Government Policy Creates New Class of Lonely Citizens

This might be a hard one for those of us reading from the American shores to get our heads around.

You’ve heard, of course, about China’s 1979 policy that limits couples to having just one child, right?

And if you’re anything like me, while you may be able to empathize with the demands of over-populated areas, your freedom-trained brain feels uncomfortable about the government plodding into the private household and legislating things like family-size.

But for some, it goes beyond even this infringement on rights. While reducing the number of people who rely on Chinese society, the long-term impact of the one-child policy is that it has birthed a whole new group of needy: parents who had only one child and now have no one.

They’re called the Shidu, a term that refers to people who’ve lost their only child to death.

The Sina News reports 760,000 families lose a child (read: their only child) each year. That means not only losing someone they love, but also often losing their primary source of companionship, financial support and care in old age.

And then there’s the intangible loss of…well, love.

This is where the bright spot of the story comes in. There are of course those who are responding to the shidu by demonstrating again to the world that the word family does not necessarily have to be defined by genetic ties. This past spring, for example, a group of young people called the Sanxiang Parents’ Plan formed a collective of young adults (some of whom had lost their parents) to stand in as pseudo children of the grieving.

It’s an odd mix that doesn’t nearly fix the problem, I admit, but sometimes the simplest gestures carry enough hope to help us live to face the world another day. And their makeshift families leave me continuing to ask the questions circling behind this blog: What if people extended love based on need instead of based on a list of need-to-be-met criteria? What if we drew lines that pulled people in instead of leaving them out? What if all of us could be to someone else what others were unwilling or unable to be for us?

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Read more about this phenomena here.