One-Child Policy

The One-Child Policy is a state birth-control program at the center of the novel’s conflict between population-level arguments and intimate reproductive consequences. It enters the story as political debate, family pressure, and medical business, then becomes an investigative link among the murdered women: all had previously had an abortion. Its significance lies in how a policy intended to manage births reaches into private lives, while the people who bear its costs have little power over how those costs are described or administered.

Policy and Public Justification

At a banquet attended by Margaret Campbell, Cui Feng defends birth control as a necessary response to the demands of feeding a large population. He presents figures for Shandong Province: without the policy, he says, its population would have approached 150 million, while it stood at 90 million; he also credits the policy with reducing the birth rate by more than half since 1970. His case includes a reported infant-mortality rate of 34 per thousand, below the world average of 50, and the claim that life expectancy in China had risen above 70 years. These are Cui’s arguments in a political exchange, not figures independently established by the narrative.

The defense is complicated by Cui’s own financial interest. The Procurator General explains that Cui had opened joint-venture clinics in Shanghai and obtained the government contract to perform the city’s abortions. Director Hu states that 300,000 abortions take place in Shanghai each year, a number presented as a substantial demand on limited public resources. Cui acknowledges that his organization is a business, while arguing that its clinics provide advice and counseling and offer a more humane process than state hospitals could provide on a production-line basis. Margaret counters that the program’s population goals cannot justify compelling abortions. Her objection is sharpened by her own experience: she had undergone an abortion after David Webber pressured her, and she continued to live with pain and guilt over it.

The exchange exposes two different ways of describing the same system. Cui speaks in terms of population, mortality, living standards, and medical provision; Margaret insists that policy outcomes must also be judged through the lives affected. Nien Mei-Ling disputes Margaret’s framing, describing women who become pregnant again after having a child as responsible for accepting abortion. Later, however, she admits that although she supports the policy in principle, it troubles her that someone should profit from other people’s unhappiness. The disagreement does not resolve the policy’s competing claims, but it makes the distribution of its costs visible: the state sets the goal, clinics carry out procedures, and families face the consequences.

Family Decisions and Unequal Consequences

Li Yan describes the policy through the history of his six-year-old niece, Xinxin. When Li’s sister discovered that her next baby would be a boy, she left Xinxin in Li’s care and went into hiding to give birth to the son she had long wanted. The child’s father had opposed the pregnancy and then disclaimed responsibility for both mother and daughter. Li’s account turns the policy from an abstract population measure into a fracture within one family: Xinxin is left behind, her mother disappears from her life, and Li becomes responsible for her care. He wonders whether the policy creates as many problems as it solves, including unwanted girls and children growing up without siblings or a wider generation of aunts and uncles.

The novel also connects birth restrictions to pressure for sons. Li observes that a preference for boys, combined with abortions of female fetuses after ultrasound tests, contributes to a rising male population relative to the number of women. In another family, An Wenjiang tells investigators that his partner, Xiao Fengzhen, wanted another child and that he feared the fines they would face under family-planning rules. His account is self-justifying and hostile toward her, but it establishes how the prospect of penalties entered a couple’s conflict over whether to have another child. The policy is therefore not only a public rule: it becomes part of the language partners use to press, blame, or explain decisions inside a household.

The case of Sun Jie and Wu Liyao offers a further version of this conflict. Sun Jie tells Li Yan that Wu Liyao had become pregnant again and appeared desperate to have a boy. He opposed continuing the pregnancy because of the penalties he expected under the policy, and she eventually had an abortion. He later acknowledged that he had bullied her into agreeing. Their relationship never recovered its former closeness; in a furious argument, Wu Liyao called him the killer of their unborn child. Sun Jie’s account reveals the aftermath not as a settled decision but as a lasting rupture, and Li recognizes its resemblance to his sister’s situation.

The effect of the policy also complicates the work of identifying the victims. The investigation extends its search through missing-person records, but Shanghai’s floating population numbers several million, and people reported missing may have left to find work, married elsewhere, or dropped out of contact for other reasons. Investigators also learn that women who become pregnant after already having a child sometimes disappear to give birth away from local authorities. In this setting, an absence from a household record does not necessarily mean a crime; it may also reflect a person trying to evade official scrutiny.

The Policy Enters the Investigation

The policy’s role changes when Margaret Campbell identifies a shared medical history among the victims. While considering the evidence from an autopsy, she observes scarring consistent with earlier abortions. Her recognition draws on a separate case in Beijing: Dr Wang had noted similar scarring in another dead woman and associated it with unsafe abortion. Margaret uses the pattern not as an isolated medical detail but as a means of connecting individual victims to a shared experience.

When Li Yan reports the finding to the team, he states that every victim had had an abortion. He has also checked with relatives of four of the five victims identified so far and learned that all four had undergone the procedure at clinics belonging to Cui Feng. The connection gives investigators a practical next step: Li wants access to the clinic records so they can compare them with missing-person files and potentially identify additional victims. The policy thus shapes the investigation at two levels. It helps explain why abortion records might contain relevant information, and its broad reach makes clinic records a possible route from anonymous bodies to individual identities.

The clinic link initially meets resistance. Section Chief Huang argues that Cui’s organization performs most abortions in Shanghai, so the victims’ use of his clinics is not itself evidence of wrongdoing. Li agrees that he is not accusing Cui of a crime; he wants to examine the records. The distinction matters: a practice made widespread by the policy can create a useful investigative lead without proving that any particular clinic or its owner was involved in the murders. Cui’s political connections and business interests nevertheless make the inquiry sensitive, especially after Margaret has publicly accused him of profiting from other people’s suffering.

Meaning and Limits

The policy’s significance is deliberately unsettled. Cui presents it as a public necessity that has helped reduce birth rates and improve living standards. Margaret objects to the use of abortion as an instrument of policy, drawing on her own experience and insisting on the human consequences behind aggregate figures. Nien Mei-Ling’s changing emphasis further complicates the debate: she supports the policy’s principle but objects to turning the unhappiness associated with it into someone’s profit. The novel gives these positions distinct motives without making their disagreement disappear.

The policy also becomes part of the investigation’s darkest speculation. Faced with evidence that nineteen women were carefully operated on and then killed, Li wonders whether their shared history of abortion might have made them targets for a surgeon acting out a distorted form of revenge. He also considers whether organs were sold. These are possibilities in Li’s unsettled reasoning, not conclusions established by the evidence presented here. The abortion histories link the victims and redirect the inquiry toward Cui’s clinics, but they do not, by themselves, establish motive or identify the killer.

Across these threads, the One-Child Policy operates as rule, family pressure, medical business, and clue. Its population-level arguments coexist with children separated from parents, partners divided by decisions about pregnancy, women who vanish beyond the reach of local authorities, and records that may help restore names to victims. The murder investigation makes those consequences newly legible, while preserving the difference between a pattern that guides inquiry and proof that resolves it.