Breaking China's One-Child Law
During lunchtime one day last April, Wei Laojin, 35, was cooking spicy pork for her two young sons at home in southern China when she got a frantic call from her husband. His brother had been arrested, he said. A dozen Chinese officials had beaten down the man's door and dragged him away. "What has he done wrong?" Wei asked in alarm. "Nothing," her husband replied. "He has been jailed because he is related to us."
Wei, a bird-thin woman with bobbed hair, let lunch burn on the stove as she heard more. "My husband said we had broken the law by having two children. The authorities were imprisoning his brother until we were punished," she says. "As soon as I learned it was about birth control, I began to cry and shake." Family-planning officials in the southern county of Puning, in Guangdong province, were going to shocking new extremes to catch and punish violators of the country's infamous one-child policy: They were seizing family members of women who had given birth illegally and were holding them hostage. The aim? To coerce the women into submitting to sterilization. Says Wei, "The officials said there was only one way to get my brother-in-law released: I had to undergo forced sterilization."
According to state-owned media—which proudly reported the news on local channels—a task force of more than 600 officials was deployed to storm homes across 28 Puning townships and seize family members of women who had broken the law. They took grandparents, siblings, teenagers, even infants. The relatives were to be jailed indefinitely until the targeted women showed up at government clinics to undergo "remedial surgery," or sterilization.
The campaign was unprecedented in recent Chinese history. According to He Yafu, one of China's leading independent experts on family planning, there had been occasional reports of relatives being detained in the past, and forced sterilization has been an abuse associated with the one-child policy since it was introduced in 1978, but this was a crackdown on an unusually large and draconian scale.
Certainly, the campaign came out of the blue for most Puning inhabitants. Family planning in the region had grown lax because the local population had been consumed with breakneck economic development. Guangdong province is the most successful manufacturing region in mainland China, with a per capita income of $5,965—almost twice the national average. A snaking backdrop of lush green mountains is rapidly being devoured by urban sprawl, and the air is clogged with construction dust. "People in the south are different. They feel that laws in the rest of the country don't apply to them," says Chinese economist Dean Peng. "It seems that many people here believed they could have a large family without serious repercussions."
Wei, a seamstress, was well aware she had breached the one-child policy by having two sons, Xiaojie, now age 6, and Xiaoming, age 4. (In deference to China's ingrained preference for sons, the government sometimes allows couples to have a second child, but only if the firstborn is a girl.) As punishment, the authorities refused to officially register the younger boy, who is mildly disabled, thereby denying him access to state health care and education. The family was also ordered to pay a fine of 5,000 yuan ($750), amounting to a third of their annual income (the heaviest fines for birth-policy violators are up to six times a couple's annual income). Wei knew there would be consequences to having two kids, but says, "Children mean happiness to people here. The bigger your family, the greater your joy. It's as simple as that."
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