Angry rural villagers in south-western China engaged in protests as they become the target of the recently renewed efforts to implement the country’s one-child family planning policy. Forced abortions, sterilisation, and immoderate fines imposed on violators sparked fury among the local residents.

Thousands of villagers in south-western China have launched protests in reaction to recent efforts of local officials to implement the one-child policy. According to reports, officials in the Guangxi autonomous region have instituted mandatory health checks, forced abortions, and fines ranging from $65 to $9,000 for families that have violated the policy.

Forcing women to undergo abortions against their will is against Chinese national law. Despite this, dozens of women in southwest China recently have been allegedly forced to undergo abortions as late as nine months into their pregnancies.  As many as 61 pregnant women were supposedly injected with an abortive drug after being dragged to local hospitals, according to reports. Officials even detained pregnant women who had not been approved to give birth, locals said, while both men and women of child-bearing age were forcefully sterilised if they had broken the law.

“They do not know how to handle the family planning policy, they never have, so now they are resorting to cruel and inhumane methods,” said a woman surnamed Yuan in Shapi township where one of the earliest riots took place on May 19.

Nicolas Becquelin of the New York-based Human Rights in China, an international NGO with a mission to advance the institutional protection of human rights in China, said that “It is [the] pressure from above to comply with population quotas that prompts local officials to adopt measures such as forced abortion, forced sterilisation, and the like. The occurrence of these cases is largely confined to poor or ethnic areas of China.” It is in these areas the central government seems to fear that non-enforcement of family planning policy would mean an immediate population explosion.

“The fine is too heavy because the annual income of the villagers was only 1,000 yuan (about $130). It is too much for people to bear,” said Lu Wenhua, a town resident. According to media accounts, all local officials had been ordered to collect $65 from people who violated the family planning policy and if violators failed to pay within three days, their homes would be demolished and their belongings seized.

Implemented in the late 1970s, China’s one-child policy limits most urban couples to one child and couples in some rural areas to two children in an attempt to control population growth and conserve natural resources. A second child is only allowed in cases where the first child is a girl. China’s one-child-per-family policy seeks to keep the country’s population, now 1.3 billion, from exceeding 1.7 billion by 2050 as projected.

According to critics, China’s family planning policy has led to forced abortions, sterilisations, and a dangerously imbalanced sex ratio due to a traditional preference for male heirs, which has prompted families to abort female foetuses in hopes of getting boys.

Sources:
“Farmers riot against Chinese government” from Associated Press, posted on May 21, 2007, <http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2007/05/21/farmers_riot_against_chinese_government/>.
“'One child' policy profiteering sparked south China riots” from Yahoo News, posted on May 28, 2007,  <http://sg.news.yahoo.com/070528/1/48uw5.html>.
“Renewed Efforts to Implement One-Child Policy Spark Protests in Rural China” from the Feminist Majority Foundation, posted on May 21, 2007, <http://www.feminist.org/news/newsbyte/uswirestory.asp?id=10322>.
“Why Forced Abortions Persist in China” from Time Magazine, posted on April 30, 2007, <http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1615936,00.html>.