By Coco Liu and Shanshan Chen
HONG KONG/BEIJING, Dec 14 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Living in Beijing for 23 years, Li Xue has never attended school, not even for a day.
China provides a free, nine-year education to every child but Li was not included. For the past 23 years, she has had no access to any form of social welfare. She has not been allowed to get married, find a job, or open a bank account.
For Li was the second child born to her parents and, due to the nation’s one-child policy that ran from around 1978 until 2015 to curtail population growth, she didn’t exist in the Chinese government’s database.
Li said her parents tried to register her at the police station when she was born but staff there refused and demanded a letter of approval from the local family planning commission.
With no letter approving her birth, Li’s parents were faced with the prospect of paying a hefty fine for breaking the one-child policy to register her but could not afford to do so.
Since then it has been a two-decade battle with officials until China scrapped its one-child policy last year and Li finally received an official paper to prove her existence.
Ending the one-child policy has left people like Li scrambling to make up for lost years, resentful as they fear this recognition may have come too late and unsure what the government is going to do to help them make up for those years.
Li missed out on an education and struggled to learn everything by herself, using library books borrowed under her elder sister’s name with her family unable to afford a tutor.
“My mother was dismissed from her job because she gave birth to me,” Li told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview at her home in Beijing, a shabby house without a private toilet and with a make-shift shower.
“All four of us had to live off my father’s meagre salary.”
Li’s mother, Bai Xiuling, a former factory worker, said her daughter used to cry when other children set off for school.
“She wanted to study at school, but she can’t. My child has already missed the nine-year compulsory education. No money can buy her time back,” she said.
