![]() He and his wife persevered and had three sons. "Our country's leaders did not want us to have children and I didn't know why, but we could not do anything about it," he sighs. ![]() Chen had been persecuted and detained in China after his work advising villagers and speaking out official abuses under the one-child rule. In the 1990s, he says, family planning officials ambushed him in his home at night and beat him with sticks in an effort to convince his wife to abort their third son.Ĭhinese lawyer Chen Guangcheng attends a rally to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre June 4, 2019, at the West Lawn of the U.S. The man wants to remain unnamed because he believes he could be harassed again for speaking of that time. "The policy was wrong and what we did with Chen was right," says a neighbor of Chen, the lawyer who sued the city of Linyi. Today, he lives in Maryland with his family. There, he was picked up by supporters and driven to the U.S. In 2012, Chen escaped by scaling a wall and running to the next village, despite being blind and having broken his foot during the escape. China's decision to abolish its one-child policy offered some relief to couples and to sellers of baby-related goods, but the government hasn't lifted birth limits entirely.īut the Chinese government punished Chen for his activism by imprisoning him, then trapping him for nearly three years in his home, in a village just outside Linyi. It was vicious," he says.Ĭhildren ride a toy train at a shopping mall in Beijing, on Oct. "This was not your average level of policy enforcement. Lu says he paid a 4,000 yuan fine to have his second son in 2006 (about $500 at the time), after hiding his wife for months. Lu says the harassment became so savage that elderly residents of Linyi became afraid to leave their homes out of fear they might be kidnapped. ![]() If you were hiding and they could not find you, they would kidnap your elder relatives and make them stand in cold water, in the winter," remembers Lu Bilun, a resident. "Officials would kidnap you if you tried to have two children. The terror of such enforcement of birth limits was widespread in Linyi, even if residents were not themselves planning on giving birth. The doctors strangled or drowned those babies." But some babies were alive when they were born and began crying. "Other doctors would artificially induce labor. "The doctors would inject poison directly into the baby's skull to kill it," Chen says, drawing on recordings he made of interviews with hundreds of women and their families in Linyi. For decades, China's family planning policy limited most urban couples to one child and rural couples to two if their first was a girl. "There is no use in trying to make sense of society."Ĭhinese parents, who have children born outside the country's one-child policy, protest outside the family planning commission in an attempt to have their fines canceled in Beijing, on Jan. "All we can do is go on living," she says. What was she hiding from? What could the family planning officials have done to her? She demurs, her voice growing quiet. She wanted to avoid the "family planning officials" in her home village, just outside Linyi, a city of 11 million in China's northern Shandong province, where the policy's enforcement was especially violent. She carried her son to term while hiding in a relative's house. Giving birth to him was a huge risk - and she took no chances. He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's one-child policy. Inside, a middle-school student completes his homework. The legacy of China's one-child rule is still painfully felt by many of those who suffered for having more children.Įditor's note: This story contains descriptions that may be disturbing.
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