Monthly Archives: September 2010

WRIC Rural girls Assistance Program in Nanle, Henan

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Training teacher Huili Chen

Nanle County is a poor rural district. Under pressure of heavy fines for “illegal” childbirth, the abortion of girls is common. There was an urgent need to open the Baby Shower project in Nanle. On Sept. 23-24, 2010, our local director Chen and her assistant arrived in Nanle to distribute gift and aid. That night, more than 70 members of the local church organization received training. The director gave the lecture, which included two parts, one on the education of children, the second on abortion. She explained that babies in the womb were still God’s creation. Not even parents had the right to murder their children. On the second day, we distributed aid to ten expectant mothers and ten baby girls. AGA communicated our aim to every mother to encourage each to raise healthy girls.

During the process, we learned of a father of three children who was jailed twice for failing to pay the unaffordable fines imposed by the Planned Birth Policy. He spent 15 days in jail for each sentence. As a Christian, he did not allow the abortion of any of his three daughters. Mr. Zhao’s life and finances were both in very difficult position.

We also learned that local government rules prohibited additional childbirth if the first born was a boy, on pain of a heavy fine, though usually the second pregnancy would not be forcibly aborted. If the first born child was a girl, a second pregnancy was allowed to continue. However if the second child was determined to be a girl through prenatal examination, most parents would choose abortion. Many couples went through multiple abortions until they had a boy this way.

Currently, among the ten expectant mothers in our program, three had already had a girl. The monthly aid not only served as economic assistance, but also gave them some dignity and leverage in their husbands’ families. It encourages the local respect and protection for girls.

Discussion on the teaching material

Individual direction after training

Distributing aid to expectant mothers

Distribution aid to baby girls

China’s one-child policy – success or failure?

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Source: BBC News OnlineAuthor: Pulsihed Time: 25 September 2010 email Print this article

Thirty years after the introduction of China’s one-child policy, the government is being urged to rethink its population controls.
During the period that I grew up in China in the 1960s and 70s, Chinese families could have as many children as they liked. Many had four or five children. Some even had six or seven.
My parents had four children. After the government started enforcing the rule of one child per family – often forcibly – my parents would sometimes jokingly remind me that I was an “exceeded quota person”, meaning that under the one-child policy I would not have existed.
Chairman Mao, who led China from 1949 until his death in 1976, regarded a fast-growing population as a productive force necessary for China to become a great power.
He treated brutally those who dared to question him and believed that China should control its population.
His successor Deng Xiaoping started to reverse the trend.
He felt the tremendous drag China’s huge population had on its fragile economic recovery after years of political turmoil.
On 25 September 1980, the Politburo of the Communist Party issued an “open letter” to all members of the party and the Communist youth league, urging them to take the lead in having only one child.
This is widely seen as the beginning of the controversial one-child policy.
The government claims that the policy has helped the country achieve 400 million fewer births during the past 30 years.
But this has come at a painful cost – keenly felt by my generation and those after us.
One of my childhood friends, who didn’t want to reveal his name, has had to let his daughter, his second child, call him uncle in order to escape punishment for breaking the rule.
He says it breaks his heart every time he talks about his daughter, who is officially registered as someone else’s child.
A female friend, like countless other young couples in China, had to pay a large fine for having a second child. But she believed the money was worth it.
Officials have repeatedly stressed that this “fundamental policy of the state”, which has been credited with helping reduce the pressure of population growth on society and economic development, will continue.
But the government has already been challenged over whether the 400 million fewer births were entirely due to the implementation of this policy.
China faces the looming problem of a rapidly ageing society with not enough young carers A team of independent Chinese and foreign academics completed what they said was the first systematic examination of the one-child policy three years ago.
They pointed out that the reduction was mainly due to a fall in the fertility rate (the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime) in the 1970s when the government began to encourage delayed marriages, longer intervals between births and fewer children.
According to Professor Wang Feng of the University of California, who led the study, China’s fertility rate was reduced from more than five to just over two before family planning policy was introduced in 1978.
The debate over whether the one-child policy is still needed was recently stirred up by a newspaper report about the little publicised case of Yicheng county, in the northern province of Shanxi.
Yicheng has been experimenting with a two-child policy for 25 years, said The Southern Weekend, a liberal newspaper based in the southern city of Guangzhou, close to Hong Kong.
Despite its more relaxed regulations, the county has a lower than average population growth rate, the report said.
After three decades, the drawbacks of the one-child policy are more and more apparent.
Even though China still has the largest population in the world, a report last month by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a leading government think tank, said officials were seriously overestimating the fertility rate.
Instead of suppressing it, the report said the government should try to lift it. More and more people in China, largely in urban areas, prefer to have fewer children.
It is unclear when Beijing might end the one-child policy. But attention will be focused on an upcoming meeting of the party central committee next month.
It will finalise a five-year social and economic development plan, only the 12th since the Communist Party took power in 1949.
Clearly, the situation is becoming urgent. Already the country’s population is ageing fast. The first children born under the one-child policy face the prospect of caring for an ever-increasing number of pensioners.
China also faces the daunting prospect of many men who can’t find wives as many female foetuses have been aborted, resulting in a huge gender imbalance.
The clock is ticking.
BPAS is sponsoring a debate the London Battle of Ideas festival, 30 October 2010, on ‘The great population debate: too many carbon footprints?’. See here for more information and tickets.
China’s one-child policy – success or failure?

The Double Persecution of Gu Guangyan: The Travails of a Chinese Woman Who Gave Birth to A Girl

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By WRIC Volunteer Li Yanglong
Gu’s husband wanted a son. He already had two daughters. He asked his wife to try one more time, illegally, to bear a son.  She was determined to give the family a boy who could carry the family name forward.
Gu’s first daughter was six, the second one four and half. As Gu related to WRIC fieldworkers during an interview late in her pregnancy, her in-laws already despised her because of the two daughters. When Gu went for her ultrasound accompanied by her husband, she found that the couple in line before their own appointment had aborted their 5 month old baby because she was a girl. There, it was revealed that Gu was carrying a girl.  Gu’s husband was more understanding then. He didn’t show visible displeasure or force her to have an abortion like the other couple.
Immediately following the ultrasound exam, Gu’s mother-in-law demanded that she have an abortion. Despite Gu’s pleas, the in-laws forced her out of the family dwelling and disowned her in public. Pregnant and without options, Gu returned to her parents Gu’s mother, perhaps to save some face for future reconciliation, defended her mother-in-law to WRIC volunteers somewhat, and explained that her husband’s family was also very poor. They discriminated against girls but didn’t kick her out.
WRIC Volunteer Li Yanglong visited Gu’s family. Aug,2010 (Photos: WRIC)
As WRIC volunteers’ s photos and videos showed, Gu’s living condition at her parents’ place was makeshift. She had little bedding and almost no furniture. The house was already damp and dark. To avoid any passerby’s seeing her and informing authorities, the curtains were drawn all day. When it rained, the water streamed from the roof along several walls to form puddles in the corners of the floor. She had lived in this almost total darkness for several months. All activity in such cramped space turned her life into a jail sentence. Her husband had never visited since her move. Nor did he send any food or supplies. All of Gu’s needs fell therefore on her mother. Gu counted herself lucky that during this pregnancy she never had any serious illness that would require hospitalization. Otherwise, she said, it would be either dying in her tiny prison or getting dragged by government officers from the local Birth Control Office for an abortion. At this point of the interview with WRIC, Gu broke down to tears.
WRIC volunteers asked Gu if she had enough supplies for the baby such as clothing and formulas. She said that since conditions were bad and resources few, there wouldn’t be too much special preparation. The clothes of the two older ones were still around, just needed a wash. As for food, she would have to make do with what her family had. Gu’s mother added, however, that difficult as it was financially, the family would at least buy a chicken to supplement her diet.
Gu’s family lived close to the local Birth Planning Office. She could not risk hospital prenatal exams and lived in fear that any moment she would be arrested by government agents for a forced abortion. Neither was there enough money to hide out in another city. WRIC volunteers discussed with her other options farther away from the Birth Control Office and relatively safer.
We concluded that the most secure option that ensured a successful birth was to move around and only rush to the hospital in a hired car at the last moment. Several years ago, some doctors without moral scruples would sell out expectant women to agents for money. This behavior had diminished somewhat lately due to the government’s “Stability above all else” policy (forced abortions and heavy fines had touched off mass riots in several provinces). Perversely, the government Birth Control Bureaus actually benefit from “illegal” births since they could impose heavy fines at will. However, constant shifting of address was still an essential strategy to avoid extremely late forced abortions just in case.
Gu Guangyan was expelled by her in-laws because her third pregnancy was another girl. She is here hiding in her parents’ house. (photo by WRIC)

 

Gu’s pregnancy continued after the interview. On September 7th, she gave birth to a healthy girl. Two days later,  WRIC volunteers visited Haizijie again. By this time Gu had moved to her uncle’s house with better safety and living conditions. The baby weighed eight pounds and had already been named Yao Siqi. Gu and her husband, who was present at this interview, had decided that after the third daughter, they did not plan on having any more children and would instead devote all their energy to their three daughters.
Gu’s husband related that on List 18th, Haizijie Birth Control Office fined him 4000 yuan. At first, the agents threatened him with 10,000 yuan a day in fines if Gu did not submit to an abortion procedure in three days. After his persistent pleading and bargaining, with some favors called in by friends and relatives, the temporary reprieve only cost 4000. But the receipt required Gu to present herself at the Birth Control Station on List 20th for a tube ligation operation (in the ninth month of her pregnancy!) or else suffer the consequences by themselves.
While they were happy with the arrival of their new born baby, the government’s “or else” on a procedure with which they could not possibly comply made Gu and her husband shudder. Looking ahead, “maneuvering” with the Birth Control bureaucracy loomed more difficult and much more menacing than the challenge of raising their three children.
WRIC volunteers delivered some emergency aid and expressed our commitment to advocate for Gu’s behalf.

 

In September, Gu Guangyan gave birth to a baby girl. WRIC workers visit her and congratulate her for this blessing from the Lord. Gu Guangyan’s new baby will face traditional prejudice and discrimination from her husband’s family in addition to governmental punishment. She was grateful to WRIC assistance, without which, she says, she doesn’t know how to face the future. (photo by WRIC)



Orphanage in Guizhou, Zhenyuan County engaged in child trafficking

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In China’s underdeveloped rural villages, for parents who have more than one child, when faced with the overwhelming fine for violating the one-child policy, some accepted the alternative of their baby girls being taken away by the family planning workers in order not to pay the fine. The government’s family planning workers see nothing wrong with this arrangement of taking the children in exchange for not charging the parents a fine. The baby girls are sent to a government orphanage and their birth and background information are altered to become that of an abandoned baby, their surname is changed into “Gu cheng (meaning old city)” and then they wait for adoptive families in Western countries to pay 3000 U.S. dollars–“support fees”–to the adoption agency, family planning office and the orphanage to make a profit.

The mystery of two “abandoned infants”

In 2004 March 18, lunar calendar New Year, in Zhenyuan county, Jiaoxi town, Tianxi village, Lanqiao group, Li Zeji’s wife, Yuan Yinyan gave birth to a baby girl. In accordance with local customs, in order to name a child, one would usually need to wait until that child is in elementary school. “I regret not giving her a good name earlier and now I do not even know what to call her,” Li Zeji says about his third child, who came into this world as another girl. For Li Zeji, he will not rest until the birth of a son. But fearful of the local family planning department’s 40,000 yuan fine for anyone who violates the one child policy, Li Zeji and his wife had to send their infant daughter to his cousin Lee for foster care and then the couple fled their home to escape the terribly heavy fines. “I didn’t dare to come back because the family planning officers were very powerful, and they often smashed houses, looted cattle, TV’s.”

Originally, Li though this was a surefire plan, but the couple did not fathom that the family planning office staff would, in the same year on April 24th, take their baby girl from their cousin Lee’s home. Two years later, when Li Zeji returned home and found out that his daughter had been taken away, he said plainly: “They took the child away, so that means I do not have to pay the fine.”

In 2006, Li did not allow the loss of a daughter affect his joy because he finally had a baby son. Only with his wife, when you mention the “disappearance” of the daughter, does she burst into tears.

Similarly, also in Zhenyuan county, Jiaoxi town, another couple also gave up their daughter in exchange for not paying the fine. Taken from Lu Xiande’s home, a little girl was born on December 27, 2003. She was the fifth child in her family and the product of a medical sterilization failure. Lu and his wife had finally had their wish of having a son with their fourth child and their fifth child, this baby girl, was an unplanned birth.

When recalling the day of April 15, 2004, the day when “number five” was taken away, Lu’s wife Yang Shuiying is very remorseful: “I did not expect it at all.” About 12 noon that day, Jiaoxi town’s family planning unit leader, Shi Guang paid a visit to Yang Shuiying. “I could not pay the fine and he took the child away,” she said. Then the family planning unit leader said, “Who told you not to abort the child?” Shi Guang said that according to the policy, Yang Shuiying should pay a fine of at least 20,000 yuan.

Yang Shuiying had no choice but to wrap her youngest daughter, “number five”, in a small quilt. When he left, Shi Guang told Yang Shuiying, “Don’t worry, when the child has grown up, the orphanage will send her abroad.”

From 2003 to 2005, the Guizhou Zhenyuan county has had at least 100 births per year that violate the One-Child Policy, and these infants were all forcefully taken away to the government orphanage. After 2005, the infants that were forcefully taken away to the orphanage were not as many as in the previous years.

On April 20, 2009, a reporter for the Southern Weekend saw the registry of the infants that were adopted out from the orphanage by foreigners after 2001. The orphanage said that all these babies were abandoned. Of these, 80 abandoned babies have the “Gu cheng (old city)” series name such as, Gu Chenghui, Gu Chengxi, Gu Chengmei, Gu Chengwei – the registry used up almost all the combinations of women’s names that could be found in the dictionary. (Old city refers to Zhenyuan as an ancient city, it is hidden in the mountains of eastern Yunnan Guizhou Plateau, guarding the entry from Guizhou, Yunnan, Hubei, Hunan as well as through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, India in the ancient trade road.) The registry had six full pages recording 80 baby girls’ dates of birth, pick-up times, pick-up locations, times of entry, health statuses, and managers. 78 of the girls were sent to United States, Belgium, Spain and other countries.

With the exception of Gu Chengqing and Gu Chengxi (who has a congenital eye disorder), 78 of the 80 have all been adopted by foreign families, far from this old city. All that is left of the “disappeared” female infants who violated the One-Child Policy is a web of crime weaved by inhumane people who were blinded by greed, poverty, and adhered to the patriarchal agenda.

Shandong Husband Under 22 Years old, Forced Abortion at Sixth Month of Pregnancy

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Summary:  Because Mr. Zhao was under the minimum marriage age of 22 in April when his wife, Ms. Xie, became pregnant, the local Birth Control Bureau demanded a ¥1,500 fine. When he disputed it, the fine was raised to ¥5,000. His mother-in-law was detained by the Bureau on Sept. 3. When on the next day his wife looked for her mother, the local office performed forced abortion against her will.

 

According to a September 5th, 2010 report in Luzhong Chenbao (Central Shandong Morning News), an expecting mother’s baby was lost after an injection. The mother’s body, which protected the life for six months, ultimately proved helpless. This morning, the Birth Control officials of Zhutai, Linzi Borough, in Zibo City, Shandong Province performed an abortion on Ms. Xie.

 

Her husband, Mr. Zhao reports that on August 25th, he applied for a Birth Permit at the town Birth Control Office, for the expected birth at the end of the year. Because he reached the minimum marriage age of 22 years of age only in July, the office charged him with a ¥1,500 fine. When he disputed and asked for evidence, the fine was raised to ¥5,000. Reportedly, four different answers were given by officials including Wang Wei, director of the Zhutai Town Birth Control Office, Mr. Jiao, town official in charge of population control and various officials of the Linzi Birth Control Office.

 

At around 9:00 of September 4th, Mr. Zhao telephoned a Luzhong Chenbao reporter because his wife was taken to the town population control office for abortion. “Come quickly, or it’ll be too late!”

 

Mr. Zhao reports that on the afternoon of Sept. 2nd, the Birth Control Office interrogated his father-in-law, lasting until 22:00 that day. The next afternoon, seven to eight officers from the town Birth Control Office arrested his mother-in-law. On the morning of Sept. 4th, Ms. Xie looked for her mother at the office and was suddenly seized.

 

Mr. Zhao and the reporter only found Ms. Xie around 11:00 that morning in a ground floor ward room of the Linzi Borough Birth Control Service Center, a lonely three story building. Her mother and mother-in-law were already at her bedside. She lay weeping in her bed, her hands on her stomach, fitfully crying out “My baby, mom will never get to see you.”

 

A Zibo City Birth Control Committee officer confides that in similar situations in which the pregnancy was only “illegal” by two to three months, the payment of certain amount of fine always sufficed.