The only memento Li Tianbing has of his childhood is five photographs. Tattered now, black and white, slightly out of focus. He's lucky, he says, to have even those: cameras weren't plentiful in Guilin, southern China, when he was a small boy in the 1970s, a three-day, four-night train journey from Beijing. He saw one only rarely, when his father – a soldier in the People's Army propaganda unit – managed to borrow one. As Li's dad could come home for only one or two days each month, and as he didn't often manage to borrow a camera, five photos is what there are.

But stacked against the walls in his studio, a cavernous former garage in a grimy Paris suburb, are some of the works those photographs inspired: huge, compelling canvases that have made Li one of the most critically acclaimed Chinese-born artists of his generation.

Rendered in the stark, monochrome detail of an old photograph, some splashed blue, red or green, others clutching unnaturally bright toys, books or bags, are children. Staring wide-eyed, deadpan they appear detached, waif-like. And above all – though each picture may contain several children – they seem alone.

These paintings are part of a semi-biographical series that has occupied Li for the best part of five years. They are an artist's attempt to recapture and reimagine what he can of his own childhood, and to explore the human consequences of perhaps the most controversial and far-reaching social policy China has decreed: the one-child rule. "My generation," says Li, serving green tea in a porcelain cup the size of a large thimble, "is unique, in China and in the world. We were the first not to fully know the meaning of the words 'brother' and 'sister'."

Labels: childhood, China, one-child policy, population control, siblings

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A fresh government poster went up the other day on the alley wall not far from our front door in Beijing. I barely paused at the cheery patriotic exhortations across the flag—Is that a sign I’ve been here a while?—and my eye fell instead on a curious thing about the family: it has two kids.

I first noticed that two-kid families had begun popping up in advertisements for KFC and General Electric a little over a year ago, but political advertising is something else entirely. The Party has held much of China to a one-child-per-family policy for thirty years, and, by and large, it still does. Some parts of the program are comically antique: a Beijing mother reminded me today that families with one child in the capital are still automatically eligible to receive a monthly “reward” from the state for adhering to the one-child plan. The amount hasn’t changed since it was set in 1979: five yuan a month, about seventy-nine cents. (It doesn’t go as far as it once did, now that China is the world’s largest consumer of Rolls Royces.)

But the Party propagandists may be on to something. Two-child families may not be so far over the horizon after all, because of a growing consensus that economic pressures demand a change.

Labels: aging, children, China, demographics, economics, one-child policy, population control

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More than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age could find themselves without spouses in 2020, state media reported on Monday, citing a study that blamed sex-specific abortions as a major factor.

The study, by the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, named the gender imbalance among newborns as the most serious demographic problem for the country's population of 1.3 billion, the Global Times said. ...

Researcher Wang Guangzhou said the skewed birth ratio could lead to difficulties for men with lower incomes in finding spouses, as well as a widening age gap between partners, according to the Global Times.

Another researcher quoted by the newspaper, Wang Yuesheng, said men in poorer parts of China would be forced to accept marriages late in life or remain single for life, which could "cause a break in family lines."

"The chance of getting married will be rare if a man is more than 40 years old in the countryside. They will be more dependent on social security as they age and have fewer household resources to rely on," Wang said. ...

The Global Times said abductions and trafficking of women were "rampant" in areas with excess numbers of men, citing the National Population and Family Planning Commission.

Labels: abortion, China, demographics, one-child policy

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