Ever since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, women’s bodies have been the business of the state. In the 1950s, labour for state-controlled work units was organised according to women’s menstrual cycles. Then for decades, there was the one-child policy.

Across vast swathes of the country the policy was enforced with a brutal severity. As well as fines for additional children, women were forced to have abortions and subjected to forced sterilisations.

Now, women in China are facing new forms of pressure from the government as China battles a fresh challenge – a falling birth rate. Women are under pressure to devote their bodies to childbearing as the government tries to encourage more pregnancies. Increasingly, women are pushing back in ways that weren’t possible in the past, while the painful legacy of the one-child policy continues to echo and reshape expectations around family today.

“For people of my generation, born at the end of the 1980s, everyone is from a one-child family,” says Guligo Jia, 36-year-old filmmaker based in Beijing. “Nowadays, Chinese women have more control over their bodies because they can decide to get an abortion or have babies, they have more freedom.”

In a four-part series, the Guardian analysed the changing status of women across Chinese society. The series examines how women are responding to government restrictions and shifting social and economic conditions, in different aspects of their lives.

Echoes of ‘childless 100 days’

Between 1980 and 2016, the state worried about overpopulation, and banned most couples from having more than one child. The one-child policy was abandoned a decade ago but for many women, the scars of that time live on.

In Shen county, a small, poor town on the fringes of Liaocheng, a city in north-east China’s Shandong province, it is not hard to find them.

Standing in Shen’s central plaza, Ms Li*, now in her 60s, pulls up her top to reveal her dimpled belly. In 1991, she was forced to have a tubal ligation , a procedure she describes as “agonising”.

Li was sterilised because she had given birth during a period which experts say represents one of the worst excesses of the one-child policy.

Dubbed the “childless 100 days”, it was a policy enforced in Shen which dictated that from 1 May 1991, no child should be born for 100 days. Because 1991 was the year of the sheep in the zodiac calendar, locals called it “the slaughtering of the lambs”. As with other parts of China, women were often sterilised after giving birth to ensure that they couldn’t have more children.

Shandong, China’s second most populous province, has a reputation for enforcing central government directives with particular vigour. “People in Shandong, especially the officials, always take policies and orders from above more seriously than other provinces,” says Yang Jianli, a human rights activist from Shandong, who describes the childless 100 days as “among the most extreme cases” of the one-child policy that he has encountered.

The childless 100 days did not have a 100% hit rate. In the summer of 1991, Li was heavily pregnant when local officials rounded her up along with other women from her village and loaded them onto trucks to be taken for forced abortions at the local hospital. A doctor was due to see her at 2pm to terminate her pregnancy but she went into labour early and gave birth to a baby boy in the hospital’s boiler room.

“They tried to stop people from giving birth, but once the baby was actually born, they wouldn’t go as far as to kill him,” Li said. She was ordered to pay a 6,500 yuan fine – the equivalent of several years of income for the farmer – and to be sterilised.

But her son survived. Everywhere around her, infants died, Li recalls. “Infants from the forced inductions were all dead, there were a lot of them, they were burned and thrown in the trash,” she said. “Those women were all crying.”

The Guardian was not able to independently verify the details of Li’s story but her experience tallies with the limited other accounts that are available from that period.

Another woman from Shen, now in her 70s, said that she was one month shy of giving birth to a baby boy in 1991 when she was given an injection to induce labour, killing the foetus.

“If you refused the injection, they would tear down your house, break into your home to arrest you, and bar you from going to work,” she said. “So many women were dragged away”.

Although official censorship has limited wider knowledge of the violent 100 days, locally, it is notorious. The local official in charge of the policy was known as “the slaughterer of the lambs”.

The Shandong local government did not respond to a request for comment.

‘We failed the women of China’

In 2013, Zhang Erli, a retired official from the National Family Planning Commission, said that the one-child policy had gone too far. “Looking back, I feel we really failed the women of China; to be honest, I feel a deep sense of guilt,” he said, in a documentary that aired on Chinese state television.

“Chinese women made an enormous sacrifice. As a responsible government, we ought to repay them, right?” The programme was later removed from public platforms.

There are no reliable estimates of how many women were affected by the 100 days policy. But analysis by Yi Fuxian – senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and vocal critic of the one-child policy, who tracks China’s population data – shows that in Shen and Guan, a neighbouring county that was also reported to enforce a “childless 100 days policy”, there seem to have been drastically fewer births that year.

China is now battling the opposite problem: its birth rate is plummeting. Last year the birth rate fell to 5.63 per 1,000 people, a record low.

For most women of childbearing age today, the traumas of the previous generation do not play a conscious role in family planning decisions. But research suggests that the decades of the one-child policy profoundly reshaped people’s family expectations, reducing the desire to have bigger families. A study published last year found that for a generation of people, growing up as an only child “led to a significant decrease in the ideal family size”.

The cost and competitiveness of child-rearing in modern China are the biggest deterrents, despite the government’s offers of subsidies and tax breaks for having more children.

Wang Yixuan, a 26-year-old traditional Chinese medicine practitioner, says that “people now don’t care as much” about having bigger families. “I don’t particularly want to have children,” she says. “I need to be financially independent first.”

Jia, the filmmaker, who has made a documentary about women turning to AI boyfriends, says: “Women don’t feel obligated to have a baby any more.”

Another recent study found that nearly 50% of 18- to 24-year-old women said they don’t want children, up from 6% in 2012. The share of men who don’t want children has also increased, but only to nearly 20%.

“In the past, people were fined for having second children,” says Chen Ying, a 40-year-old restaurant worker in Shen. Nowadays, people “simply can’t afford it”.

Yun Zhou, a social demographer at the University of Michigan, says that the one-child policy created a “general sense that reproductive rights are not something that has ever been inalienable”.

And in very real terms, the consequences of that period are evident in playgrounds across the country. In Shen, Li is playing with her two-year-old grandson, one of China’s much-needed new babies. His father is the lucky boy who survived in 1991.

*Name has been changed

Additional research by Lillian Yang and Yu-chen Li