Asurvey of 7,000 young people published on May 14 found that 60 per cent felt miserable and lonely during their childhood. They are the generation of the one-child policy.
But history might have been so different. In March 1928, a mainland economist named Ma Yinchu wrote a paper calling for controls on a population in which families had an average of five children. China had about 450 million people.
On July 5, 1957, the People's Daily published on its front page a paper by Ma, then 75 and a member of the National People's Congress (NPC), calling for measures to encourage two-child families and stabilise the population at 600 million, its then level.
Enraged, Mao Zedong fired Ma from the NPC and his post as chancellor of Peking University and confined him to a small home, where he was banned from writing, speaking or publishing for the next 20 years.
The mainland's population hit 1.3 billion in January, according to official figures, and was probably more, because rural areas under-report the level of births. Ma's analysis is as relevant today as it was more than 70 years ago.
Mao destroyed the lives of thousands who disagreed with him, but the purging of Ma Yinchu stands as the most devastating in terms of policy. Experts estimate that if Mao had followed his advice, the population today would be close to one billion, a figure which the land and environment could better sustain, and the one-child policy would not have been necessary.