• Baby crushed by car containing China one-child policy team

    By Ed Flanagan, Producer, NBC News

    BEIJING – A 13-month-old child was fatally crushed by a car containing Chinese officials after they went to collect a fine from the parents for breaching the country’s one-child policy, according to Chinese state media.

    The incident reportedly occurred Monday in Dongshantou village near Wenzhou city in the eastern province of Zhejiang, after a delegation of 11 officials from the Ruian Town birth control office drove out to get the unspecified fine.

    This did not go down well with the father, Chen Liandi, 39, and the conversation got heated.

    According to a briefing given by the Ruian Municipal Propaganda Department and reported by state media, the officials convinced Chen’s wife, Li Yuhong, to accompany them back to Ruian to talk over the couple’s options.

    The baby was reportedly left in the hands of his father and the group got back into their cars to leave.

    What happened next remains unclear – perhaps due to the politically sensitive nature of this story – but the boy was then found crushed underneath a car.      

    He was rushed to the Third People’s Hospital in Ruian, but could not be saved.

    'You were too careless'
    On China’s Twitter-like service, Weibo, users expressed frustration over the vague account given by Ruian officials and demanded more information, but no other Chinese press have printed much beyond the official government account.

    For many in China, the story brings back uncomfortable memories of Feng Jiemei, who last June posted gruesome photographs of her lying in a hospital bed next to her 7-month-old aborted fetus.

    Feng’s story created a social firestorm for Beijing when word got out that the 22-year-old mother had been forced to have the abortion because she did not have enough money to pay the $6,400 fine for having a second child.

    “I told you, $6,400, not even a penny less. I told your dad that and he said he has no money,” a family planning official wrote to Deng in a blunt text message that quickly went viral. “You were too careless, you didn’t think this was a big deal.”

    Feng was grabbed from her home and taken to a local hospital in her native Shaanxi province where she was blindfolded, thrown on a bed and forced to a sign a document she couldn’t read. Thirty hours later, her baby girl was aborted.

    China has long defended its one-child policy as a way to prevent overpopulation and to help raise living standards across the country.

    However, some experts in China and abroad argue that the policy has outlived its usefulness and may instead be a detriment to future growth.

    Others in China have pointed out the abuses meted out in cases like Feng Jiemei’s show that it causes more social harm and have called on Beijing to remove it.

    However Beijing just last month reaffirmed its support for the policy.

    NBC News’ Le Li contributed to this report.

    Related:

    China: One-child policy is here to stay

    Growing calls in China to change the one-child policy

    Not Chinese enough in China? Americans' dilemma

  • Chinese say one child is enough as Beijing weighs end of policy

    By Ed Flanagan, NBC News

    BEIJING – Liu Jie remembers clearly when her mother violated China's one-child policy and gave birth to her little brother. The family was living in Hunan province, where her mother worked as a teacher, and the illegal addition to the family cost her mother the job.

    Now 23 and working as a secretary in Beijing, Liu fully supports doing away with the country's controversial one-child policy – an argument that has been gaining ground thanks to China's increasingly grim population trends.

    In a report released this week, the China Development Research Foundation, a high-level government think tank, recommended that a two-child policy be instituted in some provinces this year and a nationwide two-child policy be made law in 2015, with all birth limits eliminated by 2020.

    Chinese government think tank urges end to unpopular one-child policy

    "It's a great idea," Liu said. "It will help to solve some social problems, cultivate children's character and improve the treatment of the elderly."

    But when asked if she would want to have more than one child, Liu quickly responded, "Oh no, I will only have one baby!"

    "Raising children isn't easy and I don't think I'll have enough money for two children… if I have two, my quality of life would be worse," Liu said.


    Hers is a dilemma confronting many Chinese: even if the government repeals the unpopular policy in order to address an approaching demographic time bomb, there are serious questions about whether Chinese families would even be willing to have more than one child in today's economic and social climate.

    The one-child policy has been credited with reducing China's population from anywhere between 100 to 400 million people since its passing in 1979 under then-leader Deng Xiaoping.

    At the same time, a gradual increase in life expectancy on the mainland has created a significant age imbalance waiting to play out: China's population over the age of 60 is expected to more than double from 185 million today to 487 million in 2053, or 35 percent of the population.

    Meanwhile, the 52 percent of the population that will be of working age by then will be expected to support this swollen elderly group as well as the 16 percent of the population that will be children, raising serious questions on how the country will be able to sustain growth.

    Gruesome photos put spotlight on China's one-child policy

    These issues are unlike anything China has faced its thousands of years of history, said Gu Baochang, a professor at Beijing's Renmin University.

    "China has no experience, no understanding, and no preparation for dealing with the new challenges posed by extremely low fertility, serious aging, speeding urbanization and wide spread of population," Gu warned.

    Thinking twice
    Amongst China's young population – the group that will be expected to carry this tremendous financial burden – there is general support for the elimination of the draconian policy they grew up with. But it doesn't mean that they are any more willing to have more children.

    With soaring inflation on everyday goods and astronomical home prices in many of China's cities, everyday Chinese are taking a closer look at the daunting costs of child-rearing and other modern societal pressures and are thinking twice about having another child.

    For Gong Leilei, a 32-year-old from Zhejiang, it's simply a question of money. Gong and his wife want a little sister for their six-year old son but have been reluctant to try.

    "I wanted to have a daughter, but my wife does not want her now," Gong said. "She thinks we should wait until we have more money."

    Joyce Li, a 38-year old program director at Beijing University, agreed that it's time for the one-child policy to go. "Right now the one-child policy has a lot of problems like the issue of taking care of the elderly… so it's necessary to change the one-child policy," Li said.

    Read more China coverage on NBC's Behind The Wall

    Still, when asked whether she would have two children, she balked. "Right now raising a child in China is very expensive, so I don't think I have enough money for many children," she said.

    "There are also other problems, like the issue of education," Li continued, "Right now it is very hard to get children into school."

    The growing number of migrants moving into China's cities concerns some. Chen Chi, a 22-year old university student in Beijing, said he actually supported the one-child policy and worried about the burdens of a growing population.

    "No, it's not a good idea to remove the one-child policy," Chen told NBC News. "The population is too high and more and more people will move to urban areas to have children, making the urban-rural population balance even worse."

    As for children: "I will only have one baby," he said. "It is an economic decision."

    New leadership, new policy?
    Despite all the hubbub about the report calling for the end of the one-child policy, the odds are deeply stacked against any rapid movement in the direction of an easing of the law. China's ruling Communist Party today is heavily consensus-driven and the report released this week will likely be mediated on for some time before the Party's legislative gears begin moving.

    That the report was issued and publicized in local Chinese media at all, however, suggests that Beijing is receptive to the idea of discussing the policy's abolition. Ultimately, if party leaders believe that removing the one-child policy is in the best interest of maintaining social stability, then change will likely be seen under the new leadership of Xi Jinping, the man expected to take power in China next week.

    Read more World news on NBCNews.com

    But in an email interview with NBC News, Mayling Birney, a scholar at the London School of Economics, warned that while a two-child policy may align now with party priorities, that doesn't mean that there won't be complications that give leaders pause.

    "People may be relieved that the government is relaxing its invasive family planning policy; they may be less likely to encounter tragic stories of coerced abortions; and the worrisome gender imbalance should improve," Birney said.

    "At the same time, more births would create new demands and strain on the education and health systems, well before the new generation could make its contributions to future economic growth," she warned.

    NBC News Le Li, Johanna Armstrong, Yanzhou Liu and Eric Baculinao contributed to this report.

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  • Chinese government think tank urges end to unpopular one-child policy

    Andy Wong / AP

    Chinese families bring their babies to the Ritan Park in Beijing Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2012. A government think tank says China should start phasing out its one-child policy immediately and allow two children for every family by 2015. It remains unclear whether Chinese leaders are ready to take that step.

    By NBC News staff and wire reports

    BEIJING -- A Chinese government think tank is urging the country's leaders to start phasing out its unpopular one-child policy immediately and allow two children for every family in the country by 2015.

    Some demographers saw the timeline put forward by the China Development Research Foundation, which is close to the central leadership, as a bold move. Others warned that the gradual approach, if implemented, would be insufficient to help correct the problems that China's strict birth limits have created.

    Xie Meng, a press officer with the foundation, said the final version of its report would be released "in a week or two," but Chinese state media were given advance copies.

    The official Xinhua News Agency said the foundation was recommending a two-child policy in some provinces from this year and a nationwide two-child policy by 2015. It also proposed all birth limits be dropped by 2020.

    "China has paid a huge political and social cost for the policy, as it has resulted in social conflict, high administrative costs and led indirectly to a long-term gender imbalance at birth," Xinhua said, citing the report.

    The foundation's press officer told NBC News that the report was "the result of two years of effort." 

    "China's demographic changes were analyzed in connection with seven areas," she said, citing the challenges of aging, unemployment, child and women's welfare, urbanization, education, health and family planning.

    But it remains unclear whether Chinese leaders are ready to take up the recommendations. China's National Population and Family Planning Commission had no immediate comment on the report Wednesday.

    'Change is inevitable'
    While they are known to many as the one-child policy, the actual rules are more complicated. The government limits most urban couples to one child, and allows two children for rural families if their first-born is a girl. There are numerous other exceptions as well, including looser rules for minority families and a two-child limit for parents who are themselves both singletons.

    Cai Yong, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said the report carries extra weight because the think tank is under the State Council, China's Cabinet. He said he found it remarkable that state-backed demographers were willing to publicly propose such a detailed schedule and plan on how to get rid of China's birth limits.

    Gruesome photos put spotlight on China's one-child policy

    "That tells us at least that policy change is inevitable, it's coming," said Cai, who was not involved in the drafting of the report, but knows many of the experts who were. Cai is currently a visiting scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai. "It's coming, but we cannot predict when exactly it will come."


    Adding to the uncertainty is a once-in-a-decade leadership transition that kicks off Nov. 8 that will see a new slate of top leaders installed by next spring.

    Cai said the transition could keep population reform on the back burner or changes might be rushed through to help burnish the reputations of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao on their way out.

    There has been growing speculation among Chinese media, experts and ordinary people about whether the government will relax the one-child policy — introduced in 1980 as a temporary measure to curb surging population growth — and allow more people to have two children.

    Though the government credits the policy with preventing hundreds of millions of births and helping lift countless families out of poverty, it is reviled by many ordinary people. The strict limits have led to forced abortions and sterilizations, even though such measures are illegal. Couples who flout the rules face hefty fines, seizure of their property and loss of their jobs.

    Read more international stories on NBCNews.com

    Many demographers argue that the policy has worsened the country's aging crisis by limiting the size of the young labor pool that must support the large baby boom generation as it retires. They also say it has contributed to the imbalanced sex ratio as some families abort baby girls, preferring to try for a male heir.

    The government has recognized those problems and has tried to address them by boosting social services for the elderly. It has also banned sex-selective abortion and rewarded rural families whose only child is a girl.

    Outdated or engine of growth?
    Many today also see the birth limits as outdated, a relic of the era when housing, jobs and food were provided by the state.

    "It has been 30 years since our planned economy was liberalized," commented Wang Yi, the owner of a shop that sells textiles online, under a news report about the foundation's proposal. "So why do we still have to plan our population?"

    Ren Hao, a Chinese journalist who recently married, told NBC that he welcomed the proposed policy change but suggested that it be accompanied by new measures in education, health care and economy in order to succeed.

    Read more China coverage on NBC's Behind The Wall

    "Raising a child is quite a burden nowadays so, in the end, it's up to the couples to decide whether they want to have one child or more based on their conditions," he said.

    Ji Jianming, a Beijing construction project manager, argued in favor of the policy. "The one-child policy was good," he said. "It allowed China to develop rapidly and improve people's lives faster."

    Though open debate about the policy has flourished in state media and on the Internet, leaders have so far expressed a desire to maintain the status quo.

    President Hu said last year that China would keep its strict family planning policy to keep the birth rate low and other officials have said that no changes are expected until at least 2015.

    Wang Feng, director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy and an expert on China's demographics, contributed research material to the foundation's report, but has yet to see the full text. He said he welcomed the gist of the document that he's seen in state media.

    It says the government "should return the rights of reproduction to the people," he said. "That's very bold."

    But Gu Baochang, a professor of demography at Beijing's Renmin University and a vocal advocate of reform, said the proposed timeline wasn't aggressive enough.

    "They should have reformed this policy ages ago," he said. "It just keeps getting held up, delayed."

    NBC News' Eric Baculinao and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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  • As she nears death, woman who saved 30 babies from trash is hailed in China

    EuroPics[CEN]

    Lou Xiaoying, right, lies in the hospital with one of her daughters, center. Lou, now 88 and suffering from kidney failure, found and raised more than 30 abandoned babies from the streets of Jinhua, in eastern Zhejiang province, China, where she made a living recycling rubbish.

    By Tianzhou Ye, NBC News

    BEIJING – “What?! No, she is alive in the hospital,” exclaimed Zhang Jingjing through the phone lines.

    Zhang was responding to concern on Weibo, China’s popular Twitter-like service, claiming that Lou Xiaoying, her adoptive mother, had died.

    The worry was understandable, for Lou, 88, has been hailed a hero in China for reportedly saving more than 30 abandoned babies from trash cans and dumps over the past four decades.

    Lou is suffering from kidney disease in the hospital, but, according to her daughter, she's still alive.

    "My mother has gotten better,” Zhang, 33, reported. “The hospital has spared us much expense. They have also minimized the kinds of medicines that my mom has to use. Money collected from donations has helped us a lot, too."

    Helping others
    Lou, who was born in 1924 in Fujian Province, collected and recycled garbage to make a living. She and her husband, who died 17 years ago, had two biological children, a daughter and a son. 

    Over the years of scavenging, Lou found 30 children who had been abandoned, mostly as a result of China’s strict one-child policy. She and her husband adopted three daughters while the remaining children, mostly girls, were passed to other people to start new lives.


    According to an article in Britain’s Daily Mail, Lou found her first abandoned child, a girl, when she was out collecting garbage in 1972. 

    “She was just lying amongst the junk on the street, abandoned. She would have died had we not rescued her and taken her in,” she said, according to the Daily Mail report. “I realized if we had strength enough to collect garbage, how could we not recycle something as important as human lives?”

    “These children need love and care. They are all precious human lives,” she added. “I do not understand how people can leave such a vulnerable baby on the streets.”

    Zhang told NBC News that "at one point, there were 12 members in the family” living in a deserted temple on the outskirts of the city of Jinhua, about 200 miles south of Shanghai. "It wasn't until 1987 when they were building a railway and wanted to remove our temple, did [authorities] find out about our family,” she added.

    The family’s future was complicated by the rigid household registration system designed to control the movement of China’s 1.3 billion people. Known in Chinese as hukou, the central government classifies people as either city dwellers or rural peasants, which determines not only a citizen’s residence but also what kind of social services and schools they are eligible for.

    Because they were living “off the grid,” none of Lou’s adopted children had a hukou. But Zhang said that people in the area soon heard about the family and help came along.

    "There were some communal donations which helped two of us adopted ones go to school. But my oldest adopted sister, who is now 40, has never gone to school,” said Zhang.  

    Even in old age, Lou kept going out to collect trash several times a day. In 2007, Lou discovered a boy, Zhang Qilin, in a dumpster. She adopted the boy, who is now 7, as her grandson; his adoptive father is Lou’s biological son. 

    The youngster encountered the same problem of not having a hukou. But after a series of reports about Lou in the local Jinhua Daily, followed by other reports in the Chinese and international press, Zhang was granted permission to attend a public school called Jindong District Experimental School in Jinhua. In addition, his hukou registration process is now under way.   

    ‘Grandma Lou deserves her dreams to be fulfilled’
    Fang Qing, the principal of the public school, spoke with NBC News about Lou’s youngest adoptee.

    “I take for granted that every child in China has a right to education, no matter what his background is like,” Fang said, adding that the school would keep a special eye on Zhang Qilin.

    “Grandma Lou deserves her dreams to be fulfilled. Good people should be rewarded with good,” Fang said.

    Many netizens have chimed in on Weibo about Lou’s heroism.

    “What would the world be like if only we have a few more people like Grandma Lou. I respect you, Grandma,” wrote one user.

    Lou’s concern for others lives on in her daughter, Zhang, who agreed to be interviewed as long as no foreign donation appeal would be made through NBC.

    “We are not in a very positive position financially,” she said, “but neither do we lack money now for my mother’s medical treatments. … We are very grateful, but we are doing fine now.”

    Asked if she has ever thought about finding her biological parents, Zhang answered “No” resolutely. “She has always been my mother.”

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  • Gruesome photos put spotlight on China's one-child policy

    Family photo

    Photos of Feng Jianmei on her hospital bed after a forced abortion have been circulating on the web. The photos were taken by her sister who in turn contacted the media about the story. The photos originally appeared in a local newspaper report online and then they were picked by netizens and distributed online.

    By Bo Gu, NBC News

    Updated at 10:33 p.m. ET: China state media says city officials have apologized to Feng Jiamei and suspended three officials, the BBC reported.

    Xinhua news said the Ankang city government will urge the county government to review its family planning operations, according to the BBC report.

    BEIJING – Feng Jianmei  says she was manhandled by seven people, some of them local family planning officials, some of whom she didn’t know. 

    Feng, 22 years old and seven months pregnant, was dragged out of her relative’s home, carried and shoved into a van that headed straight to a hospital on June 2, she told NBC News in phone interview.

    She was blindfolded, thrown on a bed, and forced to sign a document that she couldn’t read with the blindfold still on her eyes. Then two shots were injected into her belly. Thirty hours later, on the morning June 4, she gave birth to a dead baby girl.

    Feng is one of the many Chinese women who have been forced to have abortions under China’s strict one-child-only policy started in late 1970s to contain the country’s fast growing population, which has now topped 1.3 billion people.

    One-child policy
    China’s long time Communist leader Chairman Mao Zedong originally encouraged women to have as many children as possible during the Cold War-era when human power was believed to be an important force if war broke out. But the country’s rulers soon found it too difficult to feed the huge population – so they adopted a harsh policy that allows urban citizens to have only one child, and rural couples to have two, if the first child is a girl.  

    The policy has been carried out for more than three decades despite public opposition, from human rights activists to ordinary people. Thousands of years of Chinese culture fostered the belief that “more children is more blessing,” especially in remote and rural areas where the elderly lack adequate social benefits and depend on children as they grow old.

    Government family planning officials are also under pressure to make sure their constituencies follow the quota of babies allowed. When there’s no clear law telling them what they can and cannot do, forced abortions, often on late-terms pregnancies, have become the norm, particularly for the poor who are unable to pay the hefty fines to have additional children.   

    Advocates on behalf of these women are usually ignored or face government repression. For example, Chen Guangcheng, the famous blind lawyer and human rights activist, represented victims of family planning abuse in Shandong Province. Chen was jailed for four years for his advocacy and put under house arrest until he recently escaped illegal detainment and fled to the U.S. last month.

    More on Chen Guangcheng

    There are no official figures of how many women in China unwillingly terminate pregnancies every year. “All Girls Allowed,” an organized founded by former 1989 student protest leader Chai Ling, claims there are 1.3 million forced abortions annually. 

    ‘How can I agree to do that, as a mother?’
    Feng Jianmei didn’t realize she wasn’t allowed to have a second child (her first daughter was born in 2007) since everyone else around her was permitted to have a second child. Both she and her husband Deng Jiyuan took for granted that they would have the same right.  But the family planning office in Zengjiazhen, a small town in Shaanxi province in the heart of China, thought differently.  

    Through a rigorous and rigid household registration system designed to control population movement, the central government classifies all its citizens as either city dwellers or rural peasants.  The registration, also known in Chinese as hukou, determines not only a citizen’s residence but also what kind of social services individuals are eligible for.

    It is very difficult to change one’s hukou although there are many ways, including marrying a person with a different registration status, applying for a new status through one’s job, or paying an enormous sum of money. 

    The local family planning office decided that Feng wasn’t allowed to have a second child because she didn’t have the necessary permit – apparently she had failed to relocate her hukou to Zengjiazhen when she moved from her original province of Inner Mongolia.

    But the couple says they had no idea their plan to have a second child was connected with Feng’s hukou.

    They were given another option that would solve the problem: pay a fine of $6,400. But that was an impossible amount for the couple to afford – Deng is a migrant worker and Feng is a farmer. 

    “I told you, $6,400, not even a penny less. I told your dad that and he said he has no money,” the family planning official wrote to Deng in a text message that has been made public. “You were too careless, you didn’t think this was a big deal.”

    Feng’s sister received the same warning;  if they couldn’t afford to help pay the fine, it was only a matter of time before her sister had to get rid of the baby, whether she wanted to or not.

    Things came to a head on June 2, but according to the local government, Feng agreed to the abortion.

    The Zhenping Population and Family Planning Bureau released on June 11 an official stamped document, which says  that “after government cadre’s repeated persuasion, Feng Jianmei agreed to have an abortion at 15:40 on June 2.” 

    “No, I didn’t agree to do it,” Feng told NBC News. “How can I agree to do that, as a mother?”

    She sobbed when asked what happened next, and said she was too upset to think about it. She said all those officials who kidnapped her disappeared after the abortion, and she’s still suffering from a constant headache.

    Two appalling photos of her were taken and posted online that show her lying in bed, looking weak and helpless, with a dead and bloody baby next to her. The photos were taken by her sister who in turn contacted the media about the story. The photos originally appeared in a local newspaper report online and then they were picked by netizens and distributed online.

    ‘If this evil policy is not stopped, this country will have no humanity’
    Forced abortions in China are not new, but Feng’s story spread rapidly via social media, and outrage was immediate and unanimous. On Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging site, netizens left thousands of angry comments, although many of the posts were quickly deleted by government censors.   

    “The purpose of family planning was to control population, but now it has become murder population,” wrote Li Chengpeng, a well-known Chinese writer. “It was a method to contain population, but now it is a way to make money. When you can make money by killing, what else are you afraid to do? A seven-month baby can think already. I want to ask the murderer, how do you face your own mother when you go home? If this evil policy is not stopped, this country will have no humanity.”

    Zhao Chu, another writer, called it pure murder. “This is not about enforcing the policy, it is about depriving someone’s right to live. We avoid the nature of it by using a medical word ‘enforced abortion.’ For so long family planning seems like something completely irrelevant of human life. It’s like coal mining or digging mushrooms. Human life has become lifeless indexes, some cold, meaningless numbers.

    “Also, pushed by heavy fines, the controversial policy has become profit-oriented activities that everyone hates. The worst victims are those of low-class rural people who have no power to fight. Their tears and cries are not heard by so called mainstream society and the victims become worse than the untouchables,” said Zhao.

    Many called for the one-child policy to be outlawed. “We feel so sorry for the dead baby girl, we criticize those so-called law enforcers. But we should rethink the 30-year-long family planning policy. It’d be worth it if this could help to change the policy! We keep our eyes open!” commented user A-Kun on his Weibo page.

    Even Hu Xijin, chief editor of Global Times, one of China’s most pro-government newspapers, criticized the forced abortion on his Weibo account.

    “I strongly oppose the barbarous forced abortion to this 7-month-pregnant mother. Time has changed and the intensity of enforcing family planning has changed. We should promote civilized family planning,” Hu wrote.

    But he added that he didn’t think the whole policy should be abolished. “Don’t use Hong Kong and Japan as an argument to deny China’s population policy. Those places are small and developed early, fed by the whole world’s resources. But the world resources cannot afford to feed a China with billions of people.”

    ‘This has damaged the image of family planning work’
    NBC News tried to contact both town and city level family planning offices in Zengjiazhen and Ankang, but the calls went unanswered.  

    A report from Xinhua, China’s official government news agency, released on Thursday said that the Shaanxi Provincial Family Planning Committee has sent an investigation team to Zengjiazhen and requested local government to have the responsible parties held accountable.


    “This has damaged the image of family planning work, and had an adverse effect on the society. The committee will resolutely prevent such things from happening again,” the Xinhua news report said.

    Feng’s conversation with NBC News was interrupted three times by what she said were government cadres entering her hospital ward to talk.

    When asked what she would do next or whether they will seek legal help, she uttered an answer in a very low voice: “I have no idea.” 

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  • The trials and tribulations of China's 'anchor babies'

    AFP/File/Peter Parks

    China's new rich are increasingly taking advantage of loopholes in American visa law to have their babies in the United States. Parents believe these so called "anchor babies" will have greater economic and educational advantages, but many are just beginning to see the problems that come with their status as well.

    By Ed Flanagan, NBC News

    BEIJING – The question of children born of illegal immigrants - so-called “anchor babies” - was re-injected back into America’s national discourse late last year when a U.S. study found that an estimated 340,000 of 4.3 million babies born in the United States in 2008 – or every 1 in 15 - had an illegal-immigrant parent.

    While much of the debate – and a healthy dose of vitriol – was focused on immigrants of Hispanic background, stories of upper-class Chinese women flying to the United States in style and staying at private clinics to have their babies to take advantage of citizenship laws soon began to appear in the news cycle.       

    With them, a new breed of anchor baby was born, and their very existence changed the dynamics of the controversy completely.

    While Hispanic anchor babies might be stereotypically viewed as coming from poverty and consequently destined to be heavily reliant on government social services, the parents of Chinese anchor babies were wealthy Chinese who legally paid their own way to the United States, freely spent money at American stores, and generally intended to return back to China soon after giving birth.

    Just how many Chinese mothers have come over to the United States remains unclear. One report, though, cited an agency that claims it has helped over 600 mothers travel to the U.S. to have their children in the last five years.

    The motivations of these families are far-ranging: from a desire to provide better educational and travel opportunities to their children in an increasingly competitive and international job market, to a clever way to skirt China’s one-child policy, to a desire to one day enjoy the American lifestyle and all the benefits – both social and economic – that entails.

    Whatever their motivation, the machinations behind the process were always clear: for approximately $15,000, Chinese mothers were navigated through the process of applying for an American visa, including how to fill out forms and how to approach interviews given at American embassies by visa officers.

    Once in America – mostly in cities on the West Coast but sometimes U.S. territories like Saipan - the mothers were given two months of prenatal care and a month of medical support post-birth. Throughout the three months, the mothers were given room and board and scheduled activities such as shopping trips at local malls or walks around the clinic for exercise.

    Though many of these clinics operate without a proper business license, throughout their time in the U.S., the women were safe in knowing that everything they had done from the initial visa process that gained them entry to the United States to later applying for citizenship for their newborn was legal and fully protected under current U.S. law.

    Both the 14th Amendment and State Department rules that don’t regulate pregnant foreign visitors ensured that.

    Dual passports, double headaches
    Fast-forward to today, and it would seem that the trend of pregnant Chinese women traveling to the United States to give birth has not abated. Yet, on the heels of such reports comes a new story from the Chinese newspaper, Economic Observer, that details the consequences that many of these mothers returning to China with their American children now face.

    Perhaps the most immediate problem for families is the fact that China does not allow dual citizenship. Absent then of documents like a Chinese passport, birth certificate or a hukou – the infamous resident permit that allows Chinese citizens to legally live and work in a city – these children are foreigners in the eyes of the government and subsequently subjected to higher school tuitions and limited access to national health care.

    Some parents have attempted to game the system by conning the Chinese government into issuing their children passports. Still others have paid for fake birth certificates and hukous that allow them to at least enroll their children in the local schools they desire without facing the additional fees required of foreign children.

    However, with such steps come additional risks and concerns.    

    With dual passports, comes the greater chance of getting caught by both Chinese and American authorities while travelling between the two countries. U.S. law stipulates that in most cases, dual nationals must use a U.S. passport to enter and leave the United States. However, to leave China on an American passport would expose a child’s dual nationality and in essence negate their ill-gotten Chinese citizenship.

    In order to circumvent these legal landmines then, Chinese families often must apply for a visa to a second country or a region like Hong Kong, where they transit through using their Chinese passports to enter and then fly onwards from there to the United States on their American passports.

    Finally, Chinese babies born in America will eventually find themselves subjected to the same civic responsibilities that other citizens must face: taxes. After they turn 15 years old, Chinese anchor babies will be expected to pay state and federal taxes. While the consequences of not paying taxes vary from state to state, it is clear that the benefits that they would be entitled to had they paid would not be fully afforded to them.

    Also of particular interest to Chinese families of anchor babies is that while their children will one day be able to sponsor their the parents American citizenship when the children turn 21, it will be a difficult case to make to immigration officers about their suitability if their offspring have not paid any taxes into the system.  

    Whether the State Department decides to amend this loophole or whether the experience of this first generation of Chinese anchor babies proves troublesome enough to deter people remains to be seen. However, it should be comforting – perhaps coldly so to some – to Americans to know that despite all the news one reads almost daily about China gaining on the United States in a variety of measurables, U.S. citizenship still remains a hotly desired status symbol for much of China’s privileged and economically mobile class.

  • Adoption scandal exposed by muckraking Chinese journalists

    Bo Gu / NBC News

    Yang Libing (with his son) holds up a photo of his missing daughter, Yang Ling.

    By Adrienne Mong

    GAOPING, HUNAN PROVINCE – Until this year, Yang Libing, whose daughter was taken from him by family planning authorities, would receive visits from one or two Chinese journalists every year.

    "They would come to interview me about my daughter," he recalled emphatically.  "But nothing ever came of those reports.  Still no one did anything."

    In 2005, family planning officials in Longhui County, Hunan Province, took away Yang's daughter, Yang Ling, when she was eleven months old.   They accused him of not registering her birth, thereby breaking the strict, nationwide one-child policy – even though she was his first and only offspring.

    The authorities sent his daughter off to an orphanage.  From there, Yang believes she was adopted by an American family, with the family planning officials receiving a few hundred dollars in return.

    Yang has not seen her since.

    "I wish I could tell her that I didn't give her away," he told NBC News in an interview at his spartan home in the mountains of Gaoping.  "It wasn't a case of not wanting her.  I didn't reject her."

    Caixin Century publishes report
    Yang's story has the hallmarks of a great tragedy, embodying many controversial issues that touch a raw nerve in China: local corruption, brutal enforcement of the one-child policy, the policy itself, child trafficking, and poverty.

    And yet, despite stories by local journalists and a long feature printed in the Los Angeles Times two years ago, his story never seemed to catch on.  

    Then last week, the highly respected independent Chinese weekly news magazine, Caixin Century, ran a 15,000-word investigative report that featured Yang and several other families in Gaoping whose children suffered the same fate.

    This time, the tale of baby-trafficking by corrupt family planning officials electrified China's media.  Even the state-run newspapers covered the story, some reporting that an official investigation was underway.

    Within a day of publication, teams of local and foreign journalists (including NBC News) began tramping into the lush, terraced hills of Longhui County, perhaps the poorest area in all in Hunan – which is already one of China's more impoverished provinces.
     
    So why did the story suddenly capture the media's attention now?

    An obvious reason is that Caixin has a sterling reputation for its investigative journalism.  Furthermore, the report was richly detailed and well-researched, the product of four years' long work.

    "A few years ago, the story was told very simply," said Shangguan Jiaoming, the Caixin reporter behind the Hunan story.  "My report includes a lot of detail and analysis."

    Moreover, Caixin is homegrown, i.e., its reporting is done by Chinese in Chinese.

    Bo Gu / NBC News

    Gaoping sits up in the mountains of Longhui County, Hunan Province.

    "It really shows that however much foreign correspondents report on China, unless a story gets picked up by domestic media here, there isn’t much...we can do to improve the lives of people here that we interview,” said Melissa Chan, the Beijing correspondent for al-Jazeera English.  (Just as it does in the Middle East, al-Jazeera has a reputation in China for moving quickly and aggressively to cover politically sensitive stories. Chan's report can be seen here.)

    Another reason is the growing popularity of microblogs like Sina.com's Weibo or Twitter.  Although the latter is blocked in China, it can be accessed via virtual private networks (VPNs) that bypass the firewall – a tool widely used by the same crop of intellectual and professional Chinese elites who comprise Caixin's readership.

    Through microblogs, news of the Caixin report spread like wildfire.  As with many stories of this nature, anything that survives Internet censors for even a few hours can gain traction and reach readers across the country.

    But there's another reason – one which might seem a bit surprising given the repressive trend of cracking down on dissidents, activists, and media (especially foreign) in China during recent months: good old-fashioned market competition. 

    "Since the mid-1990s, commercial media in [mainland] China has become much more competitive," said David Bandurski of the China Media Project at Hong Kong University.  There was no "media market" or "ad-driven publications" before then.  Much of that transformation came about because then-Premier Zhao Ziyang pushed for a more open, liberal press corps – one which would try to use public opinion to monitor political power rather than serve as a means to "marshal public opinion."

    The trend sustained itself even after Zhao was sacked from the Communist Party for supporting the students leading the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

    Some of the more remarkable stories broken by domestic Chinese reporters include the AIDS villages in Henan Province and the SARS crisis.  The former story, in particular, was reported a year before it appeared in Western media like the New York Times.

    China’s commercial media: driven and aggressive
    "The reality is that commercial media – as opposed to state-run media – has to sell to readers, they have to have a different look, a different appeal," continued Bandurski.

    As a result, the commercial news organizations command circulation figures enviable by publishers anywhere in the world.

    Although it has not been possible to audit circulation data, Bandurski reckons that, based on China Press Yearbook statistics, "In every case, if you look at the Party-run paper and the corresponding commercial spin-off in any region," the latter outstrips the former in terms of readership.

    Adrienne Mong / NBC News

    Villagers from Gaoping look at a copy of the Caixin Century.

    "For example, in Wuhan (a second-tier city with a long intellectual history), the commercial paper has 1, 2, or 3 million circulation," he said.  "No Party newspaper has a circulation like that."

    Among those that produce some of best, influential, tough, in-depth investigative reporting are Caixin and Beijing News in Beijing and the Southern group in Guangdong Province, which publishes Southern Daily and Southern Weekend. 

    These organizations constantly recalibrate their coverage, led by senior editors such as Hu Shuli at Caixin (an excellent profile of her ran in 2009 in The New Yorker), for example, who have a finely honed sixth sense for politics, for knowing when to push their agenda.

    One way in which the more aggressive Chinese commercial media outlets appear to escape being shut down is to adopt what Bandurski calls "the shouldering the door theory."  One publication knocks the door, then another, then another – the premise being that the government can't go after every organization all at once.

    "It's always the media pushing," said Bandurski.  "It's never the government loosening."

    Corrupt media, too
    Which is not to say that the Chinese press corps is made up of only hard-charging truth-seekers.

    Far from it.  Local journalists earn low salaries, all too often supplemented by the notorious "red envelopes" – cash gifts supplied by the subjects of their reporting – and other "perks."

    Our savvy driver from Hunan's capital of Changsha – with years of experience shuttling around local and foreign reporters – summed up what he’s seen.

    "When the foreign media come out here, they work hard.  They rarely take breaks and work through the entire trip.  The Chinese media?  When they get an assignment, they look at it as an opportunity to play tourist.  They see the sights.  They eat long meals at nice restaurants. They're not interested in the story."

    More seriously, there are regular instances of blackmail, wherein reporters have demanded money or other forms of compensation in return for keeping silent.

    Regardless, the tenacity and dedication on the part of so many other Chinese journalists is remarkable.

    "The controls on the media have been tighter than we've seen in a long time," said Bandurski.  "And yet there is still so much coverage [like the Hunan baby trafficking story] by places like Caixin coming out.  These organizations are pushing harder and harder and finding ways to do that kind of reporting."

    With additional reporting by Bo Gu.

    Related story: Growing calls in China to change the one-child policy

    Chinese babies sold for adoption in the U.S.?

  • Chinese babies sold for adoption in the U.S.?

    By Adrienne Mong

    BEIJING – Since the early 1990s, more than 100,000 Chinese children have been adopted by families overseas – most of them in the U.S.

    And now it looks like some of the adoptees weren’t in fact orphans or unwanted offspring, but in fact children illegally snatched from their parents and sold to Chinese orphanages who brokered the adoptions – for as much as $3,000 a child adopted by foreigners.

    An investigative report released this week by the highly respected Chinese weekly publication, Caixin Century Magazine, found that from 2000 to 2005, local family planning officials in Hunan Province seized at least 16 children from households they claimed had violated the strict nationwide one-child policy. In almost every instance, when the parents could not pay the fine, their children were shipped off to an orphanage, which then sold them overseas.  Two of the children, their biological families believe, were adopted by American families.

    Caixin’s original report in Chinese spread rapidly around the Internet Tuesday, capturing widespread attention among netizens despite the fact that similar reports have surfaced in the years past. Even state-run media covered the story, describing a “stunned nation” upon hearing of the report.

    The allegations bring to light once more just one of the myriad problems China’s one-child policy has created in trying to address population pressures and poverty alleviation.  It also illustrates the potential for government corruption; career advancement in many instances depended on whether an official could demonstrate his or her ability to enforce the one-child policy.

    We could write more, but we encourage everyone to read the Caixin article here in an English translation.

    Related story: Time to re-evaluate China's one-child policy?

  • Growing calls in China to change the one-child policy

    China's new census shows its population growth rate is slowing down, raising the question whether it should still follow the one child policy. NBC's Adrienne Mong reports.   

    By Adrienne Mong

    YICHENG COUNTY, SHANXI PROVINCE – It’s the kind of statistic that makes one pause.

    In 10 years, mainland China added 74 million more people.

    That’s about the size of Iran’s entire population.

    Adrienne Mong

    Children at a school in Yicheng County.

    But new figures from China’s latest census (2001-2010) also showed that the growth rate of its 1.34 billion-strong population is slowing down. Maybe too much.

    In fact, if looked at another way, the average population growth each year in China over the past ten years was 0.57 percent, down almost half of what it was from 1990 to 2000.

    Compare that to India, which has the world’s second largest population. It's population grew at an average rate of 1.7 percent a year in the same period.  Or the U.S., the world’s third largest population, which grew at an annual rate of 1.1 percent – the highest of any industrialized nation.

    Chinese state-run media, in reporting the census, have credited the one-child policy with curbing the nation’s population growth.

    But increasingly over the past year demographic experts within China have voiced skepticism about the family planning practices that limit urban couples to having only one child and rural couples and ethnic minority households to two. (More recently, parents have been allowed to have two if each parent is a single child him/herself.) They say China didn’t and doesn’t need such an extreme policy.

    An experiment within an experiment
    Liang Zhongtang is one of those skeptics.  A demographic expert affiliated with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Liang has been a long-time critic of the one-child policy – which has been in place for just over 30 years.

    “[Some Chinese] demographers said the population would be 300 or 400 million more without the birth control policy,” said Liang.  “I think it’s meaningless to talk about this issue. The decrease in the birth rate is the result of industrialization and modernization.”

    The slowing population growth rate, he continues, is just “a natural result as Chinese society develops.”

    Liang should know.

    Adrienne Mong

    A billboard outlining family planning guidelines in Xingtang.

    He’s responsible for an experiment within China’s great social engineering experiment: In Yicheng County in Shanxi Province, all families are allowed to have two children – as long as they follow two stipulations.

    “They can have another one as long as they wait four years [between the first and second child],” explained Wang Honglu, the family planning chief in Yichen's Xingtang town.

    The other is that couples wanting to have two children must be married at an age later than the national average marrying age. In China, the legal marrying age is 22 years for men and 20 years for women, but in Yicheng men must be 25 years and women 23 years if they want to marry.

    County officials devote a large part of their time to public awareness campaigns. Residents are encouraged to visit family planning clinics.  Authorities visit homes, especially after a couple has just wed, to distribute literature and discuss birth control methods.

    “We give out free condoms and birth control pills every month,” he said.  “Everything is free.”

    "This policy has been in effect since 1985," said Wang, who's worked in his field for 16 years.  "But our birth rate here has been lower than many other parts of the country [which did not have a two-child policy]."
     
    'Too expensive' to have children
    But talking to some families in Xingtang, it became clear that it wasn’t simply the existence of family planning that was keeping the birth rate low.

    “One reason to have only one child is to follow the nationwide policy,” said Wang Weigang, a 36-year-old who works in agriculture.  “But the other reason is economic.  It’s a big burden to bring up children.”

    Wang and his wife, Ma Zhengxia, decided to have only one child.  Their daughter, Yujie, is almost 2 years old. 

    “I’m not going to consider having another child for sure,” said Wang.

    In fact, that’s exactly the sentiments of Wang Honglu, the family planning official.  He is also 36 and has a daughter who is 12 years old. 

    “It’s just too expensive in general,” he said. 

    Both Wang families said they wanted to be able to afford to pay for school fees and other expenses for their daughters. 

    But like many aspiring middle class households in China who are seeing the cost of living skyrocket as their quality of life improves, they also want to have enough money to buy their own home and a car. 

    Yicheng’s experience, says Liang – the man who designed the county's experimental two-child policy, shows that “a looser [birth control] policy is better than a strict policy.”

    More problems than solutions

    Even if Liang is right, there are other compelling reasons for the government to reconsider its views on family planning.

    “China doesn’t have overpopulation pressure,” said Zhang Juwei, the deputy chief of the Population and Labor Economics Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.  “A structural imbalance is the real problem we’re facing.”

    By that, Zhang means a whole host of problems that the one-child policy has engendered.

    Adrienne Mong

    By the time this little fellow's marrying age, there might not be enough single Chinese women to go around.

    “Like the distribution of people in the rural and urban areas, like aging, like the gender imbalance.  These are the problems we are facing, not too much growth,” he continued.

    Key findings of the new census confirmed Zhang’s points, even prompting the official Communist Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, to say “a crisis looms” and giving rise to a catchphrase found in much of the Western media coverage, that “China will grow older before it gets richer.”

    Among the findings:

    - the number of people age 60 or over has grown nearly 3 percent while the number of people under 14 has decreased by more than six percent;

    - the male to female ratio among newborns is roughly 118 to 100, higher than the 116 to 100 ratio of boys to girls in 2000;

    - the number of urban residents has increased to just over 49 percent of the nationwide population, up 13 percent.

    A rapidly growing aging population, combined with a shrinking low-cost labor pool, is worrying.  All last year, reports of a labor shortage in China’s manufacturing belts in the south and east were on the rise.  Add to that, the growing urbanization rate –residents moving from the countryside to seek work in the cities – means the country will have to change its economic growth model.  It can no longer depend on cheap labor or, ultimately, on being the “factory of the world.”

    The highly skewed ratio of men to women brings with it many social implications, particularly for a government that says it’s pursuing a “harmonious society.”  Although to be fair, the one-child policy is not the sole reason for the imbalance.  In many parts of the country, particularly in rural areas, families have a traditional preference for sons.

    Officials in Beijing know all this, and since late 2009 the debate over family planning has been played out openly in the local media.  And there have been regular reports about the possibility of loosening the policy or allowing families in certain regions to have two children.

    Even so, any changes – if they were to happen – would be over several years.  Pilot schemes have been mentioned, in which five or six provinces may allow couples to have two children under certain circumstances.  But a nationwide two-child policy was unlikely at the very least until 2015.

    At any rate, President Hu Jintao finally waded into the fray two weeks ago when Xinhua reported his comments in a politburo meeting that there would be no change to the one-child policy.

  • Chinese tackle child abduction issue with social media

    By Bo Gu, NBC News

    BEIJING – Last week, everyone in China was thrilled by the news that Peng Gaofeng, a young father, had finally found his 6-year-old son who had been kidnapped three years earlier in the southern city of Shenzhen. 
     
    For Peng Gaofeng and his wife, the reunion was a mix of exhilaration and tears when they finally saw their son Peng Wenle. The elder Peng had traveled all over the country looking for his son since March 2008, trying to get help from local police and posting ads online. His efforts had been to no avail, until he received a call at the end of January from someone 800 miles away, along with a photo of his son.

    Adrienne Mong / NBC News

    Peng Wenle, Peng Gaofeng's son, is chased by media after he was reunited with his parents.

    Child abduction and smuggling are big problems in China. It’s hard to find official statistics on exactly how many children are missing, the government estimates that up to 20,000 children are trafficked every year, but sociologists believe the number to be around 200,000 every year.

    Some abducted children are used by criminal gangs to earn money from begging on the street, others are forced into manual labor, and others are sold for adoption, both domestically and overseas. Particularly in poor rural areas, the demand for a male heir and a culture preference for boys, combined with China’s strict one-child policy, have created an unfortunate market for stolen boys.

    Now Chinese activists, with the government’s approval, are using the Internet and social media tools to rescue abducted children.

    Social media campaign
    Coincidentally, just a few weeks before Peng was reunited with his son, Yu Jianrong, a government critic and professor from the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, started an Internet campaign to try to reunite parents and abducted children, who have been forced to become beggars.  |
     
    Yu Jianrong’s microblog on Sina (a Chinese version of Twitter) urged netizens to upload photos of young beggars they see on the street so that parents who are missing children can look through the images to find their children.

    microblog/ Duanzhouguozhengzong

    A photo of a woman beggar with a child taken in Zhaoqing, Guangdong province. The photo was sent to the microblog blog page trying to unite parents with their abducted children.

    Yu’s appeal, which started around the same time as Peng’s reunion with his son but did not prompt it, has received a massive response. Within three weeks, more than 220,000 followers joined the campaign and more than 1,000 photos from all over China have been posted onto the Internet – six of which were recognized by parents who had lost children. 
     
    In an online survey initiated by ifeng, a Web portal, 70 percent of those surveyed believe that taking photos of child beggars and posting them on the Internet could “rescue a great amount of kidnapped children and crack down on child smuggling." Celebrities including singers, actors, sports commentators, real estate tycoons and children's writers have also started participating.
     
    Even the government has given the campaign a thumbs up, instead of resorting to its usual agitated stance toward mass campaigns involving too many followers.

    On Feb. 11, the Ministry of Public Security asked the public to call 110 (China's police hotline) if they see any suspicious child beggars and promised that they will relentlessly punish any individuals or organizations who abuse children or force them into begging. They said DNA samples will be collected from unidentified young beggars and entered into a national database for future investigations. A phone hotline has also been set up by 1,000 lawyers to provide legal help for kidnapping victims.   The punishment for smuggling children is also severe; kidnappers face the death penalty if they are convicted.
     
    Invasion of privacy?
    But Yu’s “rescue child beggar” campaign has not escaped criticism and resistance. Some netizens questioned whether the campaign might amount to image and privacy infringement, if children may be retaliated against or further abused as a result of the campaign, and expressed doubts that the action would really be an effective solution.
     
    Lian Yue, a revered freelance columnist, is among many who believe taking photos of the beggars is actually insulting the disadvantaged. “Yes, in this photo campaign, many people believe as long as they rescue one child, it’s big accomplishment. Accordingly I can say that as long as they hurt one beggar, it’s a big crime. And we all know the latter has happened so many times already," he wrote.
     
    Other critics also cited an example in which police forcefully tested the DNA of a man and a boy begging in the street, only to find out they were actually father and son. “Beggars don’t deserve rights and dignity? Why do we have the privilege to take photos as much as we like?” one Chinese critic tweeted.
     
    In a country where the social security system is still absent or extremely weak in many rural areas, families feel insecure unless they have more than one children to support them in old age, but the one-child policy prevents large families. Many local orphanages make it hard for Chinese parents to adopt, because they prefer Westerners who usually provide a much bigger “service fee” for adoptions. And in some extremely poor places, families buy young girls as future wives for their sons if parents fear the boys will be too poor to marry.
     
    Peng’s case is a typical example – the man who kidnapped his son later abducted another girl to be raised as the boy’s future wife.
     
    The Ministry of Civil Affairs estimates China has 1 to 1.5 million child beggars. It’s hard to say how long the photo campaign will last and how much passion the public will have as time goes by. Their fervor may be crippled after a recent police statement saying that most of the child beggars are forced onto the streets by their own parents or relatives, while a large number of kidnapped children actually end up being bought by families looking to adopt.