WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! Anger sweeps China over baby-killers By Damien McElroy State Family Planning Commission of China [in English] Family planning in China - OneWorld [information provided by Chinese Embassy in the UK] Human rights in China - US State Department Inside China Today IN Caidian, a township in central China, the killing of a newborn baby boy by local officials claiming to be upholding population policies has prompted national revulsion and a murder inquiry. "Family Planning Is Everybody's Responsibility" declares one of the many slogans daubed on the walls of Caidian township, where an official investigation has been launched into the murder of a newborn baby by a group of government officials. The slogans, painted in red characters by family planning officials, stress how girls and boys must be loved equally, how having fewer children results in better children, and how smaller families lead to prosperity. What the high-minded slogans do not say, but what the residents of Caidian know only too well, is that China's population-control policies allow petty bureaucrats across the country a free hand to ruin people's lives as they extort bribes and gifts and dispense life-or-death decisions. Following the wave of anger that swept through the central Chinese town at the news of the child's drowning - soon after family planning officials had induced the pregnancy of his mentally sub-normal mother - a sullen resentment has set in among residents. They fear retribution from local Communist Party officials if they speak out. As a result, few people in Caidian, in Hubei province, 800 miles south of Beijing, were willing to talk openly about the murder, which happened over a week ago, or to express their feelings about the officials who were responsible. Employees of the local authority made clear that outside inquiries were not welcome. Desperate to cover up what they had done, family planning officials attempted to deny that the incident had taken place, even though it had been reported in a state newspaper. One local woman said no one wanted to be seen talking to journalists - especially foreign journalists - about the incident. She said: "This is a question of human rights. Only the local government can take these questions." While local officials have been able to cow the residents of Caidian into silence, they have not been able to suppress reaction on the internet, where reports of the murder have caused outrage. Many Chinese users of one electronic chatroom said the officials were no better than the Japanese troops who bayoneted Chinese babies as they marched through the Yangtze delta in the Thirties. There is widespread revulsion over the officials' actions. First, they injected the mother - who already had three children - with a saline solution as her pregnancy neared full term. This is a standard procedure in China intended to produce a stillbirth. The child somehow survived, and the officials then ordered his father to dispose of his second son. The man, Huang Qiusheng, a poor labourer, dumped the baby in a lavatory behind the Caidian government finance bureau. His cries attracted the attention of a retired woman doctor, Liu Juyu, who took him to a local clinic. There the child was treated just like any other newborn infant. Word leaked back to the local family planning committee that the child was still alive, infuriating the officials. When Dr Liu returned home from the clinic with the baby, she found five of them waiting on her doorstep, demanding that she hand over the boy. After a tussle, in which the baby was dropped, the officials wrested the child from Dr Liu's arms and, in full view of local people, proceeded to drown him in a nearby rice field. The elderly doctor was devastated. "How could they be so cruel?" she said. "Yes, the child was born outside the family planning system, but it could have been looked after in a children's welfare home. How could they do it?" A week after the event, Dr Liu was still too traumatised to talk in detail about the killing. As she sat in front of her daughter's small shop, she said the incident had made her ill. "I've lost weight with the worry. My blood pressure is very high. I can't talk about this again." The victim did not live long enough to be given a name. Neighbours said his parents relied on hand-me-downs from their friends to clothe their children, and often went hungry. The couple had already earned official displeasure by having two girls and a boy. Unlike many of his neighbours, Mr Huang was unable to pay the fines that family planning officials levy on couples with more than one child. Although it is a rural town set among fields full of ripening wheat and rice, Caidian is officially part of Wuhan city and, as such, is supposed to be included in China's one-child-per-family policy. However, local family planning officials have not followed Beijing's guidelines for years. Like many bureaucrats in poor townships, they used the regulations to extract bribes and fines from the local population. While the one-child policy has been relaxed in some areas and has become increasingly ineffective in limiting the Chinese population, the 200,000 family planning officials in China still exercise enormous power over the lives of couples of child-bearing age. Even in cities, where abuses are less common, every woman is subjected to humiliating intrusions from officials, who have even been known to keep a tally of individual use of sanitary towels. A national family planning budget of less than £300 million means that many local offices rely on fines to carry out their work. Couples can be charged more than a year's wages for a birth permit to register additional children, while millions of fathers are coerced into sterilisation with the threat of heavy fines if they refuse. There are so many corrupt and devious family planning officials that China's efforts to control its population have been seriously undermined. Even official government studies have cast doubt on claims that the birth rate has fallen to a level that will produce a peak population of 1.5 billion in 2050 - from less than 1.3 billion today - and a sharp drop after that. One official magazine, Population Science of China, has predicted a rise to 1.8 billion over the next 50 years. While the government says its policies have spared the country the burden of an extra 300 million mouths to feed, the nation's population has doubled in the 20 years since the one-child rules were promulgated. *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for nonprofit research and educational purposes only.[Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ] Want to be on our lists? Write at [EMAIL PROTECTED] for a menu of our lists! ****************************************************************************** ******************* A vote for Bush or Gore is a vote to continue Clinton policies! A vote for Buchanan is a vote to continue America! Therefore a vote for Gore or Bush is a wasted vote for America! Don't waste your vote! Vote for Patrick Buchanan! Today, candor compels us to admit that our vaunted two-party system is a snare and a delusion, a fraud upon the nation. Our two parties have become nothing but two wings of the same bird of prey... 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