Why China's abortion army is now singing rhymes to its daughters

I have long been drawn to China. On my first trip to the country back in 2002, I visited the factory towns of the Pearl River Delta, the epicentre of globalisation where one out of every three pairs of shoes in the world was made.

More recently, I became interested in how the biggest movement of people in human history has affected relations between men and women. Before the mass migration from the countryside, young men could rely on their parents to find them a wife with the help of the local matchmaker. Today, many eligible women have left the village to work in the city.

If competition to find a bride is fierce, there is another inescapable factor - the country's gender imbalance. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, by the end of this decade, 24 million men won't be able to find wives.

A preference for boys and the termination of pregnancies when girls were conceived, has widened the gender imbalance, exacerbated by China's "one child policy".

As one among five sisters, I can't help but take personal interest in this side-effect of strict population control. My mother has recently been ill and spent a long period in hospital.

I have often thought about how hard it would be if I had to deal with everything on my own. Luckily, my four sisters have all helped and brought great solace to my parents.   

When China's Communist Party leaders announced they were ending the notorious 35-year-old policy in October last year, I returned for BBC World News to explore what would happen to all the men and women who had been responsible for implementing it.

China has an army of family planning officials stationed in every city, town and village in the country.

At its height, there were 85 million part-time employees at the grassroots level all the way up to half a million full-time staff at the National Population and Family Planning Commission.

Their mission was to drive down birth rates with fines, sterilisations and abortions. At times they used persuasion, at times brutal coercion.

Now that all Chinese couples can have two children, I wondered what would happen to the hated population police.

They are not yet redundant - reproductive rights are still controlled by the state - but their workload is considerably lighter. 

Then I heard about an intriguing pilot project in a remote part of Shaanxi Province, central China. A group of 69 family planning officers are being retrained as child development officers.

For my film Our World:China's Family Planning Army I met one of them, Li Bo as he was paying a visit to a two-year old girl in Danfeng County.

The toddler had a stomach ache and was whining on her grandmother's lap.

Undeterred, Mr Li diverted her attention with a squeaky plastic duck and then coaxed her into singing a nursery rhyme.

The 35-year-old enforcer reminded me of a Chinese Father Christmas arriving in the village with a bag full of toys and picture books.

His new job is to teach parents and grandparents how to develop toddlers' minds by talking, singing and reading to them.

"This is a golden period for developing skills", said Mr Li "and what I am doing now is important because it could affect what these children will be able to do in the future."

Only eight per cent of pupils from the countryside go into higher education compared to 70 per cent in the cities, according to a recent study. A third of rural children drop out before they even complete junior high school.

Mr Li's region 700 miles (1,125km) southwest of Beijing is impoverished and more than half the adults of working age have left for jobs in the cities.

A little girl, Liu Siqi, like 61 million of her peers, is a "left-behind" child, being raised by her grandparents. Her mother works in a noodle factory four hours' drive away and cannot visit often. Her father, who has a job in a quarry, only makes it home twice a year.

The Chinese and American academics behind the project hope it can soon be rolled out nationwide. If successful they believe it can achieve two objectives: provide new jobs for the once reviled family planners and raise the life prospects of millions of disadvantaged rural children.   

Liu Siqi's grandmother, Chen Huafen, was initially sceptical about the value of reading to such a small child. "I thought it was a waste of time," she laughs. "But she likes the stories and I was surprised by how much she remembers about them."

When Mr Li stepped out to answer the phone, Mrs Chen admitted she also had her doubts about him at first.

She told me her whole village "distrusted and hated" the enforcers, who confiscated property if families couldn't afford the fines.

"They used to come at night and take stuff away from families with more than one child," she says. "Bicycles, sewing machines whatever they could lay their hands on, even our cows and pigs."

Yue Ai, a senior researcher from Shaanxi Normal University, who was accompanying us during the filming, looked a bit nervous at the grandmother's candour.

Then Mrs Chen revealed that she had even greater cause to loathe the family planning workers. They had forced her to abort her second child.

In many rural areas, couples were allowed to have a second baby if their first was a girl -an attempt by the authorities to address the growing gender imbalance.

But Chen's first child was a boy so when she conceived for a second time, she was dragged off to the clinic for a termination. When she got pregnant again she went into hiding and gave birth to a daughter. But she was so afraid of a crippling fine for breaking the rules, the little girl had to live under cover.

"She stayed with my mother in the mountains for 12 years before we managed to get her registered," said the grandmother.

Unauthorised second children ignored by the state are another painful legacy of the one child policy.

Mr Li who had finished his phone call and had come back into the courtyard of Mrs Chen's house, was listening in silence. I saw he was uncomfortable discussing aspects of his old job.

He has a playful, caring side but he is also a loyal Communist party official who believes the state knows best and society's needs are greater than those of individuals.

In some villages, people threw stones at family planning officers' car and he admitted that in many places he was not a welcome guest.

"People didn't swear at us but they probably did behind our backs," he said. "It's natural because we were carrying out the law and they were breaking it so it is just like the clash between a policeman and a thief."

If Mr Li did his best to carry out the law, some family planning officers had no such scruples.

In Shandong province, I met a family still traumatised by their treatment at the hands of local officials in 2013.

They allege that the husband of a woman who was six months pregnant with her second child had been locked up and tortured in a nearby hotel.

"They were kicking my son and slamming him against the floor," said the man's tearful mother. "I just couldn't bear it any more so I called my daughter-in-law to say let's give up the baby."

When I asked the family why they didn't contact the police they told me they had tried but were told that nobody could intervene in the work of family planning officers.

"Those guys are so powerful - they just do whatever they want," said the father-in-law.

So the woman was made to have the late term abortion. As a result, a previously happy family has been torn apart.

The human cost of the one-child policy seems immeasurable.

Whatever the original intentions, the implementation led to heartache, horrific human rights' abuses and,with cruel irony, a chronic shortage of young people which threatens China's future.

(Our World: China's Family Planning Army with Lucy Ash will air on BBC World Newson Saturday, May 7 at 5pm, 10 pm and repeat on Sunday, May 8 at 10 am, 11pm.)