China's family planning opens doors to crime

Riots over China's controversial family planning policies have exposed an underside of criminal activities linked to how the radical population control strategy is implemented.

Baby trafficking in particular has emerged as a lucrative new business for those willing to exploit the profits that can be made in this southern region whose people are often desperately poor.

Nicholas Becquelin, the Hong Kong-based research director of Human Rights Watch, said the one-child policy was a key factor.

Under that policy, aimed at controlling the world's largest population of 1.3 billion, people who live in urban areas are generally allowed one child, while rural families can have two if the first is a girl.

But most couples want a boy to carry on the family line and if successful the first time have no more children, while others use sex-selective abortions to get rid of unwanted daughters.

It has led to China now having nearly 40 million more men than women since it was introduced in the late 1970s.

Becquelin said the family planning restriction "is one of the main factors in trafficking because the gender imbalance at birth has led to a shortage of women."

In July 2004, 54 people from Yulin, in the Guangxi region, were convicted of trafficking 117 girls between 2001 and 2003.

The case broke when police found 28 drugged and tied-up baby girls -- none over three months old -- in bags on board a bus bound for northern cities.

Two people from Yulin were sentenced to death over that case and more than 100 outside Guangxi were convicted, of whom at least one was executed, state press reports at the time said.

Hospitals, medical clinics, doctors and nurses were all implicated.

Yulin's administration covers Bobai County, where at least seven townships erupted in riots in the last 10 days after heavy-handed government efforts to implement the one-child policy, locals and state press said.

In China, Becquelin said, "the gender imbalance has created a huge demand for trafficking young girls from southern China to the north, where many are raised as potential wives."

A former official surnamed Yuan, in Bobai's Shapi township, said that the Yulin government had relaxed its policy after the 2004 case, but started to crack down again this year.

"From 1999 to 2004, the policy was very strict, but after 2004 they stopped punishing those people with two children," Yuan said.

"People began rioting because the government has re-implemented cruel, inconsistent, unreasonable and arbitrary methods to reach family planning goals ... they have stirred up a lot of anger," she said.

The violence, involving tens of thousands of people, broke out when family planning work teams began scouring the region, levying huge fines on those who violated the policy and looting the homes of any could not pay, locals said.

Work teams detained pregnant women who had not been approved to give birth and forced them to abort, while men and women of child-bearing age were forced to undergo sterilization if they had breached the measure.