Since the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, women’s bodies have come under the sphere of state intervention – at least in part. The one-child policy, applied from 1980 to 2016, led to hundreds of millions of forced abortions and numerous forced sterilizations. Institutional violence whose effects continue to mark several generations.
Today, Beijing faces a challenge of a different nature: the decline in the birth rate. The government is increasing measures to encourage births. For many Chinese women, the painful legacy of the one-child policy has redefined their relationship to motherhood, as the Guardian details.
«For people of my generation, born in the late 1980s, everyone comes from a one-child familyexplains Guligo Jia, filmed 36 years ago based in Beijing. Nowadays, Chinese women have more control over their bodies because they can decide to abort or have children. They have more freedom.»
The repercussions of “100 days without children”
If, like Guligo Jia, many women recognize that they have more freedoms today, memories of the decades of the one-child policy remain vivid. One campaign particularly marked the Chinese population. Nicknamed the “100 days without children”, it was implemented in certain counties of China and required that no baby be born for one hundred days, starting on 1is May 1991.
Ms. Li, now in her sixties, remembers this period. In 1991, she was forced to undergo tubal ligation, a procedure she describes as “horribly”after having given birth during the forbidden hundred days. The sanction did not stop there. In addition to this forced sterilization, the young woman had to pay a fine of 6,500 yuan (830 euros), a sum representing several years of income for this farmer.
For several years, certain voices have been raised to denounce the excesses of the one-child policy. In 2013, Zhang Erli, a former official at the National Family Planning Commission, publicly acknowledged that the policy had gone too far. “Looking back, I feel like we really let Chinese women down. To be honest, I feel a deep sense of guilt“, he said in a documentary broadcast on Chinese state television, before being removed from public platforms.
A historically low birth rate
Today, the paradox is striking: after having long sought to limit births, Beijing is now trying to relaunch them, so far without success. The birth rate fell to 5.63 per 1,000 inhabitants in 2025 – for comparison, that of France reached 9.9 per 1,000 inhabitants in 2023. According to a study published in November 2025, one of the explanations lies precisely in the legacy of the one-child policy. Having grown up without brothers or sisters influences the desire to have children and “resulted in a significant decrease in the ideal family sizeâ€according to the researchers.
But this heritage does not explain everything. The cost and difficulty of raising children in modern China also weigh on the decisions of younger generations, despite the subsidies and tax breaks granted by the state to encourage births.
Wang Yixuan, a 26-year-old traditional Chinese medicine practitioner, says that “people don’t care as much anymore» having large families. «I don’t particularly want to have childrenshe continues. I must first be financially independent.»
Another study published in April found that nearly 50% of Chinese women aged 18 to 24 say they do not want children, compared to 6% in 2012. The proportion of men not wanting to have toddlers has also increased, reaching about 20%. «In the past, people were fined if they had a second childexplains Chen Ying, a 40-year-old restaurant worker in Shen. Nowadays, “they
simply can’t afford it».
For Yun Zhou, a demographer at the University of Michigan, the one-child policy has mainly created «a general feeling that reproductive rights have never been inalienable». A lasting distrust of government intervention in reproductive choices seems to have taken hold within the Middle Kingdom.
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