You were not aware of their existence What is the story of the 12 million children found by China?

The Chinese authorities discovered that there are 12 million children of its citizens who did not know for a long time that they existed. This goes back to the so-called "only child" policy, in which Beijing tried to control the population growth of its people.

The latest population census of China revealed that the number of children in the country in 2010 amounted to 172 million, in contrast to the figure announced by the Chinese government earlier that year, which did not exceed 160.9 million. In other words, there are 12 million Chinese children whose existence the government did not know until the last census was issued.

"This difference may be due to the failure of some parents to register births to avoid punishment if they violate the one-child policy," a report by the American "Bloomberg" agency said. There is also another factor, which is the control of the Chinese birth program on the sex of the offspring, since due to the lack of females, it was allowed to add a second son if the sex of the first was male.

Thus, we find that "about 57% of the children who were subsequently registered were girls, which indicates that the discrepancy may be related in part to the failure of parents to inform about girls, so that they can continue to try to have children," according to the report.

In his conclusion, he explained that "the birth rates for the years from 2011 to 2017 were adjusted upwards in the latest statistical yearbook, which indicates that the problem of reducing the number of children is likely to persist after 2010."

One child disaster

Since the late 1970s, the Chinese government has enacted strict laws on its people for birth control and control over the number and sex of children. It only allowed one son in the family, and whoever violates this is punished with severe fines, preventing the son from obtaining identification papers, dismissal from the job, or the woman having an abortion if she is in the early stages of her pregnancy.

According to the Chinese government, this policy, and up to the year 2000, "the country has spared about 400 million births." She justified this by the necessity of controlling the population mass in line with the country's economic planning. She also attributed it to her desire to alleviate political, economic, social and environmental problems.

The Chinese authorities continued to implement these policies until the end of 2015, and ended them permanently due to the apparent imbalance in the demographic balance. However, this balance did not improve, and the number of births was only 17.86 million children in 2016, an average of 12.95 births per 1,000 people, and 0.52% less than it in 2017, according to figures from the National Statistics Office in China. In addition to the decline in fertility rates, the number of Chinese women aged 23-30 will decrease in the next ten years by 40%.

This imbalance in demographic growth fundamentally contradicts the plans of the Chinese state for economic growth, and raises the alarm bells about an expected shortage of labor in the world's largest economies. In this regard, the Chinese government has encouraged its citizens to have children, and to this end, it has studied measures such as extending maternity leave and encouraging the birth of a second child by providing direct cash incentives or tax exemptions for some time.

Being a secret child in China

In an article for the American "Foreign Policy" magazine, Caroline Kahn, a Chinese writer, tells of her life as one of the children born against the will of the government in Beijing. She says that the phrase "the policy of planning births" was what frightened them the most when they were children, as a generation that was forced to live in secret.

In her village, where she was born, Caroline says, she watched the police escorting pregnant women with a second child to the police station. She adds that she once saw policemen looting a neighbor's house because they did not have the money to pay the fine.

For her, her mother had to pay a $30,000 fine and lose her job as a public school teacher. However, she was forced to live with bullying throughout her childhood as her peers called her “Little No. 2” or “the outlaw.”

Child victims of that law are deprived of their identification papers, and thus most of them live without education or care if their parents fail to register them.