Published by: World Tibet Network News Wednesday November 19, 1997

HONG KONG, (Nov. 18) IPS - China's strict birth control policy, which used to be applied most strictly in urban areas, has begun to concentrate more on minorities and rural areas, leading to a new wave of abuses, human rights groups here say.

Earlier this year, Chinese President Jiang Zemin said in a speech the minority areas would be specifically targeted, adding new impetus to the drive in minority regions first launched in 1995.

"Each year about 22 million babies are born in China. At present, the population of China constitutes 20 percent of the entire human race while the territory of China is only 7 percent of the world's," Jiang told a recent family planning conference in Beijing.

"Although some measures are being taken in the minority areas, implementation of the Communist Party's family planning policies are not satisfactory there. From now on it is necessary to enforce implementation of the birth control policies in the minority areas," he said.

According to rights groups, particularly those monitoring the volatile situation in Tibet and the Muslim region of Xinjiang, the statement is likely to cause unrest in these two areas that previously did not strictly follow the one-child rule.

"The new concentration in these areas is bound to raise suspicions that birth control is another way of making these ethnic groups an even smaller minority in their own regions even as Han migrants grow," said a member of the Munich-based East Turkistan Information Center which tracks events in Xinjiang.

According to the 1995 census, minorities make up about 9 per cent of China's population of 1.2 billion people. Han Chinese comprise 91 per cent. In the 1980s, almost all minority families had two children, compared to only 18 per cent of Han in urban areas, which have since seen a dramatic drop in fertility.

More than 50 percent of minority families also had three children. This was almost unheard of among Han Chinese, even in rural areas where a second child was still considered the norm until the Communist Party recently targeted rural areas in carrying out its one-child policy.

In an annual speech to the National People's Congress (China's parliament) in March, Prime Minister Li Peng said: "We should give priority to family planning in rural areas and among the floating population and combine it with efforts to assist farmers to shake off poverty."

"We will improve the system whereby governments at all levels are held responsible for attaining their birth control quotas," he added.

Analysts say the stepped up birth control policy has been in place since 1994 in rural areas, and 1995 in minority areas such as Tibet and Xinjiang. But human rights groups fear that the latest speeches by the party's top leaders will lead to abuses in the name of carrying out the policy.

In testimony before the United States Congress last month Rizvangul Uigur, a member of the Turkic minority of China's Xinjiang region, spoke of babies being killed in the delivery room of hospitals if birth control quotas are exceeded. "The reason for those innocent souls' death is that their mothers have no birth control permission," she said.

The Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India has documented some abuses.

In one report they noted the forced sterilization of 308 Tibetan women in the space of 22 days between September and October 1996 in Takar near the capital Lhasa. One woman Nyima Dolma, aged 27, died after one such forced sterilization.

"Although Nyima was in good health and free of any sickness before sterilization, Chinese officials announced that the cause of the death was ill health," the Tibetan Government-in-exile said in a report.

In one area documented on the basis of eyewitness accounts from Tibetans fleeing into India and Nepal, "the percentage of childbirth allowed by the authorities in one year was fixed at 4.5 percent and it was mandatory for a couple who wished to have a child to test their luck in a lottery system," the Tibetan report explained.

"If the couple was unlucky and their names were not drawn then the mother, even if already five or six months pregnant, had to undergo an abortion," it added.

The report said that a couple that is successful in one lottery is banned from the lot system for the next three years. It continued: "If a couple is successful in two lottery draws, they are forbidden from participating in the lottery for the rest of their lives."

Officials of China's family planning office of Tibet say categorically that while the government advocates no more than three children for Tibetan couples "that is only a suggestion, not an arbitrary order."

Tu Den, director of China's family planning office of Tibet, was quoted in the official 'China Daily' newspaper as saying "such things as forced abortion and sterilization are absolutely non-existent."

In the Himalayan region, the one child policy was only introduced officially in 1980 -- five years after the rest of China and was initially restricted to the majority Han Chinese.

Although it was extended to urban Tibetans in 1985 in pastoral and rural areas, "some 88 per cent of the local population are free from compulsory birth control quotas", according to Tu Den. In 1995, the official birthrate among Tibetans was 2.56 compared to the national average of 1.7.

While the stepped-up birth control policy in China's rural areas is accompanied by an incentive scheme -- including the award of high quality seed to peasant families who adhere to the policy -- there are no such incentives in the minority areas.

Instead, human rights groups say, the minorities feel that coercive methods of birth control are unwarranted interference in their lives by officialdom.

For their part, exile groups report that women's health may be jeopardized by the birth control measures, since women seeking treatment for ailment are fearful of visiting hospitals and clinics for fear they may be forced to undergo sterilization.