How baby flushed down toilet was lucky:
Shocking toll of China's one-child rule
For people in China, the baby’s pitiful ordeal has touched a painfully raw nerve and triggered a frenzy of bitter self-criticism
It was an image that startled the world – a newborn wailing in distress as he is cut free from a filthy sewage pipe after being flushed down a toilet in China.
The survival of Baby 59 – named after the incubator where he recovered following three hours wedged in the pipe – is an extraordinary story of human spirit and the sheer will to live.
For people within China, however, the baby’s pitiful ordeal has touched a painfully raw nerve and triggered a frenzy of bitter self-criticism.
“This shames our nation,” one blogger, Zhong Zi Wei from Beijing, posted. “We are worse than animals.
"The one-child policy has turned us all into brutes.”
Another, Fu Hei Dou from the southern city of Guangzhou, wrote: “It must seem to the world that China is a country that puts no value on human life.
"Our new president talks about the Chinese Dream, but is this any way for an infant to begin his life? It is unfair and it is utterly uncivilized.”
The fact Baby 59 is alive today is a freakish slice of fortune in a country where unwanted babies are discarded and common humanity takes second place to Communist Party decree.
Thousands of women across China are subjected to forced abortions every year if they violate the one-child policy and fail to pay fines. There is no legal limit on how late in the pregnancy they can be carried out.
Outrages that would be classed as crimes of murder or manslaughter elsewhere in the world are routinely committed by officials appointed to enforce the 34-year-old law.
Last June, Feng Jianmei, who was seven months pregnant, was injected with a chemical to kill her unborn child because she could not afford the £4,000 fine for having a second child.
A photo posted online of the bereft 27-year-old lying in hospital in Shaanxi province with her stillborn daughter caused uproar.
Officials were sacked, but none were prosecuted.
Introduced by Deng Xiaoping in 1979 to curb an anticipated population explosion, the one-child policy is the world’s biggest exercise in population control.
City dwellers are allowed only one child, while in rural areas couples can only have a second child if the first is a girl. Only ethnic minorities such as Tibetans and Mongolians are exempt.
Fines range from around £260 to £8,500 but families must then pay thousands of pounds more in lifelong levies for the health and education costs of illegal children.
The policy is often ruthlessly enforced. A Shanghai office worker pregnant with a second child in the 1980s was fired, forced to have an abortion and sent to a labour camp for years.
Across China, feared family planning units staffed by 300,000 workers and 80 million volunteers are notorious for snooping on neighbours who break the rules.
They have the power to confiscate livestock and even homes of families with illegal children and can force pregnant women to have abortions and be sterilised.
Women who have had their one legal child are forced to have intrauterine devices fitted that they cannot remove, to prevent them falling pregnant again.
Village family planning chiefs painstakingly chart the menstrual cycle and pelvic examination results of every woman in their community of childbearing age.
More than 300 million abortions have been carried out since the policy was introduced and more than 200 million women sterilised.
Deaths of unwanted infants are so commonplace that dead babies, especially girls, are sometimes abandoned.
It led to one horrific incident in 2001 when scores of pedestrians walked nonchalantly past the body of a dead baby girl left in the gutter of a street in Hunan province.
Eventually, an elderly man picked up the body, placed it in a box and put it in a bin. Police refused to take any action and instead arrested a woman who photographed the heartbreaking scene and reported it.
Communist Party officials insist the one-child policy has spared China the chaotic overpopulation of India, whose numbers will soon soar past China’s 1.34 billion.
Critics call it a “barbaric experiment in social engineering” which has left China sitting on a demographic timebomb it cannot defuse.
Population expert Professor Paul Yip of the University of Hong Kong said the policy had thrown up two significant but unforeseen social consequences.
The first was the so-called “four-two-one” problem where a single child born in the 80s is today left alone to support two parents and four grandparents on a single income.
Yip said: “In China, many people get old before they get rich. We do not have a well-developed social welfare system. Most support for the elderly comes from the family.”
With no siblings to help, single children care for parents and grandparents. However, the system could buckle under its own pressure, he said.
A second issue was the “little emperors” syndrome – the vulnerability of only children born under the one-child policy and their inability to manage in the adult world.
Referring to the recent spate of suicides among staff at the Foxconn factories making Apple products, Prof Yip said: “Many only-children cannot cope with problems.
"They have huge mental health issues that sometimes lead to suicide. They have never had to compete with anyone before because there was only one child in the household.”
More critically, the policy is blamed for a yawning gender gap which has seen the ratio in China stretch to 118 men to every 100 women through decades of sex-selective abortions.
The skewed numbers means there are not enough wives to go around – leaving an underclass of low-educated men known as “bare branches” with little prospect of family life.
An estimated 50,000 women every year – some of them snatched from neighbouring countries including Burma – are being trafficked and sold as brides in China.
As hosts of the world’s biggest all-male singles club, Beijing’s biggest worry might be that in the days of imperial China, “bare branch” gangs led anti-government revolts.
Some critics, like Dr Yi Fuxian, argue the one-child policy was not necessary and that birth rates in China would have fallen naturally as they have in Japan.
Dr Yi, who moved from China to the US and had three children, said infertility rates in his home country had risen tenfold since the 1980s in line with developed countries with falling birth rates.
However, he predicted that even if the policy was scrapped today it would be too late to solve an ageing population and a shrinking labour force.
Professor Yip, who took part in a forum on the issue in Shanghai last month, said there was mounting pressure for the Chinese government to at least ease the one-child policy.
He said: “In China, life is cheap. This isn’t a very stable foundation for society. How we value life reflects our moral position as a society.
“The government is looking at this now. They want a more humane and tolerant society.
“They know if they continue with the one-child policy, there will be a price to pay.”
For millions of women – and millions of unborn infants who didn’t share the astonishing luck of Baby 59 – any change that comes will be too late.
Now aged 55, He Shaoying weeps bitterly when she recalls the day 20 years ago when she was taken to a hospital in Fujian province while eight months pregnant with her second child.
She said: “I was told it was a boy after the induced labour was over but they took him away and soon afterwards told me he had died.
“My friends working in the hospital told me later that my baby was given a lethal injection.”
According to Ma Jian, the dissident author of the one-child policy book The Dark Road, these atrocities are among the worst of the past century.
He concluded: “The stain it has left on China may never be erased.”
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Baby flushed down the toilet
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