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Spend an afternoon leafing through The Black Book of Communism, the most exhaustive accounting of death-by-Marxism to date, and you'll encounter nearly every Communist crime known to history—not only the main events, the gulags and famines and killing fields, but lesser atrocities like the NKVD's terror campaign in 1930s Spain and the depredations of Ethiopia's Mengistu regime. What you won't find, though, is more than a passing mention of one of the most recent Communist assaults on human dignity and human life: China's decades-long campaign to bring its rate of population growth to heel, whatever the human cost.
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Near the end of Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics—one of two new academic histories of population control under the Middle Kingdom's Marxist Dynasty—Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin A. Winckler note the omission of China's one-child policy from the usual litany of Communism's crimes, and wonder about the reason for it. Perhaps, they suggest, there just wasn't enough killing involved—abortions aside, of course. Unlike the Great Leap Forward, say, "whose trauma can be measured in lives lost," the human suffering associated with coercive population control is hard to quantify. You can count corpses, but how do you tally up "the trauma experienced by millions of peasants being coercively sterilized as though they were 'pigs being spayed?'"
This seems like a reasonable answer, but both the Greenhalgh-Winckler study and Tyrene White's China's Longest Campaign: Birth Planning in the People's Republic, 1949-2005 hint at another, more troubling explanation as well. However horrifying forced abortions and compulsory sterilization may be to the sensitivities of the liberal West, such policies aren't as intimately connected to Communist ideology as was, say, the ruinous collectivization of agriculture under Mao and Stalin, or the mass murder of supposed bourgeois sympathizers under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. The one-child campaign's means were totalitarian, certainly, but they weren't designed to midwife a Marxist utopia; instead, the campaign took its cues from a characteristically Western idea of progress, in which rising standards of living are the only proper benchmarks of a society's success. Whereas other Communist crimes were committed in the hopes of burying the West, Beijing embarked on its brutal one-child campaign in the hopes of emulating us.
It's true that the central anti-natalist idea—that the state could levy a "claim of authority over pregnancy and childbirth," as White puts it—originated in the murderous hubris of Mao. "With respect to births," the Great Helmsman declared in a 1957 speech, "mankind is in a state of anarchy. … In the future we want to achieve the complete planning of births." But Mao was of many minds on the subject of what "birth planning" ought to mean in practice. The Communist Party line in the 1930s and '40s had been pro-natalist, the better to make up for the lives lost to war and disease, and even once the Party took power and China's immense population began to cast a shadow across its rule, Mao retained a natural confidence in Chinese resilience—famously embodied in his remark that his country could lose three hundred million people in a nuclear exchange and come out ahead. Rather than trying to impose "the complete planning of births" by force and fear, he envisioned a future in which China's population leveled off organically, thanks to a combination of propaganda, individual family planning, and rising levels of affluence and education.
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