Chinese peasants jailed to enforce 1-child rule

Evan Osnos:

Above a shuttered fertilizer store in this eastern China town, men and women are locked up because their relatives will not agree to undergo government-ordered sterilization or abortion, according to current and former detainees.

Such detentions are against the law in China, where peasants and activists are trying to cast new light on abuses by local authorities enforcing the national population-control rule, known as the one-child policy. The jailing of residents here suggests abuses might be occurring on a wider scale than had been previously reported, despite central government pledges to curb violations.

Local family planning officials, whose headquarters face the detention center across the street, say they know nothing about the site.

Yet, the chief of the largest maternity ward in the area said the family planning office jails relatives of peasants who hide to avoid medical procedures because detention is the only way to get some residents to comply.

"What else can they do? They have a job to do," said Dr. Wang Haiyan, head of the ward at state-run People's Hospital in the neighboring town of Taierzhuang, referring to family planning officials.

In brief interviews last week, a woman and a man standing at the fenced second-floor window of the fertilizer store told a visitor below that they were being held with 10 others in connection with family planning laws.

"We cannot leave," said the woman, who described herself as a 52-year-old farmer. "We have no freedom."

The practice of illegally detaining family members to pressure people who flee population control policies is emerging as a central complaint among peasants chafing under China's limits on childbearing.

Since the one-child policy was introduced in 1979, China has relied on contraception and abortion to limit family size. Local rules vary, but the policy generally allows urban families to have one child and rural couples to have two or three.

The one-child policy has proved to be an important component of the country's economic rise. It has helped keep China's population to 1.3 billion, slowing population growth by hundreds of millions over the past generation and thereby easing the burden of feeding and clothing the world's most populous nation.

But critics say the policy leaves aging parents without enough children to support them and also creates a relative surplus of men to women. That is largely due to the illegal use of ultrasound technology to help selectively abort girl fetuses, reflecting a traditional Chinese preference for boys.

A report in the New England Journal of Medicine last month argues that China could relax the one-child policy without causing disruptive gains in population.

"With the freedoms that have resulted from wealth and globalization, the one-child policy seems increasingly anachronistic," it said. "A relaxation of the one-child policy would be desirable."

China has begun to loosen the system. In the 1980s, forced sterilization and abortion were common, but criticism at home and abroad compelled leaders to pass a law in 2002 that dictates the use of financial incentives or penalties to encourage compliance. The 2002 family planning law bars officials from violating citizens' rights but does not define those rights.

Nevertheless, Communist Party cadres can still be promoted or punished on the basis of meeting population control goals, and activists say that encourages coercion. The issue ignited in August when reports of the jailing of peasants and of forced sterilization and abortion surfaced in the city of Linyi, 60 miles northeast of here.

Chen Guangcheng, a prominent Linyi activist, told foreign reporters and diplomats that he planned to file a class-action lawsuit on behalf of peasants in the area who had been detained, beaten or forced to undergo medical procedures.

He described an aggressive campaign by local officials, including a single county in which 7,000 people were sterilized between March and July.

Authorities in Beijing responded by launching an investigation into the allegations "in a few localities" and vowing to remove local officials, according to a Sept. 19 statement by the National Population and Family Planning Commission. That announcement made no mention of extending the investigation to the city of Zaozhuang in this region of cornfields and small towns some 450 miles southeast of Beijing.

Beijing's pledge to investigate also has done little to protect Chen, the whistle-blower. After raising the issue, Chen, who has been blind since birth, was detained by Linyi officials and placed under house arrest. Telephone lines to his home have gone dead, and several dozen police officers are stationed along the main dirt road that runs through his village.

A Chicago Tribune reporter who approached Chen's stone courtyard home one day last week was barred from entering by 12 men in uniform and plainclothes and later was escorted out of town.

Lawyers involved in Chen's case said they believe local authorities are preparing to charge him with providing intelligence to foreigners, a crime that can bring a lengthy jail term.

Family planning officials in Beijing declined to comment further on Chen's case or conditions in Nigou.

But whether the central government is able or willing to rein in local authorities raises questions about more than family planning, China analysts said. The problems range from environmental pollution to corruption, they said.

"Here is a case of overzealous local officials trying to take an issue into their own hands," said Dali Yang, a China specialist at the University of Chicago. "The issue is to what extent can the central government address it."

The central family planning commission noted that it "has required staff members ... to learn lessons and draw inferences from this case." But asked if they had been informed of Chen's case or lessons drawn from it, officials in Nigou said they had heard nothing.

"We seriously enforce the law according to China's family planning regulations," said Jin Shouyong, Nigou's deputy director of family planning.

Wan Zhendong, head of the office's statistics department, said people who allege being detained are simply seeking to avoid paying fines for having too many children.

Wan said the policy is accepted by "99.9 percent of the people here."

If the detention center is meant to be a secret, it is not well kept. Peasants for miles around can provide the address, and the building sits on the town's main street, surrounded by a hair salon and fruit stands.

It is unclear how many, if any, involuntary abortions and sterilization are conducted in this town of 58,000 people. Wan, the statistics chief, and Wang, the doctor, independently said 20 sterilizations are performed each month at People's Hospital, though it's unclear if those are voluntary or coerced.

Wang said her department performs two regular abortions per day and three to four late-term abortions per month.

A 35-year-old peasant who asked to be identified only by his surname, Xu, said his wife is eight months pregnant and in hiding to avoid an involuntary abortion. He said local authorities detained his father at the site in downtown Nigou for four weeks this summer in an effort to force the daughter-in-law to return.

In the end, the family paid fines and fees of $617 - more than an average farmer makes in a year in this province - to secure his release, the son said.

Teng Biao, a Beijing-based scholar who visited Linyi in August to investigate the allegations, said descriptions of the detention center in Nigou appeared to fit the pattern of coercive practices in Linyi, though residents here have not banded together to bring light to the issue.

"Zaozhuang may have the same situation, but it is very hard for people there to get information to lawyers and the media," said Teng, a lecturer at the China University of Political Science and Law. "The local authorities will try their best to make sure nobody knows about it."

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