ABSTRACT
Before exploring each pattern of resistance, it is important to recognize that the one-child limit has been strictly and consistently enforced only in China’s cities and towns, and only among ethnically Han Chinese. In the countryside, where the policy was met with hostility and widespread resistance, intense pressures to comply in the early years of the campaign gave way in 1984 to a ‘one-son or twochild policy’. In other words, those whose first child was a daughter were allowed to try again-for a son-after a four-or five-year wait between pregnancies. In the mid-and late-1980s, some provinces and regions relaxed the policy even more, allowing peasants to have two children, if properly spaced. Officially, these twochild provisions were usually limited to peasants living in poor, remote or mountainous areas, but the relaxation sometimes spilled over into more prosperous areas. For rural China, then, the one-child limit has been more of a goal than a reality, but this should not imply a lesser degree of state surveillance and regulation. Villagers, like city residents, had to have official permission to have a child, even their first, and many were forced to abort pregnancies that were ‘extraplan’, or unauthorized, simply because they occurred too soon (i.e., before official permission to give birth had been received). Local officials had strict birth planning targets to meet, and harsh campaigns periodically brought new crackdowns on policy offenders. The reproductive process was blanketed by state regulation and
control, forcing villagers to make hard choices between the claims of the state and their own child-bearing preferences.
