"So, do we just start killing people? Who gets to decide who goes first?"
Wang Jinding, that's who. At least in his part of the world.
"As supervisor of family planning enforcement in Fujian province's Daji township, Wang Jinding says he knows the best way to kill the unborn babies of parents who want to keep them."Pressure mounts to stop China's forced abortionsBy Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY
Updated 7/24/2012 6:20 PM
BEIJING – As supervisor of family planning enforcement in Fujian province's Daji township, Wang Jinding says he knows the best way to kill the unborn babies of parents who want to keep them.
"The key point is to separate the pregnant woman from her family members," he said in an interview with USA TODAY.
That is exactly what Wang did in a case in April, enforcing the Communist Party's rules on family size. He had eight government workers kidnap a pregnant Pan Chunyan, 31, from her grocery store in Fujian city on the southern coast.
Her husband, Wu Liangjie, was frantically raising the $8,640 fee required for a third child. Wu and a dozen relatives fought to try to see Pan at the government building where she was held.
Rather than granting the family more time, Wang organized a police-led convoy of seven vehicles to take Pan to a hospital. There, Pan — who was eight months pregnant — was injected with chemicals to kill the child. She delivered a fully formed, but dead, son.
"My wife only got a glance at the child, her heart broke, and she cried loudly, because the whole body was black and the skin on the face had peeled," Wu says. "This is a life that had no time to look at this beautiful world with eyes open."
In years past, this couple's clash with authority might have ended there. But access to the Internet has allowed millions of people to elude China's censors and read postings from fellow citizens on taboo subjects such as forced abortion, dissidents and Communist Party corruption.
This story went one step further. In an even rarer phenomenon, the swelling anger on blogs over what happened to another pregnant woman in June has forced the monolithic party to respond to the outrage: It will investigate the matter. This month, a government-run website overseen by the Communist Party's propaganda agency suggested "perhaps it is time to rethink" China's one-child policy.
Opponents in the USA see the latest abuses — including the torment authorities heaped on blind activist Chen Guangcheng for his campaign against forced abortions — as a chance for the Obama administration to pressure China to change three decades of coercive family planning.
Though the White House says it opposes forced abortions, the United States has taken no overt action to sanction China for the practice and has restored U.S. taxpayer funds to a United Nations agency that anti-abortion activists accuse of abetting China's harsh family planning policies. The Obama administration opposes a bill by Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., that would revoke the funding, a measure supported by Chai Ling, who as a student led the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
"Given the United States' unique leadership, it must act to speak truth to power, to stop China's brutal one-child policy and to help rescue these powerless people," said Chai, who escaped arrest in China and founded All Girls Allowed, a Boston-based Christian organization that opposes coercive policies against women.
China's leaders have long held that enforcement of family size is necessary to lift the world's most populous nation out of decades of poverty. It was not always so. The founder of the People's Republic of China, communist leader Mao Zedong, encouraged families to have many children as a way to build a prosperous nation. In the late 1970s, the country's leaders believed that a growing population of impoverished citizens would impede economic development. They imposed a strict "family planning policy" that limits most families to one child with exceptions to families in rural areas and parents without siblings.
Those who do not qualify for an exemption must pay a relatively expensive fine, or "social maintenance fee," to keep their child. Under such a policy, the world's most populous country aborts more pregnancies than any other nation, 13 million in 2008, according to the state-run China Daily newspaper.
All Girls Allowed estimates that 10% of all abortions in China are forced.
'Cruel' acts go globalForced abortions have always been a part of the policy, but not discussed openly. That changed dramatically June 2, when authorities dragged Feng Jianmei, who was seven months pregnant, from her home. She was taken to a hospital in Shaanxi province in northwest China. Feng, 27, who already had a 5-year-old daughter, was injected with a chemical to induce an abortion and kill her child.
Feng's sister took photos of her perfectly formed dead baby girl lying on the hospital bed next to Feng. A cousin posted them on the Internet. Blogs flashed the photos and her husband's postings to millions of Chinese — and to the world. Outrage that started in this China province soon fed astonishment and anger across China.
Rights lawyers began offering free help to the victims of forced abortion. Chinese celebrities commented on popular Twitter-like micro-blogs. Actress Ma Yili said the act was a humiliation for all Chinese people. Human rights groups worldwide were galvanized, feeding the debate.
Then Pan's family publicized the circumstances of her forced abortion.
Bucking pressure from authorities to stop blogging, Wu, like Feng's husband, Deng Jiyuan, kept up his online postings and traveled to Beijing to seek a lawyer, justice and compensation. Lawyer Xu Can says that though he supports the birth control policy, he took the case because he considers abortion above six months morally wrong and illegal under Chinese law.
"It's so cruel," Xu says. "It's an independent human, with its own character, too."
In the ensuing weeks, even prominent Chinese scholars have made public appeals for Beijing to relax the one-child policy. Authorities have responded by offering cash in return for silence, while Beijing has promised to dispatch 10 inspection teams in a country of 1.3 billion people to stop late-term forced abortions. The government increased censorship of abortion-related postings online.
The moves appear unlikely to silence public dissatisfaction with a state policy Beijing says has benevolently prevented 400 million births over the past three decades.
On the other hand, the candid defense offered by government official Wang Jinding for forcing the abortion on Pan Chunyan demonstrates that such acts remain an acceptable method for the all-powerful bureaucracy.
"If we don't achieve the family planning targets, we will have our salaries cut, face administrative punishments and have little hope of future promotion," Wang told USA TODAY, emphasizing the resistance his staff encounters from lawbreakers.
"When we try to persuade a family with an extra child or extra pregnancy, they don't cooperate," he says. "Some of them even use knives to stab our staff."
Pressure buildingRep. Smith, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's subcommittee on Africa, global health and human rights, says all abortions are forced abortions in China because its cap on family size requires women to end pregnancies — voluntarily or not.
Smith accuses the Obama administration of refusing to speak out on forced abortions, noting that Vice President Biden told an audience in China last year that he "fully understood" the one-child policy. State Department spokesman Noel Clay said the administration "strongly opposes" all coercive birth limitation policies.
"If they are raising those issues with the Chinese, we aren't hearing of it," says Kat Lewis, director of communication for All Girls Allowed. "We really hope they are exerting pressure because that's going to be necessary for this to end."
There are signs that inside China, the call for change is rising in ways both old and new.
Eighteen legal and demographic Chinese scholars argued in two published articles in June that birth control legislation not only breaks constitutional promises to protect human rights, but worsens the aging crisis and labor shortage.
China's leadership faces challenges from an increasingly wired nation whose citizens use online social media tools to confront a dictatorship used to governing without input from the governed. Liang Jianzhang, co-founder of the popular travel site Ctrip.com, is among several well-known bloggers who have spoken out.
"The wall of family planning policy will collapse," he wrote. "I don't know which is the last straw that will overwhelm it; let us all pick up straw together."
Change won't come easilyEven in the wake of this sudden and vocal opposition, actually ending this widely despised policy is another matter.
The Communist Party is preparing to replace the country's leaders in the fall, something it does every 10 years, and the government is traditionally reluctant to make fundamental policy changes during this period. Thursday, the state's family planning commission posted a statement on its website that praised the one-child policy for preventing millions of births.
Another reason why the policy will probably remain is the army of family planner bureaucrats nationwide who depend on its collateral benefit: It boosts their salaries. Authorities across China collect more than $3 billion a year from "out-of-policy" pregnancies, according to China Economic Weekly magazine. Many Chinese say that money winds up in the pockets of corrupt bureaucrats.
Wu Liangjie raised the $8,640 fee before his wife's forced abortion, but his payment was not distributed in time to the several government agencies expecting a cut, he says. Since the child was never born, Wu is eligible for a refund, but only if he is sterilized.
Yang Hongfang, a house cleaner in Beijing, says the family-planning policies serve no purpose other than to enrich dishonest officials.
"In my village, all officials bought houses in the city. One house costs at least 400,000 yuan," or $62,800, says Yang, 32, from Liangshan County in Shandong, the same province where dissident Chen Guangcheng was jailed.
Yang said she refused sterilization seven years ago after the birth of her son and must undergo a gynecological check twice a year to prove she is not pregnant. She says more than half the families in Zhaogudui village have more than one child.
"I am on a 'dangerous' list now," Yang says. "The fine this year is 50,000 yuan ($7,800), but there is no receipt, as the local officials won't leave any evidence."
Wu Liangjie and Deng Jiyuan agreed to end their legal complaints against the government two weeks ago and accept compensation. But publicity over the incidents might have a lingering effect.
"I'm not as worried as I was before," says Li Fu, whose five-months-pregnant wife, Cao Ruyi, has been threatened with forced abortion. Amid the uproar over forced abortions, the U.S. Embassy "expressed its concern" for Cao to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, according to spokesman Richard Buangan. "I believe our government will handle our case according to the law," Li says.
Contributing: Sunny Yang in Beijing; Oren Dorell in Washington
http://www.usatoday.com/news/story/2012-07-25/China-forced-abortions/56465974/1More? Ok.
China's One-Child Plan Faces New Fire29 avril 2011
Conseil Carrière
BEIJING—China's latest census shows the nation's population is aging rapidly and its growth rate has declined sharply, raising new questions about the government's unwillingness to abandon its controversial one-child policy despite warnings of a looming demographic crunch.
When the Chinese government launched the world's biggest demographic experiment in 1980, it said it would take about 30 years to tame the nation's explosive population growth once encouraged by Chairman Mao Zedong.
China appears to have achieved that goal: Initial census results released Thursday show China's population, the world's largest, rose to 1.34 billion as of last year, from 1.27 billion in 2000. That puts average annual growth at 0.57% over the decade, down from 1.07% in 1990-2000.
The census, conducted last year, also shows that people over the age of 60 now account for 13.3% of China's population, compared to 10.3% in 2000. And the reserve of future workers has dwindled: People under 14 now make up 16.6% of the population, down from 23% 10 years ago.
Yet China's leaders vowed again this week to maintain the one-child family-planning policy. This despite the census results and a decade-long campaign by an informal advocacy group of top Chinese academics and former officials who have risked their careers to argue the policy is based on flawed science and vested bureaucratic interests. China's policy is enforced by the National Population and Family Planning Commission, which employs a half-million full-time staffers and six million part-timers. It collects millions of dollars a year in fines from people who violate family-planning rules.
Chinese leaders credit the policy with preventing 400 million births, helping to lift the country out of poverty and limit its carbon emissions.
Under China's one-child policy, many (but not all) couples who have more than one child face fines of several months' salary and can lose their jobs if they work for the state. The program has also led to some forced abortions and sterilizations.
According to several people close to the Family Planning Commission, the agency is believed to be considering limited pilot plans to relax the policy. But the informal advocacy group pressing for change say those measures are too little, and too late, to address a demographic crunch that will fundamentally reshape China's economy and society.
They say China's elderly population is expanding rapidly as Mao-era baby boomers retire, putting new burdens on society to cover the cost of their retirement. At the same time, China's labor force is due to start shrinking in 2016, reversing the demographic phenomenon of a widening pool of low-cost labor that powered a manufacturing boom over the past three decades.
The number of workers aged 20-to-24 is already declining due to the lower birth rate two decades ago and a rise in the number of young people seeking higher education. China's traditional preference for boys also means the nation now has about 120 males for every 100 females. By 2020 China could be home to as many as 24 million single young men with little prospect of marrying or having their own children.
The solution, members of the advocacy group argue, is for China to move swiftly to a "two-child" policy, and possibly to offer incentives for couples to have a second child. That, they say, would help China to avoid the fate of Japan and some Western countries that are struggling with an aging population and shrinking work force.
China's leadership appears to be dragging its feet on lifting the one-child limit nationwide in part because it is wary of controversy ahead of a once-a-decade Communist Party leadership change next year. The man in charge of population issues is Vice Premier Li Keqiang, the frontrunner to take over as premier.
The group advocating for ending the one-child policy thought the change "would be a simple matter," said Gu Baochang, a professor of demography at Renmin University in Beijing, former adviser to the Family Planning Commission and informal leader of the advocacy group. Changing the policy, he says, is "so necessary demographically, and so wise politically. But resistance was so strong—much stronger than we had thought."
The government inaction is all the more notable because the family-planning bureaucracy is a lightning rod for public resentment.
In one of China's most notorious human-rights cases, a blind, self-taught lawyer named Chen Guangcheng was imprisoned in 2006 by local officials after he sued them over forced abortions, even though the central government had publicly sided with Mr. Chen.
On Tuesday, President Hu Jintao told a meeting of top party leaders that China would "stick to and improve its current family-planning policy and maintain a low birth rate," the official Xinhua news agency reported. The policy already exempts several groups such as ethnic minorities, rural couples whose first child is a girl, and couples in which both partners are only children.
The commission is now considering pilot schemes in five or six provinces allowing couples in which one partner is an only child to have a second baby, according to people familiar with the discussions. But members of the advocacy group says it will take at least two years to see the results of those pilots, which will then have to be tested nationally. That means a nationwide two-child policy is unlikely before 2015, they say.
The Family Planning Commission, meanwhile, actively suppresses dissenting voices, its critics allege. Around 6 p.m. on March 11, two professors from Beijing's Tsinghua University, Wang Ming and Wang Feng, were on their way to a live television interview in which they planned to call for an end to the one-child policy.
Wang Ming is a members of a consultative body to the National People's Congress and had filed a petition against the one-child policy for the second successive year. Wang Feng is a demographer and member of the advocacy group who heads the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing.
As they approached the studio, Wang Feng's mobile phone rang. It was a producer of the show, he said, calling to say the interview had been canceled under pressure from the Family Planning Commission. "We shouldn't have advertised it in advance," the show's anchor told the two men later, they say.
"This is a really politically sensitive question," says Ji Baocheng, president of Renmin University and an NPC member, who filed a petition this year, for the fourth time, calling for a review of the policy. "The problem is there is a difference between how experts see it and how officials see it."
The official view relies to a large extent on the theory, put forward by Thomas Malthus in 1798, that China has insufficient land and natural resources to support its population.
The Family Planning Commission declined interview requests. It has denied suppressing critics who speak out against its policies.
One prominent former official, however, outlined in a four-hour interviewwhat she said was the prevailing view on the commission.
"These so-called experts [in the advocacy group] are talking nonsense," said Ma Li, an NPC member and advisor to the State Council (China's cabinet) who headed the commission's Population and Development Research Center until 2009 and still works from its offices.
She drew a graph that she said showed that China's "demographic dividend" would last for at least another 15 years as its labor force would remain stable at about one billion between 2016 and 2026.
"There's no such issue as a labor shortage in China," she said. "Our problem is we have too many people."
On the other side of the debate is the advocacy group, made up of two dozen leading demographers, economists and former Family Planning officials who joined forces in 2000.
They knew that China's fertility rate, or the average number of children born to each woman, was in decline even before the one-child policy began in 1980.The fertility rate had dropped to 2.7 in 1979 from 5.5 in 1970 due to a policy encouraging people to marry later, wait longer between children, and have fewer babies.
The advocacy group also knew that fertility rates in other developing countries had declined at a similar rate between 1970 and 1990 without a one-child policy.
So they set out to prove a point that was almost heresy to China's family planners: that the one-child policy was unnecessary.
They secured funding from the Ford Foundation through Joan Kaufman, a Harvard Professor who has studied China's family-planning policies since the early 1980s and worked in the foundation's Beijing office between 1996 and 2001. "When this initiative began, there was this belief that generating evidence would convince policy makers. That was naive, because it's not an evidence-based policy," said Dr. Kaufman.
"They have a huge family-planning bureaucracy and to have that become redundant is a worry. There's also a knee-jerk feeling that if they lift the lid everyone's going to have millions of babies."
Group members began by quietly conducting field research to prove, among other things, that China's fertility rate had fallen dangerously below the "replacement rate" of 2.1 children for every woman, which is generally required to keep a population stable. They calculated that the fertility rate should be 1.47 if the policy was implemented correctly, taking into account the various exemptions.
The commission says the fertility rate has been about 1.8 since 1991, because it assumes that many children are born secretly to avoid fines. Even taking that into account, members of the group calculated it was 1.5 to 1.6.
At first, the campaign by the activists' group had some success: They persuaded senior officials to attend two international seminars on demographics and aging populations in Hawaii and Beijing. In 2004, they filed a petition to the government which they say reached the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee but wasn't acted on.
Soon afterward, the Family Planning Commission struck back. Zhang Weiqing, its minister at the time, oversaw the compilation of a "National Population Development Strategy Research Report," which rejected many of the group's findings.
The report reasserted that the fertility rate had been 1.8 since about 1991 and should remain at that level for another three decades.
"A higher or lower fertility rate is not beneficial for economic and social development in China," the report said.
It said the one-child policy had prevented 400 million births, based on the assumption that, without it, the fertility rate would have stayed where it was in 1970, rather than falling naturally as it did in other developing countries.
It also predicted that China's overall population would peak at about 1.5 billion in 2033. The U.S. Census Bureau, and many Chinese demographers, now predict that China's population will peak at less than 1.4 billion in 2026.
Once the report was published, the advocacy group was ostracized by the commission.
Mr. Gu's group now say their findings will be backed up by the census, which tried for the first time to count children born in secret—by offering discounts on fines—and is expected to show there are fewer than previously estimated when the full results are released.
Whether it will be enough to spur the government into action is another question. "There's a saying in Chinese," said Wang Feng. "It's easier to get on a tiger than to get off it."
Write to Jeremy Page at
jeremy.page@wsj.com SOURCE:
http://online.wsj.com http://www.eurochinajob.com/fr/career/259-chinas-one-child-plan-faces-new-fire
