I think it would be helpful to define what we are walking about. What is chinas onechild policy . Guest the onechild policy is a bit of a misnomer. It is a name we use to describe a set of rules, restrictions, that china has placed to regulate family population and the size of the family. Theoretically you could call it 1. 5 child and ten it moved to a twochild policy. Host it is not one law but a basket of policies. Guest that is right. Host when did it happen . When did it go into effect . Guest i say 1980 when the communist party sent out an open letter to the members saying we are adviceing everyone to move to a onechild family. Advise. Host you are saying this went under effect under ping. What was going on in china that was so important that people imagined they needed an idea of the policy like this . Mao had just passed away and the population was growing. There was a worry that chinas population was going to overwhelm the showers and there wouldnt be enough to go around and they really need today do something. Host you write in the book you compared the onechild policy to a crash diet. You say like crash dieting the onechild policy was the gun for the reason that had merit. What was the original rational . You mention you thought it would spill beyond chinas border. What was the goal . How dd they think were going to accomplish it . Guest it was for economic reasons. China was very poor and the new leadership staked their goals on raising china up. Working back from the goal, the planners figured out this wasnt going to work with the Current Population growth rate and therefore they needed to radically move to a onechild per family household. Economic growth is like a cake, right . The productivity and controlling the number of mouths. That is what they were going for. But china was ald reducing its population and had a population planning policy in place that was much less coersive called the later and longer and fewer. Get married later, wait until later and have fewer children. The average family size went from six kids to three. That was pretty successful and a lot of experts argue they should have kept going on the rate and would have reduced the population without the side effects of the onechild policy. Host who is song jin . Why was he important . Guest he was the head of the scientists that drafted the onechild policy. Basically the onechild policy was drawn up by rocket scientists. Russian trained Missile Defense scientists who basically didnt have a lot of training in things we would think drawing up the plan would have. Host why were they not working on demogry . Most of chinas economists and others suffered and didnt have computers even to work out the complex calculations you needed. So the only group of academics and experts were the missile scientists. They had all of the capital, all of the resources, and they had the Bold Thinking because they had not been stamped on or criticized. They said we can do this and this is how we will do. They thought of it like a missile unfortunately like a trajectory and womans fertility could be adjusted up and down like flipping a switch. Host their training told them you can tune this process as finally as you might want and in fact that made them a mismatch. Guest the problem was there was no input from economists or anything. No one shedding issues on how Human Behavior could shape such a grand plan. It isnt Rocket Science to think a nation that is so in love with sons is only restricted to one child is going to have more sons and then at some point you will have more men than women. It is not Rocket Science. Host have other countries tried anything this radical . Have other countries tried to limit their population . Guest in the 60s and 70s the concern of over population was a concern for many countries. This was a time when the Population Growth Movement came in. Also the European Union population grew. All of these things were concerns. Mit had scenario where at this time we would run out of resources. Doomsday narrative. So china isnt the only one by far but china took the most drastic step. India had a Sterilization Program for a time and for that india and china received gold medals from the European Union. Host it sounds like the rest of the world didnt immediately recognize the negative consequences that could come about. Guest i think a lot of the world still doesnt recognize the consequences. There was immense support because there was concerns we were overwhelming the planet so it was like china is taking this step, good for them. That means i can run my washer and drier with more ease of mind. And for a long time, china maintained their population policy was being run without being coersed but that is nonsense. For a very long time, though, that was the belief for an a lot of people. They didnt know or didnt want to know. And you would have a lot of people speaking out in fear of the onechild policy. In the course of the book i talked to some to this day, environmentalists, feminists, who still say we should have Something Like a universal onechild policy. Host you write in 1983, clinea sterilized more than 20 million people, more than the combination of new york, los angeles, and chicago populations all together. In addition to sterilization what else did china do to enforce the policy . Guest this is such an unpopular policy. They probably didnt mind having one child but didnt want the state in their bedroom. Sterilization was one. They didnt trust people would use contraception on their own so they insisted in many cases that after you have had your one child you have to be sterilized like it or not. Host this was from the beginning . Guest yeah. Then they designed ied that you could not remove yourself. And then there is of course abortions. This was although theoretically forced forced abortions were illegal after six months. It was carried out as late as 2012, however where there was a woman. Host talk about that. Guest there was a woman from the country side and they had a daughter first and she was pregnant with her second child. She had hoped that the second child was permissible. They were Migrant Workers but in reality her registration was a rural one so the Family Planning officials said you cannot have this child. If you want to have the second child you should have to pay a find and it was Something Like 6,000 and they could not afford it. They tried to negotiate. There was constant back and forth. She was trying to evade planning officials until carried the risk full term because she was running the risk they could take you for abortion. At seven months they took her with a pillow case over her head and took her to the hospital and forced her with something that caused her to prematurely deliver the fetus. We would probably not have known about this but there is social media. What happened in her case was a relative had come to visit her in the hospital and she was lying there in the bed with the fully formed fetus right next to her and snapped a picture and sent it on a cellphone and it went viral in china and brought forth the human faith of the onechild policy. Host i was living in beijing and i remember that case felt like the interchange between the technological and the economical change and a policy that was adopted in a different period and out of step with the lives people were living. You had someone with an iphone and wired to the world and found themselves captive of the policy that was in its own way a relic. Did that have any impact on policy . Or do we not know . Guest i think it had an impact for raising city awareness. If you were a city dweller there was a chance the onechild policy in china wasnt significant. That yes, there were issues with abortions but they were going to hold the olympics and the economy was gogo was going so well. It wasnt an issue since people could afford to pay the fines and migrants were moving around and it was easier to avoid detection. There was a sense maybe it didnt matter anymore but then this case brought forth the sense that yes, these things are still happening. Host how many people in china would you say are subject to the onechild policy . Guest well, lets see, the onechild policy is a basket of policies as we agreed. So say fully a third of all chinese households are restricted to that strict onechild policy. The rest have slightly more fluid restrictions but still do. In some rural areas, you can have a second child if your first one is a girl. That is the restriction. You cannot just have whatever you want. Then maybe you believed have a second child if you are in a dangerous profession like a coal minor or fishermen. Host in the fall people may have seen the headlines about a change in the policy. What was preserved and what was discarded . Guest china announced it was moving to a nationwide twochild policy. But it is still a restriction. You have to get a birth permit. Host they loosened the rule but intervene directly in peoples private life. Guest if you want a child you have to get a birth permit. Lets say you are a single mother it is impossible to get a registration for your child first or second. Host lets switch gears. I want to talk about you and how you got interested in this subject. If you can, you write in the book, i am the youngest of five daughters all conceive of a son that never was. Where did you grow up . Guest i grew up in malasyia. You know, they say we are the most traditional and cling to the old ways. We didnt have anything like the cultural revolution to shake tup. In my families case, it wasnt the always but a love of sons. My father himself was the 16th son 16out of 18. And that is just counting the boys. Host just one mother . Guest no, there were several. My grandfather was a rich man and had had three wives. He was the 16th son from the third wife. Host in china . Guest in malasia. Host was it a distance place growing up . Guest when i was a child growing up, if i did something wrong, i would be made to kneel in front of my ancestors. Because we were five daughters, every time we showed up at a gathering all of the aunts and just everybody disapproving and saying you should be glad you were not in china you would never be born or put in a village and given away. You would not exist. Host you write my father never stopped regretting a lack of a son or reminding his daughters they were liabilities not assets. Did he mean that financially . Guest yeah, he told us that. He was an auditor. Growing up we were affair of the fact he wasnt going to spend much to educate us or send us to college because we were girls. Host did he pay were your College Education . Guest actually no, i went on my own and paid in scholarships and things. Host did you know at that point you wanted to be a writer . Guest i sort of did. When i was 16 years old i won a minor competition. Host a writing competition . Guest yeah, it was a commonwealth essay. All british colonies submitted their little essay and i wrote something ponderous and boring and i cannot remember it. But the offshoot was i was invited to meet the queen of england and she just happened to be there for a meeting. This was probably the most exciting thing that happened to me. For my father, it was the first time he looked at me and thought maybe she is an asset and not a liability. Host you decided to become a journalist and already paid for your own College Education. And so later on you decided i want to go to china. Had you already been working as a journalist and then you said i want to figure out a way to get assigned to china . Or what was the path that led you there. Guest my first job was in singapore working as a crime reporter. They would send young girl out reporters to interview grieving family members. I knew there was more to journalism than this. Same questions and generic stories. But i didnt think that pathways going to be in china. I speak indonesian language better than mandrin. China was full of relatives that would be me but i wasnt lucky enough to be born there. I had relatives saying dont go to china. You dont have doors on the toilet. It wasnt glamorous or sexy enough but my path led me there. They sent me to hong kong, the wall street journal posted me at the hong kong in 2003 in the midst of sars. That is how it started. Host when did you come to beijing . Guest in 2006. I was doing reporting on manufacturin manufacturing. Host and your husband was an author as well. You lived in beijing for how many years . Guest about four. Host during that period i would imagine you were already getting interested in the subject of the onechild policy. We will talk in a moment about the moment that really galvanized that. Did you see it around you . Were you seeing the effects of the policy . Guest i was seeing the effects of the policy in hong kong in 2003. I was going down to the factories making everything from jeans and bras and toe nail clippers. It was fascinating. But i started hearing from factory owners saying we cannot get enough workers and i said how can you possibly be having difficulty . China is the most populus nation. I talked to economists about theories and there was a sense maybe it is the onechild policy but there was a sense it was too soon. This was with a shortterm economic issue but really that was the beginning of when it was going to happen. Host something happened in 2008 that made you focus in a new way on the onechild policy. What was it . Guest i was moved to beijing to write about the olympics. It is a wonderful prism to view china as a rising nation, the big m money, the marketing, the change in in insfrastructui. It was wonderful. But before it happened an earthquake came. Host for those that dont remember, that earthquake killed tens of thousands of people. It was the largest quake in the area. You were covering mare mar . Host guest i was trying to sneak in. It was very restricted there and they were not letting in any journalists. So i was frustrated i could not get in. I got on a plane and flew to beijing and unaware of the natural disaster. I land in china and turn on the my blackberry and all my colleagues and reporters made a be line and i felt like i missed the story. I was like i could have driven. I should have stayed there. Then i started thinking how can i do the story . There must be many ways to skin a cat. I thought this is a place that supplies most guest workers to china. It is like chinas appalachian and very poor and people go to other parts of china to work. I thought there must be a lot of people in beijing trying to get back home. What if i follow a group of them. I followed a group of construction workers back home. It took about three days. We road trains, bikes, and boats. It was a very sad journey because at the end of it all most discovered their family had been killed. Host for people who may not know the earthquake was a very difficult place to do reporting. The government had taken steps to try to make it they were trying to manage the story, to try to control the narrative that was going to get out to the rest of the world, so when you depot there one of the things you discovered got there were a lot of families that had lost their one child; is that right . Guest the thing i didnt realize later on was the area near the epicenter was actually an area with a test pilot of the onechild policy before they took it nationwide in the late 1970s. It really brought down the results. And that had actually given chinas plan the inspiration to take the nationwide. They said we can do this for the rest of china. Of course, the end results were tragic for the families. They lost their own child in many cases. One of the first and earliest stories i did was about all these families who, in a matter of weeks, were rushing off to do reverse sterilization process they had been forced to undergo. Host there is a term, if there has been a distinct chinese term it is sure do. Talk about what that means. Guest it means parents who have lost their only child. Death. It is a phenomenfunauphenomenal from this earthquake. There are about a million of these parents. What makes them different is they have consistently tried to lobby beijing for more benefits and help because their argument is to lose your only child in the chinas context is to lose economic security. China doesnt have a social network to compensate. When you lose your only child you lose your retirement plan. That is a pure economic sense but of course there are emotional issues and even issues with trying to get into a nursing home. There are Nursing Homes that will not admit these parents because they say no one is there to authorize treatment or payment we prefer not to. We want people with kids. Host so did people, generally speaking, i know it is hard to generalize, but did people in china rally around the people that lost their only child or did people Say Something else . Guest people are sympathetic but there is also a sense of stigma maybe in some cases. When you lose your only child, especially in a rural context, you fall down the societal totem pole. China, despite down to a onechild policy, you are not considered an adult until you are married. You dont have the status unless you are a parent. When you lose the parenthood status you lose many things along the way. Host one thing that is interesting when you talk to young people in china about the onechild policy sometimes you find even though we know about the cases of being cohersed they will say if it were not for the onechild policy i would not have gotten into college. It is already so competitive. What do you make of that view . It is perilous to describe chinas attitudes too broadly. But how do they regard the onechild policy . Guest i think many of them support this. There was a study by the pugh center in 2008 that said 2 3rd of china people support the onechild policy. I looked into that questionnaire. It was down to one question asked and it was like do you support the onechild policy and it was yes or no. I think it wasnt very warm and there is more room if you asked people of the fee you have to pay that is a more varied response. But that is it. I think it is fair to say that a lot of people did support the idea of reducing population because if you lived in china and had to get on a subway at rush hour or get into the right school you understand that whole concept of too many people and you do support it. So i think matter of fact, it is sad that a communist party squandered this good will people had by channeling it into such a painful course. There was a lot of support from people to reduce the population. There was. But i dont think they necessarily wanted to support things like forced abortions and sterilizations. Host when you were writing about thi