Two Women and Two Trajectories in China

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By MARK MCDONALD

 | June 16, 2012, 10:29 PM 13 Comments

BANGKOK — When the photograph was posted online, the reaction inside China was immediate, massive and angry. In no time, there were more than a million page views.

In the photo, 23-year-old Feng Jianwei lies on a single hospital bed. She is dressed in periwinkle blue pajamas, and her long dark hair covers her face. Next to her, naked on a rectangle of plastic, reclined as if napping, or perhaps stretching, is her bloody seven-month-old fetus, which has just been forcibly aborted. The baby is dead.

The photo can be seen here, but a warning: It is very explicit and could be upsetting to many readers.

New details have now emerged about the abortion, and the incident continues to lead many Chinese to call for a scrapping of China’s so-called one-child policy. Others have expressed regret and outrage over the harsh enforcement of the policy, which varies widely across China, even as they defend the plan’s original intent — that an unchecked birth rate would threaten the country’s economic gains and people’s rising standard of living.

The gruesome abortion incident was cast this weekend against China’s successful launching of its first female astronaut. The sad irony of the two women’s situations was not lost on Chinese netizens, and one poignant tweet was quoted by the blog Tea Leaf Nation:

“We can send a female taikonaut out into space, and we can also forcefully abort the fetus of a seven-months-pregnant woman from the countryside. The stark contrast between the fates of two women, 33-year-old Liu Yang and 22-year-old [sic] Feng Jianmei, is the clearest illustration of the torn state of the this nation.

Glory and dreams illuminate disgrace and despair, cutting-edge technology exists alongside the shameless trampling of the people. Rockets fly into the heavens while morals reach new lows, the nation rises while the people kneel in submission. This is how the best of times meets the worst of times.”

Some space analysts questioned why China appeared to be rushing the training of a female astronaut. Male astronauts typically train for a dozen years or more before going up. The two women in the astronaut corps — both of whom started as military cargo pilots — were picked just two years ago.

“So why the apparent urgency to send an inexperienced woman into orbit, on this high profile flight?” asked Tony Quine, a blogger who closely follows the Chinese program, particularly astronaut selection. “Perhaps there has simply been political pressure to send a woman into orbit? Women’s Groups in China have been lobbying for a woman in space since 2004.”

After two years of nearly total secrecy about the identity of the first woman to be sent aloft, the Chinese space program last week finally released a photo of Major Liu. She and her husband, like Ms. Feng and her husband, have one child.

Local officials in Shaanxi Province had told Ms. Feng and her husband that they were not approved for a pregnancy and would have to pay a fine equivalent to $6,300 if they wanted to go through with having the child, their second. When the couple failed to pay, Ms. Feng was beaten, restrained and given an injection into her stomach. The fetus, which had been active and kicking, stopped moving.

“They gave her the injection on June 2, and the child was stillborn at 3 a.m. on the morning of June 4,” said Ms. Feng’s husband, Deng Jiyuan, in an interview with Radio Free Asia. “They gave the injection directly into the child’s head.”

Speaking soon after the abortion with Chai Ling, the founder of the Christian anti-abortion group All Girls Allowed, which is based in Boston, Ms. Feng said she had been grabbed by local family planning personnel while her husband was at work. (An advisory about this link: The home page of the group’s Web site has carried a photo of Ms. Feng and her dead fetus.)

“She was dragged by five strong men, they held her down, had a pillowcase over her head and put her finger with ink and pressed it” onto an abortion-consent form, Ms. Ling said in an interview with Al Jazeera, recounting her conversation with Ms. Feng.

Ms. Feng is now “in a very bad mental state” since the abortion, Ms. Ling said. “She wants to commit suicide.”

Three family planning officials in Shaanxi have been suspended over the incident, according to the official Chinese news agency Xinhua. Not fired or jailed. Suspended.

As my colleague David Barboza reported from Shanghai, “Families who disobey the one-child policy are often treated harshly by the Chinese authorities. But the government’s response to the public outcry — punishing local authorities — is unusual.”

Fearing Malthusian collapse — famine resulting from the population outstripping the food supply — China managed to bring its birth rate down during the 1970s through a voluntary government-promoted campaign called “Later, Longer, Fewer” — later marriages, longer intervals between pregnancies and fewer children. Women went from having an average of 5.8 children in 1970 to 2.7 children by 1979.

It was in 1979, however, that the one-child policy took effect.

It was not intended to last forever, and social planners in Beijing thought it should probably endure for 30 years. But it has passed that milestone and will be a fixture until at least 2015. Government statistics say it has prevented 400 million births.

It has hardly been a blanket or egalitarian policy. Provincial regulations and enforcement methods vary widely — rural people are often exempted now, for example — and parents who themselves come from single-child families can usually be granted exemptions to have a second child. There is substantial reporting, too, that corrupt local councils routinely allow wealthy or well-connected families to get exemptions for second, third or fourth children.

The policy also seems to have more exceptions than rules. Its “complexity has come to resemble that of the U.S. tax code,” said Wang Feng, a sociologist and demographer, who wrote about the one-child policy for the East-West Center.

The policy has worked almost too well. The birth rate has dropped below replacement levels, making China one of the world’s most rapidly aging societies.

“Rapid aging,” Mr. Wang wrote, “in the absence of a standard of living and a social safety net comparable to other aging societies, has also earned China the distinction of a country that has become old before it has become rich.”

A recent editorial by the Christian Science Monitor also said China “remains concerned about the security implications of having an estimated24 million bachelors by 2020 with little prospect of marriage. Officials worry about more kidnapping of women, higher crime, and other social unrest.”

Surveys show that Chinese couples, especially in urban areas, now show a preference for two children, rather than the large families favored by previous generations. And China no longer faces a food-supply problem.

In stories in China’s state-run media in recent days, government officials in Beijing have said they are bothered by the abortion that was forced on Ms. Feng. But senior policymakers also indicated there would be no changes to the current system.

Hu Xijin, the editor of Global Times, a populist pro-government newspaper, criticized the abortion on Sina Weibo, the Twitter-like microblogging service in China. Quoted in an NBC story, Mr. Hu said: “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.”

But he also suggested the one-child policy was still necessary, saying that “world resources cannot afford to feed a China with billions of people.”