September 8, 2016
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A girl with a bronze Buddha in Hangzhou, China. Despite the easing of family planning policies, China’s birthrate remains low, and scholars such as Fuxian Yi have warned that this will slow economic growth.
Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
BEIJING — On Aug. 8, cutesy graphics and laconic messages of blocked content replaced 12 years of flourishing conversation about China’s intrusive family planning policies on the home pages of Fuxian Yi’s social media accounts.
Dr. Yi, a Chinese scientist and demographer, is indignant over the concerted act of censorship that struck a month ago. He said the simultaneous shuttering of half a dozen accounts, including on Weibo and his blogs, indicated that the censorship had been ordered at a high level, probably by the country’s powerful internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, at the request of the Family Planning and Health Commission of China, for whom he has long been an irritant.
The Cyberspace Administration of China, the National Family Planning and Health Commission and leading internet companies including Sina, Tencent and NetEase, which censor on behalf of the government, did not respond to calls and faxed requests for comment.
Still, he is not downcast, Dr. Yi said in an interview.
“Of course, I’m furious. But not as furious as everyone might think, because what’s different today from 10 years ago is that public opinion has shifted,” he wrote by email from the United States, where he is a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Today, Dr. Yi, a father of three, believes that most Chinese agree with him that the state should get out of their bedrooms, and are increasingly willing to say so in public.
“Public opinion is firmly on the side of ending family planning policies,” Dr. Yi said, basing his conclusion on the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of online comments that have now vanished, his public speaking in China, and reactions to the social and statistical research in his book “Big Country With an Empty Nest,” which was published in China in 2013.
There he wrote: “Family planning was born in haste, conducted with violence and will end in equivocation and cover-up.”
Crucial among the reasons: public disgust at the physical coercion and financial penalties that accompanied it. Beginning in 1980, the authorities forced millions of women to abort, including late in pregnancy. They levied often-heavy fines for out-of-plan children.
Statistics also have played a role, Dr. Yi said. In 2014, faced with low birthrates after more than three decades of policies that limited most couples to one child, the government began to relax the rules, allowing more couples — those where one spouse was an only child — to have two children. But birthrates remained low.
In 2015, it relaxed the rules further, permitting all Chinese to have two children, though they continued to punish those having more. But China’s birthrate is still low, about 1.2 children per woman in 2015, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
Dr. Yi said he was not against China’s 1.3 billion population declining, but not so fast. A dramatic shrinkage of the labor force could negatively affect economic growth and society, with fewer young people faced with supporting many older people. He predicts that China’s economic growth will fall to 4.4 percent in 2019 and will not rise again to the heady heights of 10 percent seen in past decades, and that demography is one reason.
Something deeper, too, may be behind the swelling national conversation that was partly silenced in August — real social change and profound generational shifts described by Alec Ash in his book “Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China.”
These are happening amid habitually tight censorship and harsher crackdowns on dissent, resulting in a society that is both dynamic and rigid, freewheeling and throttled.
“There is a regressive political atmosphere at the top, and progressive change at the bottom,” Mr. Ash said.
Online, some Chinese are discussing the blocking of Dr. Yi’s social media accounts.
Perhaps reflecting that broader social disjunction, the debate largely falls into two camps: those who believe that Dr. Yi is a spy sent by foreigners to destabilize China’s population policies, and those who call that notion ludicrous and say that he’s only speaking the truth.
