CHINA:This disaster underscores the limitation of social engineering policies, writes Clifford Coonanin Beichuan
THE WOMAN had brought pyjamas and a change of clothes for her only child, a student at the Hanwang Technical College, devastated by the earthquake two days ago which left thousands of parents childless.
"My son is studying in this school and I'm waiting for the police to dig him up. I still hope he's alive," she said at the gate of the college, where soldiers in camouflage fatigues brought out bodies of the young victims and laid them in front of the gates. She shook with grief when the school director broke the news that her son had died.
In Beichuan, a city near the epicentre which has been mostly destroyed by the quake, parents called out the names of their children who had been in a kindergarten, as a small pile of bodies lay alongside.
One man found his son's body in the pile, wrapped him in a plastic sheet and carried him away. He tried to contact his wife, a migrant worker who is elsewhere in China, to tell her their child was dead, but there was no phone signal.
Outliving your offspring is an unbearable prospect, but the death of a child assumes an especially horrific dimension for many parents of children lost to the Sichuan earthquake.
Under the one child policy, imposed in 1979 to rein in population growth already at dangerously high levels, most families are limited to a single child. The worst natural disaster in 30 years has shone the spotlight on one of the country's most controversial social engineering policies, and on the unbearable pressure it exerts on many families.
Overworked rescuers in Hanwang were besieged by frantic parents, begging them to dig out their relatives. One mother banged on the chest of a People's Liberation Army officer - not something done lightly - pleading: "Rescue my child!" Struggling to maintain composure, the rescuers said they had to focus on survivors in areas where hundreds had been lost, and didn't have the resources to look for individual children.
Such was the woman's grief that even when parts of a building's front began to rain down where we stood, she remained there, wailing uncontrollably. What made the decision almost intolerable for the army officer was the parents' entreaty: "This is our only son." In a country where couples are largely confined to having one child, this was hard to ignore.
At the Juyuan Middle School in Dujiangyan, rescue workers detonated firecrackers every time the body of a youngster was identified among the 700 victims, sending the child's soul home and warding off evil spirits, but also marking the death of hope for hundreds of parents.
Li Chunyan (16) was one of the victims and her mother's grief is all the more poignant because like many of the thousands of dead students in Sichuan, she was an only child. Moreover, because these students were teenagers, there will be no more children for many of the families.
Chinese people leave it late to have babies they wish to welcome then into a stable environment. The children of the one-child policy era are cossetted and adored because entire generations concentrate their ambitions on the child.
The earthquake struck at 2.30pm on Monday, when most of Sichuan's children were at school, which means many of the dead will be children of the one-child policy. Many were taking a nap when the quake struck - one boy was found still holding a pen.
Travelling through Sichuan one is struck by the numbers of boys on the streets - the policy has led to a preference for male children and is blamed for an alarming rise in the male-to-female ratio.
Even though ultrasound tests to determine the baby's sex are technically illegal, underground ultrasounds and gender-selective abortions have resulted in 118 boys born for every 100 girls, potentially threatening social stability as more men have difficulty finding wives.
As in many developing countries, farmers prize sons because they believe they are better able to provide for the family, support their parents and carry on the family name. These are powerful enticements in a country with little by way of a social security blanket.
Raising a girl in rural areas is known as raising crops for someone else to reap. Prejudices run deep.Moreover, there are many exceptions. People in the cities can have a second child if husband and wife come from one-child families, and farm couples are allowed to have another if their first was a girl. Many ethnic minorities are allowed to have two children.
There is a growing debate about the policy in China. The government reckons that since it was introduced, more than 400 million births have been prevented. The policy has successfully slowed population growth to some 10 million people a year, it says, and there is now an average birth rate of 1.8 children a couple, compared with six when it was introduced.
In a country where famine was a living memory, there were fears that the ever-rising birth rate would put too much strain on already-stretched resources.
The parents in Sichuan today are not thinking about dependency ratios or the strain on resources. They just want their children alive.