So, for example, this family that I covered that had lost their only child, they lost a lot of status in their village. Parallels After Losing An Only Child, Chinese Parents Face Old Age Alone So now they have a population that's basically too old and too male and, down the line, maybe too few.' 'The one-child policy drastically reshaped the composition of China's people.

In about 20 years that's going to jump to about 1.6 working adults to support one retiree,' Fong says. That's pretty good, that's a very healthy ratio. 'Right now China has a dependency ratio of about five working adults to support one retiree. Looking ahead, China is also facing a shortage of workers who can support its aging population. They are the biological dead ends of their family.'įong says the policy also led to forced abortions and the confiscation of children by the authorities. They call them guang guan, 'broken branches,' that's the name in Chinese. 'Now China has 30 million more men than women, 30 million bachelors who cannot find brides. 'When you create a system where you would shrink the size of a family and people would have to choose, then people would. She says that among the policy's unintended consequences is an acute gender imbalance. one child,' journalist Mei Fong tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.įong explores the wide-ranging impact of what she calls the world's 'most radical experiment' in her new book, One Child. 'The basic idea was to encourage everybody, by coercion if necessary, to keep to. Commonly referred to as the 'one-child' policy, the restrictions were actually a collection of rules that governed how many children married couples could have. Last October, China ended its 35-year-old policy of restricting most urban families to one child.

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One Child by Mei Fong