288 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
The other change, however, was the most repressive intervention in private
reproductive lives the world has ever seen; 100 million couples were affected.
The one-child policy, begun in 1979 and formally ended on January 1, 2016,
aimed to keep China’s population at 1.2 billion by 2000. In effect, however, it
decreed that henceforth “only half of all families would have a son to carry on
the family name, the sibling relationship would disappear, and failure to use
contraceptives would be a capital offense” (Harrell and Davis 1993). Through
much of rural China, bargaining between village families and local cadres
resulted in softening the enforcement of the one-child policy, though in urban
areas, the state more successfully enforced it. The total fertility of Chinese
women—that is, the number of children a woman has over her reproductive
years—dropped from about six to less than three. The outcomes of the reduc-
tion in family size are evident in a number of ways today. The widespread new
phenomenon of the “only child” has resulted in another new phenomenon, the
spoiled child. And the traditional Chinese preference for males, which stimu-
lated in vitro gender tests followed by abortion of female fetuses, produced a
shortage of women at marrying age. Now we are seeing responses as varied as
urban young women demanding good education and being choosy about
whom they marry, to the sale of kidnapped girls as brides in remote and impov-
erished areas. Patriarchal tradition still persists, however, with men being
averse to marrying women who are wealthier or better educated than they are.
This has led to a phenomenon known as “leftover women,” in which women
who choose advanced education and a career may find it difficult or impossible
to find a partner when they choose to do so. In 2015–2016, Beijing revised the
one-child policy to allow couples to have two children, as an effort to address
the rapidly aging population and the strain that this could put on the economy.Women in Confucian China
The Chinese theory of gender differentiation is founded not in biology—a
man’s body, a woman’s body—but in a more fundamental polarity, that of yin
and yang, the complementary binary opposites that are the dynamic of the
entire cosmos. The “ten thousand things” come swirling into existence through
the tumbling energy of yin and yang. Gender is only one category of existence;
yin is everything dark, cold, female, coarse, water, earth; yang is everything
light, bright, heat, male, fire, heaven. Even the soul has a yin part, the po, the
heavy, material, fetid part that sinks in the earth with the decaying body, capa-
ble of becoming an angry ghost, and a yang part, hun, the light, spiritual part
that floats heavenward and becomes a beneficent ancestor. Male and female
bodies, natures, and appropriate social roles all follow from this cosmic
dynamic. The rightness of male authority, of patriarchy, is thus derivative of the
dominance of the strong, active principle of male yang over the passive gentle-
ness of yin.
This is not to say that gender relations have been unchanging throughout
Chinese history or that they ride above the flux of changing political and eco-