The Ghosts of China’s One-Child Policy

Posted at Vocativ:
In July a 16-year-old girl in the Sichuan province attempted suicide after a university denied her entry because she was heihaizi, sparking outrage in the countryside area. There have been parental casualties as well. Last week, Ai Guangdong, a farmer in the northern Heibei province, killed himself in protest when officials confiscated his entire harvest of corn because he had five children—four of them heihaizi because of the law. He drank poison at the home of the local party chief, after going there to plead his case...
Lu served as a geology teacher in Beijing for 15 years before learning English to gain better-paying work as a private tutor. Lu is now 46. She never married, though she does have a 4-year-old daughter, Sofi. As an illegitimate child in a country notorious for its draconian laws regarding children, Sofi is an especially complicated case. In China she is known as heihaizi, meaning “black child.” Like children born second, third and beyond, she will live the rest of her days carrying a criminal-like status, with few if any rights.

Sofi, like all children born outside the parameters of China’s one-child-per-family law, never received birth permission from the government officials who oversee the policy. As such she will never be issued hukou—an identifying document, similar in some ways to the American social security card and birth certificate, without which people in China can be denied jobs, permission to travel and even housing. Public schooling is also impossible for those without hukou, and hospitals (because they are government-run) refuse to treat undocumented children.

Recent changes to the one-child law that in some cases allow for a second child fail to address the millions of heihaizi living outside the system already.

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