Cadres’ Voices

While village cadres, along with town and county officials, are often portrayed as the strong arm of the state, enforcing the birth policy regardless of the social and personal costs, the relationship between villagers, cadres, and officials is, in fact, more fluid and complex. In-depth interviews with local cadres, including village leaders, midwives, and family planning cadres, as well as town and county officials, show a more dynamic and at times reciprocal relationship between local leaders and villagers. Many of the village cadres and officials interviewed admitted that it was not uncommon for births to go unregistered for years and that official birth counts and population reports compiled at the village level and sent up to the town governments were, at times, incomplete. The interviews reveal mutual noncompliance and selective policy implementation at the grassroots and even town and county levels.

Villagers, Daughters, and the Voices of the “Missing”

The general assumption has been that rural residents prefer sons and that under the single child policy and cultural constraints, daughters are valued less. This desire is assumed to be based on a traditional preference for sons and a virilocal marriage system that goes back more than a millennium. Given this cultural assumption and the central government’s push for birth control, a number of journalists and scholars have suggested that villagers hold continuous and unchanging attitudes toward daughters. However, national surveys and local interviews suggest that the value of daughters has changed over the last 30 years, with equal preference for sons and daughters increasing. As a result, mutual noncompliance and the change in rural attitudes has contributed to a greater number of hidden girls than previous studies have suggested.

The Registration Challenge

The registration of households has a long history in China, from the imperial period to the People’s Republic of China. The baojia system of security and local registration was used in China from its inception during the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) to the Republican period (1912–1949). After 1949, the Chinese Communist Party began massive registration campaigns. The household registration (hukou) law was introduced in 1958. Incessant problems associated with local leader autonomy and inconsistent reporting persisted from the traditional baojia into the current hukou system. Indeed, birth registration was a challenge for the Chinese Communist Party from the beginning and continued to be so into the reform era, especially with the massive administrative changes and decentralization in rural China that began in 1979. Uneven implementation meant that the birth registration process was inconsistent over time and geographically across rural China.

Introduction

On a late summer morning in June 2014, 12 female Chinese graduate students attended a workshop on conducting field interviews in rural Shaanxi province. The graduate students were selected from a top university for a research project on late birth registration and the “missing girls” in China. We told the students that the aim of the workshop was to train them in professional interviewing practices so they could survey rural families and learn about the process and challenges involved in late birth registration, that is, families registering their older children for the first time. While the national law states that births must be registered within the first month, some families wait for many months, sometimes even years, before registration, and this can influence local and national birth statistics as well as the reported sex ratio at birth (SRB). After the initial introduction to the research topic and workshop schedule, we asked the students if they had any questions. One young woman sitting in the back of the class asked: “how are we going to find these families and unregistered children?” We looked around the room and asked if anybody in this group had an immediate family member who was not registered at birth. Four students, who were from the countryside, raised their hands and admitted that their younger siblings had not been registered until they were four or five years old. We then asked if they knew anyone from their extended families who had been involved in a late birth registration, and two more students raised their hands. This answered the young woman’s question neatly and concretely. Interestingly, the following day, one of the students said she had called her mother to tell her her classmates’ fascinating stories regarding unregistered children, and her mother admitted to her that she, too, had remained unregistered until the age of two....

Historical Underreporting and the Identification of the “Missing Girls”

There are three distinct time periods in which the social and political environments influenced incentives to hide or not hide infants, children, and young adults: the pre-PRC period before 1949, the Maoist era (1949–1976), and the reform era, after 1979. Rural families and local officials avoided census counts and registration for males and females from the late Qing Empire in the 1800s right up through modern times. After 1979 came the most critical outcome of the state birth control policy: the country’s abnormally high sex ratio at birth statistic. According to an assessment of the 2010 population census, the number of girls truly missing from the population between 1980 and 2010 was estimated to be about 20 million. However, an examination of the two key assumptions behind these skewed statistics shows the number of hidden girls to be closer to 10 million, or about half of the estimated number of “missing girls.”

Street-Level Birth Control and Mutual Noncompliance

Contradictions between central policy goals and local interests can be resolved through cadres’ mediation at the village level. Village leaders act as mediators between central policy directives and rural residents. This compromise is attributable to the level of autonomy that village cadres enjoy, which affords them some discretion in the implementation of policies and regulations. The theory of the street-level bureaucrat explains how local cadres, at both the village and town levels, from the 1980s to the early 2000s, were able to use underreporting of out-of-plan births to mediate the conflicts between central policy goals and local interests. Underreporting goes beyond selective policy implementation and is a result of mutual noncompliance between villagers and cadres. One of the long-term implications of current changes in demographics is that as more rural residents permanently migrate to urban areas, the village community structure that allowed cadres to mediate between central policy and local interests may be disappearing.

Conclusion

This study has shown that the street-level bureaucrat theory and mutual noncompliance explains how more than 10 million girls can be “hidden” in China’s population data. This phenomenon is connected to the level of local autonomy that grassroots cadres have as well as the system of incentives for administrative officials at the town and county levels. From the inception of the single child policy in 1979, village cadres dealt with the inherent contradictions between the central government’s goal of reducing births and local interests in having more children. A number of villagers did not comply with the birth control polices, and many local cadres implemented the single child policy inconsistently, that is, permitted policy infraction. This is mutual noncompliance....