Through the story of three generations of women in her own family – grandmother, mother and daughter – Jung Chang reveals the whole tragic history of China’s twentieth century. Since its first publication it has been published in 37 languages and sold more than 13 million copies (while still banned in mainland China). She is still waiting for an outcome to her case.) China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission states that reproductive planning is the duty of “husbands and wives together” by contrast, the government views single mothers as unnatural for wanting to give birth outside marriage, and a threat to social stability.Few books have ever had such an impact as Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. (In 2019, a feminist activist, Teresa Xu, filed a landmark lawsuit for a single woman’s right to freeze her eggs. The children of single mothers may be denied a household registration ( hukou) and have trouble gaining entry to school or access to affordable health care, or their mothers may be forced to pay a “social maintenance fee.” Single women are banned from using assisted reproductive technology. Married Han women are now exhorted to have three children, but single women in China who want to have a baby are still penalized for doing so.

In addition, the right kind of births must be confined within the politically stabilizing institution of heterosexual marriage.

As part of that push to “upgrade,” the state media has regularly published unscientific reports on babies born with birth defects, attributed to “women having their first child at an older age.” Since 2016, it has also bombarded urban, Han Chinese women with messages urging them to hurry up and have two babies instead of one, preferably before they turn 30, lest they miss out on their “best childbearing years.” In its 2007 warning about “population pressures,” the State Council named “upgrading population quality” ( tigao renkou suzhi) as a key goal, an aim highlighted again in the latest three-child policy announcement. For more than a decade, China’s propaganda apparatus has sought to push “high quality,” Han Chinese women into traditional roles of wives and stay-at-home mothers, who produce “high quality” babies for the good of the nation.

Why doesn’t China simply get rid of all birth restrictions? Despite the rosy rhetoric about giving couples more freedom to have children, the government’s goal is not simply to increase total births nationwide - they must be the right kinds of births.

The three daughters of china