Who Controls the Family?

Du Dehong, 33, a corn farmer in Yinghu village, said seven officials showed up at her home on the night of May 9, pushed her into a small white van and took her to the county family planning station. They ordered her to fill out a form, and when she refused, one of the men grabbed her hand and forced her to leave a fingerprint.

"He said, 'Even if you stay here and resist for three days, we're going to operate on you eventually,' " Du recalled. She said she relented, and the operation took just 10 minutes.

A few days later, she and her husband sought out Chen. Over the years, their blind neighbor had earned a reputation as someone who understood the law -- and would stand up to the government.

In 1996, he had traveled to Beijing with a complaint about his family's taxes. He won a refund and admission to a university to study acupuncture and massage, the only higher education courses available to the blind in China. He took law classes on the side, and then began campaigning for the rights of the disabled and farmers.

When neighbors told him about the family planning abuses, he proposed a lawsuit. Word spread quickly, and Chen emerged as the leader of the battle against the forced abortion and sterilization campaign.

On a recent visit to Maxiagou village, in another rural part of Linyi, he interviewed Feng Zhongxia, 36. She recounted that she was seven months pregnant and on the run when she learned that local officials had detained more than a dozen of her relatives and wouldn't release them unless she returned for an abortion.

"My aunts, uncles, cousins, my pregnant younger sister, my in-laws, they were all taken to the family planning office," she said. "Many of them didn't get food or water, and all of them were severely beaten." Some of the relatives were allowed to call her, and they pleaded with her to come home.

Feng called the family planning officials. "They told me they would peel the skin off my relatives and I would only see their corpses if I didn't come back," she said. The next day, she turned herself in. A doctor examined her, then stuck a needle into her uterus. About 24 hours later, she delivered the dead fetus. "It was a small life," she said quietly.

Afterward, she said, the family planning workers insisted on sterilizing her, too. "I'm a human being. How can they treat me like that?" she asked.

Chen sat listening to and recording the peasants' stories for several hours. Some described midnight raids on their homes involving as many as 30 officials and hired thugs. Others recalled being held in rooms crowded with more than 50 other villagers, including children, adding that the officials charged them exorbitant fees for food and "study sessions" when they were released.

The last to speak was Mei Shouqin, 42, who can no longer walk up a flight of stairs because of a botched tubal ligation. When the doctor explained what had gone wrong, he didn't apologize, she recalled. He just said she needed to return in a month so he could try again.

Liu Chuanyu, a Linyi family planning official reached by phone, denied knowledge of the abuses. "All of our work is done according to national policy and the demands of upper-level officials," he said. Other local family planning officials reached by phone declined to give their names and also denied any wrongdoing.

But Yu Xuejin, a senior official with the national family planning commission in Beijing, said his office had received complaints about abuses in Linyi and asked provincial authorities to investigate. He said the practices described by the farmers, including forced sterilization and abortion, were "definitely illegal."

Yu emphasized that the central government had led the nation toward more humane family planning practices over the past decade. "If the Linyi complaints are true, or even partly true, it's because local officials do not understand the new demands of the Chinese leadership regarding family planning work," he said.

Yu also applauded the farmers for asserting their rights. If officials in Linyi violated the law, he said, "I support the ordinary people. If they need help, we'll help them find lawyers."

But back in Linyi, Chen said progress had been slow. State media have been afraid to report on the crackdown, and without the publicity, he has been unable to raise funds.

At the same time, he said, local officials have visited him three times and urged him to persuade the farmers to drop the lawsuit. He said one warned him that "offending the government isn't good," and said if any officials were fired because of his lawsuit, "they might try to take revenge."

But Chen said he wasn't backing down. "If you've violated the law, you must take responsibility," he said. "If we withdraw the lawsuit, then they'll just violate the law again next time."