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Infanticide, Forced Abortions and Sterilizations in China’s Linyi Province

LINYI, September 16, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) ¬ A massive campaign by China’s population-control authorities is underway in the country’s Shandong province, south-east of Beijing, with accounts of horrible atrocities, including infanticide, forced abortions on women, ¬even of those in the ninth month of pregnancy, ¬and the sterilizations of thousands.

Time magazine published a report, describing the situation as “one of the most brutal sterilization campaigns of recent years.”  Time reported the case of Li Juan, a woman whose term baby was forcibly aborted. “The men with the poison-filled syringe arrived two days before Li Juan's due date. They pinned her down on a bed in a local clinic, she says, and drove the needle into her abdomen until it entered the 9-month-old fetus. ‘At first, I could feel my child kicking a lot,’ says the 23-year-old. ‘Then, after a while, I couldn't feel her moving anymore.’” Continue reading the grisly account at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1103579,00.html

Since March, family-planning officials have combed the Linyi region to forcibly abort pregnant women or to sterilize women who already have the allotted one child (or two if the first is a girl or handicapped).

In one county of the Linyi region alone, at least 7,000 people were forcibly sterilized between March and July this year. Several villagers were beaten to death for hiding family members trying to avoid forcible abortions and sterilizations.

Human rights campaigner, Chen Guangcheng, the blind farmer who initiated a class-action suit against population authorities for the atrocities, revealed to an independent Chinese news source that he was brutally attacked, forcibly detained and then sentenced to house arrest.

Chen, who is blind, described being detained in Beijing by officials from his home city of Linyi after fleeing to the capital to bring evidence of the atrocities to family planning officials in Beijing.

“They dragged me into the car, and my legs were hurt in quite a few places. Some of them pulled my hair and banged my head onto the wheel and hit my face and head. My nose still has two places which are hurt,” Chen, 34, told Radio Free Asia’s Mandarin service.

“Then I was trying to shout, but one of them squeezed my neck with his arm, stopping me from shouting out,” he told RFA reporter Ding Xiao. “At that moment, I didn’t even dare to swallow. About twice I passed out.”

Chen said his requests for medical attention were refused, and he was taken to a hotel and visited the next morning by the head of the Linyi public security bureau and the city’s deputy mayor.

“The main purpose was to threaten me. He said, ‘You have revealed news information to foreign media and have been suspected of violating Article 111 of Chinese criminal law: illegally providing intelligence to foreign countries, for which the maximum sentence is life in prison. The minimum you can get is 5-10 years.’”

Officials then called in his family to persuade him to give up his activism. “But then—I don’t know why—at a little after 6 o’clock in the evening, [they] abruptly let me go,” Chen told RFA.

The deputy mayor said the reason for Chen’s abduction was to protect him from “being used by the foreign media.”

“They don’t care about what the truth is. They just won’t allow any reporting. I think this is an issue of freedom of speech,” Chen said.

“They are now near our family home watching us,” Chen’s wife, Yuan, told RFA’s Cantonese service Wednesday. “There are police vehicles and seven or eight officers. There are also officials from our local county government. They are there round the clock, and they change shifts every six hours.”

See reated LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Man who Fought Forced Abortion Law Arrested in China
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/sep/05090704.html

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