Dateline: Aug 16

Tonight Dateline looks at the end of China’s one-child policy and what it means for those who worked to maintain it, in “China’s Family Planning Army.”

For the past 35 years family planning officers have been stationed in every town in China, issuing fines to parents having more than one child, ordering abortions and enforcing birth control. But this year saw the end of the one child policy and the nation’s family planners have a new job description.

On Tuesday’s Dateline, journalist Lucy Ash travels to China to meet with family planners who were once responsible for enforcing the one-child policy.

Lucy meets Li Bo who has been re-trained as a child development specialist. While now enforcing the two child policy, Li Bo is also a pioneer in a pilot project designed to help rural children to get a better start in life. The once feared family planner now visits villages with a sack of toys and picture books; and his new job is to teach parents and grandparents how to relate better to small children.

But can he win the trust of the community? As Li Bo visits a toddler in Danfeng County the little girl’s grandmother opens up about her long held hatred and distrust of family planning officers. As a young woman she claims she was forced to abort a second child, and when she fell pregnant for a third time she decided to hide the baby girl.

“She stayed with my mother in the mountains for 12 years before we managed to get her registered,” says Chen Huafen.

Family planning officer Li Bo tells Lucy that his old job once involved issuing fines to those who were not following the law – a fee commonly known as a ‘social maintenance fee’. Li Bo tells Lucy, “[translated] The level of the fine was dependent on average local annual income. It was three to six times the annual income.”

The one-child policy has left scars, and had a deep impact on many Chinese families who claim the enforcers were brutal in their law enforcement tactics.

Lucy travels to Shangdong, a coastal province with a population of 96 million that lies between Beijing and Shanghai, and has a reputation for being especially harsh.

In recent years, there were reports of illegal detention for people accused of having unauthorised children.

Lucy speaks to one man and his family who allege he was imprisoned for nine days, and brutally beaten, because his wife was illegally pregnant with their second child. The family claim to have offered to pay the social maintenance fee, with the man’s mother saying “[translated] I said we’d pay any fine. Money isn’t everything. The baby is more important [but] they said, ‘there’s no way you can have this baby’.”

The man’s wife, who was six months pregnant at the time, was allegedly forced to have a dangerously late abortion, in order to end the detention and beatings. The man claims his wife still can’t forgive him and his family for failing to save their baby.

China is the world’s most populous nation, with an estimated 1.35 billion people; the Chinese government says the one-child policy has prevented 400 million births.

Tuesday 16 August at 9.30pm on SBS.