Illegal children will be confiscated

摘要

"Befoffe 1997 they usually punished us by tearing down our houses for breaching the one-child policy…After 2000 they began to confiscate our children." Thus Yuan Chao-ren, a villager from Longhui county in Hunan province, de- scribing in Caixin magazine the behaviour of family-planning bureaucrats. According to Caixin, local officials would take "illegal children" and pack them off to orphanages where they were put up for adoption. Foreign adoptive parents paid $3,000-5,000 per child. The bureaucrats collected a kickback. Stealing children is not an official part of Beijing's one-child policy, but it is a consequence of rules that are a fundamental affront to the human rights of parents and would-be parents. The policy damages families and upsets the balance between generations. It is so hated that even within China it is now coming under political attack. For the first time a whole province, Guangdong, with a population of over 100m, is demanding exemptions (see page 21).