China has recently announced its family planning policies are here to stay. This report from RFA’s Mandarin service finds out about the situation in Linyi city and Yinan county in the eastern province of Shandong, three years after civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng made his first blistering expose of human rights abuses under the one-child policy:
Chen Guangcheng was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment in August 2006 for “damaging property and organizing a mob to disturb traffic.”
His writings, which blew the whistle on the use of forced abortions and other abuses in Linyi city and his home county of Yinan, were widely distributed on the Internet and read by many in China. His wife, Yuan Weijing, told RFA reporter Wen Jian:
It is just the same as it always was here. If you are pregnant without permission, it doesn’t matter how many months gone you are; they will keep an eye on the pregnancy and then they will arrest you and drag you off for an abortion. If you run away, they will detain a member of your family and smash up your home. People here are terribly fearful these days…
…I really couldn’t tell you the real reason for this. To be honest with you, things got a whole lot more relaxed in 2005 after Cheng Guangcheng exposed these practices, and pretty much nobody was getting beaten up at that time. The really nasty practices lingered on in some places, however. But this year it has all started up again.
Huang Qi, online civil rights campaigner and cyber-activist, commented:
Because family planning policies are decided at national level, this has become a national-level issue. This means that whatever methods you use [to reach your targets] you are not going to come in for criticism from your superiors in the government. In fact, they might even see at as a show of strong leadership on the part of local officials. Because if the leaders don’t meet their family planning targets then they will be held responsible and can even lose their jobs. Under the one-vote veto system, it is quite possible for a leader to lose their job because they didn’t get the family planning policies right. So leaders at every level of government are racking their brains to think of any way they can to solve the problem of exceeding birth quotas.
More on Chen’s story here.
Filed under: 2008_olympics, China, East Asia, china_civil_rights, china_civilrights, china_health, china_rights, east_asia, governance, human_rights, shandong, women | Tagged: chen_guangcheng, china_population, china_rights, linyi, one_child_policy, shandong, yinan, yuan_weijing
