BEIJING â€" In a dignified letter, the parents of Lu Lingzi, the 23-year-old Chinese student killed in the Boston Marathon attack, asked people to remember their daughter by helping “make the world a better place,†as she had wanted to.
They are grieving and devastated, wrote the couple from Shenyang in northeast China, but please, “Continue moving forward,†they wrote in the open letter published in Chinese media and on the Web site of BU Today, the news site of Boston University, where Ms. Lu was studying.
Ms. Lu’s parents didn’t mention a very special sorrow - the daughter they lost was their only child. But over the weekend in China, news media reports about that were multiplying, perhaps also prompted by an earthquake in Sichuan Province on Saturday. Many single children were lost during a previous earthquake in 2008 in Sichuan, which left about 90,000 people dead or missing.
The mention of Ms. Lu’s singleton status often came in passing, or just in a headline, without going into detail in the text. The mentions came even in media that is tightly aligned with the Communist Party and state, such as the Communist Youth League’s news Web site, news.youth.cn. It’s a subject that is discussed in China, but remains politically sensitive, since it’s the direct result of the state’s “one child policy,†which began around 1980 and limited many families to one child.
There’s even a word for this special pain here: “shidu,†or “lose single.â€
There are over 100 million single children in China, Xinhua, the state-run news agency, reported in February, the direct result of state population policies. That translates into over 200 million parents of single children.
Up until 2012, there were “at least†one million families in China that had lost their only child, Xinhua wrote in a separate report carried by the Jinghua Times. About 76,000 families are added to the sad roster each year, it said.
That report was working from a far higher figure of the number of singletons in China: 190 million. There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy, but statistics in China often vary widely and may be unclear.
Increasingly, these families are being referred to in China as a “vulnerable social group,†since children are often the main source of income for parents in their old age. The parents face being plunged into poverty.
They are slowly banding together and asking for more - more support from society and bigger pensions, or special financial support in their old age that recognizes their situation. They have a Web site, called “The Lost Singleton People’s Family.â€
Last year, dozens gathered in Beijing to petition the central government for policies that would acknowledge their special position, and offer more financial support. The state has indicated it may do that, but has been slow to react, they say.
In a report dated Saturday, on the Web site of the People’s Consultative Web, which is tied to a political advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the requests for more social and financial support for the families were spelled out.
Speaking of just one city, Meishan in Sichuan Province, “there are more and more families that have lost their only child and this group has already become a new group that is in difficulty,†the report said, going on to advise the government to spend more on them and offer better social services.
On the Web site for the parents who have lost their only child, the latest post, dated two days ago, addressed the family planning officials who have for decades implemented the one-child policy. Saying they had lost their only son, the person, whose identity was protected by a sign-in system, wrote: “Family planning officials, are you paying attention to those who have lost their only child?†It continued: “If this system continues, no matter if you are an official or an ordinary person, who can guarantee to you that if something happens to your child or grandchild you won’t join the group of those who have lost single children?â€
