Harsh Birth Control Steps Fuel Violence in China

Source: NY Times.

By JOSEPH KAHN
Published: May 22, 2007.

BEIJING, May 21 — An intensive campaign to enforce strict population-control measures, including forced abortions, prompted violent clashes between the police and local residents in southwestern China in recent days, witnesses said Monday, describing the latest incident of rural unrest that has alarmed senior officials in Beijing.

Villagers and visitors to several counties of the Guangxi Autonomous Region in southwestern China said rioters smashed and burned government offices, overturned official vehicles, and clashed with the riot police officers in a series of confrontations over the past four days. They spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing retribution.

They gave varying accounts of injuries and deaths, with some asserting that as many as five people had been killed, including three officials responsible for population-control work. A local government official in one of the counties affected confirmed the rioting in a telephone interview but denied reports of deaths or serious injuries.

The violence seemed to stem from a two-month crackdown in Guangxi to punish people who violated the country’s policy that sets legal limits on the number of children families are allowed to have.

According to accounts posted on the Internet by villagers and witnesses, officials in several parts of Guangxi mobilized their largest effort in years to roll back population growth by requiring mandatory health checks for women and forcing pregnant women who lacked approval to give birth to undergo abortions.

Corruption, land grabs, pollution, unpaid wages and a widening wealth gap have fueled tens of thousands of incidents of unrest in recent years, many of them in rural areas that have been left behind in China’s long economic boom.

The central government, expressing concern that unrest could weaken one-party rule, has eased the tax burden on peasants and sought to curtail confiscations of farmland for development. But China’s hinterland remains volatile compared with the largest cities, which are relatively prosperous and stable.

Coercive measures, including forced abortions and sterilizations, were common in the 1980s, when the so-called one-child policy was first strictly enforced. More recently, many parts of China have been relying more on financial penalties and incentives to limit the growth of its population, which is 1.3 billion.

But local officials who fail to meet annual population control targets can still come under bureaucratic pressure to reduce births or face demotion or removal from office.

Several people said in the Internet accounts of the campaign in Guangxi that officials had issued fines starting at 500 yuan and ranging as high as 70,000 yuan, or $65 to $9,000, on families who had violated birth control measures at any time since 1980. The new tax, called a “social child-raising fee,” was collected even though most violators had already paid fines in the past, the people said.

According to an account on Longtan, a Web forum, officials in Bobai County in Guangxi boasted that they collected 7.8 million yuan in social child-raising fees from February through the end of April. Many families objected strongly to the fees and refused to pay.

Witnesses said that in such cases villagers were detained, their homes searched, and valuables, including electronic items and motorcycles, confiscated by the government.

“Worst of all, the gangsters used hammers and iron rods to destroy people’s homes, while threatening that the next time it would be with bulldozers,” said a peasant who identified himself as Nong Sheng and who faxed a letter complaining of the abuses to a reporter in Beijing.

Mr. Nong said the crackdown was widespread in several counties in Guangxi. He said local courts had declined to hear any cases brought by opponents of the policy, citing an edict from local officials.

Other villagers reached by phone described an escalating series of confrontations that began Thursday and continued through the weekend.

Several described in detail an assault on the government offices of Shapi Township, Bobai County, by thousands of peasants. They said villagers broke through a wall around the building, ransacked offices, smashed computers and destroyed documents, then set fire to the building. There were inconsistent reports of death and injuries during that clash and a later police crackdown.

Editor's Note: This was copied because most articles from the NY Times disappear. I cannot use them as a source if they are not available when people look for them.