Local officials have been accused of seizing baby girls from parents who broke birth control limits and helping hand them on to adoptive parents overseas for the equivalent of about £1,800 (US$2,930) each, Chinese media reported.
Six officials have been punished after children were wrongly sent to an orphanage, local authorities in Guizhou Province confirmed. The authorities were still looking into the role of the institution in the affair.
“According to our investigation, it is true that babies who have parents were forced into the orphanage and then abroad,” an official from the Zhenyuan County family planning bureau told a newspaper that uncovered the story.
The Southern Metropolis News said family planning officers removed the children when their parents could not afford to pay the fine for excess births.
The Chinese newspaper Time Weekly reported claims that officials forged documents stating that the babies were orphans, and that they split adoption fees with the orphanage.
The newspaper also said that almost 80 infants from Zhenyuan had been adopted by US and European families since 2001, although many were genuine orphans or given up voluntarily.
While rural couples in China are usually allowed to have two children, in comparison with urban couples who can generally have only one, many have more offspring, often unintentionally or because they keep trying for a son.
Yang Shuiying told Time Weekly that a family planning official warned that he would take away her fifth child unless she paid about 20,000 yuan, a sum roughly four times the household’s annual income.
When she said she wanted to keep her daughter, he replied: “You are so poor, how can you pay? Why didn’t you have an abortion?”
The official has since been punished for “misleading” Yang and her husband.
Another man, Li Zeji, said he and his wife gave their third child to a cousin and went to work in another town to stop officials discovering they had broken the rules.
“The family planning people in our village are very tough. Sometimes they smash houses and take away cows or TVs as a penalty,” he said. “[When they found out] they took away the kid and said I did not need to pay.”
He said each night he would dream his daughter was calling “Daddy” but could never see her face.
Investigators said officials took the baby from Li’s cousin, who claimed she found it abandoned, but did not do proper checks before putting the child into care.
The newspaper said that when pressed about the cases, a Zhenyuan official told them: “If the real parents still exist after investigation, they can get their children back after going through procedures.”
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS