with the death of Mao in 1976 and the disastrous Fallout of both the Great Leap Forward and the cultural revolution China's new government under dang Xiao ping was eager to Pivot away from the Perpetual revolution of their forbears and move towards stability and economic Improvement China hoped to achieve rapid economic growth in the coming years aiming to raise China's per capita GDP from around $250 to $1,000 by the year 2000 the CCP believed that China's rapidly Rising population was an obstacle to this and committed itself to controlling it their solution was the infamous one child
policy that restricted the number of children a couple could have today on a day in history we explore the Diabolical ways that China enforced this policy through deception intimidation sterilization and murder if this sounds interesting to you go ahead and like this video And subscribe to the channel for more historical videos like this the one child policy was not a single law but a general policy guideline issued by the CCP and enforced by various local and provincial governments a letter from the ccp's Central Committee issued on September 25th 1980 which explained the need to control
population to avoid economic collaps in the near future is usually pointed to as the beginning of the policy the policy was revised and reinforced several times over the years such as in the creatively titled document number 7 in April 1984 and document number 13 in May 1986 but local governments had some leeway in how they handled the implementation of these guidelines broadly speaking Chinese couples were limited to one single child they could apply for permission to have a second under certain circumstances such as when the first was disabled and eventually rural families were permitted a
second child if their first was a girl so-called excess births were dealt with mainly with contraceptives which were available for all women failing that a regime of fines sterilization intimidation abortion and infanticide comprised a Sinister tool that China used to keep tight control over its population these laws were enforced by Family Planning carers in every region and every town at a half million strong they were one of the most extensive arms of state power and had significant power to enforce compliance and punish descent relating to the one child policy fines were the most common enforcement
tool families faced a fine for every excess birth and these were no measly penalties for example in guandong Province the fine for an excess birth was between 3 to six times the family's annual income there were also rolling fines for non-compliance with other aspects of the one child policy women with one child were find every month that they did not have an IUD fitted and might face fines for missing their IUD checkups in a society where almost everything was under the control of the State penalties could come in other forms too families with excess children
saw their electricity and water bills raised their grain rations withheld and licenses for driving or running a business revoked they could also have their wages garnished on top of any fines that were imposed and it was standing policy to fire any government or party employee who had unauthorized children Collective punishment put social pressure on people to comply a letter received by a Chinese couple from September 19 1987 shows how this was done the couple were receiving training in America at the time but were expected to return to China soon when the wife became pregnant with
an unauthorized child when her Factory's population control office heard about this they sent them a Stern warning their irresponsibility meant that the factory would not receive any bonuses that year and the benefits of all workers were at risk they wrote the consequences for you are Unthinkable you would be condemned by all the staff and line employees of the factory you should seriously reflect on these consequences and come to a speedy decision to fix your problem any way you can return to China immediately for an abortion on the face these punishments were a discouragement to anyone
thinking of violating the one child policy but they had a more Sinister side a family that couldn't pay for food or water who lost their jobs and were denied their grain ration well if they did have too many children this was one way to bring that number down the strict quotas for compliance that were imposed on Family Planning Carter LED some of them to pursue intimidation tactics in 1997 the Chinese daily news reported that Family Planning carers were burning the homes of excess child families in rural areas to scare them into submitting to sterilization or
for abortion one member of these Carters recalled her experience in Vivid detail some of the people we are trying to control want to escape from us occasionally the whole family disappears they go off to another region then we burn their house the first time I went to a village I was very shocked by the violent behavior of my colleagues they shot at people and threaten them with trunions but now I'm used to it it is necessary for the enforcement of the rules there are too many people in China officially these methods weren't endorsed but unofficially
nothing was done to investigate let alone punish anyone who used them another feared form of intimidation was kidnapping many local authorities operated detention centers where violators of the one child policy all their families might end up detained mothers could be forced to submit to sterilization or abortion more on that in a moment or their family members could be used as leverage to make them comply the case of Mr and Mrs o is illustrative of these methods both were Hong Kong residents where the one child policy did not strictly apply and so they had three children
of their own that was unacceptable to the Family Planning cers of hiang County where they were living temporarily Mrs U recognized the danger and fled with her children but her elderly father was not so lucky the carers detained him and sent word to the rest of the family that he would only be released if Mrs U submitted to sterilization Mrs U gave in and was sterilized a fate she shared with many other Chinese people Between 1979 and 2015 a consistent requirement of the one child regime was that one partner in all couples who had two
children had to be sterilized in at least 80% of cases this would be the woman whether they had ignored the earlier contraception demands or if their IUD failed it didn't matter in some areas like Jin Jang municipality women who simply missed their IUD checkups were to be sterilized without exception local cers were given sterilization quotas and were punished if they weren't met for example in 1987 HEI provinces sterilization quota was 90% of of all eligible women it was expected that some would evaded but the carers had a vested interest in minimizing evasions in pursuit of
these quotas cers held sterilization drives with propaganda campaigns and some off thee books intimidation to push up the numbers one such campaign occurred in Jan guandong province in February 2000 were 10,000 people were sterilized in just one month despite these numbers at least seven Village ERS were punished for not meeting their quotas the government officially claimed that they never forced anyone to be sterilized but the quoters are just one piece of evidence debunking this the fines also had the effect of driving people to sterilization out of fear of financial ruin after all a choice between
a fine and being sterilized is no real choice at all human rights groups in Tibet also observed doctors performing sterilization on women while they were in for unrelated medical procedures doctors didn't need anyone's consent to perform the procedure and many women awoke from an unrelated surgery to find it had been performed while they were under anesthesia the scale of these sterilizations was astronomical Between 1979 and 1998 an estimated 146 million people were sterilized in China the vast majority of them being women of the 250 million Chinese women of ch childbearing age in 2000 85.3 million
had been sterilized some of these we can assume were voluntary similar to how people today choose to get their tubes tied but if even a small fraction of these Came From Fear intimidation or financial penalties then we're looking at millions of people forced into procedures they did not want to put these numbers into context the third reich's Eugenics policies forcibly sterilized about 400,000 in it its entire lifetime whatever claims the CCP makes about sterilization being entirely voluntary the evidence simply doesn't bear that out despite their efforts contraception and sterilization could not prevent every pregnancy The
Next Step was abortion China's one child policy LED it to have some of the most permissive abortion policies in the world China's Ministry of Health still allows for abortion up to 24 week weeks double the time limit that was laid down in America's famous Row versus Wade case abortion remains a divisive issue and depending on your stance you might see abortion as equivalent to infanticide in all cases or only past a certain point certainly China's policy allows abortions far later than the majority of people elsewhere in the world are comfortable with regardless of whether one
is pro-life or pro-choice we can agree that China's permissive abortion policy was not about women's Choice HEI province's 1987 quota of 90% abortion rates for unauthorized pregnancies was never a victory for women's bodily autonomy fines for excess births were effectively fines for not having an abortion and as we saw earlier even the local Factory had no quals about demanding its employees have an abortion too often these recommendations became forc submissions a particular ularly famous case occurred in 2012 when Fang janme a shanki woman who could not afford to pay the fine for a second child
was held down and forcibly injected with a drug to abort her 7-month-old fetus the story gained Global media attention and inspired Fierce criticism of the one child policy but the unfortunate reality is that Fang was just one of millions fines intimidation and outright medical deception forced countless of mother into abortion they didn't want in cases like fangs these children could have been viable outside of the womb when the procedure was performed sex selective abortions were a common occurrence male children were seen as more valuable than women in Chinese Society especially in rural areas where Sons
were needed to work the fields faced with the prospect of having a daughter many couples chose to abort them and try again for a son sex selective abortion is a major cause of China's continuing gender imbalance where men significantly outnumber women the problem became so severe that in 1986 the CCP made it illegal for parents to learn their child sex before birth and all sex selective abortions were prohibited but even if one avoided contraception sterilization and abortion an unauthorized child was still not safe and it's here that we get some of the most disturbing horror
stories from the one child policy infanticide was a pervasive problem lurking in the shadows of Chinese Society sex selective infanticide against girls had been a common problem before 1949 but early communist China saw a sharp decline in the practice up until 1979 after 1979 it skyrocketed understandably there are no clear records on how many children mostly girls were killed as infants thanks to the one child policy Scholars studying China's population have estimated that up to 50 million girls who should have been born since 1980 based on birth rate and the number of males simply aren't
there given that sex selective abortion was banned and allowing for some girls to slip through the registration it's not hard to piece together what happened to them some were simply abandoned left to starve or freeze to death where no one could find them willful neglect killed others one study from 1994 showed that of all reported infant deaths girls were significantly less likely to have been taken to hospital before they died the implication being that parents didn't seek medical help for their girls and left them to die while they did get help for boys the unregistered
deaths that occurred across China are a terrifying Gap in the record but the deaths we do know of are no less disturbing while China never had an official policy of killing excess children the systems quotas for excess births and punishments for carders who didn't meet them clearly incentivized it as some parents learned in the most horrible ways one woman named Zoo told her story of how she became pregnant with a second son in early 1981 when authorities found out they forced her to have an abortion although she wanted her child Zoo eventually submitted to the
procedure however the abortion failed and Zoo's son was born alive on August 12th 1981 she was relieved and begged to have her son but the hospital staff refused zoo was sent away and her son was euthanized probably the most disturbing story We encountered came from dong taang of Zang Province Dong's wife went into labor with an unauthorized pregnancy on October 19th 2002 dong his wife his mother and his mother-in-law rushed to the local hospital at first things seemed well the labor was progressing as planned and the nurses confirmed that they could see the baby's head
whatever Joy dong felt in that moment was shattered by the nurse's next question where is your permission certificate dong of course didn't have one when he explained this to the nurse she immediately excused herself to report to her superiors minutes later a group of officials from the hospital's family family planning office came into the room to interview dong deception was the last thing on his mind as his wife was going through labor so he admitted to the officials that he had no permission certificate he knew he'd have to pay a fine and possibly face other
penalties but that must have seemed like a small price to pay for the child he was moments away from meeting but that was not the solution the Family Planning officials had in mind a few moments later hospital security entered the room and draged dagged dong his mother and his mother-in-law into the corridor only then did dong and his family realize what was happening by the time dong managed to break free and rush back to his wife's room it was too late what dong saw is far too graphic for YouTube suffice it to say the hospital
staff ensured that there was one less excess child on their report when the police showed up a few hours later they weren't there for the hospital staff dong was reprimanded for making a scene and was bluntly told not to act foolishly again even the doctors had no sympathy for him they explained that the Family Planning Commission had ultimate authority over births and that the medical staff were just following order China's one child policy was designed to limit its population growth and boost GDP although it missed its 2,000 population goal some estimates suggest that China's population
could be as much as 400 million higher without the policy others have criticized this projection Scholars have pointed out that China's birth rate was already declining in the 1970s and that Economic Development would have continued to lower it just as it had done in every other developed country China has achieved remarkable GDP growth but experts have largely agreed that the one child policy was at best unnecessary if not counterproductive to this goal the policy had a Myriad of other effects the gender imbalance has left millions of young men with no Prospect for a family and
the shrinking family sizes have shattered China's traditional family structures the girls who did live generally experienced a rise in educational and economic outcomes but that's little consolation for the 50 million of them who should be here but aren't the CCP insists that the one child policy was the best thing for society but the people in that Society seemed to disagree with them a poll in 1988 indicated that 72% of urban couples and 90% of rural ones wanted more than one child given the powerful social pressure to conform to Authority in China and the ccp's record
of how it treats critics the fact that so many openly disagreed with them is remarkable some say that the goals of the policy don't matter the policy itself is wrong that the violation of personal freedom forced sterilization mandatory abortions and infanticide are evils that no amount of economic growth can justify however not everyone agreed in 1983 14 million abortions and almost 21 million sterilizations were performed in China many of these probably most were done under fear of punishment if they did not comply yet in that same year the United Nations presented the chairman of China's
national Family Planning Commission Kian Xin Jong with that Year's population award for his work on the one child policy today we may look back in horror back then the world applauded it the one child policy was replaced with a two child policy in 2015 and all limits on family size were ended in 2021 modern China faces the opposite problems of a small fertility rate and an aging population that pose a serious risk to its long-term economic and social stability ility in their efforts to solve one supposed problem they appear to have created another only time
will tell how China navigates these challenges and whether it or any other country will resort to such Extreme Measures to meet the problems of the future how do you feel about the one child policy was it Justified what lessons can we learn from it let us know what you think in the comments and don't forget to leave a like on the video and subscribe for more videos like like this one
