SHANGHAI — There are two words spoken in the Liang household that rarely have been uttered by a whole generation of Chinese. They are "brother" and "sister"--and they are about to be reclaimed by the people who never had one.
China's strict one-child policy, which was instituted nationally in the late 1970s, limited most urban Chinese to one child per family, meaning that millions of children like Liang and his wife grew up without siblings. But a little-known loophole in China's family planning rules made it possible for their 5-year-old boy to have a baby sister--and put the Liangs at the forefront of what could be a major demographic change in China.
In most of China's major cities, the loophole allows single children who marry to have two children. As the hundreds of millions of people born under the one-child policy in the last two decades come of age, they will have something their parents didn't: a choice.
Their adulthood marks the unofficial end to the rigid controls that successfully curbed China's population but provoked the condemnation of religious and human rights activists, and became one of the most hated elements of the government's involvement in people's lives.
"By 2005, nearly every couple will be eligible to have two kids," said Peng Xizhe, a demographer at Shanghai's Fudan University. "Along with all the exceptions in the countryside, the one-child policy as we know it will be over."
Loneliness of a Life Sans Siblings
Liang's wife, Li, a doctor, described her own lonely childhood and her delight at having two children. "When I was young, I had to go to my classmates' homes to play," she said. "I wished I had a sister."
She said her kids can help take care of each other--and that when she is old, they can take care of her too. "I am traditional," Li said. "I would rather have two kids."
Although it is now legal, and even encouraged in some areas, for couples like the Liangs to have a second child, she is reluctant to trumpet her decision. Remembering the years of hearing the message that "one child is best"--and that message's sometimes draconian enforcement, including forced abortions and sterilizations--she asked that her and her husband's first names not be used.
The government is not dismantling its birth controls. China's population of 1.2 billion--more than one-fifth of the world's people--is too large to let grow unrestricted, officials say. But with Beijing's approval, each province can amend the one-child policy "according to its needs," said an official from the State Family Planning Commission in Beijing, and the 1979 policy is dotted with exceptions.
