Layoff crisis
Zheng Gejun, director of a family planning service center in a Gong'an county township who participated in the May protest, feels that he and other family planning officials have been wrongly demonized.
"The job was filled with hardships. We had to go to villages and make door-to-door visits," Zheng, 45, who has been in the family planning field for more than 20 years, told the Global Times. "We were responding to the government's call. It was hard to complete our task unless we took administrative measures."
In this context "administrative measures" means forcing people to follow government policies.
He claims that the number of forced abortions and incidents of violent policy enforcement drastically dropped after the late 1990s and individual negative reports have demonized his profession as a whole.
Now that the policy has changed, people like Zheng feel that they have been abandoned by both the country and its people.
Such feelings are not rare. In January, family planning workers in Xingning, South China's Guangdong Province, wrote a joint open letter titled "Please give family planning workers a way out," complaining about unfair treatment and layoffs.
They wrote that they had been asked to integrate into local healthcare centers which are not fully funded by the government. The majority of them are middle-aged and lack the medical qualifications which healthcare centers require all their employees to have, according to the letter.
They said the arrangement has made them feel like the proverbial "donkey which is killed the moment it leaves the millstone."
Huang Minghui from Xinning county, Hunan Province, says he is glad he left his job at a township family planning office five years ago.
He took the job in 2003 when the office had more than a dozen workers. But now, only two or three remain. "I heard that the government has reduced their staff quota, and some even rumor that the office will be closed. Sensing the crisis, most of my former colleagues have left or jumped to other departments," Huang told the Global Times. In 2011, he sat the civil service exam and was recruited by a nearby township government.
Parenting trainers
Li Jianmin, a professor of population studies at Nankai University, argues that the government should accept its responsibility to people like Peng and Zheng.
"The victims like Peng and the layoffs or job transfers facing family planning workers are all a legacy of the one-child policy period. The government should give them a proper solution," Li told the Global Times.
Shi Yaojiang, professor at Shaanxi Normal University's Center for Experimental Economics in Education, believes it would be a great loss to throw China's 1 million family planning officials onto the scrapheap.
"Their function was to control the population size and raise population quality. But before, we focused on the former task. Now, it's time for us to shift the focus to the latter," Shi told the Global Times. He has led a program to help family planning workers become "parenting trainers" in Shangluo, Northwest China's Shaanxi Province since 2013.
"Our survey showed that more than half of the children in poverty-stricken families suffer from malnutrition and slow physical and mental development," he noted. "In the US, there are about 2 million people engaged in infant development guidance. But in China, there are almost no government-backed personnel in this sector."
Li Bo, 33, who became a family planning officer in Shangluo in 2005, is happy to have found a new role. He joined Shi's program and has become one of 130 parenting trainers in Shangluo, who occasionally visit rural families to distribute nutritional supplements, hand out toys and teach parenting skills.
"Instead of resentment, the villagers show us respect," Li told the Global Times.
So far, family planning officials from 17 provincial-level regions have inspected the program, according to Shi. Some local governments in Yunnan and Hebei provinces have already begun to promote similar schemes in their jurisdictions, he said.
Wang Peian, deputy head of the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC), reiterated that comprehensive measures shall be taken to reduce the cost of raising children and to help children get the best start in life possible.
As many young people are less willing to have second children than their parents and grandparents were and China faces an aging society, some suggest family planning workers should encourage them to have larger families. In some communities such as Lu'an, East China's Anhui Province, neighborhood family planning committee workers have started to pay door-to-door visits to persuade couples to have more children.
However, Zhai Zhenwu, chairman of the standing council of the China Population Association under the NHFPC, said the time to encourage or force couples to have second children is yet to come. "It won't be disastrous if some couples don't have a second child." Zhai told the Global Times.
Yi estimates that China will completely terminate its birth control policy in the near future and family planning workers will have to find a new niche for themselves.
He suggests they find work in sectors such as senior care rather than engaging in prenatal and postnatal care. "It's hard for these workers, who used to be keen on birth control, to change their mindset to facilitate births," Yi said.
Zheng doesn't think they are worthless. He argued that they still play a crucial role in supervising population size and gender balance.
Li Bo echoed Zheng, saying "Beside parenting guidance, we have lot of other work to do, such as distributing birth control tools, promoting sterilization knowledge, as many couples demand this service."
