Since China loosened its restrictions on the number of children that couples can have, the officials who were tasked with enforcing the one-child policy have felt abandoned by the government as their role becomes less important. They face redundancy and public scorn. In an effort to keep these 1 million family planning officials useful, some local governments are trying to find new tasks for them to take on.
Peng Yulong was blinded 26 years ago by an explosion caused by an angry villager during a raid to enforce the one-child policy. He has spent the years since then asking the government for compensation.
"I was disabled while doing a public job to enforce State policies. The government should compensate me," he told the Global Times. Now a masseur in Xingwen county, Southwest China's Sichuan Province, he dedicates most of his spare time to his hunt for compensation even though he has been told every time that there is no policy that covers his situation, as he was a village official rather than a government official. As of today, there seems to be little hope he will ever receive compensation.
Aside from the local authorities, he has also gone to Beijing to make appeals to the central government. His grievances were reported by the national media in February, but received little public attention. Some netizens even commented that he "deserved the outcome." Peng, a former family planning official left out in the cold, is far from alone.
As China has reformed its family planning policy and streamlined this branch of the government, thousands of grass-roots family planning officials have been transferred to other departments or made redundant.
It was announced in March 2013 that the National Population and Family Planning Commission, a ministerial-level department established in 1981, would merge with the Ministry of Health.
In December that year, the country took its first steps to relaxing the one-child policy, allowing couples to have a second child if either parent was an only child. On January 1, the policy was further loosened to allow all couples to have two children.
Seeing their salaries and benefits cut, some family planning officials wrote open letters or even staged protests. However, unlike other petitioners or laid-off workers who usually receive public sympathy and support when faced with adversity, they have largely drawn ridicule and antipathy. Many say they are being repaid for their past "evil" acts.
Career shame
In late May, dozens of family planning officials in Gong'an county, Central China's Hubei Province, staged a protest in front of the county bureau of health and family planning, demanding better wages. They claimed their monthly salary had been cut to less than 2,000 yuan($303), half of what most civil servants can expect to be paid.
One of them shared pictures of their protest and written appeals on Weibo, hoping to draw attention and support. Though the post was widely reposted, however most netizens showed little empathy toward their complaints.
Yi Fuxian, author of non-fiction work A Big Country in an Empty Nest which argues that the birth control policy has hurt China, thinks this kind of reaction clearly shows how much the public dislikes the way that the country's family planning policies have been enforced.
"Under the call of the government, the family planning officers were empowered to use coercive measures and collect fines, which generated lots of resentment," Yi, senior scientist of Obstetrics & Gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US, told the Global Times.
In the 1980s and 1990s, population control was at the top of local governments' and village committees' agendas. In urban areas, couples could lose their jobs if they had more children than they were allowed. In rural areas, families who wouldn't or couldn't pay fines would have their property confiscated and sold by family planning officials, including livestock, furniture and appliances.
Faced with losing so much of their already meager wealth, forced abortions and sterilizations, villagers across China became hostile to family planning officers.
During that period, family planning officials were regularly attacked, sometimes fatally, by villagers.
On June 18, 1990, Peng, then an official in Xinyi village, Xingwen county took part in a raid along with superior family planning officials who were in the village to investigate and penalize one-child policy violators.
At noon, a coal miner whose wife had been forced to abort their third child and had had his pig confiscated, set off explosives which killed him and six others in addition to injuring 21, one of whom was Peng.
Of the 28 killed or injured, 26 were innocent villagers between 6 months and 58 years old. Besides paying funeral fees, the government abandoned the injured after offering them initial medical treatment, according to news-probe, an investigative unit under news portal qq.com.
