失独家庭：中国社会之痛_BEC初级作文

失独家庭：中国社会之痛

She never thought about violating the policy and having another child, even though she heard some people willingly paid a fine -- usually a matter of at most a couple thousand dollars -- to get past the quota. Jiang, until now, firmly believed what the government had told her: the country's prosperity depended upon reining in population growth. However, deep down, she knew her family was taking a risk. In a life full of uncertainty, Jiang and her husband had made only one single bet.

"I felt like a soldier in the battlefield," she said, "You know there will be bullets ahead of you, but you can only proceed."

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Today in China, there are about one million such "shidu" families, the term for parents that have lost their only child, a number that grows by about 76,000 each year. Yet demographers said this is only the beginning of the real problem, because the percentage of one-child families across China has exploded in the past three decades as fertility restrictions spread from big cities to every corner of the country.

A 2005 survey on the Chinese population, the most recent year available, showed that the country then had 210 million only children -- most of whom on the younger end of the spectrum. For the population group aged 25 to 29 (born between 1976 and 1980), only 15 percent were only children. However, for the generation born 25 years later, the percentage of only children nearlyquadrupled.

"In the future, tens of millions of Chinese people will be affected by this phenomenon," said Yi Fuxian, a University of Wisconsin scientist whose book A Big Country in an Empty Nest describes the damage of China's family planning restrictions. "Parents will lose hope and when they get old, nobody will take care of them. Because every kid is exposed to deadly risks, every one-child family is walking a tightrope."