China Reform Monitor: No. 1075

December 9:

Ai Guangdong, 45, a Chinese farmer from Liangerzhuang, Hebei with five children, drank a fatal dose of pesticide at the local party chief’s home after his family’s entire annual income (3.5 metric tons of corn) was seized for violating the one-child policy. Ai and his wife had four daughters and a son and their farm makes only 5,000 yuan ($825) per year. Under the one-child policy rural couples can have a second child if the first is a girl, allowing officials to demand the Ai family pay a 60,000 yuan ($10,000) fine for the birth of their third child. By contrast, the local government offered Ai’s family 15,000 yuan ($2,500) for funeral costs and compensation. Since the incident the village chief has disappeared. Fines for violators of family planning policies are an important revenue source for local governments and officials. Last year, 24 of China’s 31 provinces collected nearly 20 billion yuan ($3.3 billion) in penalties; none has detailed how the money was spent, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reports.

December 11:

In a desperate bid for attention that underscores the need to reform China’s national petition system, a dozen people protesting the demolition of their homes in Wuhan, Hubei drank pesticide in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The 12 petitioners, who have been unsuccessfully seeking redress since 2010 when local authorities razed their homes and provided little or no compensation, survived after treatment. “We have been petitioning for so many years, but either we are dragged back home or locked in secret jails and beaten, and no one has been willing to help us,” one petitioner said in comments carried by the Japan Times. “We felt like there was no hope left.” He said the protest was a group suicide attempt. Each petitioner drank the pesticide then lay down until police arrived and drove them to a hospital.

[Editor’s Note: Every year millions of Chinese file petitions about injustice or official incompetence. Common complaints include land expropriation, forced home demolitions, labor disputes, and local authorities’ failure to prosecute crimes.]

December 13:

China is cracking down on academics that have children abroad. Amid a review of birth control policy, Cai Zhiqi, an associate professor of chemistry at South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, was fired “in accordance with Guangdong’s family planning regulations,” the university announced. In response, Cai’s lawyer cited a 2002 notice from the National Population and Family Planning Commission allowing Chinese studying overseas to have a second child as long as they are abroad for over a year. Cai’s first child was born in 2007, when he was working in the U.S. and is an American citizen, while his second in Tianjin in 2010. Cai is the latest academic to lose his job over a violation of the one-child policy. In March, Cao Tingbing, a chemistry professor at Renmin University, jumped to his death from a campus building after he was fired for having a second child. Yang Zhizhu, an assistant professor at China Youth University for Political Science, was sacked in 2010 after his wife gave birth to a second child, the SCMP reports.

December 16:

The China Times reports that the national security bureaus of China and Taiwan held talks in an unnamed Southeast Asian country over a proposed exchange of jailed spies. China asked for the release of Major General Lo Hsien-che, who was sentenced to life in prison for selling military secrets to Beijing, but Taiwanese authorities rejected the demand. Taiwan requested the release of two colonels with the Military Intelligence Bureau - Chu Kung-hsun and Hsu Chang-kuo - who were arrested in 2006 by China’s national security bureau at the Vietnam border.

[Editor’s Note: Lo Hsien-che was involved in the biggest espionage case in 50 years. In June 2011, Taiwan’s Military High Court sentenced the former head of communications and electronic information at army command headquarters to life in prison for selling military secrets to China. On five occasions Lo Hsien-che delivered classified military secrets to Beijing in return for more than $1 million. In 2004 Chinese agents recruited Lo in a “honey trap.” Beijing agents filmed him in Thailand frequenting prostitutes and blackmailed him into spying.]

December 17:

Police in Shufu County, Kashgar, have arrested six suspects in connection with the violence that left 16 people dead. The authorities also confiscated a number of explosive devices, homemade firearms, knives and other weapons, according to the regional news portal Tianshannet.com. The attack saw a mob hurl explosives and attack with machetes, killing two police officers. Police killed 14 of the gang members during the clash, which occurred at around 11 pm. Xinjiang police said the incident was an “organized, premeditated violent terrorist attack” and that 20 gang members, led by a suspect called Aishan Simayi, had been forming since August. The gang met several times to watch terrorism videos, preach religious extremist ideas, make explosives and firearms, and to plan Sunday's attack, the police said.