China's Family Planning Army Our World

and when the trial will start.

Now on BBC News, Our World.

China, the world's most populous nation.

Its leaders imposed a ruthless one-child policy to keep

the birth rate down.

But now, after 35 years, it is finally over, and the country

is hoping for a baby boom.

Today's mothers have more flexibility to shape

their own future.

I am, you know, the only child of my family.

Sometimes I feel a little bit lonely.

So I think two or three is perfect.

Now, the government must find a way to re-employ the despised population

police, an 85 million-strong army tasked with enforcing birth

control and abortions.

Across China, the enforcers have left their scars.

So what is the legacy of the one child policy?

With a rapidly ageing population, how well-equipped is China now

to face the future?

It is Tuesday morning in Dapeng county in central China,

700 miles south-west of Beijing.

Li Bo is on his way to work.

He belongs to the army of family planning officials stationed

in every town, city and village in the country.

Their mission has been to drive down the birth rate,

and to limit most families to just one child.

At the beginning of 2016, China finally scrapped

its one-child policy.

Now, Li Bo's role has taken a dramatic turn,

in a new direction.

Down here?

Today he is taking me to check up on a small girl who has been ill.

Liu Siqi is two, and like more than 60 million Chinese children,

she is being raised by her grandparents.

Her parents are migrant workers, and she only gets to see them

twice a year.

Li Bo is a pioneer in a pilot project designed to help rural

children to get a better start in life.

Today, the once-feared family planner visits villagers with a sack

of toys and picture books.

It is quite interesting.

He is not just kind of giving her sweets,

or making silly faces.

He is actually asking her what colour is that,

how many are these.

He is getting her to count, getting her to recognise parts

of the duck's face.

It is all quite educational.

Li Bo's new job is to teach parents and grandparents how to relate

better to small children.

But I wondered about Mrs Chen's earlier experience of

the hated population police.

What about people that were forced to have abortions,

or were forcibly sterilised?

Were there any cases of that?

Extraordinarily, Mrs Chen had two daughters after that,

but they had to live undercover.

The one-child policy, introduced in 1979, was designed

by military scientists to keep the world's largest

population in check.

An enormous family planning bureaucracy rolled into action,

enforcing abortions and sterilisations

on an unprecedented scale.

At least 336 million abortions have been carried out under the policy,

often with coercion and brutality.

Since the start of 2016, all Chinese couples are now allowed

two children, but no more than that.

And the enforcers, like Li Bo, still have to ensure that each

birth is authorised.

Today, he is busy with part of his old job,

screening local women.

The woman's medical history is logged in this little red book.

It lists the children she has, contraception she uses,

and any terminated pregnancies.

Tell me what these various stamps are in here.

You've got, like, different signatures, different...

Lots of pages of them.

What does it mean?

Now, you are allowed to have another child, yes?

Do you want another one?

What do you think?

What does your husband say?

Is that your husband?

At that moment, her husband shows up.

This is a bit cheeky, because I haven't met you before,

but can you just tell me why you don't want to have another baby?

But later, maybe?

In China's big cities, the future has already arrived.

I wonder if young women here in the capital,

Beijing, feel more confident about having a second child.

So I have come to meet some expectant mothers.

Antenatal yoga classes are becoming fashionable,

as affluent women seek more control over their bodies,

and shun the old one-size-fits-all approach to childbirth.

Can I just ask you, how many of you are thinking

about having a second child after the first one?

If my first baby is a girl, I want a second one.

If the first baby is a boy, I think I can have one baby.

Boys are expensive here, because when they get married,

they are expected to pay for a new home.

My first is a boy, and my second is boy again, so I feel a little

stressed right now.

This is your first child.

Would you like to have another one?

Absolutely.

I am, you know, the only child in my family.

Sometimes I feel a little bit lonely.

And I don't like, you know, my kids to feel the same.

So I think, you know, two or three is the perfect.

Two or three.

Three, for the time being, is not legal.

Yes, but I think as time changes, a lot of things can change.

Do you think that the policy was necessary in the first place?

It is a very sensitive topic to discuss in China.

But, you know, I think at that time point, it is like 20 or 30 years

before, probably it was kind of a must for us to do that,

because of a lot of considerations from the government.

But right now the government sees, you know, the need for us to raise

the popularity in China.

Raise the population?

I guess so, yeah.

China remains the world's most populous nation,

with nearly 1.4 billion people.

Without coercive birth control, the government claims

there would have been an extra 400 million citizens,

putting intolerable pressure on the country's

environment and resources.

But the one-child policy has produced negative side-effects,

like a chronic gender imbalance.

Many couples choose to abort girls over boys.

Policymakers in Beijing are increasingly concerned.

Dr Cai Jaiyun is deputy director of the Family Planning Commission.

Back in Dapeng county, Li Bo has invited me

to meet his family, his wife and nine-year-old daughter.

He is a loyal Communist Party official, and his daughter,

like her classmates, is a young pioneer.

I wonder whether Li Bo and his wife wish the law allowing a second child

would have come earlier.

Now that you and your wife could have another child, is that

something you would consider?

His parents had urged him to have another baby while the one-child

policy was still in force but then they would have had to pay a big

fine - the so-called Social Maintance Fee.

How big was the fee?

What was the normal cost of having a child out of plan?

Li Bo tells me that his job was to enforce the one-child policy

by issuing these fines.

Did you sometimes have to persuade them an abortion

was in their best interest?

Li Bo is clearly uncomfortable with my questions and I feel

uncomfortable asking them.

Did it make you feel quite unpopular in this town?

I have come to Hangzhou, eastern China, to meet the man

who knows all about conflict with the population police.

Wu Youhui is a lawyer who spent years investigating alleged abuses

within the family planning system.

He says he has proof that fines imposed by family planners

are siphoned off by corrupt officials.

This receipt shows 10,000 RMB, or around $1600, spent

on luxury silk quilts.

What is interesting about this, scrawled in the corner,

written in black ink, is an authorisation saying

that the money can be taken out of 35,000 RMB paid into the local

family planning office, and a previous receipt with matching

names and dates says 35,000 RMB was raised from so-called social

maintance fees, which are fines for having illegal children.

So what does this mean?

But these fines are not just spent on restaurants and fancy goods.

Mr Wu says some cash-strapped local authorities have come

to depend on them as a vital source of revenue.

Such was the pressure that officials even roped in criminals

to help them.

Within China, family planning officials' treatment of those

who break the rules varies.

Shangdong, a coastal province with a population of 96 million,

lies between Beijing and Shanghai, and it has a reputation

for being especially harsh.

In recent years, there have been a string of illegal detentions

here of people accused of having unauthorised children.

Many are too scared to talk but one family has agreed to tell me

about their experience.

We meet in a building belonging to friends.

They say going to their village would be far too risky.

We are not naming the family, but some members have decided

to show their faces.

Who were these people?

This is the building the man says he was taken

to and where he was held captive for nine days.

His wife was pregnant with an illegal second child,

so the family hid her until she was six months gone.

At that point, they believed it would be too late

to force her to have an abortion.

They were wrong.

The woman is still too upset to talk about what happened.

Did you offer to pay the social maintenance fee?

The wife's sister was also kept prisoner to increase the pressure.

She was not let out until the family handed over $1500 -

money to pay for the hotel room where the husband was tortured.

His parents were made to watch.

By the ninth day, it had become too much to bear.

The father accompanied his daughter-in-law to the hospital

for the abortion.

Afterwards, the woman's mother-in-law saw the foetus.

Three years have gone by but her grief is still raw.

The husband tells me his wife cannot forgive them for failing

to save the baby.

The one-child policy has caused heartache in millions

of Chinese families.

Li Bo, the family planning officer, played his part in the system

but he is not looking back.

His focus is on the next generation.

Today, he is visiting this new centre.

It is part of the pilot project in Shaanxi Province designed to give

deprived rural children the best start in life.

How important is what is going on here, your work here,

for the future of China?

Perhaps officers like Li Bo did their job too well.

After the one-child policy, China faces a growing shortage

of young people and that could threaten its dynamic growth.

Now every individual is needed to meet the challenges ahead.

Welcome to the weekend.

That is meant sincerely.

Here is what's in store for Saturday.

Low pressure with weather fronts, meaning even if you start dry

it won't last.