ZHUJI, China (AP) — Seven
months pregnant, Wu Weiping sneaked out early in the morning carrying a
shoulder bag with some clothes, her laptop and a knife.
"It's good for me I wasn't
caught, but it's lucky for them too," said Wu, 35, who feared that family
planning officials were going to drag her to the hospital for a forced
abortion. "I was going to fight to the death if they found me."
With her escape, Wu joined an
increasingly defiant community of parents in China who have risked their jobs,
savings and physical safety to have a forbidden second child.
Though their numbers are small,
they represent changing ideas about individual rights. While violators in the
past tended to be rural families who skirted the birth limits in relative
obscurity, many today are urbanites like Wu who frame their defiance in overtly
political terms, arguing that the government has no right to dictate how many
children they have.
Using Internet chat rooms and
blogs, a few have begun airing their demands for a more liberal family planning
policy and are hoping others will follow their lead. Several have gotten their
stories into the tightly controlled media, an indication that their perspectives
have resonance with the public.
After finding out his wife was
expecting a second child, Liu Lianwen set up an online discussion group called
"Free Birth" to swap information about the one-child policy and how
to get around it. In less than six months, it has attracted nearly 200 members.
"We are idealists,"
said the 37-year-old engineer from central China, whose daughter was born Oct.
18. "We want to change the attitudes of people around us by changing
ourselves."
Freed of the social controls imposed
during the doctrinaire era of communist rule, Chinese today are free to choose
where they live and work and whom they marry. But when it comes to having kids,
the state says the majority must stop at one. Hefty fines for violators and
rising economic pressures have helped compel most to abide by the limit. Many
provinces claim near perfect compliance.
It's impossible to know how
many children have been born in violation of the one-child policy, but Zhai
Zhenwu, director of Renmin University's School of Sociology and Population in
Beijing, estimates that less than 1 percent of the 16 million babies born each
year are "out of plan."
Liu thinks his fellow citizens
have been brainwashed. "They all feel it's glorious to have a small
family," he said. "Thirty years of family planning propaganda have
changed the way the majority of Chinese think about having children."
The reluctance to procreate is
also an issue of growing concern for demographers, who worry that the policy
combined with a rising cost of living has brought the fertility rate down too
sharply and too fast. Though still the world's largest nation with 1.3 billion
people, China's population growth has slowed considerably.
"The worry for China is
not population growth — it's rapid population aging and young people not
wanting to have children," said Wang Feng, director of the
Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy, a joint U.S.-China academic
research center in Beijing.
Wang sees a looming disaster as
the baby boom generation of the 1960s heads into retirement and old age.
China's labor force, sharply reduced by the one-child policy, will struggle to
support them.
He argues that the government
should allow everyone at least two children. He thinks many Chinese would still
stop at one because of concerns about being able to afford to raise more than
that.
Penalties for violators are
harsh. Those caught must pay a "social compensation fee," which can
be four to nine times a family's annual income, depending on the province and
the whim of the local family planning bureau. Parents with government jobs can
also lose their posts or get demoted, and their "out of plan"
children are denied education and health benefits.
Those without government posts
have less to worry about. If they can afford the steep fee and don't mind
losing benefits, there's little to stop them from having another child. There's
popular anger over this favoring of the wealthy but not much that ordinary
people can do about it, since the policy is set behind closed doors by the communist
leadership in Beijing.
In 2007, officials in coastal
Zhejiang province threatened to start naming and shaming well-off families who
had extra kids, but the campaign never got off the ground, possibly because it
threatened to tarnish the reputations of too many well-connected people.
Hardest hit by the rules are
urban middle class parents with Communist Party posts, teaching positions or
jobs at state-run industries.
Li Yongan was ordered to pay
240,000 yuan ($37,500) after his son was born in 2007 as he already had a
13-year-old daughter. After refusing to pay the fee, Li was denied a household
registration permit for his son, forcing him to pay three times more for
kindergarten.
He was also barred from his job
teaching physics at a state-run university in Beijing. "I never regret my
second child, but I have been living with depression and anger for years,"
said Li, who struggles to make ends meet as a freelance chess teacher.
Of course, there are
surreptitious, though not foolproof, ways to evade punishment: paying a bribe
or falsifying documents so that, for instance, a second child is registered as
the twin of an older sibling. Or, sometimes second babies are registered to
childless relatives or rural families that are allowed to have a second child but
haven't done so.
Wu, the woman who made the
early morning escape, said she never intended to flout the one-child rule. She
had resorted to fertility treatments to conceive her first child — a daughter
nicknamed Le Le, or Happy — so she was stunned when a doctor told her she was
expecting again in August 2008.
The news triggered a monthlong
"cold war" with her husband, Wu said. Silent dinners, cold shoulders.
She wanted to keep the baby. He
didn't. After a few weeks, he came around, she explained with a satisfied
smile.
But family planning officials
insisted on an abortion. The principal at her school also pressured her to end
the pregnancy.
Desperate, she went online for
answers — and was led astray.
At her home on the outskirts of
Zhuji, a textile hub a few hours south of Shanghai, the energetic former high
school teacher recounted how she divorced her husband, then married her cousin
the next day, all in an attempt to evade the rules.
The soap-opera-like subterfuge
was meant to take advantage of a loophole that allows divorced parents to have
a second child if their new spouse is a first-time parent.
Wu had helped raise her cousin,
who is 25 and 10 years younger than her, and when she asked if he would marry
her to help save the baby, he agreed.
The divorce, on Sept. 27, 2008,
involved signing a document and posing for a photo. It was over in just a few
minutes. The next day's marriage was similarly swift.
"I remember I was very
happy that day," Wu said holding the marriage certificate with a glued-on
snapshot of the cousins. "Because I thought I'd figured out a way to save
my baby."
But her problem wasn't over.
When the newlyweds applied for a birth permit, officials informed them
conception had to take place after marriage. They were told to abort the baby,
then try again. Wu was back to square one.
A popular option that was out
of reach for Wu economically is to have the baby elsewhere, where the limits
don't apply. Some better-off Chinese go to Hong Kong, where private agencies
charge mainland mothers hundreds of thousands of yuan (tens of thousands of
dollars) for transport, lodging and medical costs.
The number giving birth in Hong
Kong reached 40,000 last year, prompting the territory to cap the number of
beds in public hospitals they are allowed from 2012. However, parents of kids
born abroad face the bureaucratic hurdles of foreigners, having to pay premiums
for school and other services.
In the end, Wu also fled, but
not as far as Hong Kong. Three months from her due date, she kissed her baby
daughter goodbye, telling her she was going on vacation, and hopped an early
morning train to nearby Hangzhou. There she switched to another train bound for
Shanghai, hoping the roundabout route would throw off anyone trying to tail
her.
In Shanghai, Wu used a friend's
ID to rent a one-room apartment with shared bathroom and kitchen. It was tiny
and not cheap for her, 700 yuan ($107) a month, but it was across from a
hospital that allowed her to register without a government-issued birth
permission slip and it had an Internet connection.
Wu had never used email, so her
husband — the real one — set up a password-protected online journal that he
titled "yixiaobb," or "one tiny baby." She posted to the
journal up to nine times a day, describing where she was living without ever
revealing her exact location. She prefaced every entry with a capital M for
mother, and added a number to mark how many messages she wrote in a day. Using
the same journal, her husband wrote to her, coding his messages with an F.
It felt like an invisible
tether linking Wu to her husband. He didn't know where she was, but knew she
was OK. Shortly before her due date, she asked him to come to Shanghai, and he
was present for the birth of their son.
More than two years later, she
and her former husband, the father to both her children, have yet to remarry —
hoping it will legally shield him from any future punishment.
The marriage with her cousin
was easily dissolved after they discovered it was never valid, because
marriages between first cousins is illegal in China.
Wu was fired from her job as a
public school teacher because of the baby, and her ex-husband, who is also a
teacher, was demoted to a freelance position at his school. Though told she has
been assessed a 120,740 yuan ($18,575) social compensation fee, Wu has refused
to pay.
Enforcers of the family
planning limits showed up at their house in July, and again in November,
threatening legal action. Wu is afraid their property might be confiscated or
that she or husband might end up in detention, but she doesn't want to pay the
fine because she doesn't believe she's done anything wrong.
"I don't think I've
committed any crime," she said. "A crime is something that hurts
other people or society or that infringes on other people's rights. I don't
think having a baby is any kind of crime."
ALEXA OLESEN | AP
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