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Paper short abstract

This paper explores family secrets and silences surrounding sent-away second daughters under China’s One-Child Policy. Through ethnographic life histories, it shows how unspoken separations shape family relations, moral reasoning, intimacy, and fragile dialogue decades after the policy’s end.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how family secrets and silences were produced under China’s One-Child Policy. Introduced in 1979, the policy subjected reproduction and family formation to intensive state regulation. In Chinese rural areas, families were permitted a second birth only if the first child was female. When the second child was also a daughter, long-standing son preference intersected with policy constraints, leading some families to quietly send the newborn girl to relatives or childless households. These decisions were shaped not only by fear of administrative punishment and economic hardship but also by gendered expectations surrounding lineage and family continuity.

Although the family planning policy has been formally terminated, the social and emotional consequences it generated have not disappeared. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Shandong Province, this paper traces how secrecy and silence continue to structure family relations decades after the policy’s end. Silence operates not merely as the absence of speech but as a patterned mode of interaction through which families manage a difficult past. Parents avoid compress narratives into moralized explanations, or displace responsibility onto historical necessity, while everyday family encounters are organized around what cannot be asked, remembered, or acknowledged. For sent-away daughters, silence becomes a relational condition shaping intimacy, belonging, and self-understanding, often persisting even after reunion with biological kin. By attending ethnographically to silence itself, this paper shows how family secrets function as a means of managing guilt, preserving fragile relationships, and containing unresolved moral conflict long after the policy that produced them has ended.