Peng Peiyun, 95, Dies; Official Renounced China’s One-Child Policy

She was given the “hardest job under heaven”: upholding birth limits enforced by often brutal local officials. She came to support softening the policy, then abolishing it.

Peng Peiyun, a senior Chinese Communist Party official who was given the task of enforcing her government’s draconian “one-child” family-planning restrictions at their height and who then worked to soften and, ultimately, end the policies, died on Sunday in Beijing. She was 95.

Her death was reported by China’s official Xinhua news agency, which eulogized her as a “loyal Communist fighter” and an “outstanding leader” in population policy and women’s and children’s issues.

That official praise barely hinted at the predicaments that Ms. Peng faced when she was assigned to China’s State Family Planning Commission in 1988 and put in charge of what she and other government figures called “the hardest job under heaven.”

Ms. Peng had thrown herself into the Communist revolutionary cause as a teenager and rose as an enforcer of the party’s policies in universities. But as a woman, she was a rarity in the higher ranks of government, and as the minister of the family planning commission, she saw the suffering wrought by China’s campaign to drastically reduce birthrates.

Rural women in particular endured forced abortions and sterilizations, beatings by local cadres of enforcers and slipshod medical procedures for contraception.

Ms. Peng said she was “also a woman and also a mother,” one of her advisers, Gu Baochang, wrote in a memoir. He recalled her asking him, “Must family planning policy really be done this way?”

During the 1990s, Ms. Peng tried to make enforcement of the restrictions on family size — one child for most urban families, often two in the countryside — less brutal. Many local officials, under intense pressure to meet mandatory birth goals, bristled at her efforts. Some dismissed her as a naïve outsider.

But Ms. Peng enlisted demographers, medical experts and like-minded officials to develop the case that less-harsh measures, including education and more choice in contraception methods, could be more effective in holding down birthrates. Over the next three decades, she shifted from trying to make birth policies less coercive to asking why China stuck with them at all, as more couples were reluctant to have even one child.

“While she had no option but to support top party authorities and ensure the targets for the one-child policy were met, she acted at several critical moments to relax the policy and move its enforcement in a more humane direction,” said Susan Greenhalgh, a professor emerita at Harvard University who got to know Ms. Peng while researching Chinese population policy.

In retirement, Ms. Peng lobbied China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to pull down the birth restrictions altogether, warning that the country could become a society with too few children.

“Just as she unwaveringly executed the one-child policy, she became equally adamant about abolishing it a decade later,” Wang Feng, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine, said in an email. He is a co-author of a coming book about the end of the one-child policy, which draws on an unpublished biography of Ms. Peng, with which she cooperated.

Peng Peiyun, the eldest of eight children, was born on Dec. 25, 1929, in Nanjing, then the national capital, in eastern China. Her father, Peng Hu, was a banker and company manager, and her mother, Fan Xinshou, ran a school for the children of her husband’s employees.

Precociously smart, Ms. Peng was just 15 when she enrolled at the National Southwestern Associated University, which had been created by academics fleeing the Japanese invasion of 1937. She studied sociology and embraced leftist politics before transferring to a university in Nanjing to appease her parents, who worried about the risks she was taking with her activism.

There, too, Ms. Peng was drawn into student protests against Nationalist Party rule, and she joined the underground Communist Party when she was 16. She struck up a romance with Wang Hanbin, a student who had introduced her to the party, and they married in 1949. They later had two sons and two daughters.

In 1947, Ms. Peng and Mr. Wang moved to Beijing, where she finished her studies in sociology at Tsinghua University while working as an underground party operative. Near the end of the year, having toppled the Nationalists in the Communist Revolution, Mao Zedong stood over Tiananmen Square and declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

After graduating from Tsinghua, Ms. Peng was appointed secretary-general of the university’s Communist Party committee, the first of her multiple jobs in higher education. In 1964, she was made a deputy party secretary of Peking University, holding that post while her husband was an official under Peng Zhen, the powerful party secretary of Beijing (and not a relative of Ms. Peng’s).

But the couple’s prominent roles became their downfall. In 1966, Mao launched his Cultural Revolution to root out perceived internal enemies he believed threatened the purity of his cause, and two of his targets were Peking University and Mr. Peng, the party boss.

Mr. Wang was purged, and Ms. Peng became a target when militants, backed by Mao, attacked the Peking University administration. In one painful moment, her own teenage son denounced her. She spent years in a labor camp, and did not see her husband for six years.

After Mao’s death in 1976, China’s new leaders began restoring the battered university system, and Ms. Peng resumed her career as an education official. In 1987, the party sent her to restore order at the University of Science and Technology of China, in the country’s east, which had become a center of student protests, and where Fang Lizhi, a famed astrophysicist and university vice president, was speaking out for democratic change.

Months later, a senior party official called Ms. Peng with another, unexpected assignment: to take charge of the State Family Planning Commission at a time when China’s population growth was accelerating. The country’s leaders feared that growth would slow economic modernization, and so in the 1980s intensified enforcement of the strict limits, established in 1979, on the number of children a couple could have.

With some reluctance, Ms. Peng became minister in charge of the Commission in early 1988 and set to work in a cramped office, faced with the difficult task of implementing birth limits across China and particularly in the countryside, where large families were the norm.

Ms. Peng began visiting dozens of villages, where the government relied on zealous local officials to enforce the restrictions, often brutally. To learn more about family planning, she turned to demographers and then foreign experts for information and ideas.

Though committed to the birth-limitation goals, she hoped to find more humane ways to achieve them. Experts who worked with her said that she knew that the government’s policies were poorly grounded in science and that she wanted to change them from within, using her bureaucratic skills.

Starting in 1991, her commission promoted the so-called Seven Prohibitions, which tried to deter local cadres from using physical abuse and detention, exorbitant fines and even demolition of homes in their enforcement of birth restrictions. Ms. Peng and like-minded officials also pushed to give women access to better health care and more varied contraceptives.

But China’s top leadership kept up the pressure on local administrations to enforce the birth limit, and critics said Ms. Peng’s efforts were mere posturing. Others who worked with her, though, said that by operating within the constraints of China’s system, she had made a real difference.

“She was really the person responsible for softening the one-child policy,” said Joan Kaufman, who worked in Beijing on population policy and reproductive health in the 1990s, first for the United Nations Population Fund and then for the Ford Foundation. “To some degree, the family planning program shifted away from coercion to a program that improved services and choice for women, even while the population targets remained.”

Ms. Peng stepped down as commission head in 1998 but continued to be engaged in population issues in other roles, including as president of the All-China Women’s Federation, a party-run organization.

She is survived by her husband, four children, four grandchildren, five great-grandchildren, three sisters and two brothers.

Behind the scenes after retirement, Ms. Peng continued to voice concern that China’s stringent controls on family size had gone too far for too long. Population growth was beginning to slow markedly, and Ms. Peng feared that leaders in Beijing were not responding.

In 2014, at a seminar on population policy in Shanghai, she urged the dozens of experts in attendance to appeal to the central leadership to replace the one-child policy with a two-child one. She sent the proposal directly to China’s leader, Mr. Xi. In October 2015, a Communist Party conference approved the move to a two-child policy.

China’s population continued to age and shrink, however, as many young people shied away from the burdens of raising children. In 2018, Ms. Peng again wrote to China’s leaders, urging total abolition of birth limits. It was not just wise policy, she wrote in the letter; it was a matter of citizens’ rights.

“Fertility policy should return to the norm of allowing citizens to make their own decisions about childbearing,” she wrote.

In 2021, China shifted to a three-child limit.

Additional reporting by Siyi Zhao and Vivian Wang in Beijing.

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