Two-child study quells fears of a baby boom (2)

Proposal approved

In the early 1980s, Liang, who was then a researcher at the Shanxi Provincial Party School, made the proposal to the central government to test his plan to contain population growth.

In September 1980, the Party Central Committee issued an open letter to all members of the Party and the Youth League, suggesting couples should only have one child to keep the population under 1.2 billion, to reduce the mounting pressure on resources and the environment.

Liang disagreed with the one-child policy, holding that the country could still effectively meet its target of keeping the population under 1.2 billion by allowing every couple to have two children while delaying the age of marriage and the age they could have children.

The central government approved Liang's proposal and Yicheng was selected because of strong support from the county's top officials.

Liang applied his test in the county's rural areas because giving birth to more than one child was more popular among rural couples before the family planning policy, and rural households are more prone to violating the policy.

Before the pilot program in Yicheng, Wang Yongliang, a family planning official in Wangzhuang township for about 30 years, said his job was "the most difficult in the world".

"People were giving birth to at least four or five children before the 1970s, and all of a sudden they are ordered to have only one," he said, adding that the policy resulted in conflict between family planning officials and couples.

"Every time you went to a village, people said, ‘Here come the gangsters'. They would curse you behind your back," he said. "If we knew a woman was pregnant but already had a child, we tried all means to convince her to give up the baby — taking all the family's precious belongings, tractors, cattle and giving them back immediately after they agreed to abort the child."

In 1985, when the county started pushing the pilot program, many family planning officials were shocked.