BEIJING – As supervisor of family planning enforcement in Fujian province’s Daji township, Wang Jinding says he knows the best way to kill the unborn babies of parents who want to keep them.
“The key point is to separate the pregnant woman from her family members,” he said in an interview with USA TODAY.
That is exactly what Wang did in a case in April, enforcing the Communist Party’s rules on family size. He had eight government workers kidnap a pregnant Pan Chunyan, 31, from her grocery store in Fujian city on the southern coast.
Her husband, Wu Liangjie, was frantically raising the $8,640 fee required for a third child. Wu and a dozen relatives fought to try to see Pan at the government building where she was held.
Rather than granting the family more time, Wang organized a police-led convoy of seven vehicles to take Pan to a hospital. There, Pan — who was eight months pregnant — was injected with chemicals to kill the child. She delivered a fully formed, but dead, son.
“My wife only got a glance at the child, her heart broke, and she cried loudly, because the whole body was black and the skin on the face had peeled,” Wu says. “This is a life that had no time to look at this beautiful world with eyes open.”
In years past, this couple’s clash with authority might have ended there. But access to the Internet has allowed millions of people to elude China’s censors and read postings from fellow citizens on taboo subjects such as forced abortion, dissidents and Communist Party corruption.
This story went one step further. In an even rarer phenomenon, the swelling anger on blogs over what happened to another pregnant woman in June has forced the monolithic party to respond to the outrage: It will investigate the matter. This month, a government-run website overseen by the Communist Party’s propaganda agency suggested “perhaps it is time to rethink” China’s one-child policy.
