Beginning in 1979, the Chinese government decided to implement the well-known—and highly controversial—one-child policy to try to confront, to the greatest extent possible, the problem of the country’s exponential population growth. The rule envisaged, as its name implies, the bearing of a single child with limited exceptions. In case of non-compliance, the consequences could range from loss of job or party membership to more extreme ones such as reproductive violence.
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While the one-child policy was the universal law, there were some exceptions introduced that allowed families to have more than one child in very specific cases. These mostly concerned families that were part of an ethnic minority group or whose first child was born with a handicap. Other exceptions included allowing for more than one child if the family’s first kid was a daughter or they lived in rural areas.
It’s important to note that many of these exceptions conceded by the Communist Party were directly related to the difficulty in enforcing the policy in rural areas. In less developed and rural areas, families often relied on their children for labor power, meaning that implementing the one-child policy required a larger social change than needed in urban areas. Additionally, rural families were harder to monitor.
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Although gender may seem to be a less obvious element of China’s one-child policy, it was a crucial component. Not only did this cultural gender preference cause a large demographic imbalance between boys and girls, but it also led to phenomena like mass adoptions and even infanticides of baby girls. The government has also occasionally contributed to unethical and extreme measures by carrying out forced abortions and sterilisations in order to make families comply with the policy.
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The one-child policy, which reigned in the country for more than 30 years, has also resulted in the development of an entire generation of children—who are now also adults —that do not appear in Chinese state records. People who fall into this group are popularly called “Heihaizi“, China’s “black children” who could not obtain a hukou— an official household registration. Such children were primarily second-born or later children who, upon birth, had no recognized right to exist due to this family planning policy.
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For the millions of Heihaizi, this administrative hole causes devastating consequences. They can’t access regular public services such as healthcare, get legally married, or even use public transportation. Moreover, they can’t go to school and get a formal education as normal citizens, and when they become adults, they can’t legally get a job.
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Moreover, despite the promises of the Chinese Communist Party, a great number of people have not yet been able to obtain official registration. The fines to be paid by Heihaizi and their families are still very high, and acquiring the documents necessary for a life in the open still seems to be a utopia for many.
As an addition:
Sex-selective abortions over the past four decades in China -- (Study, published February 2025)
China now faces multiple challenging demographic and public policy problems that have emerged from four decades of sex-selective induced abortions [...] The annual proportions and number of selective abortions [meaning that female fetuses were aborted much more often than males] rose in the 1980s with the strict family planning policy [...] In China, the long-standing preference for sons, easy access to sex-selective technologies, and the spontaneous fertility decline have led to the continued practice of selectively aborting female fetuses, despite its prohibition. As a result, the imbalanced sex ratio may take years to normalize.