October 14, 1999	atimes.com

China Curbing China's population is still an uphill battle By Antoaneta Bezlova GONGDONG, Guangxi, China - After the birth of their second child, Kuang Haofeng's family decided it was he who was going to be sterilized. His wife, a 30-year-old diminutive woman from the Miao ethnic minority was nursing the baby and didn't want to suffer the pain. ''Somebody had to do it because the family planning station in the village was going to fine us for every day we delayed sterilization,'' explained Kuang. He opted for vasectomy also because it was free of charge, while his wife would have had to pay for the sterilization. ''It hurt,'' he grumbled in embarrassment. ''There was no anesthetic.'' China has just announced impressive figures on the success of its strict birth-control policy but in this obscure border area of Guangxi province where people from the Zhuang, Miao and Dong minorities live, family planning has been hard to enforce. Despite all the harsh punishments and incentives, in early 1990s - more than 10 years after the one-child policy was launched in rural areas - many families here still had seven or eight children. Fearing they would not be able to hold the population growth in check as the millennium end approached, family planning officials decided in 1995 to introduce compulsory sterilization after the second child. In the township clinic of Gongdong alone, more than 1,000 sterilizations were performed last year. ''Five years ago, Miao people were allowed to have three or four children,'' said Yang Qingcheng, a young local doctor from the Miao group. ''But now, just when I'm married and want to have children, sterilization is compulsory after the second child.'' The new regulations in Guangxi amount to a dramatic alteration of the exemption from the strict one-child policy granted to the ethnic minorities by late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s. The general rule of one child per family in towns, two in the countryside and three for minorities was restated last month in a White Paper on China's Ethnic Minorities, published by the State Council, China's cabinet. The document said the population policy was more relaxed for minorities and those in border areas were allowed to have three or more children. In Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region though, family planning officials admit the reality is different. Birth-control regulations have been steadily tightened since the 1980s. The Zhuang minority, which totals 10 million, are regarded as the majority in Guangxi and have never been allowed more than one child. ''Before 1989, a family with one parent belonging to another minority [like Miao or Dong] could have two children,'' said a spokesman for the Guangxi Family Planning Commission. After 1989, this was restricted to families in which both parents were non-Zhuang. Philippe Legall, a French medic working in the area, says: ''People hide children from the authorities, which makes health statistics very unreliable. We suspect only 30 to 50 percent of children are being immunized'. In Rongshui county, a poverty-stricken area where the Miao and Dong are in the majority, parents are fined 50,000 yuan (about $6,000) if they have more than two children, even though peasants' annual incomes average only 300 to 500 yuan. ''No one can pay, of course, but if you resist the officials will pull down your house and take away all your possessions, including pigs and oxen,'' said Xie Jinbao, a doctor in a village four hours' walk from Gongdong. The Guangxi Family Planning Commission spokesman counters: ''Before 1992, we used to pull down one room of their house just to scare them into not having more babies but we never pulled down the whole house. We stopped doing it after 1992. Now for each baby the regulations are to fine the parents 50,000 yuan but in reality we can't fine them that much.'' It is an uphill battle, but China announced on World Day of Six Billion on Tuesday that it will press ahead with the one-child policy to help curb population and ensure food self-sufficiency. ''Even if we continue our one-child policy, there will still be at least a growth of 12 million in the population each year in the coming few years,'' Minister of the State Family Planning Commission Zhang Weiqing told the World Population Conference in Beijing. Officials said 330 million births had been avoided in the past three decades thanks to the one-child policy. They vowed to contain the Chinese population within 1.3 billion by the year 2000. But in fact, even if that target is achieved it would still be far short of the original goal - a population of 1.1 billion by 2000, announced when China first introduced the policy in 1971. The original target was revised upwards after 1985 to about 1.2 billion and in the 1990s it was again revised to 1.3 billion. After 28 years of planned-birth administration, China still has to promulgate its first law on this fundamental state policy. When the Communist Party adopted the policy in the 1970s, it was seen as a temporary measure to cope with the surge of births but as China approaches the end of millennium, officials say a law legitimizing family planning is in the works and the policy will stay. (Inter Press Service)

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