Peng Peiyun, a senior Chinese Communist Party official who was given the task of enforcing her government’s draconian “one-child” family-planning restrictions at their height and who then worked to soften and, ultimately, end the policies, died on Sunday in Beijing. She was 95.

中国共产党高级官员彭珮云于上周日在北京去世，享年95岁。她曾受命在计划生育政策最严格时期执行严苛的“独生子女”限制措施，而后又致力于放宽并最终结束这些政策。

Her death was reported by China’s official Xinhua news agency, which eulogized her as a “loyal Communist fighter” and an “outstanding leader” in population policy and women’s and children’s issues.

中国官方媒体新华社发布讣告，称她为“忠诚的共产主义战士”，以及在人口卫生工作与妇女儿童工作的“杰出领导人”。

That official praise barely hinted at the predicaments that Ms. Peng faced when she was assigned to China’s State Family Planning Commission in 1988 and put in charge of what she and other government figures called “the hardest job under heaven.”

这样的官方赞誉几乎未触及彭珮云在1988年被任命为国家计划生育委员会主任时面临的困境，她所负责的工作被她本人和其他政府官员称作“天下第一难”。

Ms. Peng had thrown herself into the Communist revolutionary cause as a teenager and rose as an enforcer of the party’s policies in universities. But as a woman, she was a rarity in the higher ranks of government, and as the minister of the family planning commission, she saw the suffering wrought by China’s campaign to drastically reduce birthrates.

彭珮云自青少年时代就投身于共产主义革命事业，并在高校中作为执行党政策的干部逐步升迁。但作为一名女性，她在政府高层中实属罕见；而作为计生委主任，她见证了中国这场大幅降低出生率的运动造成的苦难。

Rural women in particular endured forced abortions and sterilizations, beatings by local cadres of enforcers and slipshod medical procedures for contraception.

特别是农村妇女，她们被迫堕胎、绝育，遭到地方干部的殴打，还要面对简陋的节育手术。

Ms. Peng said she was “also a woman and also a mother,” one of her advisers, Gu Baochang, wrote in a memoir. He recalled her asking him, “Must family planning policy really be done this way?”

她的顾问之一顾宝昌在回忆录中写道，彭珮云曾说，她“也是女性, 也是位母亲”。他回忆彭珮云曾问他：“难道计划生育就一定要这样干吗？”

During the 1990s, Ms. Peng tried to make enforcement of the restrictions on family size — one child for most urban families, often two in the countryside — less brutal. Many local officials, under intense pressure to meet mandatory birth goals, bristled at her efforts. Some dismissed her as a naïve outsider.

在上世纪90年代，彭珮云曾试图让计划生育——城市家庭为一孩，农村家庭通常可以有两个孩子——的执行不那么残酷。在必须完成生育指标的巨大压力之下，许多地方官员对她的努力颇为不满。一些人认为她不过是个天真的局外人。

But Ms. Peng enlisted demographers, medical experts and like-minded officials to develop the case that less-harsh measures, including education and more choice in contraception methods, could be more effective in holding down birthrates. Over the next three decades, she shifted from trying to make birth policies less coercive to asking why China stuck with them at all, as more couples were reluctant to have even one child.

但彭珮云召集了人口学家、医学专家以及志同道合的官员，共同论证这样一种主张：较为温和的举措——包括宣传教育与更丰富的避孕方式选择——可能更有助于控制出生率。接下来的30年里，她从一开始力图减轻计划生育政策的强制性，逐渐转向了质疑：在越来越多夫妻连一个孩子都不愿生的情况下，中国为何还要坚持这些政策。

“While she had no option but to support top party authorities and ensure the targets for the one-child policy were met, she acted at several critical moments to relax the policy and move its enforcement in a more humane direction,” said Susan Greenhalgh, a professor emerita at Harvard University who got to know Ms. Peng while researching Chinese population policy.

“尽管她别无选择，必须支持党的最高领导，并确保独生子女政策的目标得以完成，但在几个关键时刻，她采取行动放松了政策的执行，并使之朝着更为人道的方向发展，”哈佛大学荣休教授葛苏珊(Susan Greenhalgh)说道，她在研究中国人口政策时结识了彭珮云。

In retirement, Ms. Peng lobbied China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to pull down the birth restrictions altogether, warning that the country could become a society with too few children.

退休后，彭珮云对中国领导人习近平进行游说，呼吁彻底取消生育限制，她警告说，中国可能会成为一个孩子太少的社会。

“Just as she unwaveringly executed the one-child policy, she became equally adamant about abolishing it a decade later,” Wang Feng, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine, said in an email. He is a co-author of a coming book about the end of the one-child policy, which draws on an unpublished biography of Ms. Peng, with which she cooperated.

“正如她当年坚定地执行独生子女政策一样，十年之后，她又以同样坚决的态度希望废除它，”加州大学尔湾分校的社会学家王丰在电子邮件中说。他是即将出版的一本关于独生子女政策终结的书的合著者，该书引用了一部未出版的彭珮云传记，这本传记的写作获得了彭珮云的协助。

Peng Peiyun, the eldest of eight children, was born on Dec. 25, 1929, in Nanjing, then the national capital, in eastern China. Her father, Peng Hu, was a banker and company manager, and her mother, Fan Xinshou, ran a school for the children of her husband’s employees.

彭珮云1929年12月25日出生于南京，是家中八个孩子里的长女。位于中国东部的南京是当时的国都。她的父亲彭湖是一名银行家和企业经理，她的母亲范新绶则为丈夫所在企业的员工子女创立了一所学校。

Precociously smart, Ms. Peng was just 15 when she enrolled at the National Southwestern Associated University, which had been created by academics fleeing the Japanese invasion of 1937. She studied sociology and embraced leftist politics before transferring to a university in Nanjing to appease her parents, who worried about the risks she was taking with her activism.

彭珮云天资聪颖，15岁就考入了国立西南联合大学，该校由躲避1937年日本侵华战争的知识界人士创办。她先攻读社会学，并接受了左翼政治思想，后来为了安抚担心她的激进活动会有危险的父母，转学到了南京的一所大学。

There, too, Ms. Peng was drawn into student protests against Nationalist Party rule, and she joined the underground Communist Party when she was 16. She struck up a romance with Wang Hanbin, a student who had introduced her to the party, and they married in 1949. They later had two sons and two daughters.

在南京，彭珮云同样投身于反对国民党统治的学运，并在16岁时加入了中共地下党。她与介绍自己入党的学生王汉斌相恋，两人于1949年结婚。此后两人育有两儿两女。

In 1947, Ms. Peng and Mr. Wang moved to Beijing, where she finished her studies in sociology at Tsinghua University while working as an underground party operative. Near the end of the year, having toppled the Nationalists in the Communist Revolution, Mao Zedong stood over Tiananmen Square and declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

1947年，彭珮云和王汉斌搬到北京，她在清华大学完成了社会学学业，同时从事地下党工作。1949年底，中共革命推翻了国民党统治，毛泽东站立在天安门城楼上，宣告中华人民共和国成立。

After graduating from Tsinghua, Ms. Peng was appointed secretary-general of the university’s Communist Party committee, the first of her multiple jobs in higher education. In 1964, she was made a deputy party secretary of Peking University, holding that post while her husband was an official under Peng Zhen, the powerful party secretary of Beijing (and not a relative of Ms. Peng’s).

从清华毕业后，彭珮云被任命为清华大学党总支书记，这是她在高教系统担任的多项职务中的第一个。1964年，她出任北京大学党委副书记，在担任这一职务期间，她的丈夫在位高权重的北京市党委书记彭真（与彭珮云没有亲属关系）手下任职。

But the couple’s prominent roles became their downfall. In 1966, Mao launched his Cultural Revolution to root out perceived internal enemies he believed threatened the purity of his cause, and two of his targets were Peking University and Mr. Peng, the party boss.

然而，这对夫妇的显赫地位为他们的日后埋下了祸端。1966年，毛泽东发动文化大革命，要清除他所认为威胁其事业纯洁性的内部敌人，北京大学和彭真就是他的两个目标。

Mr. Wang was purged, and Ms. Peng became a target when militants, backed by Mao, attacked the Peking University administration. In one painful moment, her own teenage son denounced her. She spent years in a labor camp, and did not see her husband for six years.

王汉斌被打倒，彭珮云也在毛泽东支持的造反派冲击北大校方时成为批斗对象。她经历了一个痛苦的时刻，自己十几岁的儿子公开批斗她。此后，她被送去劳改，有六年时间未见到丈夫。

After Mao’s death in 1976, China’s new leaders began restoring the battered university system, and Ms. Peng resumed her career as an education official. In 1987, the party sent her to restore order at the University of Science and Technology of China, in the country’s east, which had become a center of student protests, and where Fang Lizhi, a famed astrophysicist and university vice president, was speaking out for democratic change.

毛泽东于1976年去世后，中国的新领导人开始在高教系统拨乱反正，彭珮云也重返教育系统任职。1987年，彭珮云受党中央委派，前往位于华东的中国科技大学，负责恢复那里的秩序。当时该校已成为学生抗议活动的中心，著名天体物理学家、时任该校副校长的方励之正在公开呼吁民主变革。

Months later, a senior party official called Ms. Peng with another, unexpected assignment: to take charge of the State Family Planning Commission at a time when China’s population growth was accelerating. The country’s leaders feared that growth would slow economic modernization, and so in the 1980s intensified enforcement of the strict limits, established in 1979, on the number of children a couple could have.

数月后，一名中央领导致电彭珮云，给了她一个出乎意料的任务：在中国人口加速增长时期执掌国家计划生育委员会。当时中国领导人担心人口增长会拖慢经济现代化进程，于是在20世纪80年代加强了对1979年制定的严格生育限制的执行。

With some reluctance, Ms. Peng became minister in charge of the Commission in early 1988 and set to work in a cramped office, faced with the difficult task of implementing birth limits across China and particularly in the countryside, where large families were the norm.

1988年初，彭珮云不太情愿地出任了国家计生委主任，在一间狭小的办公室里开始工作，她面对的艰巨任务是在全国范围内——尤其是在多子女为常态的农村地区——落实生育限制政策。

Ms. Peng began visiting dozens of villages, where the government relied on zealous local officials to enforce the restrictions, often brutally. To learn more about family planning, she turned to demographers and then foreign experts for information and ideas.

彭珮云开始走访数十个村庄。在这些地方，政府依赖积极的地方官员执行计划生育政策，手段往往十分残忍。为了解更多计划生育情况，她向人口学家求教，后来又向外国专家寻求信息和建议。

Though committed to the birth-limitation goals, she hoped to find more humane ways to achieve them. Experts who worked with her said that she knew that the government’s policies were poorly grounded in science and that she wanted to change them from within, using her bureaucratic skills.

虽然她仍然致力于实现控制生育的目标，但希望找到更为人道的方式来达成这些目标。与她合作的专家们说，她知道政府的政策在科学依据上并不充分，并且希望利用自己的官僚工作技巧，从体制内部推动改变。

Starting in 1991, her commission promoted the so-called Seven Prohibitions, which tried to deter local cadres from using physical abuse and detention, exorbitant fines and even demolition of homes in their enforcement of birth restrictions. Ms. Peng and like-minded officials also pushed to give women access to better health care and more varied contraceptives.

从1991年开始，她领导的国家计生委推行所谓的“七不准”，试图阻止基层干部在执行计划生育时采取体罚拘禁、高额罚款甚至拆房毁屋等极端手段。彭珮云与志同道合的官员还努力推动改善妇女医疗保障，提供更多样的避孕选择。

But China’s top leadership kept up the pressure on local administrations to enforce the birth limit, and critics said Ms. Peng’s efforts were mere posturing. Others who worked with her, though, said that by operating within the constraints of China’s system, she had made a real difference.

不过，中国最高领导层仍然向地方政府施压，要求严格执行生育限制，而批评者认为彭珮云的努力不过是做做样子。但也有与她共事的人表示，在体制的约束范围内，她确实带来了实实在在的改变。

“She was really the person responsible for softening the one-child policy,” said Joan Kaufman, who worked in Beijing on population policy and reproductive health in the 1990s, first for the United Nations Population Fund and then for the Ford Foundation. “To some degree, the family planning program shifted away from coercion to a program that improved services and choice for women, even while the population targets remained.”

“她确实是让独生子女政策变得柔和的关键人物，”上世纪90年代先后任职于联合国人口基金和福特基金会、在北京从事人口政策和生殖健康相关工作的琼·考夫曼说。“在一定程度上，计划生育项目从强制转向了改善服务、给妇女更多选择的项目，尽管人口目标仍然存在。”

彭珮云出席了多场关于妇女和人口控制的国际会议。她利用自己的官僚技巧，从体制内部努力改变中国的独生子女政策。

Ms. Peng stepped down as commission head in 1998 but continued to be engaged in population issues in other roles, including as president of the All-China Women’s Federation, a party-run organization.

1998年，彭珮云卸任国家计生委主任，但仍以其他身份继续参与人口事务，包括担任中华全国妇女联合会主席，这是一个党领导下的组织。

She is survived by her husband, four children, four grandchildren, five great-grandchildren, three sisters and two brothers.

她的在世亲属包括丈夫、四个儿女、四个孙辈、五个曾孙辈，以及三个姐妹和两个兄弟。

Behind the scenes after retirement, Ms. Peng continued to voice concern that China’s stringent controls on family size had gone too far for too long. Population growth was beginning to slow markedly, and Ms. Peng feared that leaders in Beijing were not responding.

退休后，彭珮云在幕后持续表达对中国长期严格限制生育政策的忧虑。随着人口增长开始显著放缓，她担忧北京的领导层未能及时采取措施。

In 2014, at a seminar on population policy in Shanghai, she urged the dozens of experts in attendance to appeal to the central leadership to replace the one-child policy with a two-child one. She sent the proposal directly to China’s leader, Mr. Xi. In October 2015, a Communist Party conference approved the move to a two-child policy.

2014年在上海举行的人口政策研讨会上，她敦促在场的数十位专家向中央领导层呼吁，将独生子女政策调整为“二孩”政策。她把这一建议直接送到了国家领导人习近平手中。2015年10月，中共中央全会批准实施“二孩”政策。

China’s population continued to age and shrink, however, as many young people shied away from the burdens of raising children. In 2018, Ms. Peng again wrote to China’s leaders, urging total abolition of birth limits. It was not just wise policy, she wrote in the letter; it was a matter of citizens’ rights.

然而，随着许多年轻人害怕抚养子女的负担，中国人口持续老龄化且总量萎缩。2018年，彭珮云再次致信中国领导层，呼吁彻底取消生育限制。她在信中写道，这不仅是明智之举，更关乎公民权利。

“Fertility policy should return to the norm of allowing citizens to make their own decisions about childbearing,” she wrote.

她写道：“生育政策应回归常态，让公民自主决定生育。”

In 2021, China shifted to a three-child limit.

2021年，中国改为“三孩”政策。