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BIRTH CONTROL IN CHINA
Riots greet pressure to limit population
Tuesday,  May 22, 2007 4:40 AM
THE NEW YORK TIMES
BEIJING -- An intensive campaign to enforce strict population-control measures led to violent clashes between the police and residents in southwestern China in recent days, witnesses said. The rural unrest has alarmed senior officials in Beijing.

Villagers and visitors to several counties of the Guangxi autonomous region in southwestern China said rioters smashed and burned government offices, overturned official vehicles, and clashed with the riot police in a series of confrontations over the past four days.

They gave varying accounts of injuries and deaths, with some asserting that as many as five people were killed, including three officials responsible for population-control work. A local government official in one of the counties affected confirmed the rioting in an interview by telephone but denied reports of deaths or serious injuries.

The violence appeared to stem from a 2-month-long crackdown in Guangxi to punish people who violated the country's birth-control policy, which limits the number of children families can have.

Corruption, land grabs, pollution, unpaid wages and a widening wealth gap have fueled tens of thousands of incidents of unrest in recent years, many of them occurring in rural areas that have been left behind in China's long economic boom.

The central government, expressing concern that unrest could undermine one-party rule, has eased the tax burden on peasants and curtailed confiscation of farmland for development. But China's hinterland remains volatile compared with the relative prosperity and stability of its largest cities.

To limit the growth of its population of 1.3 billion, many parts of China rely more on financial penalties and incentives than on coercive measures, including forced abortions and sterilizations, that were common in the 1980s, when the so-called one-child policy was first strictly enforced.

According to villagers and witness accounts posted on the Internet, officials in several parts of Guangxi mobilized their largest effort in years to roll back population growth by instituting mandatory health checks for women and forcing pregnant women who did not have approval to give birth to abort fetuses.

Several people said officials also slapped fines of from 500 yuan to as high as 70,000 yuan, or $65 to $9,000, on families that had violated birth-control measures anytime since 1980. The new tax, called a "social child-raising fee," was collected even though the vast majority of violators had already paid fines in the past, the people said.

Many families objected strongly and refused to pay.

Witnesses said that in such cases villagers were detained, their homes searched, and valuables, including electronic items and motorcycles, confiscated by the government.

Other villagers reached by phone described an escalating series of confrontations that began Thursday and continued through the weekend.

Several described an assault on the government offices of Shapi Township, Bobai County, by thousands of peasants.

They said villagers broke through a wall surrounding the government building, ransacked the offices, smashed computers and destroyed documents and then set fire to the building. There were inconsistent reports of death and injuries during that clash and a subsequent crackdown by riot police.



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