DONG FUTU VILLAGE, CHINA—It was a spring day, as Feng Caishan recalls.

Here, in this farming community on China’s Loess Plateau — a jagged, golden landscape of shifting sands tucked into an elbow of the Yellow River — 70 or 80 officials assembled in a local meeting hall.

They’d been summoned to a lecture, which seemed routine enough.

But what Professor Liang Zhongtang told them that day, 25 years ago, astonished them: Every rural household in Yicheng County, he said, would now be allowed to have two children.

“I couldn’t believe my ears,” says Feng, then a local Communist Party official and now retired.

Neither could anyone else.

Everyone knew that China’s parents were allowed only one child. The government policy, started in 1979, was strictly enforced to curb overpopulation.

Those who violated the policy were ordered to have abortions and faced heavy fines.

It was the law.

Now, suddenly — here in Yicheng at least — that policy was about to change.

“At first I was afraid,” says Feng, now 65. “I thought if people had two children, they’d want three. Then everything would spin out of control.”

But Professor Liang explained to the gathering that the new, two-child policy for Yicheng was an experiment approved by the central government. As a social scientist, he wanted to see how people would respond if they had the freedom to choose — what would the overall impact on the population be?

The officials sat in rapt silence.

There were a few rules, however, Liang went on: Under the plan, people would be required to marry later — men at 25 instead of 22; women at 23 instead of 20 — have their first child a year later, and, after an interval of five or six years, they’d be allowed a second child.

Liang, then teaching at the Communist Party School of Shanxi province, had designed the plan himself. He’d written directly to then Communist Party Secretary Hu Yaobang to win permission.

One other detail: There was to be no reporting of the experiment in the media. The government wanted the plan kept as quiet as possible.

Later when local people in Yicheng learned of the plan in a door-to-door canvass, they were ecstatic. People applauded, officials recall.

In no time at all the experiment was a resounding success: abortions plummeted, fines for violators declined, and Yicheng’s population growth actually fell beneath the national average.

While across China parents were resisting the one-child national policy by having two, three or more children, here in Yicheng, some parents happily had two, others happily chose one. But almost no one exceeded the limit.

Equally important: Local officials no longer had to use a heavy hand to enforce a policy no one liked.

“It made our jobs easier,” says Feng, who went on to become the county’s family planning commissioner. “The people were so happy we ended up calling the experiment the ‘Loving the People policy,’ because that’s the way people felt about it.”

Yicheng’s experiment has never ended.

Here in this rural county about 1,000 kilometres south of Beijing, it continues to this day.

But so does China’s one-child policy.

There are exceptions: In cities, for example, if one parent is from a minority group, or if both parents are themselves single children, a second child might be allowed.

In rural areas, a second child might be permitted, but only if the first child is a girl. After that, parents must stop.

In this small piece of China, however, a second child is allowed without any restrictions or qualifications.

Statistics show that 63 per cent of Chinese parents are still controlled by the one-child policy: 35 per cent are urban dwellers while the remaining 28 per cent are mainly rural parents who had a boy as their first child and, as a result, were required to stop.

The state employs 400,000 family planning officials to oversee strict compliance.

The lessons of Yicheng, it seems, have yet to be applied.

But a growing number of demographers say they should be. They point to Yicheng as clear evidence that the one-child policy should be abolished.

A national debate is heating up.

“The Yicheng experiment gives us hope,” says Gu Baochang, professor of population and development studies at Beijing’s Renmin University of China. “It refutes the belief that if people are allowed to have two, they’ll want three or more, and eventually China’s population will explode.

“With Yicheng, those worries have been shown to be groundless,” he says.

“The (one-child) policy should be changed . . . and its abolition should be the ultimate goal.”

Momentum for change is building.

Only last week the research arm of the popular newspaper China Youth Daily published a poll of more than 6,000 people showing that 78 per cent preferred to have two children, if only the state would allow it.

Here in Yicheng County it’s common.

Here you can see siblings set off to school together, and even behold that rarest of sights in tradition-rooted China, where male children are still highly prized: the two-son family.

“I always wanted to have a girl,” confesses 47-year-old Liu Yunqing, a mother who bore two boys under the plan. “But on our second try it was a boy again!” she says with humour-laced exasperation.

“You know I’m not the only one on this street with two boys,” she adds, seated in her spotlessly clean home in the county’s Dong Futu Village. “Just a few houses down Dr. Kong Delan also has two.”

Yicheng County might not be as rich as Shanghai, or as powerful as Beijing. But it has a strong sense of community and functions well — an example of what President Hu Jintao says all Chinese should strive to build, namely, “a harmonious society.”

But it wasn’t always this way, acknowledges 83-year-old An Dousheng, the county’s family planning commissioner when professor Liang’s plan was launched.

Smartly dressed in a black pea jacket and dapper grey cap, An says relations between the people and officials under the one-child policy were “very tense.”

When he heard Liang was looking for a place to conduct his experiment, he offered Yicheng.

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He was confident the new plan would work.

“At the time, the one-child policy was so far from what the people wanted and they were putting up strong resistance. They didn’t want to be limited to just one child.”

Some would leave the county to bear a child, then return to face unbearably heavy fines.

“People had very little money back then,” he says.

After five years of remarkable success under the new plan, authorities in Shanxi’s provincial capital were so impressed they asked An to go to Beijing, report on the program and ask permission to expand it into the larger region of Linfen.

An remembers China’s then national family planning director being impressed by two key results: first, abortions had sharply declined; second, gender ratios between boy babies and girl babies were normal — strongly suggesting that if parents were legally allowed two children, they’d quit pursuing boy children and value girls just as much.

“Girls were no longer discriminated against under the new plan,” says An. “Gender ratios were normal.”

A later, detailed study confirmed that. Normal gender ratios are between 106 to 108 boys born for every 100 girls in China. But in 2000, the national rate soared to 117.8 boys for every 100 girls.

Social scientists say parents were aborting girls to try again for boys.

But in Yicheng that wasn’t the case. Its gender rate remained solid at 106.1.

Still, Beijing balked. Despite the program’s success, the bid to expand it was given a chilly reception.

The one-child policy had by then become a top guiding principle, and that very same year, 1991, the government announced that local officials’ promotions across the country would be based on how well they carried out the policy.

“We returned home and just carried on,” says An. “But you know, personally, I still believe it would work in Linfen.”

It still works in Yicheng, peacefully and harmoniously. Local family planning officials say they’re free to focus on service rather than management. They hold seminars for expectant mothers, hand out birth control pills and anti-conception devices, and ensure abortion is available on demand.

Local mom Li Hongye was a model citizen under the new plan: she married at 23 as required, had her first child at 24, and after an interval had her second at 32, both girls.

But Li took an extra step. After her second child she voluntarily went in for a tubal ligation, ending her childbearing years, and for doing so, the government pays her and her husband 50 Chinese yuan each per month (about $7.60 per parent). When they turn 60 they’ll be paid 720 yuan per parent annually ($110 each).

Officials say the cash rewards are an added incentive to discourage parents from continuing to pursue boy children.

“Having two children makes sense for the simple fact that the kids can keep each other company,” says Li, who works part-time at an insurance agency. “When my girls grow up they’re both going to college,” she adds.

But demographers say it will be a far, far different China by then.

For as China still works feverishly to suppress births, lowering the national fertility rate to somewhere between 1.6 and 1.8 births per 1,000, it’s also experiencing the fastest rise in life expectancies in modern times.

When Mao Zedong took control of China in 1949, the average Chinese person was expected to live to just 35. Today that number has soared past 73.

Those two forces — declining births and rising life expectancies — are working at cross purposes: as China’s labour pool shrinks, the number of retirees is about to balloon, setting the stage for demographic disaster.

By 2050, demographers say, China will have 335 million retirees, a nation of pensioners the size of the United States, or 10 times the size of Canada.

“Over the next 10 years alone, the number of people in China’s labour force between the ages of 20 and 24 will drop by 50 per cent,” says demographic expert Dr. Wang Feng of the University of California at Irvine, who has studied population trends in China for years.

“The fact is,” says Wang, “today’s China is headed down a very steep slope. And instead of putting on the brakes, it’s actually stepping on the gas pedal.”

The country, he says, “is sitting on a ticking time bomb.”

A change in policy is “inevitable” he says, but given the guarded nature of governance in China, no one can predict when.

Renmin University’s Gu Baochang says the government here faces an enormous task: how to persuade a nation to alter its thinking after telling it for decades that China has “too many people.

“People still continue to think the old way,” says Gu, “but the situation has fundamentally changed.

“People need to know,” he says. “Otherwise, China is looking at huge development problems down the road.”

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