China's birth-control policies led to riots

BOBAI, China — Chinese state media on Wednesday confirmed that riots had broken out over the weekend in southern China against the enforcement of birth-control policies.

As many as 3,000 people joined in violent protests that led to the detention of 28 people, according to the New China News Agency.

People in Bobai, 110 miles southeast of Nanning in southern China's Guangxi province, said birth-control bureaucrats showed up in a half-dozen towns with sledgehammers and threatened to knock holes in the homes of people who had failed to pay fines for having more than one child.

Other officials, backed by hired toughs, pushed their way into businesses owned by parents of more than one child and confiscated everything from sacks of rice to color televisions, they said.

It was the latest example of abusive local enforcement of a policy that China's leadership says is vital to maintaining swift economic growth and spreading its benefits more evenly among a population already at 1.3 billion people.

Local officials eager to meet population quotas have frequently been accused of forcing women to submit to abortions or sterilizations to keep the birth rate down.

In this region of fertile rice paddies and pineapple fields, the one-child policy has been interpreted as such: Families whose first child is a daughter can try again for a son but have to pay a $375 fine for their second offspring, local parents said. Those who give birth to third and fourth children have to pay progressively higher fines, local residents said.

But, they added, Bobai authorities traditionally have been lenient about collecting the money, realizing farmers often face a cash shortage between crops. As a result, many families have three or more children.

But the farmers of Bobai and nearby towns have been known since the Qing Dynasty for resistance to high-handed rulers. The townspeople shared the widely held view that local officials generally were corrupt and that the money for fines would go to line their pockets rather than into government coffers.

Townspeople and villagers said an unknown number of people were killed, but this was unconfirmed. Several people reported seeing police carrying pistols and rifles, but there were no firsthand reports of gunfire.