More and more Chinese, denied children, are rejecting family life altogether

The One-Child Policy 

Has Destroyed the Chinese Family

In collaboration with Steve Mosher 

It wasn’t so long ago that the ideal Chinese family was large, consisting of multiple generations, and sometimes multiple families, living together. In fact, author Lao She entitled his bestselling novel about life in Beijing under Japanese rule, Four Generations Under One Roof.

But that was before the one-child policy decimated Chinese families, discouraging the young from marrying and having children, aborting and sterilizing hundreds of millions of expectant mothers, and leaving the elderly bereft of the children and grandchildren who would have loved and supported them in old age.

The upheaval caused by the Party-State’s intervention into the private lives of its citizens is reflected in a new report China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC), the bureau charged with enforcing the one-child policy. Not surprisingly, the report shows that family size is shrinking rapidly, from 5.3 people at the time of the Communist revolution, to only around three today.

The primary driver of this decline is, of course, the one-child policy, which allows urban couples only one child and rural couples two. This trend has been accelerated as the young flee to the cities in search of economic opportunity, leaving villages peopled by the very old and the very young.

There are now tens of millions of unmarried young workers living in and around the cities, along with large numbers of couples who have delayed having children or decided to remain childless. Then there is China’s huge and growing population of elderly, living alone as singletons or as couples.

...................

Read more: www.aleteia.org