In a city setting they could maybe, if you worked for a [civil service-like] job they might threaten to fire you. … This is for having a child. If you went for a termination, all of this would go away. But, of course, then there were people who really wanted the child and then they would try and evade the whole process of being taken away for a forced abortion, because here’s the thing: Between your conception and your delivery date, all bets are off — they can make you.

Last October, China ended its 35-year-old policy of restricting most urban families to one child. Commonly referred to as the “one-child” policy, the restrictions were actually a collection of rules that governed how many children married couples could have.

“The basic idea was to encourage everybody, by coercion if necessary, to keep to … one child,” journalist Mei Fong tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.

Fong explores the wide-ranging impact of what she calls the world’s “most radical experiment” in her new book,One Child. She says that among the policy’s unintended consequences is an acute gender imbalance.

“When you create a system where you would shrink the size of a family and people would have to choose, then people would … choose sons,” Fong says. “Now China has 30 million more men than women, 30 million bachelors who cannot find brides. … They call them guang guan, ‘broken branches,’ that’s the name in Chinese. They are the biological dead ends of their family.”

Fong says the policy also led to forced abortions and the confiscation of children by the authorities. Looking ahead, China is also facing a shortage of workers who can support its aging population.

“Right now China has a dependency ratio of about five working adults to support one retiree. That’s pretty good, that’s a very healthy ratio. In about 20 years that’s going to jump to about 1.6 working adults to support one retiree,” Fong says. “The one-child policy drastically reshaped the composition of China’s people. So now they have a population that’s basically too old and too male and, down the line, maybe too few.”

Interview Highlights

On the economic and cultural implications of losing your only child in China

It means a lot, economically speaking, because a lot of families still don’t have any kind of a financial security, so losing one child is basically a pension plan, so that’s one thing. For the Chinese, culturally speaking, the continuance of the family line was very important, so when you die without any issue you are basically violating all sorts of duties to your ancestors, which is very important. … Chinese society is still very family-centric even if it’s just a small family size, you’re not considered fully an adult until you are married, and you’re not considered complete until you have a child, and when you lose that child, you fall quite far down the societal totem pole.

So, for example, this family that I covered that had lost their only child [in an earthquake], they lost a lot of status in their village. They said that their neighbors were avoiding them and shunning them, basically, that they were worried that this childless couple would now be hangers-on, clinging onto them, borrowing money, not having any sort of protection — so that’s what losing your one child means.

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