what's it like to grow up in a world where no-one has brothers or sisters? Are siblings really that important? Researchers have been asking those questions for years and China, with its famous one-child policy, has been a good place to look for an answer. Chinese families used to have an average of four children each, but life changed radically in 1979, when a law was introduced dictating that most parents could only have one child. Last week, we learned that the policy will now be relaxed, after being enforced across the world's most populous county for more than a generation. on the township roads, there slogans written on flamboyant red banners. telling people to are have fewer children and raise more pigs." says art photographer Fan Shi San, recalling a recent trip to the impoverished province of Gansu. Fan, himself an only child, takes photographs of single children alongside their "phantom" brothers or rs the siblings they never had "Most of my audiences do not realize they have a special identity he explains, noting that many parents even stopped questoning why they could not have more than one child and forgot that things had ever been different.