It was only my third day as secretary of my village Party committee. It all started on April 26 of that year during a meeting of the county Party committee. To the west of the county hospital was a garbage dump with two wells several meters deep, practically overflowing because so many bodies were thrown in every day. If word of the policy reached you late and your child was already born, it still didn’t matter. At the time people with a rural hukou were prohibited from having children, regardless of their individual circumstances. Tents lined the thoroughfares of the county seat, and inside every tent were pregnant women about to go into labor. Witness I, Part 1īanners filled the streets with recycled slogans: “Better to stop the family line and put the Party at ease,” “A rope to hang yourself, a bottle to drug yourself,” “Better to miscarry than to give birth,” “Be resolute in carrying out policy, absolutely no more children.”
Childless hundred days tv#
Perhaps, I thought, this was due to relevant departments’ habit of “refutation through deletion.” However, when I came across several audio recordings, a Phoenix TV interview with a family planning official who did not deny it, and Guan County online forum where no one refuted it (and indeed several provided first-hand evidence), I knew I had to set the record straight in the hope of providing future generations a more rigorous understanding of what really happened. But when I started to look for refutations, lo and behold, I found none. My first response to this documentary was that it was all a rumor.
Childless hundred days full#
The post is translated in full below: “The Hundred Childless Days,” Guan County, Shandong, 1991 The accounts seem to date back about 20 years, but they were completely new to Wuyishuo, as the post author explained in a brief preface. The Phoenix TV documentary mentioned in the piece below is no longer available online but the transcript is archived.
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These testimonies were posted by (Wuyishuo) to their WeChat public account on March 15, but have since been censored for “violating regulations.” The provenance of these accounts is unclear, but their details are consistent with information found elsewhere. As China’s population ages and may be shrinking, the economic and social repercussions wrought by a generation of curtailed births are only just beginning to sting. While the “one-child policy” was loosened to a two-child policy in 2015, its lingering effects will only be felt more acutely in the coming years. In some extreme cases, such as in Guan County, this led to gruesome abuses. Under the one-child policy, local officials in China were responsible for implementing broad guidelines from the central government about family planning quotas, leaving little oversight of how localities reached their target birth rates. The families of pregnant women were publicly shamed in reprises of the Cultural Revolution. Children who did make it into the world were reportedly strangled, and their bodies tossed into open pits. In what some locals called “ the slaughter of the lambs,” women across Guan County were rounded up for forced abortions or induction of labor one local official claims that these “procedures” were sometimes no more than a kick in the stomach from an out-of-town mercenary. As local accounts attest, authorities in the area went to extraordinarily inhumane lengths to be the “best” at reproducing the least. County officials sought to correct this by ensuring that not a single baby was born between May 1 and August 10, 1991. Thirty years ago, Guan County, Shandong Province launched the “Hundred Childless Days” campaign under the aegis of national family planning, known in the West as the “one-child policy.” The birthplace of the “Boxers” was deemed to have too high a birth rate by the provincial government.
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