What does that say to you?įONG: Well, it tells me that these latest changes that just happened are probably not going to result in a baby boom that the Chinese government hopes for and needs to keep the economy going and growing forth. SIEGEL: You write about, among other things, the pilot projects and the exceptions to the national policy by which some Chinese couples could have had two children. SIEGEL: And you would point to other neighboring countries where there also was great modernization and urbanization.įONG: They came down, and they - with none of these negative side effects that China is experiencing now. And my answer is, no, there were better ways to do it. And so one of the big arguments I have in the book is, did it - was the one-child policy even necessary in order to curb China's population. And those drastically changed the way people had families. There were changes in reproductive technologies, social changes. It just wasn't - you know, there are so many social changes that happened in the '70s and '80s and '90s. It's sort of like trying to plan an itinerary, a tour itinerary, on the assumption that people still travel by steamship, you know?

And it didn't take into account all these social changes that would happen. And so they had the resources and the tools and the political capital to bring forth these big ideas. The only kind of branch of higher learning were - they were protected - were the military scientists. A lot of social scientists, economists had all been devalued as a result. How did this happen?įONG: Well, this all came about in the '60s and '70s, and this was post-Cultural Revolution. SIEGEL: As you write, astonishingly, the one-child policy was the brainchild of rocket scientists, not of public health experts or demographers, but rocket scientists. It's called 'One Child,' and she joins us now. Mei Fong wrote about the one-child policy as The Wall Street Journal's China correspondent, and she's now written a book about it that's about to be published.

One Child by Mei Fong