The Price of Life in China
16 July 2012
How much is a life worth? In Ankang City, in central Shaanxi Province, the answer is 40,000 yuan, or about $6,300. That’s the amount Feng Jianmei did not have when population control officials demanded the amount as a fine for a second birth. As a result, no fewer than 20 officials went looking for the 22-year-old woman. When they found her, they forced her into a car. When she resisted, they beat her. Then, they detained her for three days.
On June 2nd, officials forced Feng to undergo an abortion.
Afterwards, they laid the blood-soaked, seven-month-old fetus next to
her on her bed. A photo of the mother with her dead child circulated
online, causing national outrage. “This is what they say the Japanese
devils and Nazis did,” a comment on the website netease.com said.
Eventually, family planning officials paid Feng 70,600 yuan to settle the matter. Deng Jiyuan said he and his wife still want another child.
In Changsha, in Hunan, the price of a life is $24,000. Cao Ruyi, five months pregnant, didn’t have that much. She was lucky. After being detained, Cao was released because US Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey intervened on her behalf. She was allowed to leave the hospital after signing an agreement to abort her child. She is now in hiding until her baby is born.
There are countless Fengs and Caos across China. Reggie Littlejohn, the founder of San Jose–based Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, told the story of some of them to the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs last week. As she noted in prepared testimony, “Whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, no one supports forced abortion, because it is not a choice.”
And no one—at least outside the Chinese government—supports murder. In Linyi, in Shandong Province, in March, a full-term fetus was ripped from the mother. It cried at birth, but officials drowned the infant in a bucket of water. Population control officials, enforcing the one-child policy, have been involved in the killing of infants, according to reports.
Some argue the solution to these horrific abuses is a two-child policy. Littlejohn disagrees. “The central issue,” her prepared testimony states, “is not whether the government allows couples to have one or two children. Rather it is the coercion with which this limit is enforced.”
As she says, the one-child policy is now all about controlling the Chinese people. The population of China will level off soon, perhaps by 2020. A country that once had one of the most dynamic demographic profiles in the world will soon have one of the worst. Estimates put China’s total fertility rate—the average number of children born per woman—as low as 1.2, when 2.1 is needed to keep the size of a population stable. China is facing a demographic catastrophe, yet Beijing retains its one-child policy long after it is no longer needed and when it has even become disadvantageous.
In reality, the Communist Party keeps the policy in place because it is clinging to political power in a volatile society. And as a result, local officials commit murder from one end of China to another.
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