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China's population is shrinking so its government is trying to get more people to have kids by offering financial incentives and its own dating app. But not everyone is on board. Some people, especially young women, aren't keen to follow in their parents' more traditional footsteps. The BBC's Fan Wang tells us how China got into this situation. Is it fair to put it all on women?And Mei Fong, the author of ‘One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment', talks us through why she thinks an apology from the government over its strict one-child policy could help it persuade more people to have babies. Plus, our population correspondent, Stephanie Hegarty, explains what China's shrinking population could mean for the rest of the world.Email: whatintheworld@bbc.co.uk WhatsApp: +44 0330 12 33 22 6 Presenter: Hannah Gelbart Producer: Emily Horler, Julia Ross-Roy and Mora Morrison Editors: Verity Wilde and Simon Peeks
On this episode, Theresa and Cody talk about one of the most infamous restrictions on personal freedoms in the modern era, China's one-child policy, and the role it will play in China's future.Podcast to recommend: The Explorers (https://explorerspodcast.com/)SourcesAird, John S. Slaughter of the Innocents: Coercive Birth Control in China. Washington, DC: AFI Press, 1990.Fong, Mei. One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment. New York City, NY: Mariner Books, 2016.Johnson, Kay Ann. China's Hidden Children: Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Costs of the One Child Policy. Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago Press, 2017.Larmer, Brook, and Jane Zhang. “China's Population Is Shrinking. It Faces a Perilous Future.” National Geographic. 22 Mar 2023. < https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/china-population-shrinking-feature>. Retrieved 25 Sept 2023.Silver, Laura, and Christine Huang. “Key Facts About China's Declining Population.” Pew Research Center. 5 Dec 2022. < https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/05/key-facts-about-chinas-declining-population/>. Retrieved 25 Sept 2023.Vogel, Ezra. Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013.“World Population Prospects 2022.” United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. < https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/156>. Retrieved 25 Sept 2023. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
For the first time in six decades, China's population shrank last year. It's resulted in growing fears around the future of the country's economy and has pushed government authorities and private companies to launch incentive programs to boost the population. Just last week, government officials in the Chinese province of Sichuan announced they would allow couples to have an unlimited number of children. It's a radical turn from the days of the one-child policy, which was in place from 1980 to 2015. According to Mei Fong, author of One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment, that policy has influenced a generation of young people to push back against societal expectations around marriage and childbearing. This week on Nothing is Foreign, we dig into those changing attitudes and how they might help us understand the population decline we're seeing in China today. Featuring: Mei Fong, author of One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/nothing-is-foreign-transcripts-listen-1.6732059
The story of China’s infamous One-Child Policy, the most ambitious (and catastrophic) social engineering project the modern world has ever seen. SOURCES:Fong, Mei. One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment. 2016Evans, Karin. The Lost Daughters of China. 2008Johnson, Kay Ann. China’s Hidden Children. 2016Xinran, Message From an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love. 2012Greenhalgh, Susan. Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China. 2008. Ren, Yuan. “How China's one-child policy overhauled the status and prospects of girls like me”. The Telegraph. Dec 2013. Clarke, Aileen. “See How The One-Child Policy Changed China”. National Geographic. Nov 2015. Chen, Shanshan. “Lost lives: the battle of China's invisible children to recover missed years”. Reuters. Dec 2016.
Mei Fong is a journalist with more than a decade of reporting in Asia, most recently as China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, which is where she was working when I met her several years ago in Beijing. Her stories on China’s transformative process in preparation for the 2008 Beijing Olympics formed part of the package that won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, an honor she shared with her colleagues at the Journal. Her work has also won awards from Amnesty International, New York’s Society of Professional Journalists, and the Society of Publishers in Asia. Mei appears regularly as a China commentator on NPR, CBS, CNN, and PBS. She has taught at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and at Shantou University in China. And she is currently the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, a think-tank in Washington, DC. Last year she published her first book, One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment. The book recounts the history and after-effects of China’s one-child policy, the country's longest-running and most radical social experiment. Through a combination of in-depth research, on-the-ground reporting, and vivid storytelling that draws on her time as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in China, One Child explores the far-reaching social and economic impact of the policy. In our conversation, Mei explains how she got the idea for the book, how she meticulously conducted the research that went into it, and the process she went through to pitch it to publishers, write it, and edit it. She also shares some inspiring and very practical advice for writers, and she reveals her favorite writing craft book—which happens to be one of my favorites as well! For more information about Mei, and to find a link to her book on Amazon, just head to writewithimpact.com/episode62. You can also learn more about Mei on her website at meifong.org.
A Pulitzer prize-winning author joins us for this episode! Mei Fong tells us all about her book, One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment, and why China is full of horny young men these days. The chat gets a bit serious as we discuss the realities of the One Child policy, and one of us has a little cry. We also talk about Mei's experiences of miscarriage and IVF. But then it's back to the usual old nonsense as Mei tells us about the time she met the queen sporting the world's dodgiest perm, and why suburban America is the strangest place she's ever lived. We finish up with Scummy Mummy Confessions, and Ellie almost throws Mei off the podcast for slagging off Marie Kondo. Mei's brilliant book is out now. You can read more about her at meifong.org, and follow her on Twitter @meifongwriter. We're on Twitter (@scummymummies), Instagram, and Facebook. Please send your confessions to scummymummiespodcast@gmail.com and visit us at ScummyMummies.com. If you like the podcast, do tell your friends! Thank you for listening! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
This week's show features more interviews from the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. We talk with actor Rainn Wilson, author of a new memoir, The Bassoon King, and with Malaysian Chinese writer Mei Fong, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment. We also talk with LARB Senior Humanities Editor Sarah Mesle about the upcoming season of Game of Thrones. Featuring Tom Lutz, Laurie Winer, and Seth Greenland. Produced by Jerry Gorin. The LARB Radio Hour airs Thursdays at 2:30pm on KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and Human Rights Press Award, author Mei Fong discusses China’s one child policy, women’s issues and child adoptions in a candid discussion of her recent book, One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment, with National Committee Senior Director for Education Programs Margot Landman. Despite its implementation at a time of global concern about over-population, China’s one-child policy developed into one of the most controversial social policies of the twentieth century. Between 1970 and 1976, the Chinese government successfully led the “Long, Late, and Few” campaign which aimed to curtail population growth at a time of limited resources. However, by the end of the decade, after a brief decline China’s population growth rate began to rise again, prompting the leaders to reexamine their efforts. In response, in 1980 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China announced the implementation of the so-called one-child policy, in which Han couples would be limited to one child. There were exceptions, particularly for rural families. The contentious population control policy lasted for more than three decades; in late 2015 the Chinese government announced that families would be allowed to have two children. The one-child policy has had tremendous demographic repercussions far beyond a significantly reduced birth rate. Acclaimed author and journalist Mei Fong has spent years documenting and analyzing the impact of the policy. In her book,One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment, Ms. Fong writes about the origins of the policy and some of its unintended consequences including the creation of “little emperors” (spoiled children), a huge gender imbalance, and a rapidly aging population. Mei Fong discussed her book with the National Committee on March 8, 2016 in New York City.
January 2016 marked the end of China’s one child policy—a regime of family planning policies and enforcement that scarred generations of parents and children. On this edition of Making Contact, China correspondent Gady Epstein speaks with Mei Fong, author of One Child:The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment, and Barbara Demick, journalist and former Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times.
January 2016 marked the end of China’s one child policy—a regime of family planning policies and enforcement that scarred generations of parents and children. On this edition of Making Contact, China correspondent Gady Epstein speaks with Mei Fong, author of One Child:The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment, and Barbara Demick, journalist and former Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times.
In collaboration with ChinaFile When Communist Party leaders adopted a one-child policy in 1980, they hoped curbing birth rates would help lift China's poorest and increase the country's global stature. But at what cost? Now, as China moves to a nationwide two-child policy, it faces a population grown too old and too male, with a vastly diminished supply of young workers. Mei Fong's latest book, One Child: The Story's of China's Most Radical Experiment, explores the human impact of the one-child policy and its future implications: will China's "Little Emperor" cohort make for an entitled or risk-averse generation? How will the country manage to support itself when one in every four people is over sixty-five years old? Perhaps most importantly, exactly how much has the one-child policy hindered China's growth?