Wang Fanzhi, a poet of the Tang Dynasty—
The first person to advocate family planning
Wang Fanzhi, a poet in the early Tang Dynasty. Born into poverty, he wrote poems in vernacular and created the vernacular poetry school of the Tang Dynasty. He saw the harm of unlimited population reproduction and clearly proposed the idea of ??"having only one child". Wang Fanzhi's poems went against the policies and customs that encouraged childbearing at that time, and clearly pointed out that having more children is not a blessing, but a misery. For example, "A couple gave birth to five boys":
A couple gave birth to five boys and a pair of girls.
When a son is older, he must marry a wife, and when a daughter is older, she must marry a virgin.
The household servant sent Ke Ke to come and take care of me and my wife.
The wife has no brown skirt, and the husband has no hakama.
Both his parents are eighty, and his son is fifty-five.
Worry about your wife and children instead of caring for your parents.
My wife’s family lacks food and is usually hungry.
Men and women sitting together look like hungry wolves and tigers.
Everyone cooks the rough rice, and the delicious food is left in the house.
Looking hard at relatives, looking only for milk and food.
The young man enjoys the night, and the old man suffers from himself.
Here is a description of the miserable life of a happy family in the traditional sense with five sons and two daughters. After seeing this picture, who can say that having more children brings happiness?
People often talk about a phenomenon: "Rich people who can afford to raise children have fewer children, while poor people who cannot afford to raise children have particularly strong fertility and have more children." As the saying goes: "The poor have very strong fertility and have many children." If there are many children, there will be many frogs in the depression. Wang Fanzhi has already discovered this phenomenon. He wrote in "Rich Sons, Young Men and Women":
Rich children, young men and women, and poor people give birth to a group of poor people.
With no clothes on his body, he squatted in the grass.
When I arrived at Daye, I suddenly felt like an animal full of chaff.
When he grew up, he served in the military and did not leave home.
If one cannot get rich by accumulating generations, it is called a poor village.
In this poem, Wang Fanzhi not only revealed the above-mentioned strange phenomenon, but also pointed out that the wealth in life is directly related to the number of children. The reason why poor people are poor is because "they have been born many times and become poor." The formation of poor Han villages is shocking. After reading this, the author’s idea of ??advocating fewer children is already clear.
Wang Fanzhi thinks about the disadvantages of unlimited population increase not only from a family perspective, but also from a national and even global perspective. He wrote in the poem "To Live or to Die":
To live or to die is not my fault.
After being born one after another, there is nowhere to sit in the world.
If you don’t pull your legs in a hurry, you will see the sky bursting.
This poem is as clear as words and clearly points out: Too much population will not only leave no room on the earth to sit on, but even the sky will be burst. The word "seeing" reflects the urgency of the problem and aims to enhance people's sense of crisis.
Based on this understanding, he clearly put forward the idea of ??birth control:
Big trees are wrapped in big skin, and small trees are wrapped in small skins.
You don’t need to have too many children, just one is enough.
The province is divided into fields and houses, and no one is lying around.
But if you practice equality, God also misses loneliness.
Look, the author clearly points out that there is no need to have more sons, having one capable son is enough. It means "to get things done" and "to be able to do something". This sentence contains not only the idea of ????reducing students, but also eugenics. In order to make his opinion understood, he further explained the advantages of "having only one son": he would save having more sons and divide up the limited land. In this way, when the population is small, no one will be "suffering" (sadness and embarrassment). In response to the common worry among ancient people about being bullied because they have few children, he said bluntly: "As long as you practice equality, God also cares about loneliness." As long as you live with equality and care about God, how can anyone bully you? Woolen cloth? Treat others with equality, and others will treat you with equality - Wang Fanzhi also told us the philosophy of life that the "only son" should uphold.