Congress ignores population police in China: Help!

A few days ago in southern China, rural villagers banded together and decided to fight back against their country's coercive population policy.

When Chinese population police showed up at their door, armed with sledge hammers and cattle prods, many families with more than one child refused to pay their "social child-raising fee." In response, the population police forcibly took their property and destroyed their homes with sledge hammers.

Please contact Congress about this human rights outrage! [The toll free number is 1-866-340-9281.]

Some poor families would have paid the excessive tax, but they simply couldn't afford it. The population police didn't care. One poor farmer saw his home bulldozed before his very eyes after he told officials he couldn't afford to pay the fines. When he went to a local government office to protest, he returned with broken fingers. His neighbors were outraged. And they fought back.

This recent event was just one of many in a long campaign by the Chinese population police to enforce their so-called "voluntary" one-child policy. Unfortunately, after last week, the villagers couldn't take it anymore.

In recent months, women faced mandatory health checks and forced abortions at the hands of government officials. Poor families faced exhorbitant fines that they simply could not afford.

It breaks my heart to learn that these families were compelled to resort to violence just to defend their livelihood from the violent population police. The Chinese government likes to claim their population policies are "voluntary." The broken homes and broken bones of these villagers tell a very different story.

Coercive Population Police attacks just like these are exactly why the U.S. Government doesn't send your taxpayer dollars to the United Nations Office for Population Assistance, or the UNFPA. After Congress and the State Department found the UNFPA working hand in hand with China's Population Police to implement the coercive one-child policy, funds were cut off.

But the new abortion Congress thinks human rights abuses like these are OK. And they are calling for renewed funding of the UNFPA.

Please contact Congress today and tell them you don't want your money supporting organizations that help Chinese officials violate human rights!

Please do not let these abuses fall beneath the radar. Tell Congress today that U.S. taxpayers will not stand for these types of abuse!

Please use our new "Forward to a Friend" link below to share this important message with ten people who share your commitment to women and the unborn around the world.

For Life,







Marjorie Dannenfelser
President
Susan B. Anthony List
www.sba-list.org.

Villagers riot as China enforces birth limit

Source: Guardian Unlimited.

Officials beaten by crowd in south-western province
Large fines and seizing of property spark violence

Jonathan Watts in Beijing
Tuesday May 22, 2007
The Guardian.

Thousands of villagers in south-west China have attacked family planning officials, overturned cars and set fire to government buildings in a riot sparked by the state's one-child policy.

Riot police have been sent to at least four townships in the Guangxi autonomous region after disturbances that led to multiple injuries and unconfirmed reports of two fatalities, witnesses and Hong Kong media reported yesterday.

The unrest comes in the wake of a new crackdown by the Bobai county government against families that break birth control regulations. Financial penalties have increased and parents who fail to pay are being punished by having their property confiscated or destroyed.

At the height of the demonstrations on Saturday, a crowd of several thousand stormed the Shapi municipal office, pulled down a wall and chased and beat officials from the family planning department. This followed demonstrations in towns across Bobai county.

Under state policies dating back to the late 1970s, most urban couples can only have one child. Families from rural areas and ethnic minorities can often have two children, especially if the first is a girl. The aim of the policy is to slow the growth of the world's biggest population, which is seen as a drain on resources.

In Bobai, the rules were weakly enforced for many years, but this spring the local government established "family planning work squads" to collect penalties retrospectively.

A student who gave only his surname, Zhou, told the Guardian his family were fined 2,000 yuan (£132) because they had three sons in the 1980s. His uncle, who has five children, was fined 20,000 yuan. "He only earns 1,200 yuan per month ... But if you cannot pay, the officials come to your home and confiscate the contents. If you refuse, then smash, smash, smash."

On internet chatrooms and in telephone conversations, locals said the work teams had confiscated cattle, DVD players, crockery and other household goods in lieu of unpaid fines.

Officials from other government departments were mobilised for the campaign. One woman, Mrs Luo, said she was recruited to make up the numbers of the "work squads". "Usually we went to a house and asked them to pay the fine," she said. "If no one answered, some men in our group used hammers to break in and take away property. If there was not enough to confiscate, they smashed the walls. Before we used to force women to have abortions but now the target seems to have changed to raising money. I hate this job, but I have no choice."

Another local man, Mr Lu of Yulin village, said the riot started after the work teams bulldozed the house of a poor farmer who could not afford the fine. The farmer reportedly went to the municipal office to protest and returned with broken fingers, stirring up anger in his community.

Local governments and police refused to comment. The state-run media has been forbidden to report the incident.

A doctor at the Shabei hospital told Reuters that several injured people had been treated there. Online photographs of protests showed smashed cars, burning buildings and a rioter stealing a computer monitor. There were also images of work squads in army fatigues carrying sledgehammers.

The one-child policy has become a symbol of the wealth gap in China. Earlier this month, government officials admitted that many rich families violated the rules because they could afford the fines.

Inequality, land grabs and pollution fears have prompted a wave of unrest. According to the ministry of public security, there were 87,000 "mass incidents" reported in 2005, up 6.6% on 2004 and 50% on 2003.

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.