In China, one-child policy compounds loss of child for parents

The Washington Post reports:

It’s been 11 months, and Xu Min still rarely leaves the house.

He spends his days on the couch in front of a TV, trying to block out memories of his dead son. He blames fate for the car accident that killed the 23-year-old in September.

But for the loneliness that will haunt him and his wife the rest of their lives, Xu blames the Chinese government.

China told the couple that they could have only one child and threatened to take away everything if they didn’t listen. They were good citizens, Xu said, “so for 20 years, we put our whole future and hope into our son.”

Now, the couple have no one to support them in old age. But even more crushing, said Xu, 53, they have nothing to live for.

For more than three decades, debate has raged over China’s one-child policy, imposed in 1979 to rein in runaway population growth. It has reshaped Chinese society — with birthrates plunging from 4.77 children per woman in the early 1970s to 1.64 in 2011, according to estimates by the United Nations — and contributed to the world’s most imbalanced sex ratio at birth, with baby boys far outnumbering girls.

Human rights groups have exposed forced abortions, infanticide and involuntary sterilizations, practices banned in theory by the government. And officials are increasingly deliberating whether the long-term economic costs of the policy — including a looming labor shortage — outweigh the benefits. In the latest sign of such concern, the government announced last weekend that it is studying possible ways to relax the one-child policy in coming years, according to state media.

Little discussed and largely ignored, however, is a quiet devastation left in the policy’s wake: childless parents.

A parent’s worst nightmare in any country, the deaths of children in China are even more painful because of the cultural importance of descendants, increasing financial pressures on the elderly and the legal limits on bearing additional offspring.

The legacy of the eugenics movement.