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2 China's addiction
to birth planning By
Peter Lee
Recently, the sad case of Feng
Jianmei roiled public opinion, both inside and
outside China. Feng, a young woman living in a
rural corner of Shaanxi province in northwest
China, was bullied into aborting her pregnancy in
its seventh month. A family member took a terrible
picture of the mother lying in a hospital bed with
the stillborn fetus beside her and posted it on
the Internet. Global shock and revulsion ensued,
and the Chinese government dispatched municipal
officials to issue an apology to Feng.
This is business as usual for
the People's Republic of China's (PRC's)
controversial birth-planning system. The central government
fixes birth policy, the localities go too far
in enforcing it, abuses occur, are reported and
in some cases remedied. This is indeed how the
case of Chen Guangcheng, the blind activist
in Shandong, evolved. (His whistleblowing on
the issue of birth-planning abuses elicited a limited
positive response from the
center. When the local
government decided to go after him in revenge, it
trumped up public security charges that were
unrelated to birth planning.)
China is
the abortion capital of the world - although
what vociferous anti-abortion activists tend to
gloss over is the fact that the percentage and
absolute number of coerced abortions and sex
selection abortions driven by the one-child policy
have shrunk dramatically in recent years. Many if
not most abortions in contemporary China
are completely voluntary and sought outside the
birth-planning system by single young women with a weak
grasp of the mechanics of contraception and no
inclination to carry their babies to term.
But in China's countryside,
the traditional, toxic birth-planning dynamic
persists, abuses continue to occur, and China's
rural women, in particular, suffer physical and
psychological trauma on a massive scale.
The PRC government is addicted to
birth planning as an instrument of social policy
and social control. Local governments, in a time
of strained budgets, also appear to be addicted
to the generously funded birth-planning program as a
prop to their local finances and authority.
Birth planning is near the core of the
Chinese Communist Party's efforts to move beyond
the rhetoric of class struggle and the command
economy to social regulation based upon market
forces and the rule of law.
Deng
Xiaoping can be considered the father of China's
birth-planning policy. When he took over after the fall
of the Gang of Four in 1976, Deng wanted to make a
break with the confrontation and chaos of the
Cultural Revolution and liberalize economic life,
and at the same time buttress the party's shaky
authority by emphasizing its role as protector of
the national interest.
Birth policy proved
to be a useful tool. Infatuated with the
unleashing of productive energies by socialism,
Mao had rejected the Malthusian doctrine of
population catastrophe (that a geometrically
growing population will outrun an arithmetically
growing food supply); Deng Xiaoping embraced it.
His sober-minded economic team projected
the numbers, and anticipated that the steady,
incremental economic progress they hoped to
achieve would be eaten up by galloping population
growth.
China's population growth was
identified as a national crisis - a crisis,
moreover, that only the Chinese Communist Party,
with its unique ability to command and mobilize on
a national scale, was qualified to solve. That
population control also served as a repudiation of
unscientific, reckless Maoism was an important
side benefit.
The most infamous expression
of the program was the "one-child policy".
Implementation reached its climax in 1983 with a
coercive campaign that yielded all-time records of
17.76 million IUD insertions, 16.4 million tubal
ligations, 14.37 million abortions, and 4.36
million vasectomies (China's menfolk have
successfully resisted vasectomies for the toll it
reputedly takes on masculine vigor, despite the
well-documented and extensive physical and
psychological trauma that the more invasive
procedures inflict on women).
The campaign
generated numerous horrors that blackened the
reputation of the People's Republic of China and
shook the authority of the local governments
charged with enforcing the detested policy.
In response, the central government pulled
back, stepped up monitoring of abuses by adding an
element of popular supervision, and tweaked the
policy, but never abandoned it - even after some
combination of the program's effects, economic
development, and urbanization served to suppress
birth rates to an acceptable level (and, in
Shanghai, unacceptable levels far below the
replacement rate).
In 2003, demographers
were already suggesting that the official
limitation on births be relaxed to permit
two-child families. The government refused, and
instead embarked upon several initiatives to cope
with the undesirable side effects of the one-child
policy, most notably the massive trend toward
aborting female fetuses after Ultrasound B - which
enabled gender identification in the earlier
stages of pregnancy - became widely available in
the countryside.
In an era of economic
liberalization and massive movement of population
toward towns and cities, birth planning appears to
be one of the few tools available to the
government to justify and enable the supervision
and control of an increasingly independent rural
and floating population.
As the
Chinese social and political system evolves,
the government has worked to sustain the viability
of the rather anachronistic socialist experiment
in birth planning by marketization (offering
economic incentives to follow the plan),
legalization (creating a structure of laws at least
nominally derived from the governed instead of reliance
upon party commands) and, imported from the
West, "management by objective", an effort to
improve the performance and prevent abuses by the
birth-planning bureaucracy by moving beyond quotas to a
dynamic system of checks and balances.
The
facts of Feng Jianmei's sad case provide an
insight into how the system is working … and not
working.
In keeping with the
birth-planning system's enforcement model of permitting
some down-up reporting of abuses to keep public
dissatisfaction with the unpopular and extremely
intrusive regime within bounds, local Chinese
media exhaustively reported the Feng case after
the photos hit the Internet.
In particular, an eight-page report posted on
the media outlet Chinanet attributed to
reporters Jiang Yue and Lei Ying drew on
extensive interviews with Feng, her family, and friends
to paint a detailed report of the birth-planning
system and life in rural China today. [1]
The report revealed that Feng and
her husband, Deng Jiyuan, had acted on the
assumption that they would have their second child
without processing a birth permit, then pay a fine
and square things away after the fact. This is
how they had their first child, a daughter.
Even though the gap between pregnancies met
the official target of a five-year span, they
couldn't process a birth permit since Feng was an
outsider, from northeast China, and her residence permit
had not been transferred to her current village
of residence in Shaanxi, Zeng Jia Township
for inclusion in the local birth-planning regime. This
situation was common in the village, according to
Deng. It was a poor town and most of the girls
married out; the local men found brides elsewhere,
brought them home without transferring residency
and, when they had children, paid the fine
retroactively.
The birth-planning
office had known of Feng's pregnancy in March two
months before. Apparently, the township planning
office's lack of activity convinced Deng and Feng
that there would be no problem dodging the system
and having the baby. However, the
desultory performance of the township birth-planning office
had also attracted the unfavorable attention of
the higher-ups in the county government.
Zeng Jia Township's birth-planning
work had been "slipping" for two years;
sampling revealed that "on spec" performance was less
than 95%. As a result, the township had been issued
a "yellow card", warning. Anxious to remove
the yellow card, the township cadres decided
to intensify their birth-planning work. Fatefully,
the heightened push was scheduled for June.
Oblivious, Deng left to work at a mine
in Inner Mongolia on May 30. His five siblings
were also out of town, leaving his father the
only close relative on the scene. On the same day,
the birth-planning van pulled up in front of Feng's
apartment and cadres began the long, slow-motion
process of coercing Feng into going to the
hospital to have labor induced.
Feng
claimed her stomach hurt, and the cadres did not
force the issue. Then, after a few hours at home,
she told them she was going out to buy some food.
Instead, she walked down the street, trailed by 15
or so people, and slipped into an aunt's house.
The cadres tracked her down but did not make a
move to seize her. Instead, they occupied the
living room of the house, rotating six people in
for four-hour shifts while she stayed in a back
room.
In the middle of the night, her uncle found
out that eight or nine heavy stones had been piled
against his back door, presumably to prevent Feng
from sneaking out that way. The next morning she
went to the kitchen for breakfast - and
disappeared, sparking a frantic hubbub as the
minders, who spent their shifts drinking, smoking,
and playing cards, tumbled out into the street
looking for her.
It turned out that Feng -
"champion in the 100-yard dash at her middle
school" - had dashed out of the house and flagged
down a mini-van, begging for a ride "because
there's some people chasing me". The driver
wordlessly let her get in and dropped her off
further down the road. She hid in some hillside
brush for 14 cold, miserable, and rainy hours, and
then made her way to another relative's house in
the country.
This picture of abject misery
is somewhat relieved by the fact that Feng had a
cellphone and was able to keep in contact with her
family to discuss strategy and arrange refuge
during her 70 hours on the run.
Somehow,
she was soon found hiding under a bed by a group
of searchers, who let her get a night's sleep
before bundling her into a van on the morning of
June 2. She did not go willingly or quietly,
according to several witnesses. She was carried
out of the house and into the van by four men,
with her face covered by a piece of clothing, and
transported to the grim confines of the Zhen Ping
county hospital and isolated from her
father-in-law, the only close family member at
hand.
Feng told reporters that, inside the
hospital, she was restrained by two men, one of
whom forcibly applied her fingerprint to a consent
form, and another made her sign a document:
They forcibly applied my fingerprint
to the consent form. I was unwilling. They used
a pillowcase to cover my head. There were two
men, one grabbed by left side, the other my
right, they forced me to sign my name with my
right hand, and they forcibly applied the
fingerprint with my other hand. The fingerprint
on the document is a
mess.
Subsequently, she was wheeled
into the operating room and was injected with a
drug to induce labor.
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