The one-child policy precipitated one of the greatest ruptures in the family in China’s history. From 1980 to 2015, the state’s efforts to drastically lower the birthrate led to immense suffering, leaving the nation traumatized. The fear of being targeted for reproductive control persists today in people’s anxiety about the three-child policy, and the possibility they might be forced to have more children than they want. As students of contemporary China, we owe it to the Chinese people to honor what they have lived through and to tell our stories in ways that do justice to historical fact.
It was with such thoughts and hopes that we turned to historian Sarah Mellors Rodriguez’s recent book. The premise was promising. Focusing on a little-explored dimension of reproduction – birth control and abortion – she seeks to relay the history of the one-child policy from the Republic of China (ROC) founding around 1911 to the near-present, 2021. Her book has six chapters, two on the Republican era and four on the Communist period, plus an introduction and epilogue. To explore regional variation she focuses on three localities, the large wealthy cities of Shanghai and Tianjin, and the smaller, poorer city of Luoyang. Drawing on research in more than ten archives, as well as 80 interviews with women and men casually encountered in public places during 2015–19, Rodriguez centers the lived experience of grassroots-level contraceptive use.
