State-sponsored cruelty has been a staple of the human condition for millennia.
But has there ever been a more wicked policy, with more disastrous social consequences, than the “one-child policy” China began to implement in the early 1980s a state-decreed population-control measure that resulted in, among other horrors, untold tens of millions of coerced abortions?
In her new book, One Child (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), veteran China-watcher Mei Fong describes both the impact of the policy on the destruction of China’s traditional social fabric and its draconian effects on China’s medium- and long-term future.