Soon after Simona Dai was born in 1992 in rural China, she was sent to live with a foster family, hidden away so her parents could hold out for a son.
Driving that decision was the country’s one-child policy, in place from 1980 through 2015 . Dai was the second daughter of her parents, under an exemption that let rural families have a second child if the first was a girl. She wasn’t really a part of her birth family again until after her brother was born four years later.
Her fate as an unacknowledged daughter wasn’t uncommon among women born during that era , where the edict to limit births often collided with family pressure to have a son. Across China’s villages and small towns, many women hid from state enforcers to avoid forced abortions in out-of-quota pregnancies or fought with relatives over whether to hide or abandon “illegal” baby girls.
Now 32, Dai has decided against having children herself. “I never felt the kind of unconditional love from my mom,” she said. “I don’t know how I could give it to another human.”
Having scrapped the one-child policy, the Communist Party is now championing the term “ family values ” and pressuring women to have more children as it grows increasingly anxious over China’s shrinking population . Those pressures are colliding with the lingering—and never addressed—emotional toll of decades of draconian enforcement of birth restrictions.
Dai and countless other women not only witnessed their parents’ pain over children abandoned or never born but were themselves made to feel that they were mere obstacles in the family’s quest for a son. Some of these women now say the sense of feeling unloved and uncared for shattered their very concept of family, part of a backlash by women who resist getting married or having any children at all.
“The one-child policy created generational trauma,” said Mei Fong , author of “One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment,” a book on the policy. “And that has left such a deep scar that women today are reluctant to build happy families. Why would they? They had very unhappy families.”
Most Chinese women still marry and have children. But the percentage of unmarried women ages 30 to 44 in China increased from less than 1% in 2000 to 5.6% in 2020. And a 2023 study of childlessness by five Chinese demographers estimated that around 5% of 49-year-old Chinese women had no children, a number that for decades stayed below 2%.
China’s National Health Commission, which oversees birth issues, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Trisha Zhu, 40, remembers her mother repeatedly disappearing for months from their home in a small town in central China, ostensibly to visit relatives. Later, Zhu realized her mother was hiding during pregnancies from officials and nosy neighbors. It took eight tries before her mother finally gave birth to a son.
As a teenager, Zhu learned she had a younger sister who had been given away to another family as a newborn. Another sister was kept off birth registers to avoid punishment for an out-of-quota birth. There were also abortions and, in one instance, induced labor that resulted in one baby’s death. Zhu says her mother fainted when she found out it was a boy.
It wasn’t possible to interview Zhu’s mother. In a conversation that Zhu videotaped, her mother recounts being scorned by her in-laws for her failure to give birth to a son and her fear of being forced to terminate her pregnancies.
Zhu recalls her mother telling Zhu and her sisters that she was tempted at times to drink pesticide, one of the most common methods of suicide for rural women back then. “We couldn’t make sense of what she went through,” Zhu said.
Research on the policy’s psychological impact has generally focused on children growing up without siblings—or the parents who lost their one child. Little research has focused on the policy’s mental-health impact on women of the era.
The one-child policy was just one stress factor in the hard life of rural women of childbearing age, a group that at the end of last century had one of the world’s highest rates of suicide, according to one 1998 study. The rates of suicide among rural women have come down in recent decades, which some researchers have attributed partly to China’s economic development.
Four decades after the party launched the one-child policy, the number of births in China is in free fall. The country had just over nine million newborns in 2023 , compared with around 16 million in 2013. The United Nations now expects China’s population to drop from 1.4 billion today to 639 million by 2100.
‘Please come, little brother’
In China’s cities, where most families had only one child, many girls received access to education and opportunities similar to boys. In rural China, the limits on births exacerbated the Confucian preference for sons.
One unsubtle practice that emphasized the second-class status of these extra, unwanted daughters was to give them names such as “Zhaodi” or “Laidi,” meaning “please come, little brother.”
In recent years, some of these women have changed their names. One of them posted on social media about how she had felt ashamed her entire life when called Zhaodi in public. Her post received thousands of comments and stories about other Zhaodis.
In the cases where a younger brother was eventually born, the family generally stopped having children and directed resources toward their son.
Researchers from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, examining data collected for a survey by the University of North Carolina, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and others, found that between 1991 and 2009, four out of 10 rural girls and women ages 6 to 30 had a younger brother, while only two out of 10 males of the same age did.
Having brothers often hurt women’s educational opportunities during the one-child era.
Nanfu Wang, a filmmaker who co-directed “One Child Nation,” a documentary critical of the one-child policy, said her college dream was shattered when her family sent her to a vocational school instead of high school at age 13.
The hope was that after graduation she could help lessen the family’s financial burden so that her younger brother could continue his education. Her brother, Wang Zhihao, said he only learned about that in middle school. “I felt really guilty,” he said. “I wish things had gone differently.”
One 2017 study based on 2010 national data by researchers from Jinan University and Guangzhou Philanthropy Academy found having brothers reduced the average years of education for women by half a year. Many girls also were hampered in their schooling by the mere fact that they had been hidden by their parents and were undocumented.
‘Hard on my heart’
After Wu Yaping was born in 1992 as the family’s third daughter, her parents left her on the curb outside the hospital. But her father came back for her, reasoning she would be an extra hand in family chores.
Growing up, Wu says, she was “at everyone’s beck and call.”
She didn’t question the love and attention showered on the brother born after her. Wu and her sisters crammed into damp and crowded public schools, while her brother went to private school with his own snacks, brand-new school supplies and a monthly allowance seven times that of his sisters. When he got married, her parents paid the down payment for an apartment and bought him a car.
Wu thought that was the way it should be. But she has also always had a strained relationship with her parents. “I’ve told my mom countless times that I really wish I hadn’t been born,” she said. “I’m worried if I had a kid, they’d become another me.”
Wu is now an intellectual-property lawyer in Shenzhen. She assumed she would one day herself marry and become a mother, but she has gradually turned her back on that prospect, saying she has realized she has options. “I’m not anyone’s attachment. I live for myself,” she said.
It wasn’t possible to reach Wu’s parents or brother.
Much like Wu, Zhu and Dai have spent much of their lives coming to grips with their upbringing.
In 2015, Zhu started collecting personal stories from women who were abandoned or grew up as unacknowledged daughters. She republished more than 100 stories on her Chinese social-media account. “It was a collective trauma,” she said.
After witnessing her mother’s pain, Zhu wasn’t even considering marriage and motherhood. That changed after she left China for graduate school in the U.S.
She is now married and has a 4-year-old daughter. “Had I stayed in China, I wouldn’t have done either,” she said.
One evening in late 2019, Dai decided to interview her mother about her experiences during the one-child-policy era. She was shocked to learn her mother had a forced-labor induction when she was eight months pregnant in the early 1990s. The baby, who died, would have been another girl.
“I still find myself thinking about it at night. I really regret it,” her mother said in a recording of the conversation. “It is hard on my heart.” Dai later used her mother’s story as the first installment in a podcast she created on marriage and birth. It wasn’t possible to reach her mother for comment.
Dai got married when she was 26. For years she resisted persistent demands from both families to give birth and finally arrived at the conclusion that the only way to stop the demands was to end her marriage. Last year, she filed for divorce.
Write to Shen Lu at shen.lu@wsj.com
