In China, Signs One-Child Policy May be Coming to an End

[Last week, my agency announced it would no longer be handling adoptions. It would still have a presence in China, supporting orphanages and schools, and would still be providing services for families who adopted children through them. But after years of only performing special needs adoptions, now they're no longer even doing that. The times, they are a'changing. I'm actually relieved. Of course I want to see China start to care for its own, and make improve its social policies. I'm not selfish enough to read this and think about a second adoption that may or may not happen. The world doesn't owe me anything. And if someday we find ourselves in a position to adopt a really needy child... well...]

China could be considering relaxing its harsh one-child policy because of women like Hu Yanqin, who lives in a village at the edge of the Gobi desert.



When Hu married a construction worker seven years ago, she knew she was going to have only one child, although the area where she lives, the Jiuquan region in northwestern Gansu province, is one of the rare places in China where those living in rural areas have been free to have two children since 1985.



"Those people with two children are those who are better off,'' said Hu, 32, dropping her six-year-old son off at kindergarten. "The majority of people in my village only have one child.''



Advocates of reforming China's one-child policy use Hu and millions like her as evidence that relaxing the law will not lead to a surge of births in the world's most populous nation.



Jiuquan has a birth rate of 8 to 9 per 1,000 people, lower than the national average of about 12 births per 1,000 people.



The policy, implemented since 1980 alongside reforms that have led to rapid economic expansion, is increasingly being seen as an impediment to growth and the harbinger of social problems.



The country's labour force, at about 930 million, will start declining in 2025 at a rate of about 10 million a year, projections show. Meanwhile, China's elderly population will hit 360 million by 2030, from about 200 million in 2013.



"If this goes on, there will be no taxpayers, no workers and no caregivers for the elderly,'' said Gu Baochang, a demography professor at Renmin University.



China's top statistician, Ma Jiantang, said last Friday that the country should look into ``an appropriate and scientific family planning policy'' after data showed that the country's working-age population, aged 15 to 59, fell for the first time.



Economists say the policy is also responsible for China's high savings rate. A single child often must take care of two - and four in the case of married couples - retired parents, increasing the likelihood that working adults will save money for their old age rather than spend.



That has delayed the "rebalancing'' of Beijing's economy toward more consumption, a step economists believe China needs to take to keep its growth going.



Expectations that Beijing will ease the restrictions, by gradually allowing couples to have two children, have been building since outgoing President Hu Jintao conspicuously dropped the phrase ``maintain a low birth rate'' in a work report to a Communist Party congress in November.



It was the first time in a decade that a major speech by a top leader had omitted such a reference and could signal the new government led by Xi Jinping is leaning toward reform.



"I think that the 18th Party Congress report indicates that, and this is my personal interpretation, the one-child policy is going to be adjusted,'' said Ji Baocheng, a delegate to China's rubber stamp parliament who advocates change in the policy.



Brutal



The one-child policy covers 63 per cent of the country's population and Beijing says it has averted 400 million births since 1980.



Its enforcement can be brutal. Couples who flout family planning laws are, at minimum, fined, some lose their jobs, and in some cases mothers are forced to abort their babies or be sterilized.



Last summer, a woman who was seven months pregnant was forced to have an abortion, triggering outrage on China's Internet and international condemnation.



But evidence has been mounting for years that the policy may be unnecessary to control population growth.



In 2008, Renmin University's Gu and the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy published a study on two-child policy programs in four regions, home to about 8 million people. They concluded that the high cost of having children is enough to hold down birthrates, but the freedom to have a second child results in a less skewed gender disparity.



The next year, sources told Reuters, the National Population and Family Planning Commission decided, as a first step, to expand pilot programs to relax the policy in four to five other regions.



The proposal was dropped for lack of a consensus among the leadership, according to a person familiar with the discussions.



The new leadership in Beijing, which assumes power formally in March, is likely to make another run at change, reform advocates believe.



"The adjustment of the policy is certain, it's only a question of time,'' said a recently retired official from the family planning commission, who maintains close ties with the agency.



Boys and Girls



A skewed gender ratio is another unwelcome effect of the one-child policy.



Like most Asian nations, China has a traditional bias for sons. Many families abort female fetuses and abandon baby girls to ensure their one child is a son, so about 118 boys are born for every 100 girls, against a global average of 103 to 107.



In Jiuquan, there are 110 boys for every 100 girls, far less skewed than the national average, because of the freedom to have two children.



Tian Xueyuan, one of the drafters of the original one-child policy, told Reuters that he had warned top officials nearly a decade ago of the flaws.



"A substantial portion of China's men will not be able to find a match ... and that will be a major factor of social instability,'' Tian said he told party leaders.



The usefulness of the one-child policy, he said, has run its course. "It's a special policy with a time limit, specifically, to control the births of one generation,'' Tian told Reuters.



Still, there are significant pockets of resistance. Last week, Wang Xia, the minister in charge of the family planning commission, said China will "unswervingly adhere'' to its family planning policy.



Her remarks dismayed reformers expecting change from the new government, and ignited an outcry among Chinese Internet users.



Analysts said Wang's remarks did not necessarily reflect the thinking of the incoming government. The commission declined to comment.



In Jiuquan today, though the one-child policy is relaxed, women are still subject to strict family planning rules. They are fitted with intra-uterine devices after their first child, sterilized after their second. Anyone who defies the two-child quota pays a 30,000 yuan fine.



Few do. The women in Jiuquan complain about expensive school fees and other expenses of bringing up children.



"It's hard to raise a child,'' said Xing Juan, a 26-year-old with one son. "The burden is heavy.''

Melody

Fun with Mandarin Chinese phrases

 zánmen  huí  jiā ba - let's go home.

Yeah, that one's useful. I'm going to start using it.

I've started frequently using

"wǒ bù shì yǐ zi!"

(Geez, it's hard to format when I c&p the syllables directly from the online dictionary.)

Anyway, the above means, "I am not a chair!" Something I say frequently anyway, as someone tends to try to use me as a chair frequently.

Cloud doesn't quite understand the syntax of qustions. If I ask, "Wo shi yi zi ma?" he is immediately lost.

Ah well, all things in due time.

Fish, fish, more fish, and a blue lobster

Today I discovered that there is exactly enough time in the morning to drop my husband off at work, drive to the museum of natural history where we have a membership, walk around until the building opens, and see all the exhibits before having to go home for lunch and afternoon preschool.

Today we did just that. We walked all the way to the beach. I refused to actually go on the beach, because it was covered with resting sea gulls and I didn't want to disturb them.  Cloud insisted on going down himself and throwing some pebbles in the water. But instead of scaing the gulls, he only aroused their curiosity, and several started to move closer and closer to him. I guess they hoped he was throwing food.

In the basement of the museum building is a nice little aquarium with a do-not-touch tidal pool.  A museum director came out to chat with the day's first visitors, and in the course of conversation, he mentioned that his freshwater tank at home contained too many platyfish.  Suddenly he and I were making a deal for him to give some platyfish to me. 

And there was a blue lobster. Those are getting really common these days, aren't they? No aquarium had one when I was a kid. But now this aquarium had one, and the Woods Hole aquarium has one, and those are very, very small establishments.

Intolerable kid

You ever have one of those days when your kid follows you around being in-your-face annoying in every conceivable way, while at the same time bursting into tears at the slightest provocation (and even no provocation at all)?

My kid is normally not like that. Yes, he thinks I'm a jungle gym, punching bag, and tree fort all rolled into one. Yes, he thinks whatever I'm doing is infinitely more interesting than anything else that he could be doing.  But today he's in a mood, and the weepiness is especially indicative of that.

He went off to have a picnic with his dad, and just in time, too, because I was just about done trying not to be cross with him.  Now I'm stress-eating some junk food. And some broccoli too, so it's not all bad, I guess.

Now my goal is, if not precisely to cheer up, at least to get enough done so my husband feels that rescuing me was a worthwhile endeavor.

I oughtta write by now

Well, my old friend at Unexpected Journey ended her Blogger hiatus today, and I helped prod her, so I guess I should end mine too.

It'll be a lot easier to blog when my new laptop arrives. I've been without a computer of my own for personal use for about 2 years now, and it was a pain to have to log my husband out and myself in every time, and then make him do the same when it was his turn.

Since we last checked in on AwesomeCloud, he has turned four, finished 3-year-old preschool, been gallivanting across New England with his dad and/or me, learned to speak in (often hilarious) sentences, learned to ride a trike and dunk a kiddie basketball, been to the beach a bazillion times, and greatly improved his social skills.

Now he's getting ready to head to school again. He has the same teacher as last year, which is great - although he's not the kind of kid who crumbles at the sight of something new, it's still nice to have the familiarity of the same classroom and the same teacher and teacher's aides.

He will also be returning to kung fu lessons at USA kung fu academy, although there, he will be changing teachers.  He was bummed when I told him Tai Si Hing wouldn't be there anymore.

Also, there will now be soccer lessons, just for the fall.  They're in the morning, so they don't interfere with preschool or kung fu in the afternoons.  I laughed when my husband told me about signing him up and then called me a Soccer Mom. Hey, it's cheaper than hockey, so I'm not complaining.

Hmm, what else?

Adoption Day anniversary is coming up next month.  We usually celebrate by going out to a fine Chinese restaurant and ordering as close as we can get to authentic cuisine. And maybe I'll make a train cake. I have a train-shaped cake pan.  Cloud keeps trying to play with it like it's a toy train. I admire his single-mindedness.  He can make almost any small solid object go vrrroooom.

Too late!

Every time I want to write a post on this blog, I run out of time. My excuse now? It's midnight. And I have to do a bunch of things tomorrow, so I need to get some sleep.

Some other time, I guess. I always say that. Some other time, some other time.

Trayvon Martin

The story of Trayvon Martin's death totally shreds me up inside. There are no words to describe it. I think I'm actually grieving, in spite of having absolutely no personal connection to the case. It's just a news story to me. But on the other hand, it's the absolute worst kind of reminder that racism is alive and well and deadly in my society. Being middle-class is no protection. Being a generally nice person is no protection. And worse, now that the victim is dead, the excuses are flying. It wasn't that he was Black... it was that...

Now I've heard people say that he shouldn't have been wearing a hoodie. Really? KMart sells hoodies. Macy's sells hoodies. I own two hoodies, and I'm wearing my brown one right now.

No, that's not it. He shouldn't have been black.

Like I said, I'm not attached to the case in any way, but I have a feeling that no matter what additional backstory comes out, it will never develop beyond that. I doubt there will be any dark secrets revealed to prove that Trayvon deserved to be murdered; deserved anything less than to be left alone.

This is not the world I want to live in - to say nothing of the world I want my son to live in.

Library storytime and techno parade

This morning I brought AwesomeCloud to one of the little libraries around here for storytime. I like their storytime. It's held in a big space, so I'm not getting constantly tripped on by toddlers. Cloud is one of the oldest kids there, but that seems to be good for him - he does not yet seem to be "too old" for anything. Even "Head Shoulders Knees and Toes" is still a challenge for him. That's not always a good thing, but it's a thing, and so it goes.

Before storytime, the kids all gather around the train table. Cloud was playing nicely with the only other preschool-aged boy there. But when the track became misaligned, he started to call out to Mama: "Hewwwp!"

"Don't slam it," I called across the room. I was kind of stuck in a rocking chair just outside the children's area, with mounds of coats and purses walling me out. "Just push it gently into the hole with your fingers."

"Hewwwp!" he screamed, banging on the train track harder.

"Ask your friend to fix it for you," I suggested. "Just say, 'Excuse me, can you fix this?'"

"NOOO!!" cried Cloud. He was really wailing and red-faced now.

"Come here," I invited. "Do you want to rock?" Whenever he hurts himself or otherwise gets overcome with emotion, if there's a rocking chair handy, I offer to rock him to comfort him. He knows what that is now and will occasionally ask to rock without me having to mention it first. Fortunately, I was already in a rocking chair, so he came right over, climbed in my lap, and let me rock him.

"Now that boy is fixing the track," I observed.

"I can't... I can't talk," Cloud wailed. I guess he was trying to explain that he was too flustered, or shy, or whatever, to take my suggestion and ask the boy for help. Cloud then begged to go home, but I assured him that storytime would start soon and then he'd have something completely different to do and he'd forget all about this. And it did, and he did.

When we got home, I cooked us some mac'n'cheese with broccoli, and afterwards I decided I wanted to drown my sorrows in ice cream. So I told Cloud we were going to the store to get some ice cream. You'd think I said Santa Claus was coming back. We had one of the most festive trips to the supermarket ever, and now I'll probably pay for it in begging because this is the kind of thing Cloud doesn't forget for a long, long time.

After ice cream, I put on my Fatboy Slim CD and we had a techno dance parade featuring maracas, a tambourine, and some jingly cat toys, because I am a bit of a masochist but also because it seemed like a good activity to do on a rainy day, and because I was anticipating my husband calling for me to come get him so he could leave me at home alone for the rest of the afternoon to rest in peace. Which I am doing. Except that I'm also trying to mend his steampunk vest, which is proving difficult because it's very thick and the needle doesn't go through the material very well. And now my back hurts from the effort of pushing it through.

The value of a Chinese New Year party run by white parents

Tomorrow is our Chinese New Year party, hosted by the adoption agency, a little bit past the actual date as tradition holds (so that people can still come if they have other Chinese New Year parties to go to, or perhaps so that we can hire the good dancing troupe when it's in the budget).

I'm on the planning committee, which is a little funny when you consider that I can't plan my way out of a paper bag, but there you have it. I managed to be useful this year - I painted a lovely dragon banner for the year of the dragon, Cloud and I took a great little trip to Chinatown with Auntie C to buy gifts and trinkets, and I had the amazing good fortune to find someone with a dragon head while both of our previously used dragon heads were busy becoming unavailable. You can't have a lion dance without a dragon head. Our tradition is to have the little kids line up behind the dragon head and follow it around the room, doing whatever kind of jiggling, swaying dance they're physically capable of. It's not very authentic. Nobody there has actually spent significant time in China. None of the ethnically Chinese people were old enough to learn how to throw a real Chinese New Year party when they were adopted, and in fact most of them are still very, very young. Cloud is about average age and he's not even 4 yet. Also, a bunch of the kids are from Kazakhstan.

I had a conversation with someone about cultural authenticity, and he defended the idea of it. I agree with him, actually. I want cultural authenticity too. I'm glad that he cares enough about Chinese culture to defend it; a lot of people don't. A lot of people like to fawn over the cute Chinese kids, and are happy that we have our families, but when it comes to things that are actually Chinese... well, China is the country that makes all our stuff and buys all our national debt. And that's not something to think happily about. They talk funny and they have all those human rights issues that we'll just avoid talking about because-- hey, these kids sure are cute.

And we parents realize that when we throw them a Chinese New Year party, we're not giving them the real deal. We don't know what the real deal looks like. We make some of it up, and we add American traditions like the balloon guy and the gift raffle. We eat food that's mostly typical of an American Chinese buffet, with a few special desserts across from the French fries and General's chicken. We let the kids go off and play with each other, not exactly a sea of Asian faces but not exactly alone in a crowd of platinum blonds either.

And we realize that someday the kids will look back on these parties and know that they weren't authentic. They'll know that the lion dance wasn't THE lion dance. They'll have mixed emotions about our efforts, but each parent hopes that one of those emotions will be, "At least they tried. At least they gave us something."

We can give them other things, too, in life. Mandarin lessons, history lessons with an emphasis on respecting Chinese culture, maybe a trip back to China. We can give them the opportunity to take what little we've given them and run with it, expand it into a cultural identity that fits themselves. We hope they'll try, that they'll appreciate a small head start instead of resenting us for doing too little or too much.

There are some people who claim that removing a child from his original culture is cruel. If we adoptive parents are so aware that we're doing an inadequate job, shouldn't it be better not to do it at all? Maybe. Maybe maybe maybe. Always, there's something that could be better than it is about everything in the world. Anyway, there's more to life than parenting to culture. I'm betting on a post-racial future, a future in which Homo sapiens as a single species is given more weight. (It's coming! Thanks, geneticists, for all your recent discoveries!) A future in which we remember what we'd meant by 'melting pot'. One thing that probably won't happen in the future is the ability to see how far we've come already. Within a lifetime; decade to decade; year to year. When I was growing up in the '80's, Asian people were still novelties to be gawked at and joked about in White America, and Westerners were the despised enemy in China. Now there are Gaps and Walmarts in China, and Chinese people named James and Jessica in the US. It got better, and it will keep getting better, and all the cross-racial mish-mashing that is going on will contribute to the erasing of racial lines and the strengthening of Homo sapiens.

And when should we start, if not now? Who can wait until post-racialism is normalized? The good stuff in life is all achieved before it's all safe and comfortable to achieve things. Anyway, we're not trying to contribute to a race eradication movement. Race eradication is a nice ultimate goal, someday, but all we're trying to do is our best for the kids we have. So, yeah, it's a challenge; a little challenge. Authenticity is nice. But the world changes so fast, what the hell is authenticity anyway?

It's people failing to remember how things used to be before they were the way they were recently. It's people holding onto flawed memories from a specific point in time, ignoring the fact that time is a continuum. It's an esoteric idea that people strive to grasp from some entity that they perceive as 'authentic'.

We can all do that! That's no problem! Recent studies in neurology have hinted that the part of the brain that perceives the long view of life is different from the part of the brain that perceives the short view. I'm a long view thinker, mostly because I found out that most people neglect the long view so I was going to embrace it as my own. But even I use the two different views separately from each other. Even I forget one view while I'm considering the other.

My son has a whole life ahead of him, in a society that I grew up in but still very different, and he has many philosophies and opportunities available to him. But in the past two weeks, he has managed to stomp on my injured toe a minimum of 20 times. And he has picked up the hilarious phrase, "Nice dragon, Mom!" which he blurts out at random while I'm working on the New Year banner.

Thanks, kid. I think so, too.

The kung fu/Arisia weekend

Well, AwesomeCloud missed most of Arisia. This is a good thing. I had to be on a panel as soon as we got there on Friday, and when I got to the table, my husband reported that the Kiddo had been behaving very well. The table was completely set up and ready for business, so obviously he hadn't been too disruptive. However, as soon as Rick left us, Cloud subjected me to a solid hour of whining, writhing on my lap as I tried to look professional for potential customers, and demonstrating a generally klutzy three-year-old lack of coordination. You know how small children flail mindlessly whenever they're bored? And how the closer they are to something that should not be knocked over, the more carelessly they flail? Yeah.

So, I'm not going to complain that he was terrible, but I will say that having him stay over his Auntie and Uncle's house Saturday and Sunday was probably more fun for everyone. Someday Cloud will be useful at cons. Maybe when he's six. Right now, he usually falls somewhere between, "He was good but bored and restless" and "He couldn't stand being anywhere near the table."

And, to be honest, it's tough being a vendor. You need a lot of stamina. At least he's not traumatized by crowds, right?

On Saturday morning, all three of us skipped out on Arisia, leaving the table closed for business, to attend Cloud's kung fu belt test/ceremony. I'd been under the impression that he had his orange belt (which was accidentally yellow) and was earning his purple belt, but actually he was going from his yellow belt to his orange belt. Whatever. The colored belts are just for fun at this age anyway. They can throw in as many colored belts as they want in there; at the age of 3, there's no way he's going to outcompete an adult novice at real kung fu, and the real purpose of the lessons is to teach him how to pay attention, follow directions, and challenge his body.

In fact here he is demonstrating a skill he has worked long and hard on - kicking. Learning to kick has been a long, hard road for him. His leg strength and his sense of balance have always been weak areas. In fact, when he started kung fu, his Early Intervention therapist told me to warn the instructor that he was 'floppy'. He's still, maybe, a little bit floppier than he has to be at his age. I don't know; maybe it's a personality quirk. But part of the issue was just a lack of strength, and he's been addressing that(with some encouragement).

I've started telling him, "If you practice kung fu every day, you'll get really good at it." And then I get down on the floor and do push-ups with him, or sometimes without him, and as a result I've been getting a little better myself.



I haven't tried doing pushups while raised on pads, though, like Tai Si Hing is getting ready to have Cloud do here.


Oh, and apropos of nothing, this stormtrooper is a cake. It's about 10 inches taller than I am, but still a cake. Just sayin'.

Anyway, Kid has an orange belt now, and I think I've already seen some improvement in his ability to follow directions. Also, we made good sales at Arisia and met lots of good people.

Arisia 2012, here we come

AwesomeCloud doesn't have a costume, but he does have a vendor's table at Artist Alley. We're still working on teaching him the phrase, "Buy our books!" Maybe this is the year it clicks.

Arisia is a great con, and although we'll be busy with 9 panels between my husband and me, and our intern will be present only on Sunday, we anticipate having a lot of fun. It's close by in Boston, so we're commuting. Even better, Cloud's kung fu purple belt test is Saturday morning, and we both want to attend that, so we're skipping out right in the middle for a kung fu ceremony!

Oh my goodness, I'm tired just thinking about it.

Now I just have to figure out what I'm going to say in my five panels...

Oh hey, my panels are the following:
Fri: Nonfiction Comics
Sat afternoon: Finishing What You Started (comics)
Sat evening: Race, Gender, and Disability in Comics
Sun afternoon: Minicomics
Sun evening: How Comics Are Made

I don't think I'll be speechless for any of those. I could just start yammering about any or all five topics at a moment's notice. But I should really show up with a plan.