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【特写】一个计生红旗县的"二孩时代"|界面新闻 · 中国

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位于江苏东南部的如东县，比全国提前十年实行计划生育，比全国提前二十年进入老龄化。全面二孩政策能够延缓如东"衰老"吗？

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一个90后的田野调查笔记：我们村的计生史_绿政公署_澎湃新闻-The Paper

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这些构成了现代乡村的生育图景。这幅图景向历史，向现代，也向未来不断地延展开。看见这些生育故事，或许能真正地看见一个时代。

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超生，教师，计划生育，计生，计生政策

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"超生教师"如何度过计生最严时期：丢饭碗，扮流产，罚巨款_思想市场_澎湃新闻-The Paper

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生下孩子一周多，她便将孩子留在亲戚家喂米糊糊，自己回家，对外宣称因为自己的病，孩子没保住，生下是个死婴，还是个男孩，又假装悲伤了一阵。后又上演"捡弃婴"戏码。

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与二胎有关的三个故事|界面新闻 · 正午

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2013年，我国开始实施"单独二孩"政策（即"夫妻一方为独生子女的家庭可以生育第二个孩子"）；2016年1月1日开始，我国全面实施一对夫妇可生育两个孩子的政策。随着这些政策的实施，越来越多的二胎家庭开始出现，根据卫生计生委的统计数据，2017年的前5个月，全国住院的分娩数中，二孩及以上出生占57.7%。生育政策改变了，人们的家庭结构和亲子关系也都正在经历着巨大的改变。今天，正午带来了三个中国...

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China's family planning policy includes a series of measures regarding child-bearing, contraception, rewards and restrictions, and the child-bearing measure is the core of the policy.

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It might seem impossible that 13 million children could escape the notice of the central Chinese government, but this is exactly what was revealed in the 2010 census. A population the size of a small country has been denied birth registration and the corresponding proof of identity known as the hukou (household registration) by local Chinese governments. This document is usually necessary for children to access education.

Most of these children were born to parents that had broken the " one-child policy," a policy enforcing birthing restriction for all Chinese citizens. Defiance of the policy, in itself, will not necessary lead to a child being undocumented. Usually, children denied birth registrations are those whose parents have yet pay a "social compensation fee" - a fine for having their child without permission. Although this is an illegal action by local police bureaus, not only is denial of birth registration prevalent, many state officials see it as a key component of enforcing restrictions on reproduction.

The fines parents receive depend on the disposition of their local officers and the parent's income. Localities show considerable variations in how its calculate fines. Some charge fines parents are unable to afford. Parents unable to pay their fines may face the risk of repeated short-term detention, while others are taken to court or have their assets seized. Parents report daily harassment by local thugs or local government officials. In other locations, parents might receive sympathy from their local cadre, or pull in favours to reduce their fines. Luck, connections and money effectively play a part in determining when a child can become recognized.

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Only when the 2010 census was conducted did the scale of the problem emerge. The central Chinese government makes it a priority to collect accurate demographic data, so around the time of the census parents are encouraged to admit if their children were undocumented. Parents were promised that the information would not be shared with the local police bureau or the population and family planning department. Consequently, it was revealed that 13 million children were undocumented.

Of course, not all parents would have confessed the existence of their illicit children. Assurances notwithstanding, some would have worried that it would lead to demands for money from their local government. In previous censuses similar promises to parents of anonymity were broken. So the true population of hidden children could be significantly larger.

Five years on from that 2010 census and things are slowly changing. The one-child policy was significantly modified in 2013, and couples now can have two children if one parent is an only child. So, in theory, the number of undocumented children should decline as more parents than ever before can legally have two children.

But the political landscape of childbirth is not as transformed as one might imagine. By law, prior to 2013 rural citizens were already able to have a second child if their first was a girl; so most rural couples are under the same regulations as before. Besides, restrictions on childbirth are still in place for third children and beyond, and single women are still not permitted to have a child outside of wedlock.

Moreover, the relaxation allowing second children is rarely retrospectively applied by local governments, so parents who breached the policy prior to 2013 still face fines. The result has been that many parents who should be allowed second children under current law are still fighting to register their child's birth.

Being an undocumented child implies facing daily difficulties. Take Ms. Li*, for example, a Beijing resident interviewed last September. Her son is already 8 years old, and has no birth registration and thus no legal documentation. He has been denied the hukou because not only is he a second child born without permission; he was also born outside wedlock. Consequently Li has been fined particularly harshly - $50,300. Until this is paid, her son will continue to live without documentation.

Given that Li earns $300 a month she has little hope of her ever paying the fine. For now, her child attends an illegal private school, but there are no secondary schools he can attend without legal documentation.

Li is not alone: Countless other parents are in similar circumstances, while stories continue to surface in the media. Last year, the story of a father of four from Guizhou province, Mr. Wang made it into Western media. Wang committed suicide when his children were denied the hukou and education until he paid a fine of $3,500. As an improvised farmer he could not afford the amount. Only upon his death did the local government register the births of his children, and now they can have an education.

Given that the hukou is vital for a child's survival, parents of unregistered children must quickly find the money to ensure their children can gain an identity. Most try to ensure they can do so before the child's sixth birthday, the age at which children enter school. Some parents take out loans from loan sharks or borrow from family and friends. Others sell off assets to raise cash.

Those who cannot pay their fine can attempt to fight back. Li, for example, tried to sue her local government several times. With the help of a grassroots NGO she found legal representation. But in a state with no independent judiciary, her case was dismissed.

The case of China's missing children says something revealing about the Chinese state. It seems counterintuitive for so many children to be denied legal documentation: China's civil documentation system - the hukou system - is a cornerstone of Chinese governance. When a birth is registered, a child is put onto a family or work unit's hukou booklet and onto a digital database. This registration gives a person access to an ID card, which is necessary for all facets of modern life, such as employment, travel, marriage, and state welfare. The hukou is also needed for children to access state education. Within the hukou system a person's life is documented. So all citizens should be - and indeed, want to be - registered in the system because they need civil documentation.

The hukou system has also allowed the Chinese government to control migration; because citizens are allowed only to work and access education and welfare in the location they are registered. The documents citizens hold dictate their citizenship rights. In some circumstances citizens can temporarily register their residence in another location, or even move their registration to another city. But the central and provincial governments attempt to control that process. Of course, there is some illegal migration, but this does not allow citizens any rights in the cities they reside. Consequently, the central government places great emphasize on maintaining the hukou system.

So denial of the hukou, despite its importance for central government, points to deeper cracks within the Chinese state. Local governments hold children's identity documents to ransom until the fines are paid for the parent's transgression, even though that undermines the central government's system of migratory control.

Local governments do this because they continue to benefit from the revenue gained from the childbirth policies, and they have no need to declare how this revenue is allocated. The central government can do little but turn a blind eye to this if they want their policies enforced. But in the long run, the central government knows that a complete civil documentation system is essential to becoming a developed country, as is a system of governance whereby local, provincial and the central government work in unison.
Stephanie Gordon is a social researcher across the Chinese legal, political and anthropological fields, with a focus on human rights.
*Her name has been changed to protect her identity.

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It might seem impossible that 13 million children could escape the notice of the central Chinese government, but this is exactly what was revealed in the 2010 census. A population the size of a small country has been denied birth registration and the corresponding proof of identity known as the hukou (household registration) by local Chinese governments.

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China's Hidden Children has 88 ratings and 10 reviews. Stephanie said: As an adoptive mother, I felt it was my duty to read this book. It definitely poin...

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RESEARCHERS may have found millions of women and girls who were believed to be missing across China.

It was estimated that between 30 and 60 million girls were "missing" in the world's most populous country, with many believing they were either killed before or after birth simply because of their gender.

But new research suggests 25 million girls do actually exist after all and didn't appear on government records because they simply weren't registered.

The findings raise the possibility that the country's serious gender imbalance is not as severe as previously believed.

John Kennedy, an associate professor of political science at the University of Kansas, along with co-author Shi Yaojiang, an economics professor at Shaanxi Normal University, believe these girls went unreported at birth.

However they later appeared on government census records.

Prof Kennedy said it now appeared the administrative story had to do with how births are registered at local levels in China.

"People think 30 million girls are missing from the population. That's the population of California, and they think they're just gone," he said on the university's website.

"Most people are using a demographic explanation to say that abortion or infanticide are the reasons they don't show up in the census and that they don't exist. But we find there is a political explanation."

The sex ratio at birth was 118 males for every 100 females the 2010 Chinese census found.

However according to the new research, published this month in the journal China Quarterly, the female to male ratio isn't as dire as it sounds.

Using interviews and observations with villagers in rural China, the researchers analysed national population data which spanned a 25-year period.

They found a combination of late registration and unreported births helped explain a larger portion of the "missing girls" than previously cited in Chinese sex-ratio-at-birth statistics.

Prof Kennedy, who began looking into this issue 20 years ago, said they found authorities, particularly in rural areas, would turn a blind eye to extra children as they had to work and live in the village where such policies were implemented.

One farmer he spoke at this time called his second daughter "the non-existent one". In the 1980s rural Chinese were allowed to have a second child if their first was a girl.

The farmer, from the northern Shaanxi province, had a third child, a boy, and registered his son instead as his second child.

Researchers also found girls such as this were often reported later in life, often from the age of 10.

They then compared the number of children born in 1990 and compared it with the population figures 20 years later, discovering an extra four million people, with a million more females than males.

"If we go over a course of 25 years, it's possible there are about 25 million women in the statistics that weren't there at birth," Prof Kennedy said.
'DAMAGING POLICY'
Last year, Beijing announced it was officially ending the one child policy after a bill was signed off allowing all married couples to have a second child.

The policy was introduced in the 1979 by then Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in a bid to curb China's rapidly growing population.

But the one-child policy meant couples faced severe penalties, including fines and reported forced abortions if they had further pregnancies and children.

Concerns were also raised about the gender imbalance given the societal preference for boys while claims of sex-selective abortions or infanticide targeting girls also emerged.

The policy was loosened for rural families and ethnic minorities as concerns were filed over an ageing population and a perceived gender imbalance.

Further reforms occurred in 2013 when the government allowed couples to have a second child if they were only children themselves, however this did little to appease the problem with too few people taking the opportunity, AFP reported.

Some critics claimed it was too little too late to address the looming population crisis.

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Asian powerhouse could have more girls than previously believed

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RESEARCHERS may have found millions of women and girls who were believed to be missing across China. It was estimated that between 30 and 60 million girls were "missing" in the world's most populous country, with many believing they were either killed before or after birth simply because of their gender.

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渐行渐近的人口危机--中国生育报告2019（上）

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全面二孩政策不及预期，生育堆积效应业已消退，2018年出生人口或减少13%以上，总和生育率降至1.5以下。恒大研究院任泽平呼吁：应立即全面放开并鼓励生育，让更多的人想生、敢生，提升总和生育率到1.8左右。

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An intimate investigation of the world's largest experiment in social engineering, revealing how its effects will shape China for decades to come, and what that means for the rest of the world

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中国生育二胎开除公职家庭调查报告

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生不起二胎？这个省GDP全国第三，6成孕妇生二胎！

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1  The High Cost of China's One Child Policy revised

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Hearing that made me sad. It was because of the one-child policy that my mother resorted to an illegal clinic where she had the IUD that the hospital inserted, immediately after the birth of my older brother in 1985, removed. It was because of this policy that she then hid with her relatives in another village during her next pregnancy-when she was carrying me.

I am an unwelcome second child. The Chinese government would have preferred I had never been born. If my mom's pregnancy was ever discovered, I would have been aborted.

Now, after almost 34 years of enacting it and 24 years after my birth, China has reversed its one-child policy. As long as one parent is a single child, families can now welcome a second child. People like me, whose parents weren't very obedient, will just have to marry another only child if we want two kids. I might be spared from my mother's pain.

As I ponder the extent to which the government will guide my love life, I think about one huge effect of the policy: the plethora of male only-children that are my age. Being a woman is obviously an advantage since by 2020, there will be 24 million more men than women of marriageable age in China, as a result of the one-child policy and the skewed gender selection it created. The birth preference in Chinese tradition is for a boy to carry on the family name and the blood line. If a family can only have one child, parents try to make sure it's a boy. Neighbors considered my parents' decision to have a second child not worth the risk since they already had a boy. But for my parents, who grew up with five and six siblings each, they just couldn't accept a kid growing up without the love of a brother or sister.

Last week, I congratulated a close friend from Beijing, a mother of a six-month-old son, who will now be able to have a second child. Her response was less than enthusiastic: "It doesn't matter. Even the policy doesn't change, as long as you have enough money to buy through, you can always have second or third kid." In other words, before the actual reversal, the policy only applied to people who couldn't afford to bend the rules.

In rural areas, having more than two children is also not uncommon. Like my mother, if the parents are not reported during pregnancy and safely delivered the baby, paying a fine is the final negotiation with the government. In 1989, my parents, both farmers, paid their entire savings, 364 yuan, just under $100 at the time, for my birth. During the 1980s, the largest penalty for a second child was about 2,000 yuan or around $540. Now, the highest single fine for an extra kid is 1 million yuan ($164,134). Last year alone, the birth control bureau in 19 provinces collected 16.9 million yuan ($2.7 million) in penalties for families having a second child. This team of 500,000 officials is unlikely to be dismissed anytime soon; as everywhere in China, countless parents are still fighting for the chance to have more than one child.

Officials assure that there are not many couples who fit the requirement of the new policy-that is, at least one of the parents is an only child. According to the National Health and Family Planning Commission, there are about 15-20 million couples who are now free to have a second child, and only half of them expressed the willingness to raise two children. "There can be plans to divide time gap among births, give priorities to elderly couple and ensure the approval process for the applications of a second child," says Wang Peian, deputy chief of the commission.

Too often, a big number is used to interpret results-such as control of the population to secure China's economic development. The commission alleges that a total of 400 million births were successfully prevented because of the policy. If this is true, that this plan has led to China's growth, then before the my government further directs its plan for whom I marry and how many children I have, maybe first there should be a plan to fix marriages of the 24 million men who won't be able to find wives, a plan to ease only children's burden to care for elderly parents, a plan to soothe the pain of parents who lost their children, to make whole the families who were not as lucky as mine.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

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Hearing that made me sad. It was because of the one-child policy that my mother resorted to an illegal clinic where she had the IUD that the hospital inserted, immediately after the birth of my older brother in 1985, removed.

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academy of macroeconomic research at the national development and reform commission

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national development and reform commission

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China's invisible children battle to recover lost years

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As many as 13 million Chinese born outside the one-child policy were denied education and health care, have found getting work hard and could not marry. Has the end of the policy come too late for many of these invisible children?

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Little Jie, in a yellow cap and grey hoodie, darts out the doors of his school and across the road to where his mother is waiting to pick him up for lunch. He jumps up and down in excitement. "My favourite food is French fries," the nine-year-old says. His favourite period at school is xiake, when class is dismissed. "Because after xiake, you can have fun outside."

While his mother, Lu Cuiping, steams vegetables inside their small apartment on the outskirts of Beijing, he brings out a Lego navy frigate, which in his hands becomes a Chinese vessel mounting assaults on the enemy. "I want to be a military expert," he says, "researching naval weapons."

"He's very patriotic," Ms. Lu says. Usually, "the enemy is Japan. ... But sometimes he will aim at the family-planning committee."

For most Chinese, a child who dreams of attacking the state would be horrifying. But Little Jie is not Chinese - at least not according to the country in which he was born and lives. To China, he is no one. A ghost.

Forty-five years ago, China inaugurated an era of population control, amid fears that too many people would bring catastrophe. In 1980, it officially announced a national one-child policy, forcibly limiting the size of families. But there have been, inevitably, second (and, rarely, third and fourth) children: children who go unrecognized by the government, have no official identity - who are left to live outside the institutions of regulated society. Little Jie is one of them.

Since 1971, China has seen a total of 336 million abortions, completed 196 million sterilizations, and inserted 403 million intrauterine devices.

More difficult to count are the ghosts: the ones who were born, but have no official status. China's 2010 census estimated that there were 13 million people without official documentation - a population almost the size of Ontario's.

China's one-child policy has been called the "most spectacular demographic experiment in history," and "one of the most draconian examples of government social engineering ever seen." It has also been, according to the best available evidence, a failure even on its own terms.

It did little to alter birth rates - much of the decline had come earlier, under a 1970s-era two-child policy. Meanwhile, the most significant purported economic benefit of the one-child rule - that women who bear fewer children would be better able to join the work force and boost national productivity - is being offset by the mess China faces today, due to its vast forgone population.

While population restrictions fundamentally reshaped China, the one-child policy itself, which coincided with a time of growing wealth that brought natural declines in birth rates, didn't do China much good. Instead, by artificially cutting families to just one child, it brought decades of pain - and the millions of ghosts it has created are still without official home or respite.

Life as a ghost

The foundation of Chinese civic life is the hukou, a maroon-and-gold household-registration document. It is a form of identity used to control people's movements inside the country, set up by the Communist regime, and similar to systems used in Soviet Russia and imperial China. With it, a person can secure a national-identification card, attend school, access basic medical services, find a place to live, board a bus or train, open a bank account, get a job, and secure a passport. Without it, each of those things becomes difficult and, for those with too little money or too few connections, often impossible.

There is, for those with fat enough wallets, a way around it. Although families are limited to one child, Chinese authorities allow them to simply pay a fine - that, if unpaid, grows over time - for any extra offspring; the wealthy, in other words, can buy for themselves as many children as they please. Pay the fine, and your child gets a hukou, becoming indistinguishable from any other child. Those with more modest salaries, meanwhile, struggle with sums so punitive that they are effectively impossible to pay.

The last time Ms. Lu checked, in 2012, her fine was at 333,466 yuan (about $67,500). Before Ms. Lu lost her job recently, she earned 2,000 yuan a month (about $400). It would take 166 months - nearly 14 years - of her entire salary to pay off the fine.

She lost that job, in part because she turned down her boss's request to move to a new location, a neighbourhood where she knew she would not find a school with a sympathetic administrator - the only way Little Jie (the name his mother calls him) is able to attend elementary school right now. Even if they stay put, his education won't last: Little Jie won't be allowed to write the standardized exam that provides entry to middle school.

Ms. Lu, who is 42, has grown consumed by a desperation that she has cursed her child merely by giving birth to him. She tried to sell a kidney to raise money to pay the government fine, but was told she was too old. "I have thought about robbing a bank," she says. "But I don't have those kinds of skills."

For the most part, she hides her feelings from Little Jie, but he already feels his situation keenly. When he found out about bird flu, he stopped eating chicken, afraid it would make him sick and that a hospital wouldn't help him without proper documentation. For his last birthday, he begged his mother not to get presents or a cake. At the grocery store, he tells her not to buy anything unless it's on sale. He wants her to save money in hopes of paying the fine.

Over a lunch of shredded potato with chili peppers, bok choi and dry tofu, Little Jie suggests another solution. "Maybe you can marry a big official, so he can kill Mr. Ji," he says, with childlike naïveté. In Chinese, "ji" is the first syllable in "family-planning office."

None of this was supposed to happen.

In 1993, Ms. Lu had her first child, a daughter. Six years later, she divorced; her husband got custody of their child. Then, she fell in love again, and although they didn't marry, she became pregnant. She was thrilled - a new child might help assuage the pain from the girl she had lost. Fears of violating the one-child policy did not enter her mind; she has Mongolian ancestry, and minorities are largely exempt from birth restrictions. Besides, her first child had already been taken away.

But after Little Jie was born, she was asked to show marriage credentials. She didn't have any. A court eventually deemed her legally married to Little Jie's father, who himself had lost custody of another child from a previous marriage. "So the family-planning office judged that [Little Jie] is my third kid," Ms. Lu says.

She is so crushed by the thought that she has ruined her son's life, she is willing to give him up if it can give him a better one. "Find me some family to adopt him, so he can go to school," she says. "Otherwise, I'm going to destroy him."

A new population theory

There are lions of history inside the curving halls of Beijing's Millennium Monument: 40 men and women cast in life size, each a towering contributor to the country's culture. Confucius and Sun Tzu are here, as are those who invented paper and movable-type printing, founded Taoism, pioneered railroads and performed new styles of opera. Among them is Ma Yinchu, a man born in 1882 and identified as an economist, educator and demographer.

"Ma advocated birth control for China," the plaque reads. To many, he is the father of the one-child policy.

Mr. Ma's own family is horrified at that association. It "patently was not Ma Yinchu's theory," says Ma Size, his grandson, during an interview in Beijing, where he showed photos of the sprawling courtyard house in which he grew up with his famed ancestor. "Actually, my grandfather's demography theory called for families to have two children," he says. "And he opposed abortion. He saw it both as the killing of a life and bad for women's health."

Ma Yinchu's story is, nonetheless, in many ways the backdrop to the grand narrative of China's attempts to control its population.

When the Communists took over in 1949, Mr. Ma was among China's most prominent academic voices. He served as president of Peking University and was friends with Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People's Republic of China. And Mr. Ma was worried about babies. The first census of Communist China, in 1953, counted 600 million people, a shocking rise from 450 million in 1947. The prospect of the population cresting a billion was suddenly possible - and frightening. If China wanted to make each of its people wealthy, Mr. Ma reasoned, it would be easier to do so if there were fewer of them. Besides, he added, China didn't have the land to feed so many new mouths.

As a fix, he proposed a "new population theory" that embraced the widespread use of child-restraint propaganda, encouraged birth control, offered incentives for small families, and called for bureaucratic dissuasion of large families.

China was not the only country wrestling with these questions. For different reasons, the U.S. military began to sound the alarm in the 1950s, worried that burgeoning Asian populations would provide fertile ground for Communist revolutions. In the 1960s, after the global population passed 3 billion, environmental concerns also arose internationally. The United Nations and the World Bank both advocated population control, the latter deeming unchecked population growth a detriment to economic expansion. Richard Nixon called it a "world problem which no country can ignore."

The world took notice, often in problematic ways. India oversaw a campaign that forcibly sterilized 8 million women in the 1970s. (Coerced sterilization remains a concern there today.) Bangladesh paid women to be sterilized. Indonesia set reproductive targets for local leaders to enforce.

For a long time, China had resisted these ideas. When Mr. Ma unveiled his theory to the public in 1957, it was met with hostility; he was called "a lifelong opponent of the Party, socialism, and Marxism-Leninism." Mao Zedong famously believed that more workers meant more production, and that a big enough population would make the country invincible in war. "The more people there are, the stronger we are," he once said.

But just over two decades later, when China's population surpassed 800 million, Beijing began to warm to the idea of taking action, and in 1971, China set explicit goals for reducing the growth rate. Under the slogan "Later, longer and fewer," the country set rules for delaying marriage (with specific age requirements for men and women) and required couples to wait at least four years after the birth of their first child before having a second. In cities, families were cut off at two children. Officials had already started handing out birth control for free in the 1960s.

Then, in the 1970s, great numbers of Chinese women were forced to use intrauterine devices. Compliance was not optional. A campaign of forced abortions and sterilizations was also launched, though not implemented to the extent it would be later on.

Propaganda played a part, too. People were told about their local community's financial situation, as a way of creating peer pressure on couples not to burden the system with additional children. A famous 1979 state-newspaper editorial suggested the country had erred grievously by ignoring Mr. Ma. Its headline: One Individual Wrongly Criticized, 300 Million More Births.

The next year, the full-fledged one-child policy was introduced, amid fears - based on faulty science - that without more drastic action, China's population risked growing to 4 billion, and its people risked running out of water and food. At the time, medical groups rallied around a slogan of "having only one child for the revolution."

Immediately, the use of coercive tactics spiked. In 1983 alone, 20.7 million Chinese women were sterilized, and there were 14.4-million abortions. Many were not done by choice.

Losing faith in the system

Mr. Feng was a senior engineer at a rocket-research institute. It was a coveted job, a high position at a state-run organization in Beijing. He and his wife tried for years to have a child, eventually resorting to in-vitro fertilization, at a cost of roughly $10,000. They had a girl in 2009, and thought they were done.

Then his wife, against all odds, got pregnant again, this time naturally. And their lives began to unravel.

"I knew for certain that I was going to lose my job. But then we talked about it and thought, 'Maybe we can have the baby in secret,'" says Mr. Feng, 42, who asked that only his surname be used because of continuing sensitivities around violating the one-child policy. That decision launched his family into a cat-and-mouse game with colleagues, friends and neighbours that would shake his loyalty to the very system that had once brought him such success.

As his wife began to show, she stayed inside. But someone - he still doesn't know who - reported the couple to his local work unit, who called Mr. Feng to ask about the pregnancy. He denied it to them, and then denied it to the leader of his research institute, who asked as well. "They said, 'Okay, then call your wife here. Let's have a look.'"

He lied again. "My wife is not in Beijing," he said, "she's already gone back to Nanjing," her hometown. The stakes were high: As an employee of a state-owned firm, he had to confirm each year that there were no additional pregnancies in his family. If he was found to break the rules, he, his boss and all his colleagues would forfeit their bonuses and, potentially, chances at promotion. Mr. Feng made plans to have his wife stay with a friend in a village outside the city. Within 48 hours of the first phone call, he had taken the afternoon off work to drive her there.

On the way, his cellphone rang. Another work leader wanted to meet. "Come back quickly," he said. Mr. Feng stopped at a small public park where his wife could hide, and drove back to work. He was told to pledge in writing that his wife was not pregnant, and that he would have to accept all possible consequences if she was. He signed.

That night Mr. Feng drove his wife and daughter away. More than a week passed, and he started to breathe easy. Then he got another call from a boss at work. This time, they needed proof that his wife was not pregnant. Mr. Feng offered to provide it from afar, then had his sister-in-law pose as his wife for the test.

The ruse didn't work for long. Ten days later, a colleague came by and said it was imperative that his wife return to Beijing. When Mr. Feng said that wasn't possible, the colleague revealed he had already booked two tickets to Nanjing, saying: "You and I will go to see your wife and get her tested at a hospital. If it's negative, okay. But if it's positive, she has to have an abortion."

The tickets were booked for that night.

"There was nothing I could do to hide any more. I said it was impossible to take him to Nanjing with me. I said I would accept whatever decisions they made."

His colleague got up and printed a resignation letter, saying Mr. Feng was leaving for personal reasons. Mr. Feng signed it; they took his security pass, and that same afternoon he was gone.

"I used to be a person who believed we shouldn't make trouble for the party. But this has made me rethink not only the family-planning policy but also broader issues such as people's rights and the construction of our civil society. I started rethinking the whole system."

At home, neighbourhood authorities visited daily, pressing for Ms. Feng to obtain an abortion. When their second child, a son, was eventually born, he was told it would cost 370,000 yuan - $75,000 - to buy him proper registration. "We don't have that kind of money," he recalls telling them. "I can't even raise that by selling my house."

Mr. Feng had spent his life chasing success in the Chinese system, from his days as university student-union chairman onward. But the experience of having a second child was deeply jarring. "Isn't it natural for humans to have a child," he asks, "and isn't it reasonable to do so?"

"I used to be a person who believed we shouldn't make trouble for the party," he says, in an interview at a cafeteria outside his new workplace - a private company where he works as a software engineer. Neither the benefits nor the job title match his old status, but at least he has work. "But this has made me rethink not only the family-planning policy but also broader issues such as people's rights and the construction of our civil society. I started rethinking the whole system."

His is a common sense of disenfranchisement.

Second children are conceived and born for all sorts of reasons. Some parents want a larger family badly enough that they consciously flout the law. Often, though, second pregnancies are accidental, and carried to term by families that cannot countenance an abortion, and then cannot afford the fine that follows forgoing one. The policy poses little obstacle for the wealthy, some of whom simply skip the system altogether by giving birth in places like Hong Kong, the United States and Britain. It's the middle and lower classes who find themselves without hukou. Unable to game the system, their experiences often breed a dark cynicism.

A failure on its own terms

China credits the one-child policy with avoiding 400 million births. Without it, family-planning officials have said, the population would be 30 per cent larger than it is today. Outside China, green groups have called it the country's single greatest environmental contribution to the planet's health, while economists have suggested it has contributed greatly to the immense wealth the country has amassed in recent decades.

But demographers have been less certain: Some 70 per cent of the decrease in China's child-bearing rates actually came in the years before the one-child policy was launched, under previous efforts at curbing family size through less-severe restrictions, such as delaying marriage and second children. And although the 1970s-era two-child policy led to unmistakeable human-rights violations, the one-child policy constituted a major increase in birth restrictions and fast accelerated the pace of forced abortions and sterilizations. It also lasted far longer than a single decade - and much longer than needed, according to demographers, who point to China's Asian neighbours, where a rise in wealth has by itself led to much lower birth rates.

Some of the most striking criticisms of the policy come from Chinese academics who have looked at the whether the policy really did prevent 400 million births; some suggest a more accurate number would be 100 million. "Most of the births averted, if any, were due to the rapid fertility decline of [the 1970s], not to the one-child policy that came afterward," demographers Wang Feng, Yong Cai and Baochang Gu wrote in a recent paper. History, the demographers concluded, will "likely view this policy as a very costly blunder."

The only explanation they can conjure for the policy's continued existence is bureaucratic: Maintaining the one-child regime now employs so many officials - in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps more - that China hasn't been willing to put them out of work.

A desire to avoid catastrophic population growth initially lay behind China's strict controls. But after nearly a half-century of artificially altering birth rates, China has created long-term demographic problems that are prompting a rethink of the entire grand experiment. Though estimates vary, the population is expected to peak between 2020 and 2030 at around 1.45 billion. By 2030, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences expects China to be the greyest society on Earth: Today, the country counts almost five taxpayers for each person drawing a pension; by 2030, the ratio will fall to roughly 2:1.

Academics and blue-collar workers alike fret over China's growing old before it grows rich; at the same time, the country's GDP expansion has already slowed to its lowest level in 24 years, and is expected to continue dropping. China has reached a "post-Yinchu era," Mu Guangzong, who is with the Institute of Population Research at Peking University, recently wrote. The country stands at the "crossroads of history" and needs to depart from "the myths of 'overpopulation' and 'strong family planning' " as soon as possible.

As a result, China is reconsidering the one-child policy so seriously that many believe it is only a matter of time before Beijing does away with birth restrictions altogether; in some cities, there is already talk among officials of baby bonuses to spur more children. The country has resisted any explicit concession of wrongdoing, saying in 2013 only that the policy will be "adjusted and improved step by step." At that time, it was relaxed to allow families two children if even just one parent is a single child (before then, both had to be single children to be allowed a second child).

In publicly grappling with the problems, China's elites have tacitly acknowledged that the one-child policy has gone too far. What they haven't done is grandfather in changes that would alleviate the pain felt by the policy's most acute victims: the ghosts.

'Social maintenance fees'

Max Wong, 48, was a long-time pastor, a man for whom the notion of abortion was anathema. So when his wife unexpectedly got pregnant a second time, and then a third, there was never a question they would carry through to birth. What he didn't expect was the upheaval such births would cause.

He was fired after their third child was born. "Since, as a pastor, you have broken the Chinese law, you are not a good example," he was told by other church leaders. At home, his second son was retreating into himself, telling his family, "Because I have no identification, I don't want people to know me." The depression was serious enough that Mr. Wong returned to his old hometown to look into paying the fine - it would be cheaper there. He was told to pay 100,000 yuan, or roughly $20,000, up front for his children's documentation. He was told "you are going to get it soon."

That was more than a year ago. He still hasn't received anything, though he expects to soon. He is critical of the system. The penalties, he believes, are a convenient way for officials to pad their own pockets. For him, that helps explain why the policy has been so persistent. "That money becomes grey income for the local government," he says.

In response to written questions submitted by The Globe and Mail, China's Health and Family Planning Commission replied that local officials must make public their rules about one-child-policy fines, as well as information about how much money they collect. The law requires local officials to submit those fines - which China calls a "social maintenance fee" - to the national treasury, although they are then returned to local budgets. As a result, there remains an incentive for neighbourhood officials to use second children as a revenue source. It's not small change: In 2012, a report that tallied such fees in two-thirds of China's provinces found that they had brought in $2.6-billion in fines from violators of the policy.

Despite the shifting attitudes in the Chinese government, in its response to the Globe the commission defended the necessity of maintaining family restrictions, writing that "some of the fundamental realities of China are not changing, such as the country's large population and the heavy pressure it places on economic and social development." The commission also said that the fine would be assessed at "three times or less" the average per-capita disposable income in a given area, per parent.

"This policy is not fair. Isn't giving birth a basic right?"

The Globe and Mail interviewed a half-dozen parents who, together, had eight "ghost" children. Those parents told us the fines were up to 14 times the average annual salary in a given area, and that they rise every year.

Raine Ma, a 34-year-old accountant, has seen the fine for her second child - a daughter who is now 6 - increase from 300,000 yuan ($61,000) in 2012, to 430,000 ($87,000) in 2014. That's nearly 10 times the 45,052-yuan average annual income last year in her neighbourhood of Beijing.

Paying it would leave her family destitute for years. "This policy is not fair," she says. "Isn't giving birth a basic right?" Besides, she points out, neither Bill Gates, Warren Buffett - nor even Mao Zedong or current president Xi Jinping - were first-born children. "How many outstanding people were planned out of existence?" she asks. "I think the policy right now is just to control people like us, living decent and honest lives."

The Globe also asked the Commission about the prospect for further easing restrictions. There is "no timetable to make it wide open for a second child for every family," came the reply. And "cancelling the social maintenance system would be unfair to the people who have answered the call of the state and strictly obeyed the family-planning policy."

A world passing her by

From the small confines of Li Xue's chilly house in downtown Beijing, talk of reform seems awfully distant. Over her lifetime, a new China has crept up around her, but for Ms. Li little has changed in the 21 years since she was born as a second child. The loosening of China's one-child policy has done little to give legal standing to the "ghosts." Officially, she still does not exist.

Ms. Li did not come from wealth. Her father cut leather at a state-owned company, for 100 yuan a month. When her mother became pregnant a second time, with Ms. Li, a cooking injury left her with an infection that, doctors said, prevented her from having an abortion. Her mother, who had polio as a baby, lost her job at a collectively owned neighbourhood company when Ms. Li was born. At the time, her father was told to pay a 5,000-yuan fine for her birth - 50 times his annual salary. "If we pay this penalty, who will pay for my family to live?" he asked them.

Ms. Li was never vaccinated, and has no formal education. As a child, she raided neighbours' old books and gave herself a basic education, teaching herself math, reading and writing. She traces the subsequent years through a sheaf of documents that scrupulously document the attempts she and her parents made to reverse her situation: official notes, letters and petitions that catalogue a lifetime of frustration, with countless trips to police stations, the family-planning office and courts - a grand game of jurisdictional Ping-Pong.

She cannot buy basic medicines, which require an ID card. She cannot board a train or long-distance bus without proper documentation; her life has been confined to just the few kilometres around her house.

Her status, or lack thereof, has also meant social exclusion. "Parents would like to have their kids socialize with people who are well-educated or have good scores, instead of me, who hasn't studied at all," she says. Others are nervous to be with her, too, since for years her local neighbourhood committee, seeing her as a troublemaker, has kept watch, making her look suspicious. She knows this because in 2009 her father found a paper in the trash showing the 10 people - a mix of police and neighbours - organized into shifts, 24 hours a day, to monitor the family's comings and goings. "Basically, I don't have friends," she says.

She hasn't dated, either, because she knows no one would want to marry a "black child," as the Chinese call ghosts. Besides, dating belongs to talk of a future she tries not to contemplate. "I don't think too much about dreams," she says.

More recently, she has spent much of her time caring for her ailing parents - cooking food and accompanying them on doctors' visits. Her father's weak health was compounded by the times he was roughed up for advocating for his daughter, and last year he was hospitalized. When Ms. Li spoke with The Globe and Mail in the fall, the hospital called to say others were in greater need of the ventilator that had supported him. It was pulled out, leaving Ms. Li "afraid that without the ventilator, my dad will die."

A few days later, he passed away. With him went his 1,260 yuan ($255) in monthly state support. In its place was roughly 15,000 yuan ($3,000) in medical debt.

Sitting on the spartan queen-sized bed she shares with her mother, Ms. Li is largely stoic as she recounts the details of her many indignities. But as she contemplates her father, her voice grows pinched. "He suffered so much for me," she says. Tears roll down her face. "I feel like I should never have been born."

Among the papers she has collected are decades-old internal family-planning-commission documents, dog-eared from years of being pored over, including one from 1988 with rules that suggest Ms. Li should have been awarded a hukou, and that her parents should bear the punishment, not her. Ms. Li has poured much of her time into studying law, researching her case and handwriting legal petitions, but has failed to convince a court to side with her. She has lost two lawsuits against the local family- planning office.

Still, she holds on to hope. She plans to file a new appeal in late March. And in January, her life suddenly took a turn upward. A foreigner in Beijing hired her as a waitress at a new restaurant. She didn't know how to make coffee or mix a drink. It's an illegal job, and she whispers about it at home, lest her neighbours find out. But for now, she is making money that she can use to buy her mother medicine. "My burden," she says, "has lifted a little."

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The ghost children: In the wake of China's one-child policy, a generation is lost

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In 1980, China introduced the one-child policy. In the process, it created a lost generation - second and third children who went unregistered, couldn't go to school, and who continue to live in the shadows.

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China, the world's most populous country, continues to keep its population growth in check by implementing strict birth control measures. Health officials across the country conduct regular medical tests on all women in the childbearing age and anyone who conceives the third child is reportedly forced to undergo an abortion.

Those flouting the norms and giving birth to a third child are often forced to go into hiding or pay a hefty fine, the BBC reported, citing the ordeal of a man who has moved out of his village with his family as his wife has just given birth to their third child.

The communist government announced a new two-child policy in October 2015, changing the one-child policy that had been in place for decades. The change in policy came after the government was alarmed by falling birth rates and a decline in the population of the young. However, government figures reportedly showed that the previous policy prevented around 400 million births.

Although the restrictions of having babies was changed from one to two, effective 1 January, all other rules remained intact, including fines and punishments for flouting the rule. A fine of up to 10 times the annual average income is reportedly imposed on families opting to keep the third child.

"We don't have the money for the fine. We just don't know what to do," the person told the broadcaster. He added that he does not regret having the forbidden child. "When I look at our new baby, I feel happy."

He also said that the local government carries out pregnancy examinations every three months. "If we weren't in hiding, they would have forced us to have an abortion."

On inquiring about forced abortions, a senior health official of a family planning centre in a city in eastern China said "very few" such operations have been conducted at the centre. The official, however, confirmed that all women of childbearing age in his district are required to report for two ultrasound examinations every year.

Those found bearing a third baby "will be advised accordingly", he told the BBC reporter, who visited the centre.

When a female reporter called some family planning centres posing as a pregnant woman bearing her third child and wanting to give birth to the baby, she was told that she will be "persuaded" to abort the child.

"If you're reported to us, then we'll find you and we'll persuade you not to give birth to that baby," one centre told the woman. Another said: "We'll definitely find you and persuade you to do an abortion," said another.

When asked if she would face any physical force if she showed resistance to their persuasion, one centre replied that it was still possible "in principle", while the other said it was "hard to say".

On asking if she could keep the baby by paying the fine, a health official from another centre said: "No. You just can't."

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Strict birth control measures in China force parents to abandon child or go into hiding

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China, the world's most populous country, continues to keep its population growth in check by implementing strict birth control measures. Health officials across the country conduct regular medical tests on all women in the childbearing age and anyone who conceives the third child is reportedly forced to undergo an abortion.