LINYI CITY, China, Fri Apr 8, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Chinese family planning official stabbed and killed the brother of a woman on whom officials were planning on performing a forced sterilization, according to a report by Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers.
Family planning officials in the city of Linyi, in Shandong Province, reportedly entered the home of Xu Shuaishuai on March 21 to seize his sister for a forced sterilization under the authority of China’s coercive one child policy.
According to Littlejohn, when they were unable to find her, the family planning officials began to beat Xu’s father. When Xu defended his father, one of the officials stabbed him twice in the heart with a long knife. Xu died on the way to the hospital.
“This murder is a shocking and extreme example of how coercive family planning presses fear into the hearts of the Chinese people every day,” Littlejohn said in a press release.
“Women who become pregnant without a birth permit – illegally pregnant – are terrified of discovery and forced abortion. Fathers feel helpless to protect their wives and children. Paid informants – friends, neighbors, co-workers – tear down trust in Chinese society. Family members are detained and tortured.”
Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute told LifeSiteNews that occurrences such as this are all too common under China’s brutal population control policy, but are almost never reported.
“It’s a crime in China to interfere with officials who are carrying out their population control work,” Mosher said. “These officials have the power to arrest, lock up, beat or torture anyone who offers resistance, but are never called to account for their actions, because they are carrying out state policy.”
Mosher pointed out that the media is strictly controlled in China and news of incidents such as this are only made known by the courageous acts of witnesses, risking retaliation by government officials, who send emails or text messages to organizations that are concerned about human rights abuses in China.
“Foreign journalists in Beijing are watched all the time. You can’t even go out into the street to interview someone without a permit from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” Mosher said. “There’s a lot of pressure brought to bear of foreign correspondents – they all know these things are happening, they all hear about them in China, but they usually only write about them on the day after they leave for the last time.”
Two recent examples of the brutality of retaliation against those in China who oppose forced abortion and sterilization have been reported by LifeSiteNews.
In February, Amnesty International issued an urgent call for universal action after Chinese prisoner of conscience Mao Hengfeng was re-arrested and shipped back to a labor camp for her struggle against China’s one child policy.
In March last year, Hengfeng was sentenced to a year and a half of “re-education through labor” (RTL) for “disturbing public order” by having had three children. Hengfeng had been released on parole due to health concerns from her ill treatment and torture during imprisonment on February 22, but was arrested and sent back to a labor camp on February 24. Her whereabouts remains unknown.
In a story bordering on the bizarre, a report by the French magazine Liberation in December, 2010 said that Chinese authorities had effectively converted an entire village into a prison in order to prevent Chen Guangcheng, a blind, pro-life dissident, from moving freely about the country.
Chen, a lawyer, had revealed to Time magazine in 2005 that he had filed a lawsuit against the local provincial government for carrying out thousands of forced abortions and sterilizations against the population.
Chen was sentenced to four years in prison, where he was beaten by fellow inmates at the behest of guards, then confined under house arrest in the prison village where he remains with no communication with the outside world.