Chen Guangcheng Still Detained Over China's Forced Sterilization Programs

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Chinese peasants jailed to enforce 1-child rule
Chicago Tribune | October 10, 2005
BY EVAN OSNOS
[img]http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2005/08/26/PH2005082602079.jpg[/img]
NIGOU, China - (KRT) - 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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