This paper voices the experiences of ‘black children’ (heihaizi) who lived outside the one-child policy and its local-level modifications in China from 1979 to the early 2000s.

These children experienced family separation; concealment in terms of documents, emotions, and bodies; and family reunification; and they have lived with long-lasting impacts through adulthood. The one-child policy and costs to parents have been well researched, but little is known about the daily experiences of unregistered children as they grow up.

This paper, based on a unique dataset of semi-structured interviews with 20 now-adult 'black children' from rural and urban China, examines this hitherto overlooked group, illuminating how a vulnerable, dependent population can be ‘othered’ through a combination of family injustice and state sovereignty. It analyses their life-course narratives of being 'black', their engagements with multiple agents from biological and foster families to schoolmates and local cadres, and their conceptualisation of ‘self-worth’, ‘children’, ‘family’, and ‘humanity’.

The paper thus represents their silenced voices through its focus on the sense-making of children in a family, and the meaning of ‘human respect’ in a society.

About the speaker

Jingxian Wang is a final-year PhD student from the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham. Her research focuses on the culture of patriarchy, feminist approaches, children’s victimhood and traumatized childhoods, family (in)justice, decivilising processes and loss of human respect.