China has long sought to control women’s bodies. Increasingly, they’re making their own choices

More women are rejecting state pressure over their reproductive choices, amid the devastating legacy of the one-child policy Ever since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, women’s bodies have been the business of the state. In the 1950s, labour for state-controlled work units was organised according to women’s menstrual cycles. Then for decades, there was the one-child policy. Across vast swathes of the country the policy was enforced with a brutal severity. As well as fines for additional children, women were forced to have abortions and subjected to forced sterilisations. Now, women in China are facing new forms of pressure from the government as China battles a fresh challenge – a falling birth rate. Women are under pressure to devote their bodies to childbearing as the government tries to encourage more pregnancies. Increasingly, women are pushing back in ways that weren’t possible in the past, while the painful legacy of the one-child policy continues to echo and reshape expectations around family today. “For people of my generation, born at the end of the 1980s, everyone is from a one-child family,” says Guligo Jia, 36-year-old filmmaker base

Jun 11, 2026 → Jun 11, 2026