China's Family Planning Army

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2016

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Now that China has ended its One Child policy, one group of state employees may soon be out of a job – the country’s hated population police. Hundreds of thousands of officers used to hunt down families suspected of violating the country’s draconian rules on child bearing, handing out crippling fines, confiscating property and sometimes forcing women to have abortions. But with an eye on improving child welfare in the countryside, there is a plan to redeploy many of these officers as child development specialists. Lucy Ash visits a pilot project in Shaanxi Province training former enforcers to offer advice and support to rural grandparents who are left rearing children while the parents migrate to jobs in the big cities. If successful, the scheme could be rolled out nationwide to redeploy an army of family planning workers and transform the life prospects of millions of rural children.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a BBC podcast.
0:02.4	You can get all our podcasts and our terms of use
0:04.9	at BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts.
0:19.0	Welcome to assignment on the BBC World Service. I'm Lucy Ash and this week I'm in China. Oh, Kaudalow! Two-year-old-year-old-year-old Lucechi is beaming as a man she calls Uncle Lee pushes her along on her plastic
0:31.9	bike, but she has eyes on a bigger prize.
0:35.0	She's looking at herself in the mirror of Leboe's motorbike and she like playing with his bunch of keys and now
0:45.2	she's absolutely ecstatic because he's let her get on it and it's a nice big red
0:49.6	shiny bike. When Libo first met the toddler in her village in Shangxi province several months ago,
0:59.0	he remembers how shy she was hiding behind her grandma.
1:03.0	At the first sight of me, she even cried.
1:09.0	And then she became used to all this, and she became more lively. You know she's developing very fast.
1:17.0	Luci's parents are migrant workers in the provincial capital, Tsian, four hours drive away.
1:23.9	Her dad works in a quarry and her mom in a noodle factory.
1:28.0	So like more than 60 million other children in China, she's raised by her grandparents. As she
1:33.8	wriggles on her grandma's lap, Uncle Lee diverts her with a song.
1:37.8	Lee Bo, a gaunt man with high cheap bones and a wide smile belongs to China's army of family planning officers.
1:50.0	For the past 35 years, their job has been to strictly, at times brutally enforce birth quotas.
1:57.0	But with the end of the one child policy at the beginning of this year, some have a very different role.
2:05.0	I played simple game with Liosi just now to teach her how to tell the color, how to count,
2:12.0	and also how to play with the toy on her own.
2:17.0	In this week's assignment I'm looking at a project to turn the once reviled population police
2:25.6	into child development specialists.
	...

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