That’s why China’s leaders long resisted calls to end the policy, even though economists had persistently warned that it was shrinking China’s workforce, diminishing productivity, and storing up a future problem in pension shortfalls. Those who drafted the one-child policy were cynically more concerned with the preservation of power than helping lift people out of poverty. The answer, of course, is that China’s birth-control policies have always been less about births, and more about control. Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts Listen to the Uyghur refugee Aséna Tahir Izgil discuss life after escaping genocide on The Experiment podcast. If the one-child policy was designed to boost economic growth and benefit citizens, why is Beijing actively suppressing reproduction among Uighurs-who are Chinese citizens-when the country’s birth rate has plunged to its lowest in 70 years, imperiling future growth? Why is the party telling Han Chinese to have more children, even as it sterilizes more Uighur women than the population of Hoboken, New Jersey? Recent reports from the Associated Press and the noted Xinjiang scholar Adrian Zenz about forced sterilizations imposed on China’s repressed Uighur minority should quash this lingering, pernicious fig leaf. Deng Xiaoping, then China’s paramount leader, insisted in 1979 that without a drastic fall in birth rates, “we will not be able to develop our economy and raise the living standards of our people.” The one-child policy, it claimed, was a difficult but necessary move that was crucial for the country’s advancement. This has always been the Chinese Communist Party’s narrative. For years, when I was giving talks or discussing my reporting on China’s one-child policy, well-meaning audience members would inevitably ask a question that I had come to expect: “Of course forced abortions and sterilizations are bad,” they would say, “but isn’t the one-child policy good, in some ways? Doesn’t it help lift millions of people out of poverty?”

One Child by Mei Fong