much on micro issues. We should attend to our duties and must not meddle in what is not in our business,” Ma Kai, secretary-general of the State Council, or Cabinet, told the legislators. He said that overlapping government functions has often led to buck-passing.

[…] The public has been complaining about government inefficiency and for that reason “we should dare to push ahead with cracking the tough nut of structural reform,” the state-run Jinghua Daily quoted Wang Feng, an official in the Communist Party office involved in drafting the reform program.

But Wang Xiangwei cautioned at the South China Morning Post last week that the rearrangements could bring their own problems:

Some analysts, including Wang Yukai , a professor with the Chinese Academy of Governance under the State Council, told state media that five super ministries created under reform measures in 2008 produced mixed results. Indeed, how to force the bigger ministries to deregulate and decentralise may prove to be an even more arduous task for Li in years to come.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) is the earliest example of a super ministry. It was formed in 2003 and evolved from the State Planning Commission, a key ministry in the days of the planned economy.

Its purpose is to draft national economic and social development plans and undertake various economic reforms. But in reality, it has become a super powerful ministry with broad regulatory powers covering all the major industries.

Some cynics argue that it has been the biggest stumbling block to structural reforms.

The Economist (via CDT) also argued recently that “super-sized” ministries might fail to deliver promised benefits.

Bloomberg News examined the restructuring of responsibility for China’s maritime security, which comes after an alleged radar-lock incident raised questions about Beijing and Tokyo’s grip on events around the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands.

The State Oceanic Administration will oversee the coast guard, fisheries law-enforcement and the smuggling police, which now fall under separate ministries, a report to the National People’s Congress, the country’s legislature, said yesterday. The administration also has a law enforcement arm.

The decision signals that China wants to better organize its maritime assets as it wrangles with Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam in territorial disputes. The U.S. has expressed concern that an accident or miscommunication could lead that sparring to escalate further.

“The recent tension has convinced the central authorities to better coordinate those agencies,” said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, head of the department of government and international studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. “There’s been growing concern among observes including foreign governments about whether those agencies were coordinated or not. We have evidence that they are not.”

At The Wall Street Journal, Colum Murphy described the break-up of the colossal railway ministry, which currently employs over two million people, runs its own police force and courts, and oversees spending greater than China’s official military budget.

Currently, the ministry both regulates and operates China’s rail system, which has made for a murky structure and impeded both competition and financing.

[…] Under the new blueprint, the Ministry of Transport will absorb administrative duties including overseeing technology and safety standards and service and railway-project quality. A new entity, China Railway Corp., will focus on operational and commercial areas such as management of freight and passenger business as well as railway construction. Given the ministry’s problems, such a move was widely expected.

[…] “The large railway system is critical to China’s economy—and will become even more so with the economy’s shift from coastal areas inland,” said Gerald Ollivier, senior transport specialist with the World Bank, adding that the current multiplicity of roles at the ministry creates “some conflicting objectives.”

Assessments of the restructuring’s likely implications for family planning were somewhat divided. One source quoted by Michael Martina and Sui-Lee Wee at Reuters stressed continuity:

A recently retired official from the Family Planning Commission who maintains close ties with the agency, said the merger does not mean the commission’s power will be reduced.

“For such a long time, hundreds of millions of people had to have contraception and birth control, this kind of work is necessary. But it’s possible that there will be fewer things done by force,” the retired official said.

But some other observers argued that the changes herald the end of China’s ‘One Child Policy’, whose harsh enforcement and demographic effects have grown increasingly contentious. From Laurie Burkitt at The Wall Street Journal:

While the family planning agency will still exist, merging with the Ministry of Health, leaders have preserved it merely as a face-saving measure, said Wang Feng, a population expert and director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing. “The way to interpret this is that the laws are in effect, but the judges and the policemen have all been fired,” Mr. Wang said.

Cheng Li, a political expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., said, “This is a signal to an end of a policy that in reality isn’t in line with China’s other reforms.”

[… But] “The family planning and one-child policy has been running for so many years, and it is in the constitution as state policy,” said Li Jianxin, a population expert from Peking University. “So I guess it might not be this easy for the new leaders to just simply put an end to it.”

Though their anticipated absorption by the Ministry of Culture did not materialize, two major media regulators are to merge. But the China Copyright and Media blog cautioned that halving the number of organs was unlikely to mean less intervention:

[…] As had been anticipated, the General Administration of Press and Publications and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television will merge into a new body, the State Administration of Press, Publications, Radio, Film and Television (guojia xinwen chuban guangbo dianying dianshi zongju 国家新闻出版广播电影电视总局). The National Copyright Administration, a subordinate department of GAPP, will also be brought into the SAPPRFT, an unfortunate moniker if ever there was one. […]

It should not be expected, however, that this merger will lead to any form of liberalization or deregulation. It is likely that cultural and media policy will remain in line with the Central Committee Decision on Cultural Reform of late 2011, which aimed to combine commercial success with enhanced political control. Also, problems of administrative overlap and dual licensing remain, particularly in the field of Internet management, as the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology maintain their respective Internet portfolios.

Or, more succinctly:

China’s new ministry: State Administration of Press Publication Radio Film and Television.Netizen: too long, but we know you’ll cut it!

— Kai-Fu Lee (@kaifulee) March 10, 2013

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: coast guard, corruption, diaoyu islands, drug safety, family planning, food safety, GAPP, Japan, kai-fu lee, Ma Kai, maritime security, media regulation, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Railways, National Development and Reform Commission, National People's Congress, NDRC, one-child policy, philippines, railway safety, railways, SARFT, State Council, State Family Planning Commission, State Food and Drug Administration, super-ministries
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SPIEGEL: Unspeakable things happen in many of your novels. In “The Garlic Ballads,” for example, a pregnant woman, already in labor, hangs herself. Still, “Frog” seems to be your sternest book. Is that why it took so long to write?

Mo: I carried the idea for this book with me for a long time but then wrote it relatively quickly. You are right, I felt heavy when I penned the novel. I see it as a work of self-criticism.

SPIEGEL: In what sense? You carry no personal responsibility for the violence and the forced abortions described in your book.

Mo: China has gone through such tremendous change over the past decades that most of us consider ourselves victims. Few people ask themselves, though: ‘Have I also hurt others?’ “Frog” deals with this question, with this possibility. I, for example, may have been only 11 years old in my elementary school days, but I joined the red guards and took part in the public criticism of my teacher. I was jealous of the achievements, the talents of other people, of their luck. Later, I even asked my wife to have an abortion for the sake of my own future. I am guilty.

SPIEGEL: You are not only a member of the party, you have repeatedly said that you retain a utopian vision of communism. Yet don’t your books show step by step that this utopia doesn’t always become reality? And should you not therefore consider letting go of this utopia altogether?

Mo: What Marx wrote in the “The Communist Manifesto” was of great beauty. However, it seems to be very hard to make that dream come true. But then again, I look at those European, specifically Northern European, states and societies and wonder: Would these welfare states even be thinkable without Marx? We used to say in China that in a way Marxism has saved capitalism. Because those who benefited most from his ideology seem to be societies in the West. We Chinese, Russians and Eastern Europeans seem to have misunderstood Marxism.

See more about Mo Yan and the Nobel debate via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: abortion, communism, Cultural Revolution, literature, Liu Xiaobo, marxism, mo yan, Nobel Prize, one-child policy, Red Guards, writers, writers and literature
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