Beijing Attempts to Reverse China’s Population Decline by Softening Barbaric One-Child Policy Slogans

A one-child policy billboard saying, 'Have less children, have a better life', greets residents on the main street of Shuangwang, in southern China's Guangxi region, in May 2017. Goh Chai Hin/AFP via Getty Images

News Analysis

Many local authorities in China have recently issued notices to revise the one-child policy slogans on billboards. The slogans, often gruesome and brutal, reflect the horror and inhumanity of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) policy over the past few decades.

On March 27, the Health Commission of Fengjie County in Chongqing Municipality issued a draft for soliciting comments on the implementation plan of the three-child policy. The main goal of the draft was to “strive to solve the problem of women not wanting to, or afraid to, give birth,” to “remove individual childbearing conditions from household registration, school enrollment, employment, excellence selection, and promotion,” and to deal with “historical problems.”

The so-called historical problems include the still widespread propaganda slogans on family planning, such as the following examples: “Have the over-birthing families ruined”; “It is better to have a river of blood than to have excess children”; “Induce it, abort it, absolutely don’t give birth to it”; “Better to have ten more graves than one more newborn”; “The entire village will get in trouble for an unplanned birth.”

On March 28, the Duji District government of Huaibei City, Anhui Province, issued a notice to update slogans promoting family planning in Gaoyue neighborhood, saying that if the slogans are not revised, it “will have a negative impact on the population and family planning work in the new era, as well as the image of the government.” The neighborhood said it would comply with the order.

On March 17, the health bureau of Xinhe County, Xingtai City, Hebei Province, said on its official WeChat account that the county had issued a notice requiring towns and villages to revise family planning slogans on billboards, especially those that do not comply with the CCP’s three-child policy.

A billboard encourages couples to have only one child, along a road leading to a village in the suburb of Beijing, on March 25, 2001. Goh Chai Hin/AFP/Getty Images

Hebei Province was recently singled out for outdated family planning slogans by Health Times, a newspaper affiliated with CCP mouthpiece People’s Daily, along with the provinces of Gansu, Hainan, Fujian, Yunnan, Shanxi, Sichuan, Hunan, and Hubei.

CCP’s ‘Brainwashing Propaganda’ Is Ineffective

According to the official population data, the birth rate hit a new low of 6.77 per 1,000 in 2022, compared with more than 10 per 1,000 in 2019. It was also the first time in more than 60 years that the CCP’s official population data showed a significant decline. 

“The reason the CCP cleaned up the family planning slogans and replaced them with slogans promoting a three-child policy is that Chinese people have generally lost interest in having more children, and this brainwashing propaganda won’t have any effect,” Zhuge Mingyang, a freelance writer, told The Epoch Times on March 29. 

On whether Chinese people would like to have a third child, the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times interviewed some residents in mainland China on March 30. 

“The birth rate in China is very low now, mainly because the financial pressure is too great. Even if you find a job, the work hours are long, and the income is low. For example, a college graduate can work as a cashier for more than 10 hours a day, earning only 3,500 yuan [about $525] a month,” Zhang Miao (pseudonym) from Suzhou city told The Epoch Times. 

“Nowadays, many older women don’t get married, let alone have children, because life is too stressful,” Wang Hao (pseudonym), a resident of Changchun city, told the publication. “In my area, there is no high salary. People working in the [state] system are better off. Those who work in the kindergarten canteen opposite my home earn only 1,700-1,800 yuan [$255-270] a month.”

“Now, if you start a business, you must lose money. [Yet] you can’t find a job. Three years of COVID-19 and ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy have shifted the supply chain. ... Life is too stressful. If welfare had kept up, it wouldn’t be like this.”

From ‘Strength in Numbers’ to Population Control

In 1957, economist Ma Yinchu published “New Population Theory,” which proposed that China needed to control its population. However, former CCP leader Mao Zedong believed that “there is strength in numbers,” and Ma’s publication was considered a “great poisonous weed” attacking the CCP. As a result, China’s population soared in the 1960s. According to official data, from 1962 to 1972, the average annual birth rate was 26.69 million, with 300 million births in total.

In the 1970s, the CCP shifted its attitude to population control, and from Sept. 25, 1980, it called on couples to have only one child. The one-child policy was written into China’s constitution in December 1982.

In the 1970s and 1980s, painting slogans on houses was one of the CCP’s usual propaganda techniques. At the time, gruesome family planning slogans were seen throughout the country. In rural Jiangsu Province, for example, one slogan read: “It is better to have a river of blood than to have excess children.”

Women had to undergo four primary operations: intrauterine device (IUD) insertion, tubal ligation, abortion, and induced labor.

In October 2010, the government of Caojun town, Huarong County, Hunan Province, ordered all women to undergo surgeries, and local authorities were required to “supervise operations in their jurisdictions.” Authorities who failed to complete 60 percent of this task were removed from their posts. 

Human Rights Crisis Under One-Child Policy

Many women and families have been subjected to inhumane persecution under the one-child policy.

In Qianjiang city, Hubei Province, for example, at least 300 women were victims of botched hysterectomies. Most rural women were forced to get a hysterectomy around the age of 24, and the so-called operating table was merely a desk. In some cases, the pain was unbearable immediately after surgery, with swelling in the abdomen and back pain, and the condition deteriorated to the point where the patient became bedridden.

Chinese human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng with his wife and daughter outside their home in Dongshigu village on March 28, 2005. Chen spent over four years in prison for accusing family-planning officials in Shandong Province of forcing at least 7,000 women to be sterilized or undergo late-term abortions. AFP/Getty Images

The CCP’s family planning rules also prohibited couples from having a second child if their firstborn was a boy. However, if the first child is a girl, the couple can have a second child after six to eight years, but only with the authorities’ approval. This has led to a humanitarian crisis in which unwanted baby girls were aborted, given up for adoption, abandoned, and murdered.

In an interview with the media on Nov. 11, 2013, Mao Qun’an, the former spokesman and head of the publicity department of the CCP’s Health and Family Planning Commission, said that more than four decades of family planning in China had prevented over 400 million births.

Those 400 million people were all killed by the CCP, Li Yanming, a political commentator, told The Epoch Times on March 30.

“After the CCP established the government from Mao Zedong’s belief that ‘there is strength in numbers,' encouraging Chinese people to have more children in preparation for wars, to implementing the national policy of family planning, and then to encouraging families to have more children now, behind the capriciousness is the arbitrary enslavement of the people in order to preserve its dictatorship, creating not only a severe demographic crisis, but also a deep social and family crises,” Li said.