When you watch Li Bo playing with two-year-old Liu Siqi, you might think he’s her father, but in fact he was employed to stop children like her ever having a brother or sister.
“Did you sometimes have to persuade them that an abortion was in their best interest?” reporter Lucy Ash asks him on Tuesday’s Dateline.
“Yes, I did,” he replies. “China has a serious problem with our large population.”
He was one of the army of family planning officials based in every city, town and village across the country to enforce the one-child policy. It’s estimated they prevented around 400 million births.
Now he uses picture books and toys to teach families how to better relate to their children. It’s part of a pilot program to assist those in rural areas, but the irony isn’t lost on Liu Siqi’s grandmother.
“They forced me to have an abortion when I was pregnant with my second child,” Chen Huafen says.
Mrs Chen had two other daughters after that, but had to keep them hidden – the youngest until she was 12-years-old.
“Officers from the Family Planning Committee used to come and arrest people in the middle of the night,” she says. “They came at night because they knew people would be asleep and hid during the day.”
Up to two children are now allowed, but enforcers like Li Bo still have to screen local women and ensure that each birth is authorised.
He checks their medical history to see if they already have children or have had any terminated births, and if they use contraception, noting all the details in a red notebook.
But there’s a legacy of tension between former one-child policy enforcers and the community. Li Bo says he was far from popular in many of the communities he visited.
“Sometimes the villagers wouldn't welcome us. The policy went against their wishes,” he says. “It was like police and thieves. They would definitely hate you and you would hate them.”
He’s married with a nine-year-old daughter, but is still hesitant about having a second child.
“I think the government has a plan for the whole country. Individuals don't have the right to do whatever they like,” he says.
Until recently, having a second child meant being hit with a huge fine, equivalent to up to six years’ annual income, or worse.
“My daughter-in-law was already six months pregnant,” one man says as he recounts how his son was abducted and tortured to force the family to abort the child.
“I said we’d pay the fine, money isn’t everything, the baby is more important,” his wife says. “They said, ‘There’s no way you can have this baby’.”
“The baby was well formed, he even had fingernails,” she says tearfully as she recalls seeing the aborted foetus. “I couldn’t bear it, I was heartbroken.”
It’s estimated that 336 million abortions were carried out during the 35 year policy.
For those who had more than one child, the money raised from fines went to the authorities, but Dateline hears from a lawyer who believes it was then sometimes siphoned off by corrupt officials.
“The fines were being spent on luxuries like silk quilts and porcelain,” he says, showing Lucy a set of receipts. “Not on social services or the public.”
“Often, the people who brutally extracted the fines were local thugs who had been hired as temporary family planning officials,” he adds.
The result of the one-child policy is that the country’s 1.4 billion people now have a gender imbalance of more men than women, and a rapidly ageing population.
So how will the world’s most populous nation face the future? Watch Tuesday’s Dateline at 9.30pm on SBS.
