Riots expose underside of China's population control

By Robert J. Saiget | AFP | Middle East Times
27 May 2007

Riots over China's controversial family planning policies have exposed an underside of criminal activities linked to how the radical population control strategy is implemented.

Baby trafficking in particular has emerged as a lucrative new business for those willing to exploit the profits that can be made in the southern region whose people are often desperately poor.

Nicholas Becquelin, the Hong Kong-based research director of Human Rights Watch, said the one-child policy was a key factor.

Under that policy, aimed at controlling the world's largest population of 1.3 billion, people who live in urban areas are generally allowed one child, while rural families can have two if the first is a girl.

But most couples want a boy to carry on the family line, and if successful the first time have no more children, while others use sex-selective abortions to get rid of unwanted daughters.

It has led to China now having nearly 40 million more men than women since it was introduced in the late 1970s.

Becquelin said the family planning restriction "is one of the main factors in trafficking because the gender imbalance at birth has led to a shortage of women."

In July 2004, 54 people from Yulin city in Guangxi region were convicted of trafficking 117 girls between 2001 and 2003.

The case broke when police found 28 drugged and tied-up baby girls - none over three months old - in bags on board a bus bound for northern cities.

Two people from Yulin were sentenced to death over that case and more than 100 outside Guangxi were convicted, of whom at least one was executed, state press reports at the time said.

Hospitals, medical clinics, doctors, and nurses were all implicated.

Yulin's administration covers Bobai county, where at least seven townships erupted in riots in the last 10 days after heavy-handed government efforts to implement the one-child policy, locals and state press said.

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