Who Controls the Family?

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[img]http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2005/09/06/PH2005090601641.jpg[/img]
Chen Guangcheng, a blind farmer shown last month speaking with women in
Linyi, China, was seized in Beijing in an apparent effort to block him from
meeting with senior government officials who had expressed support for his
cause.

Photo Credit: By Philip P. Pan -- The Washington Post
Related Article: Rural Activist Seized in Beijing, page A22

Who Controls the Family?
Blind Activist Leads Peasants in Legal Challenge To Abuses of China's
Population-Growth Policy

By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, August 27, 2005; Page A01

LINYI, China -- A crowd of disheveled villagers was waiting when Chen
Guangcheng stepped out of the car. More women than men among them, a mix of
desperation and hope on their faces, they ushered him along a dirt path and
into a nearby house. Then, one after another, they told him about the city's
campaign against "unplanned births."

Since March, the farmers said, local authorities had been raiding the homes
of families with two children and demanding at least one parent be
sterilized. Women pregnant with a third child were forced to have abortions.
And if people tried to hide, the officials jailed their relatives and
neighbors, beating them and holding them hostage until the fugitives turned
themselves in.

Chen, 34, a slender man wearing dark sunglasses, held out a digital voice
recorder and listened intently. Blind since birth, he couldn't see the tears
of the women forced to terminate pregnancies seven or eight months along, or
the blank stares of the men who said they submitted to vasectomies to save
family members from torture. But he could hear the pain and anger in their
voices and said he was determined to do something about it.

For weeks, Chen has been collecting testimony about the population-control
abuses in this city of 10 million, located about 400 miles southeast of
Beijing, beginning in his own village in the rural suburbs, then traveling
from one community to the next. Now he is preparing an unlikely challenge to
the crackdown: a class-action lawsuit.

"What these officials are doing is completely illegal," Chen said. "They've
committed widespread violations of citizens' basic rights, and they should
be held responsible."

It might appear a quixotic crusade -- a blind peasant with limited legal
training taking on the Communist Party's one-child policy, which has long
been considered a pillar of the nation's economic development strategy and
off-limits to public debate. But the Linyi case marks a legal milestone in
challenging the coercive measures used for decades to limit population
growth in China.

While there have been scattered cases of individuals suing family planning
officials, legal scholars say the Linyi farmers appear to be the first to
band together and challenge the state's power to compel people to undergo
sterilization or abort a pregnancy since the enactment of a 2002 law
guaranteeing citizens an "informed choice" in such matters.

"The population and family planning law affects everyone's individual
rights, so a case like this is an important test," said Zhan Zhongle, a law
professor at Beijing University who helped draft the legislation. "By suing
the government, the Linyi peasants are merely asserting their legal rights.
Whether the courts accept the case, and how they handle it, will be a test
of China's justice system and of whether China can govern according to law."

Forced abortions and compulsory sterilization, though never openly endorsed
by the government, have been an element of China's family planning practices
since at least 1980, when the national population topped 1 billion and the
party concluded that unchecked growth could undermine economic development
and launched the one-child policy. But resistance has always been
widespread, especially in the countryside, where farmers depend on children
to help in the fields and support them in their old age.

As rural anger mounted and international criticism of such practices grew,
the party began experimenting in the mid-1990s with less coercive methods,
expanding health services for women, providing more information about
contraception and implementing regulations barring involuntary sterilization
and abortion. The government adopted the law granting citizens the right to
make an "informed choice" in family planning, and in recent years it has
moved toward a system of economic rewards for couples with only one child
and fines or fees for those with more.

But many local officials continue to rely on forced abortion and
sterilization, in part because the ability to limit population growth
remains a top consideration in party deliberations about promotions and
raises. In much of China, an official who misses a population target, even
if he or she excels in other fields, is dismissed, according to researchers
and family planning officials.

In Linyi, residents said local officials ordered couples to come in for
sterilization even if they had been given permission to have a second child.
Women with intrauterine birth-control devices were not exempt.

Du Dehong, 33, a corn farmer in Yinghu village, said seven officials showed
up at her home on the night of May 9, pushed her into a small white van and
took her to the county family planning station. They ordered her to fill out
a form, and when she refused, one of the men grabbed her hand and forced her
to leave a fingerprint.

"He said, 'Even if you stay here and resist for three days, we're going to
operate on you eventually,' " Du recalled. She said she relented, and the
operation took just 10 minutes.

A few days later, she and her husband sought out Chen. Over the years, their
blind neighbor had earned a reputation as someone who understood the law --
and would stand up to the government.

In 1996, he had traveled to Beijing with a complaint about his family's
taxes. He won a refund and admission to a university to study acupuncture
and massage, the only higher education courses available to the blind in
China. He took law classes on the side, and then began campaigning for the
rights of the disabled and farmers.

When neighbors told him about the family planning abuses, he proposed a
lawsuit. Word spread quickly, and Chen emerged as the leader of the battle
against the forced abortion and sterilization campaign.

On a recent visit to Maxiagou village, in another rural part of Linyi, he
interviewed Feng Zhongxia, 36. She recounted that she was seven months
pregnant and on the run when she learned that local officials had detained
more than a dozen of her relatives and wouldn't release them unless she
returned for an abortion.

"My aunts, uncles, cousins, my pregnant younger sister, my in-laws, they
were all taken to the family planning office," she said. "Many of them
didn't get food or water, and all of them were severely beaten." Some of the
relatives were allowed to call her, and they pleaded with her to come home.

Feng called the family planning officials. "They told me they would peel the
skin off my relatives and I would only see their corpses if I didn't come
back," she said. The next day, she turned herself in. A doctor examined her,
then stuck a needle into her uterus. About 24 hours later, she delivered the
dead fetus. "It was a small life," she said quietly.

Afterward, she said, the family planning workers insisted on sterilizing
her, too. "I'm a human being. How can they treat me like that?" she asked.

Chen sat listening to and recording the peasants' stories for several hours.
Some described midnight raids on their homes involving as many as 30
officials and hired thugs. Others recalled being held in rooms crowded with
more than 50 other villagers, including children, adding that the officials
charged them exorbitant fees for food and "study sessions" when they were
released.

The last to speak was Mei Shouqin, 42, who can no longer walk up a flight of
stairs because of a botched tubal ligation. When the doctor explained what
had gone wrong, he didn't apologize, she recalled. He just said she needed
to return in a month so he could try again.

Liu Chuanyu, a Linyi family planning official reached by phone, denied
knowledge of the abuses. "All of our work is done according to national
policy and the demands of upper-level officials," he said. Other local
family planning officials reached by phone declined to give their names and
also denied any wrongdoing.

But Yu Xuejin, a senior official with the national family planning
commission in Beijing, said his office had received complaints about abuses
in Linyi and asked provincial authorities to investigate. He said the
practices described by the farmers, including forced sterilization and
abortion, were "definitely illegal."

Yu emphasized that the central government had led the nation toward more
humane family planning practices over the past decade. "If the Linyi
complaints are true, or even partly true, it's because local officials do
not understand the new demands of the Chinese leadership regarding family
planning work," he said.

Yu also applauded the farmers for asserting their rights. If officials in
Linyi violated the law, he said, "I support the ordinary people. If they
need help, we'll help them find lawyers."

But back in Linyi, Chen said progress had been slow. State media have been
afraid to report on the crackdown, and without the publicity, he has been
unable to raise funds.

At the same time, he said, local officials have visited him three times and
urged him to persuade the farmers to drop the lawsuit. He said one warned
him that "offending the government isn't good," and said if any officials
were fired because of his lawsuit, "they might try to take revenge."

But Chen said he wasn't backing down. "If you've violated the law, you must
take responsibility," he said. "If we withdraw the lawsuit, then they'll
just violate the law again next time."

[img]http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2005/08/26/PH2005082602081.jpg[/img]
Chen Guangcheng, who has organized a class-action lawsuit against forced
abortion and sterilization in China, listens as women describe their
experiences.

Photo Credit: By Philip P. Pan -- The Washington Post
Related Article: Who Controls the Family?, page A01

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Rural Activist Seized in Beijing
The detention of Chen Guangcheng, 34, a blind peasant who has been preparing
a class-action lawsuit to challenge population-control abuses in the eastern
...

Who Controls the Family?
LINYI, China -- A crowd of disheveled villagers was waiting when Chen
Guangcheng stepped out of the car. More women than men among them, ...

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