Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment
    One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment
    One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment
    Audiobook7 hours

    One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment

    Written by Mei Fong

    Narrated by Janet Song

    3.5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    When Communist Party leaders adopted the one-child policy in 1980, they hoped curbing birth-rates would help lift China's poorest and increase the country's global stature. But at what cost? Now, as China closes the book on the policy after more than three decades, it faces a population grown too old and too male, with a vastly diminished supply of young workers.

    Mei Fong has spent years documenting the policy's repercussions on every sector of Chinese society. In One Child, she explores its true human impact, traveling across China to meet the people who live with its consequences. Their stories reveal a dystopian reality: unauthorized second children ignored by the state, only-children supporting aging parents and grandparents on their own, villages teeming with ineligible bachelors, and an ungoverned adoption market stretching across the globe. Fong tackles questions that have major implications for China's future: whether its "Little Emperor" cohort will make for an entitled or risk-averse generation; how China will manage to support itself when one in every four people is over sixty-five years old; and above all, how much the one-child policy may end up hindering China's growth.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateFeb 9, 2016
    ISBN9781515972433

    Related to One Child

    Related audiobooks

    Social Science For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Solving A Population Puzzle

      May 20, 2021

      How should we regard China’s demographic changes and related issues at a time of heated discussions about new births hitting a record low, the population about to see negative growth and the aging process accelerating? How should China address the po

      4 min read

    • Article

      China's Falling Birth Rate Prompts Elon Musk To Warn Of Looming 'Population Collapse'

      Jun 7, 2022

      Elon Musk, the billionaire co-founder of electric car maker Tesla, has warned of a looming "population collapse" in China, where his company seeks to expand after opening a major factory in Shanghai in 2019. Commenting on an article carried on the BB

      3 min read

    • Article

      How Can China Raise Its Total Fertility Rate?

      Dec 17, 2020

      According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, China’s total fertility rate (TFR) has fallen below the warning line as the country’s population development has hit a critical point. The birth rate on the Chinese mainland dropped to 10.48 per 1,000 peopl

      5 min read

    • Article

      China's Moralising Of Public Policy Risks Eroding Gains In Human Welfare

      Aug 30, 2023

      The Chinese government's reaction to the country's persistent youth unemployment highlights a worrying tendency to apply simplistic, moralistic reasoning to complex problems. Editorials in state media encourage young people to "embrace struggle" and

      5 min read

    • Article

      China's Population Crisis Reflects Diminished Public Trust In Government, Academics Say

      Oct 27, 2023

      To motivate couples to have kids in the face of China's deepening demographic crisis, Beijing should start by trying to restore the credibility that it lost during the pandemic, according to academics. Despite a slew of pronatalist policies being rol

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Precarious Spotlight

      Jan 22, 2022

      A Precarious Spotlight
      3 min read

    • Article

      A Precarious Spotlight

      Jan 21, 2022

      A Precarious Spotlight
      3 min read

    • Article

      By The Num83r5

      Dec 20, 2022

      If the success of a species might be measured by its numbers, humankind seemingly has much to celebrate. Remarkably, two millennia ago, there were just 300 million of us. Within your grandparents’ lifetime, that figure exploded to 2.5 billion. Now we

      12 min read

    • Article

      Facts Tell A Different Story

      Jul 22, 2021

      China has billionaires and is a top destination for foreign direct investment. It has thousands of branches of Starbucks and KFC, along with significant private ownership of capital. It suffers from different levels of inequality. These factors lead

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Global Population Peak

      Apr 5, 2024

      The Global Population Peak
      3 min read

    • Article

      Millennials Bore COVID’s Economic Brunt. Will Boomers Help Them Out?

      Mar 25, 2021

      COVID-19 has widened the global generation gap. Governments run by baby boomers can narrow it by helping young people get back on their economic feet.

      3 min read

    • Article

      China’s Baby Bust

      Apr 5, 2024

      China’s Baby Bust
      4 min read

    • Article

      China’s Baby Bust

      Apr 5, 2024

      China’s Baby Bust
      4 min read

    • Article

      As China Urges The Rich To Give More For 'Common Prosperity', It Can No Longer Afford Restrictions On Charity

      Aug 28, 2021

      "To get rich is glorious." "Our policy is to allow some people and some regions to get rich first." In the 1980s, these two concise and famous quotes from Deng Xiaoping crystallised China's revolutionary shift, from Mao Zedong's obsession with creati

      4 min read

    • Article

      China’s Only Children Want the Same for Their Kids

      Jan 17, 2022

      Last May, when China released the results of its most recent census, the numbers showed a problem the government already knew about but whose magnitude it might not have expected. China’s fertility rate—the number of children a woman is expected to h

      5 min read

    • Article

      Birthrates Are Tumbling Worldwide, Forcing Hard Choices On Societies

      Mar 29, 2024

      After a century in which the global population grew almost fourfold to 6.2 billion people, stoking fears of overpopulation, conflict, and ecological collapse, a turning point awaits.  At some point in the 2060s, 2070s, or 2080s, the world population,

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Jobs Imperative

      Jul 6, 2020

      The Jobs Imperative
      3 min read

    • Article

      Population Push By Beijing Calls For Shift In Attitudes Of Society

      Aug 23, 2022

      The multipronged strategy China needs to reverse a declining population is laid out in a State Council policy document. Issued by 17 ministries, it contains approaches widely acknowledged by demographers as being necessary to encourage couples to mar

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for One Child

    3.5/5

    41 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Blending journalism and history with a pinch of personal essay, this book argues that China's 'one child' policy has had a number of terrible consequences. I'm glad to have read it, and learned a lot, but Fong's thesis deserves a better treatment than this. From the outset, I think most observers could agree that heavy government pressure to limit reproduction to one child per couple, especially in a society that lacks an independent judiciary and strong protections for individual liberty, is likely to result in corruption and horrible human rights violations (including forced abortions). The strongest parts of this book are the chapters that describe how the policy was implemented, the corruption the policy fed, and the human cost. However, that's not what Fong starts with - instead, she launches the book recounting the 2008 Sichuan earthqauke, noting that the massive child mortality caused by the collapse of poorly-built schools left thousands of parents with no surviving children. Certainly, the death of children is wrenching, but it seems bizarre to blame this result on the 'one child' policy, rather than corruption and shoddy construction. More broadly, Fong notes the phenomenon of 'shidu' parents, parents who have lost their only child, and now have difficulty getting access to nursing homes and buying burial plots. Again, this is a terrible situation, but there are intervening factors between the one child policy and the treatment of seniors with no surviving children; surely there are many couples who never chose or were able to have children, and are in the same boat.That said, Fong identifies several problems worth following: * the rapidly-changing ratio of retired seniors to working people* the excess of unmarried men resulting from sex-selection of fetuses and infants* social tension and violence associated with the large cohort of unmarried men* resulting social pressures to treat women as valuable but without valuing them as free agents.* the sketchy sourcing of Chinese babies adopted to families overseas.* the fact that, after changes in the economy, many young Chinese couples do not want to have multiple children, even as the government has relaxed the policy.What remains missing from the book is a serious discussion of what China should have done instead, especially given the social, economic, and environmental stresses that would have attended fast population growth. Fong argues the one child policy didn't slow growth that much, but to the extent that it has contributed to a lasting shift in the desired size of families, the policy appears likely to make a difference well into the future. The book's policy argument would be a lot more powerful if Fong made a case for a better alternative, but that's just not here.
    • 4/5
      Well, this was a relatively fascinating read.

      There are so many aspects to China's One Child policy and what makes it what it is, and Fong sets out to disentangle the many threads that make up this subversive policy.

      Unlike most people who read this book and reviewed it, I enjoyed Fong's story about her miscarriage and how certain aspects of Chinese culture had affected her life. I felt that it grounded the story and made all those traditions and superstitions all the more real.

      Sometimes I felt a lot of the stories were rushed, but how else are you supposed to cover such a huge and expansive topic in 200 pages?

      The only part of the book I didn't like was when Fong was discussing adoption in China. Of course, so many aspects of adoption in China are shady and suspect -- but I'm adopted and so it hurt to have adoption painted in such a vague and negative light. I'm sure the author didn't intend for it to be that way, but that's just how I felt.

      This is a mess of a review but if you're at all curious about China or sociology or how a country manages to conjure something up like the One Child policy, check out this book. You'll learn a whole bunch of weird and wonderful facts that'll make you really fun at parties, I promise.
    • 4/5
      A fascinating and in depth exploration of China's One Child Policy and all its political, economic, social, and psychological ramifications. Sometimes a bit academic, but a truly important topic with enormous implications for China and the world.
    • 4/5
      Interesting analysis of this misbegotten policy that had led to an imbalance of genders and to changes in social policy to take care of elders who formerly could count on daughters to manage their sunset years. Now there are no daughters to do it, and much fewer daughters-in-law, because boys and boys only.Chapters deal with the overpopulation panic of the 1970s, the treating of off spring as male princes, how the situation has impacted adoptions (baby selling?) of Chinese girls in the first world, and how the majority of males may be one of the causes of tensions between China, Korea, and Japan. The most heart-rending chapter was about the post-earthquake world of 2008, when so many schools collapsed and so many parents were left childless, which in China is like a death sentence.