ABSTRACT
Introduction The TV serial Parents of the Single Child (Dushengzinu de popomama, 2013) is a family-based drama that engages with a number of topical social issues about people from the one-child generations. By portraying the domestic and workplace-related conflicts in the one-child generations, the show foregrounds the harm inflicted upon this whole generation of people in particular and Chinese society generally, as all of China was affected by the demographic policies of previous national governments. However, by exposing only some of the harmful social effects of the one-child policy, the show narrows the topics and neutralizes some of the debates and concerns about the deleterious outcomes of the one-child policy. The drama takes a superficial approach towards the more disturbing social problems caused by the one-child policy, such as the sex ratio imbalance and the “shidu” family, issues which might cause public discontent and even social unrest.
The Chinese government launched the one-child policy in 1979. It was a radical family planning project which was, however, incongruously incompatible with much of China’s reform policy adopted at the outset of the Opening Up period, a time that witnessed the beginning of the state’s gradual withdrawal from its extensive involvement in every facet of family and social life. This drastic social engineering program directed that childbearing was a state concern; childbearing was essentially “collectivized” at a time when the economy was heading down a reverse path (White 2007). China’s population reached around 1 billion in 1980, and the then Chinese leaders believed that unless a rigorous policy of population control were implemented, China would not realize its economic goals by the year 2000 (White 1992; Greenhalgh 2008) and that a family planning strategy was required to correct China’s demographic dilemma (Tien 1991). As a result of these sweeping birth control restrictions, there have been about 150 million children born under the one-child policy over nearly four decades, and China has become the country with the most single-child families in the world.1 In 2015, more than thirty years after the adoption of the one-child policy, the CCP government made significant adjustments to its family planning scheme in order to cope with emerging social problems caused by China’s aging population – a costly outcome of
