Family-planning officials took & sold babies: report

• Source: Global Times
• [01:47 May 10 2011]
• Comments

Filing a lawsuit was also an option, he said, but would be much more time consuming and costly.

Some analysts questioned the apparent lax government supervision over an alleged decade-long series of crimes.

Lu Jiehua, a sociologist with Peking University, told the Global Times that the difficulties of enforcing the one-child policy might have forced the officials to resort to extreme measures.

"They are under extreme pressure as all their job evaluations are related to the effectiveness of reducing the number of children," Lu said. "Their job is difficult, but that is no excuse for trafficking children, which is absolutely illegal."

Other analysts called for more adoption regulations to prevent a profit chain in which family-planning offices snatched babies and welfare centers repackaged them into "products" for export.

Longhui is by no means the first county to snatch babies.

In 2005, a number of children welfare centers in Hengyang, also in Hunan, were exposed for participation in human trafficking.

Some of the welfare centers even required employees to look for children that could be seized, the Caixin Century Magazine said, citing local news reports.

Two years ago, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported similar cases in Zhenyuan county, Guizhou Province, where local welfare centers bought children for 3,000 yuan and sold them to adoptive foreigners for $3,000 each.

As the population increases in China, family planning policy faces increasing challenges.

More than 13 million people in the country have no hukou, or household registration, and most had been born in violation of the national family planning policy, according to Ma Jiantang, head of the National Bureau of Statistics.

Li Qian contributed to this story