An Investigation on China Village’s One Child Policy “Three Examinations”

Posted on 2015-03-22 by wrchina

Women’s Rights in China Founder Jing Zhang testified in Congress US Neb 10, 2009

Summary: In rural villages, the Chinese government’s One Child policy is enforced with the ¨Three Examinations,〃 which check women for use of contraceptive rings, pregnancy, and illness practice that is hostile and abhorrent to women.

WRIC Founder Jing Zhang (left four)testified in Congress US in Neb 10, 2009.

Jing Zhang giving a speech before testifying for the hearing

From September 2008 to March 2009, we visited the provinces of Shandong, Guangdong, Guangxi, Sichuan, and He Bei to investigate the conditions of rural villagers with regard to the One Child Policy. During this time, the focal points of our investigations were the so-called ¨Three Examinations,〃 which check women for use of contraceptive rings, pregnancy, and illness four times each year.

The Head of the One Child Policy Commission, Zhao Bai Ge, said: ¨There exist 240 million women of childbearing age inChina now, and among them, 83 percent use birth control and contraception.〃 There is some truth in those words. For example, during a trip to a village in Hebei, we found that among the 288 women in that village, 279 women of childbearing age wore the contraception ring (about 92 percent). Only those who have womb defects did not use the intrauterine device.

But Zhao Bai Ge, a Cambridge graduate, has also said: ¨Chinaˇs One Child Policy is not as controlling as it seems. The people are voluntarily choosing to enforce the policy.〃 That is a complete lie.

Not only do enforcers of the policy disrespect womenthey have no regard for the ethic of preserving personal privacy.
According to a 17-year enforcer of the One Child Policy, as well as several women who have undergone the Three Examinations, the procedure is as follows:
1. The woman is stripped naked for an external physical examination. Her abdomen is pressed to determine if there is any pregnancy, and her breasts are kneaded and squeezed to see if breast milk comes out. Often there are mothers who have no more breast milk.

2. The uterus is checked for the presence of a contraceptive ring.

3. Using a vaginal mirror, the appearance of the vagina is examined. (This part of the procedure is often omitted in poor villages since each vaginal mirror costs 5 RMB). If the vaginal folds appear to be new, this is taken as evidence of either a recent birth or miscarriage. In the case of a miscarriage, proper proof must be provided. If it was a birth, an investigation is launched on the legality of the birth under the terms of the One Child Policy.

While interviewing the One Child Policy supervisor in a SiChuan village, we consulted a book titled “One Child Policy Contract and Protocol”. It clearly indicates that if villagers do not make their appointed date for the Three Examinations, they will be fined 10 RMB a day. We have spoken with many mothers; not one of them wants to go to a gynecological clinic four times a year for a uterine checkup.

Furthermore, women are forced to carry an introduction letter written by their villageˇs One Child Policy supervisor whenever they travel. Those who travel to foreign lands must first report to a local One Child Policy supervisor for the three examinations, and then mail the results back to their own villages. If the village commission office does not receive the test results, a large fine will be imposed upon the family of the woman.

One can imagine the limitations that the quarterly examinations impose on women; their life-giving capacities, travel, and even them most intimate relationship between husband and wife are all controlled by the government. It can be said that until Chinaˇs women reach menopause, they are confined like sows by the fence of forced birth control, controlled and monitored by the government with the sole purpose of not allowing them to have children.

Truthfully, mothers are given no respect in China; their wombs are the property of the Communist regime, raised like livestock with their every use subject to approval. Mothers are required to keep a record of their uterine activities, including the date they put their rings in and the type of ring used, when their periods come each month and duration of their period, and the date on which their child was conceived. To the Communist Party, every mother is a suspected criminal and the three examinations are ways to stop the mother from committing the crimeit is a precaution against future motherhood.

In a way, enforced wearing of the contraceptive ring is like putting shackles on womenor rather, like putting tracking devices on them so that they may be watched and monitored like animals. Women cannot be touched and their men cannot display any interest. The ring guards the motherˇs uterus, representing the nationˇs power, and, as decided by the law, the ring is the nationˇs defender of that power. It lies deep within the womanˇs vagina, not only killing the husbandˇs sperm but also providing the One Child Policy workers with a key to that ring.

If someone dares defy the law and removes the ring, it becomes proof of a crime as severe as murder. The perpetrator will be punished immediately. We interviewed women living on boats on the Guang Dong (Guang Xi River), the majority of whom have removed their rings. They have become escaped criminals ever since, living in constant fear of being caught and punished. Imagine a baby who has to hide inside its motherˇs womb for nine months before it can secretly be born into a society far more dangerous than the womb, then watch its mother face cruel punishment, jail time and heavy fines. And when this child grows up, he or she will have to live under the restrictions of the One Child Policy as well, and will be forced to live a life of fear and unfairness.

In November 2008 we took a long-distance bus trip to Bo Bai County in Guang Xi to investigate the One Child Policy. Upon entering the county borders, a large advertisement for the One Child Policy said: ¨The One Child Policy services create families so that every village and every household can blossom!〃 There are even One Child Policy slogans on both sides of traffic signs with blue background and white text. Itˇs like passing through a bizarre One Child Policy road.

We visited small towns in the Bo Bi Xian County: Shuang Wang and Sha Po.
To protest the imposition of the three examinations on women in Bo Bai Xian County (in particular the fines and penalties for children that exceed the One Child Policy limit), the people there organized the largest uprising since theTiananmen Square demonstrations. More than 50,000 people from the county surrounded and destroyed six government office buildings in the villages and smashed the concrete roads in order to obstruct police cars. There were at least seven deaths, including two police officers who were beaten to death by the rebellious masses and five student demonstrators who were trampled to death. More than 200 people and 100 students were captured and jailed.

What is more, the incident exposed the corruption of the local government, which had used the policy penalties as their own income. Prior to the rebellion, the countyˇs official Website stated that ¨the entire county has provided more than 5,800 men to the labor force, produced more than 200 cars, tied the tubes for the countyˇs 17,000 women, performed abortions and installed contraceptive rings, and imposed [One Child] policy fines that reach up to 7.88 million RMB.〃

(Note: This content was subsequently deleted from the Website.)

In order to investigate the factors leading up to the rebellion, we questioned local barbers, photographers, cab drivers, street peddlers, restaurant workers and hotel personnel, etc., and found that there were a few main points. The factors that these people resented most greatly were the corruption of policy personnel, the fact that the government uses One Child Policy penalties to accumulate wealth, and the unfairness of suddenly enforcing policy rules very strictly after 10 years of leniency.

This last point is one that peasants and farmers repeatedly complain about most bitterly. Previously the One Child policy was not enforced very strictly in Bo Bai County; families with two, three and even up to five children were not uncommon. In those days offending parents could pay off policy personnel with a few hundred RMB. Now, those who exceed the policy limit are forced to pay a finebut now that their ¨illegal〃 sons and daughters are already grown up and attending junior high school, the parents refuse to pay more money. To deal with the villagersˇ refusal to pay up, policy enforcers organize third-class county cadres and policemen into a large military unit, marching into towns and letting no family escape from investigations of policy offenses. They imposed 1000 RMB fines on women who do not make their Three Examination appointment and had the courts of law enforce that payment. They also used an extreme course of action, the ¨One Ring, Two Tie〃 procedure, in which they force (by binding) a woman to go to the hospital, where a ring is inserted and, in addition, a tubal ligation is performed (a surgical procedure in which the fallopian tubes are cut, clamped, blocked, or tied to prevent the womanˇs eggs from reaching her uterus; the sperm is also blocked from traveling along the tube to meet the egg).

Ever since March 1, 2007, a One Child Policy leadership group established by Bobai Countyˇs policy personnel has raided the houses of extremely poor families and villages, tearing down the meager establishments and destroying possessions. Peasants began to hide in the mountains and along the lake shores. More than 250 mothers were captured and arrested at a reservoir near the town of Jiangning and taken to a hospital. There pregnant women were given an abortion shot, women who were not pregnant yet had a contraceptive ring inserted, and those with two or more children had their fallopian tubes cut off surgically.

In the small town of Yingqiao, male villagers and middle school students found this to be the last straw. They rushed into the homes of One Child Policy personnel and smashed their belongings. Afterwards they escaped to the mountains, but were eventually surrounded by more than 300 police officers, and 13 of the villagers were arrested and sent to prison. Especially in the town of Shuangwang near Guangdong, many female villagers who were familiar with the area escaped to Pubei County and Lianjiang City in Guangdong, where they were chased by potential captors sent from Bobai County. The husbands and elderly relatives who were unable to escape with the women were taken hostage by policy personnel, and even larger fines were imposed upon them.

The uprising in Bobai County was defeated, and the rebellious villagers were forced to pay a heavy price: Some older mothers agreed to have their tubes tied in order to beg the government to release their sons from imprisonment, and some women were even forced to undergo tubal ligation three times. Many people were stripped of their homes. Policy personnel took away valuables like electric appliances, farming tools, iron framed beds, aluminum window panes, pigs, chickens, cows, and sheep, while goods of little value such as pots, pans and teapots were all smashed. Many villagers took their sons and daughters to spend the nights in the mountain forests, where many became very ill. Countless families were broken up. Like the aftermath of theTiananmen Square incident, rebellion was once again resurrected in the villages.

The Chinese government has used inhumane methods to implement its One Child Policy. It defies human rights. It is uncivilized and barbarous. This sort of behavior must be condemned by humanity because every human being is born of a mother. Mothers should not be disgraced and humiliated by any government as they are by the Chinese government.

These are the findings of our extensive investigation into the Three Examinations. The department charged with enforcing the One Child Policy is gradually becoming more secretive, especially after the central authorities sent down orders to keep all work confidential. All the people that we interviewed and any exact locations have been concealed for the sake of their safety, which the reader will surely understand.

(Please credit www.wrchina.org)

WRIC in Hearing: Chinese Government Crackdown on Jasmine Revolution Extends to Women and Children’s Organizations

Posted on 2015-03-22 by wrchina

Source: WRIC May 12, 2012

WRIC Founder Jing Zhang (from right to fourth) was testifying in Congress.

In February of this year, inspired by the wave of democratic mo vements in the Arab World, the Chinese-language internet community gave birth to messages of the Jasmine Revolution. The Chinese Communist Government reacted in panic and severe crackdown, in blatant violation of the Chinese Constitution and the UN Charter. It dismissed international condemnation, arrested hundreds of dissidents, civil rights attorneys, artists including Jiang Tianyong and Ai Weiwei, even members of the public in the streets who happened to carry jasmine flowers. In Guizhou province, since March 18th, more than a dozen dissidents were arrested for more than a month without reason. One of them, Ms. Wu Yuqin had cancer. Her eighty-year-old mother was also arrested for defending her daughter. Two other women, Wang Lihong and Liang Haiyi, were also arrested and charged for expressing opinions related to the Jasmine Revolution. The Chinese government has also put non-governmental organizations and their workers under surveillance. The work of All Girls Allowed had suffered drastic impacts because of threats and harassment of the police and National Security Bureau.

WRIC Volunteers under Surveillance

Women’s Rights in China is a non-profit organization registered in the United States. WRIC operates many projects benefiting girl babies and orphans in a number of provinces in Mainland China. One of these, the Rural Girls Assistance Program was a charitable project whose aim was the aid of rural Chinese mothers and baby girls. Every month we distribute funds to help families of baby girls buy milk and supplement the nutrition of pregnant women. The purpose of this aid was to encourage women who gave birth to girls, to combat traditional discrimination against women and to erase gender imbalance. More than 500 babies and orphans have benefited in this program. However, since March of this year, our workers and volunteers have been harassed by local police and security agents. They had been detained and interrogated multiple times and forced to divulge every detail of this program. Officials of local towns and villages disseminated rumors that workers were trouble makers who would be arrested by the police, which troubled and frustrated mothers who received aid.

Police in one province (to protect the personal safety of our workers, we elect not to identify the specific location.) not only conducted forced interrogations, but also sent two agents to record the aid distribution locations by video. They followed our workers on their visits to families in remote villages, “witnessing” the conversations between our workers and families receiving aid. When our workers and local families were talking at the doorstep, they would stand close by. When our workers entered local houses, they would enter and sit down as well. One may well imagine our workers and the rural families’ feelings. Some families requested to stop receiving aid in order to escape police attention. They feared that the attention would have long-lasting ill effects for the whole family. Many volunteers also backed out of this charitable project. They entered our work to do good for the local community but found themselves treated as felons under open police surveillance. Neighbors of our workers also became suspicious and opposed their work.

Mothers came to receive aid from WRIC via Rural Girls Assistance Program, (Picture Provided by WRIC)

A police agent (black leather jacket) videotaping mothers receiving aid from Rural Girls Assistance Program, (Picture Provided by WRIC)

A farmer whose family receive our aid was forcibly pushed into a police vehicle for interrogation. His cell phone was confiscated. The police threatened him, asking whether the aid carried any conditions, what the volunteers said to him, whether there was any encouragement to join Falun Gong. He was not released until an interrogation lasting hours after he was no longer deemed a “suspect”.

In another location of WRIC’s program, as a result of police harassment, field workers and some aid-receiving families requested an early end to the Rural Girls Assistance Program. Hundreds of baby girls and their families would lose the 100 yuan per month assistance for milk, which carried no conditions. To a family whose monthly income was only between 300 to 500 yuan, this would represent a grave loss.

A field worker told me, “It’s hopeless. If we continue the program, we might get into prison. If the government wants to arrest someone, there’s no shortage of made-up charges. In China, it’s not easy to do good even if you want to. The government wants to watch everything. It doesn’t want to overlook any detail, even your though. They have all the money and all the manpower. That’s what it means to have a strong and glorious country.”
Arrests in Tiananmen Doesn’t Spare Pregnant Woman

The openings of the People’s Congress and the Political Consultation Congress in March coincided with the Jasmine Revolution. The government’s surveillance and oppression became even more rampant. Police arrested all “questionable personalities” found in sensitive locations Tiananmen Square and McDonald’s Restaurants and kept in detention centers such as Jiu Jin Zhuang( Short-term imprisonment center ) in Beijing. Ms. Nie Nina, a woman from Henan province, got in touch with us through difficulties. She has now been pregnant for five months. Her family house was forcibly demolished, she could find no redress from the local government. She was forced to petition the central government in Beijing and was beaten many times as a result. She had been put into administrative detention in Beijing’s Jiu Jin Zhuang center. On March 28th, Ms. Nie was transferred from Jiu Jin Zhuang to her local detention center for ten days. During this time, she suffered beatings, including to her head, from the hands of government agents.

On April 19th, Ms. Nie was again arrested and kept in Xiangcheng, Henan detention center. Seven to eight male government agents undressed her in the court yard of the detention center in front of 60 onlookers, leaving only the bra on her upper body. Afterwards, she was dragged to ultrasound exams and threatened with forced abortion. She was extremely frightened and greatly humiliated. In the end, because her pregnancy was deemed “legal”, she was spared an abortion after her family frantically called for help. During her three day detention, she was given no food or water by the authorities. One day she was suffering severe stomach pain from hunger, a woman working in the kitchen sneaked some bread to her. Government agents told her, “We’ll kill you if you go to Beijing to petition again. Police in Beijing told us to arrest you.”

March 15, 2011 Ms. Nie is forcibly arrested by police and government officials.(Pictures provided by WRIC)

I asked if she had visited sensitive locations with connection with the Jasmine Movement. She answered that she had no idea about any “jasmine”. Her only purpose was to uphold her rights by petitioning in Beijing.

Similarly, a victim of the Birth Planning Policy was detained in Jiu Jin Zhuang in March. A farmer’s wife from Nanping, Fujian province was forced to undergo tubal ligation, a sterilization operation several years ago. The doctor mistakenly severed the ureter tract of a kidney, leading to infections in her kidney system. Even when Beijing hospitals proved that the ureter tracked was medically severed, local government and hospital refused to compensate her, forcing her to petition the central government.

According to her, after multiple arrests, beatings and detainment, she was used as an example of “illegal petitioner in arrest” in the local television station’s program, which led to the destruction of her reputation and collateral punishment to her children and family. When she was taken into hospital in March for forced “treatment”, she lost all freedom. She was followed by agents even when she went home to pick up clothing. Local law enforcement agents threatened that if she petitioned the government again, her death would be in “murky” circumstances. She only recently knew that the nervous atmosphere was the result of something called “jasmine”. She said that one kidney was completely destroyed, her head was also beaten. She estimated that she would not have long to live and had no desire to persist in living. Hearing these words, the only things we could offer were comforting words and prayer.

Cutting Off Foreign Funding, Scholarships Stopped

The Orphan Scholarship Program is one of WRIC’s projects. As a result of the One Child Policy and bias against girls, many new born girls were abandoned by parents quickly after birth. Buddhist nuns in Tongcheng, Anhui province adopted many abandoned baby girls. WRIC provided scholarships and aid to more than twenty of these orphans according to their ages. Since the beginning of this year, the guardians of these orphans, the nuns suddenly became unenthusiastic about such assistance. They almost completely stopped accepting aid in February and March. After a special investigation, we discovered that the nun in charge of accepting the funding, a member of the Tongcheng Buddhist Association, received pressure from “talks” with local authorities. She was no longer willing to have any connection with economic aid from abroad, even charitable foreign Christian donations.

The central government announced its orphan assistance program many months ago. The funding was supposed to be retrospective to January of 2010. In our March, 2011 investigation, we discovered that even provincial-level welfare agencies had not seen the funding, let alone city-, county-, and township-level agencies. In the Tongcheng nunneries, not one has heard of such assistance.

We do not know whether the Orphan Scholarship Program had any connections with the government crackdown over the Internet Jasmine Revolution or the content of the conversations between Tongcheng police and the nuns, but the sudden change in the nuns’ attitude towards scholarship donations speaks to the pressure they were under. It also speaks to the Chinese government, especially local government’s suspicion of foreign charities and donations. This suspicion totally dismisses the needs of the most vulnerable group, the interests of the abandoned orphans. In other words, the Communist government, in order to maintain stability for its rule, not only controls dissidents, civil rights advocates and internet opinion, but also keeps surveillance over activities of foreign non-governmental organizations. As these organizations’ work mainly benefit women, children and disease patients, such controls led to direct suffering of these vulnerable communities.