Saturday, November 16, 2013

Brothers and Sisters




The Detroit pianist, Tommy Flanagan, the man on the keys behind Sonny Rollins' “Saxophone Colossus” and John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” is playing all by himself this morning, sadly elegant, heartbroken, “How Long Has This Been Going On?” asks the song . . .
Front-page news replies that China’s been at it for about thirty-four years.  The One Child Policy that is.  The New York Times is telling me that China will finally be easing off the broad social-engineering project, among significant other reforms announced yesterday. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy

I thought about my wife who had my stepson during her first marriage.  Unlikely we would have met if she’d had a second and a third and a fourth child.  Unintended perhaps, it certainly meant that hundreds of millions of women, were freed from decades of otherwise requisite birthing.  Perhaps I personally, should be grateful for this remarkable, authoritarian equalizer among a fifth of humanity. 



China then, is now on the tale end of this strange three and a half decade experiment.  Thinking back, to a time when it wasn’t a fait accompli it is almost impossible to imagine a government could conceive, let alone hope to enforce such a policy.  I balk at the notion that the Chinese government should take away my Sunday from time to time as they manipulate holiday schedules.  Who is going to complain about a lowly Sunday when such a thoroughgoing curtailment of human behavior is enforced among so many people, for so long?

I can recall a conversation with an Australian graduate student whom I met twenty years ago, at the East China Normal University where I was living in Shangahi.  One of the things he said always stuck with me.  He tried to profile China as a profoundly modern place.  And this was ironic on the surface because at that time, Shanghai didn’t have any elevated highways, no subways, not a single café, and Pudong was an uninspiring collection of warehouses and fields.  What do you mean “modern?”

Rather, he was considering the systemic implementation of ideology on this enormous population.  The Maoist efforts to “rip up” traditional beliefs like Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism and replace them with a hybrid foreign and domestically adapted ideology.   What other non-western society went through such a thoroughgoing effort to fashion a collective “modern” consciousness, purposefully severing traditional antecedents?  Think of how completely different India and her circumstances are, as a result.  Vietnam?  Cambodia?  Surely, though the gestation of the revolutionary period was not nearly as long as China.  North Korea?  Most assuredly that nation is, by this benchmark, profoundly ‘modern."

Comparatively modern concepts like psychology, and sociology were widely used by the CCP to buttress and explain human behavior.  Propaganda was and is systemically used to fashion proper attitudes among citizens.  Mandatory sacrifice, radical egalitarianism, to fashion a socialist future.  Then, shortly after the completely disruptive “modernization” of the Cultural Revolution a new mandatory collective sacrifice for everyone, restricting all Han Chinese couples to one child.  The touch of the state and its will fashioning so deeply the behavior and the consciousness of every citizen.

Of course, like so many state policy rollouts of any government, this was begun with the best of intentions.  China was poor and there weren’t enough resources to go around.  Chinese leaders understood it as their responsibility to architect a new nation, by whatever means necessary and they set about to, in their view, “save” the population from itself.  Not unlike Cultural Revolution efforts to ‘storm the barricades’ and take on the most precious fundaments of Chinese civilization, like respect for teachers or elders, the One Child Policy confronted core Chinese notions about procreation, male heirs, and a family line.  These could no longer be a Chinese birth right.  I’m sure there are many notable exceptions, but that in general every Han Chinese, including certainly all Party members, were subject to this collective sacrifice on this matter, is also oddly modern, ennobling and self perpetuating.

The policy then had countless unforeseen side effects, among which were my being able to meet my wife.   At a macro-level the policy has created a demographic time bomb, with the nation’s vast population becoming old, before it becomes rich.  There will need to be a new policy socially engineered no doubt with new good intentions, to mandate care for the vast aging population.  This too rather daunting, like so many other Chinese-size state challenges, considered at the outset.



Like many, I wonder about these four decades worth of only children and what it means for collective consciousness.  As it concerns this individual or that, being raised as an only-child is a perfectly reasonable alternative maturation path to life with siblings.  But for an entire nation?  Hundreds of millions of only-children wrought as a collective default.  Does that mean a nation of people who are on the average more selfish, less able to share, less inclined to negotiate?  Or in fact does it mean more people are recipients of comparatively more love, engagement, and wealth?  望子成[1]  Regardless, the hand of the state has through this policy, fundamentally altered what it means to be Chinese.

I often wonder about my two daughters attending a Chinese school of only children. Are the other children envious?  Do they find it exotic that someone has a “sister?”  Not every squad of siblings gets along, but mine do.  I know they derive power and identity in juxtaposition to one another, in concert with one another.  They certainly have lots of nice friends.  Behaviors can be spoiled and selfish just as easily as they can be bright or caring.  Those kids will now, it seems be the tail end of that remarkable experiment.  Perhaps some of their parents saw the same news I did this morning and considered anew whether or not it was too late, to have a second.

So we have a thirty-four year block of humanity, many hundreds of millions of people who are moving now into positions of responsibility.  Within a decade they will become key decision makers.  This China of only children, this willful, collective experiment, will shortly inherit the responsibility to orchestrate China’ engagement with the world, for the first time in over 160 years, as a civilization leading the world’s modernity.

With the state’s release of the grip, a new 'sibling-generation' will presently commence.  Queue the Gershwin brothers: and all the little only-child-princes and only-child-princesses can sing:

Oh, you said you was never intending
To break up our scene this way
But there ain't any use in pretending
It could happen to us any day




[1] wàngzǐchénglóng:  lit. to hope one's son becomes a dragon (idiom); fig. to long for one' s child to succeed in life / to have great hopes for one's offspring / to give one's child the best education as a career investment

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