An Evil Secret behind the Stolen or Faked Blank Birth Certificates

About one month ago, South China Morning Post published an article ‘How Chinese Officials Inflated the Nation’s Birth Rate and Population Size for 2019’, authored by Yi Fuxian, the famous senior scientist of UWM.

In that article, Yi claimed that, in China, ‘as more than 20 social benefits are tied to one’s place of birth, under the hukou household registration system, some parents buy additional to provide a “dual citizenship” to their newborn’.

Below that claim, Yi cited 2 examples from a report by the Democracy and Legal System Times’ and an official announcement released by ‘the Commission for Discipline Inspection of Chenzhou city, Hunan province’ .

I found these 2 articles, the former was titled as ‘Faked Information but Real Hukou: An Investigation Revealing the Inside Story of the Birth Certificates Trading’ (《假信息真户口：“出生证”买卖内幕调查》https://www.sohu.com/a/115017011_305034) , and the latter, ‘Birth Certificates from 500 Kilometers away (《千里之外的出生证明》http://www.czlz.czs.gov.cn/ajjc/content_2934302.html).

I read them from the beginning to the end, but found no word, not a single word, mentioning the ‘dual citizenship’ or the so-called ‘more than 20 social benefits’ claimed by Yi.

But I found something Yi didn’t mention in his article.

The first story, ‘Faked Information but Real Hukou’, concerned the problem of how some families from Fujian Province used faked birth certificates to conceal the real identifications of their 'adopted children', of which some were suspected to be trafficked from other provinces.

It was an anti-trafficking volunteer who first blown the whistler.

‘In black market, the price of a birth certificate could be as high as 100,000 yuan’. The journalist(s) pointed out.

That’s a big money for most Chinese people. In 2016, the per capita disposable income of China was only 23821 yuan, according to a report by Xinhua News Agent. ( 《2016年和2010年相比 居民收入实际增六成》http://www.xinhuanet.com/fortune/2017-07/07/c_1121279359.htm)

So how many families could and would pay that big money just to get ‘more than 20 social benefits’ which Yi never specifically stated?

Mr Yi, who has always been able to collect data from resources which ordinary scholars could not even dream of, never gave us a reliable figure on this.

Some people may point out that, due to the One-Child Policy, it was difficult for children born outside Family Plan to get birth certificates. Of course such phenomenon did exist and might account for some of the cases appeared in those 2 articles mentioned by Yi.

In that case, if as many as ‘4,000 blank birth certificates… were stolen and sold’ at only one hospital in Mengcheng county alone, as Yi himself mentioned, then in the whole country there must be large quantity of new-born babies who, as the 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th…child of their families, could not get legal birth certificates and therefore be omitted by ‘the Health Statistics Yearbook compiled by China’s health care authority’.

That means what Yi claimed, ‘the number of births released in the Health Statistics Yearbook is overestimated’, is completely groundless. The contrary is far closer to the truth.

But parents with children born outside birth-control plan surely aren’t the only potential buyers of illegal birth certificates.

Because from the beginning of 2016, China had implemented the two-child policy and abolished the old rules concerning those children. So such problem no longer existed for them any more from then on. That means, since 2016, any children delivered in hospitals could get the birth certificates they need to apply for hukou.

And according to Yi, ‘the hospital delivery rate is 99.9 per cent in China’.

As for the 0.1 per cent delivered in other places, they could still get the birth certificates if their families could provide some extra materials, including DNA identifications from qualified hospitals to prove that they were their biological parents.

However, some reports show that the illegal trading of birth certificates in black markets continued to exist after 2016.

In 2019, a ‘Focus Interview’ Show from CCTV revealed how a hospital in Sichuan Province sold faked birth certificates for 30,000 to 40,000 yuan each. (《四川遂宁现代妇女儿童医院医生倒卖出生证明 已停业》https://finance.sina.com.cn/chanjing/gsnews/2019-10-23/doc-iicezzrr4464278.shtml）

' The birth certificates are probably faked to conceal the crimes of trafficking children or illegal adoption', the report pointed out.

Another report of the same year from the Democracy and Legal System Times, titled as ‘Baby-Trafficking Gang Provided Service Packages with Birth Certificates, and Proclaimed “Do No Sin”’ (《45人贩卖婴儿团伙捆绑销售出生证 自称不做缺德事》https://news.163.com/19/0302/23/E9A557RQ0001875P.html), told the story of a gang from Hunan Province who bought unwanted new-born babies from their parents and sold them to families which wished to adopt children but could not get any, due to the strict adoption laws of China.

Ironically, the gang, which was called as ‘Kele Gang’, actually made more money from selling birth certificates than babies.

According to the leader of that gang, ‘baby-trafficking is only the sideline, their main business is selling birth certificate’. Similar to those from Sichuan Province in the above story, the certificates themselves were actually genuine ones from a big hospital, only the information of the babies’ parents were faked.

In one case, the gang would get 110,000 yuan from the package selling of both the baby and the birth certificate, but pay only 40,000 yuan to the biological mother.

Some people may blame such thing to the strict rules on adoption. A case happened in a railway station of Nanjing can explain how necessary such rules are for protecting the human rights of the adopted children.

In 2017, people waiting for their trains in that station witnessed how a little girl was sexually harassed by a young man accompanied by his parents, in public. After investigation, the police revealed that the little girl was adopted by that family. (《身份确认！南京南站被猥亵女童为养女！警方回应》http://js.ifeng.com/a/20180620/6665462_0.shtml)

The public felt furious about what happened to that girl, some even suspected that she probably was a child bride because such evil thing has existed for decades in certain areas of China after the communists came to the power.

Among such areas, the most notorious is Putian in Fujian Province. And the victims of this modern crime was the ‘Chang Le Girls’, or ‘A Le’ as they have been simply called. Most of them came from Chang Le County of the same province and were sold into actual slavery as child brides since they were babies.

‘A Le’ had first appeared in 1960s, so don’t blame this to the Family Plan Policy that came into being almost 2 decades later, the omni-scapegoat for nearly all the social and economic problems of China in the ‘research’ of Yi and others who share the same view with him.

Mainly through illegal ways such as stealing or deception, or, in other cases, after being abandoned by their parents, many baby girls of Chang Le County were trafficked to Putian by the so-called 'match-makers'.

If they were strong enough to survive the long journey and the poor conditions, the girls would be sold in the villages around Putian, or on a bus station in that city.

‘The bus station looked like a market for baby-selling...’ a 2011 report described the ridiculous scene, ‘parents were picking and choosing, bargaining with the matchmakers, as if they were buying vegetables or clothes’. (《调查称福建莆田有数万名童养媳 多数从云贵拐卖》 http://roll.sohu.com/20110519/n308011134.shtml )

‘A group of women selling baby girls went into a village and stayed at the Buddhist temple.’ a victim recalled in a 2018 report, “Putian Matchmakers’ Network of Abandoned Girls”, written by Guyulab（谷雨实验室）, ‘During the daytime, they would carry a load of babies, peddling on the streets like hawkers, as if they were selling toufu or Chinese cabbage’ . (《莆田“媒婆”的弃女网络》https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?src=11&timestamp=1582549023&ver=2178&signature=Tr*yZ8u8vwTTHdwG5HRfEIFt13xaVVpFWVClaMZGkkU0ve6DYWbJo3aSAaEfqBuzrtLyRCxYBIKX7pg0QplyKXa8LjKTctsaESgzJnHCdpj*S7slTgS5*HMWzXRCx1FN&new=1)

Sometimes, the villagers would see baby girls dying or already dead, by the side of farmlands, in the fish ponds or outside the temples, obvious abandoned by the ‘matchmakers’.

Some of the ‘Chang Le Girls’ were lucky enough to be treated by their adopted families as their own children, but others became small slaves, being abused and deprived of the opportunity to get education, having to do heavy works for the families. After they grew older, they were forced to marry their ‘brothers’.

But not all the ‘A Le’ were trafficked from Chang Le County.

With the Reform and Opening-up Policy befalling, people could travel more conveniently within China, therefore girls from other places, especially south-western provinces of Guizhou, Sichuan and Yunnan, were trafficked to Putian and nearby districts.

Such terrible crimes have lasted for several decades.

According to a 2010 report from Strait News （《海峡都市报》）, a gang of criminals had trafficked 46 babies during a period of 2 years. It's the most serious criminal case of this kind in Fujian Province since 1949.

In the past, local governments usually turn a blind eye on this phenomenon, and some of the trafficked children could get their hukou registered if the police officers were bribed.

But, as the public became more and more intolerant to such crimes, the government had to tighten the registration rules of hukou. So those families which ‘adopted’ children through illegal channels had to seek new ways to conceal their evil secrets. And faked birth certificate or the genuine ones with false informations became the must for them.

That’s why birth certificates remained to be one of the highly demanded commodities in the black markets of China even after the Two-child Policy had been introduced. And that is the little evil secret behind the groundless conclusions of Yi Fuxian’s new ‘demographic research’.

Now here is the question: why Yi Fuxian lied in his unreliable ‘study’? or, why he tried so hard to cover up this evil secret behind those faked or stolen birth certificates?

Perhaps we could find the answer from the leader of that baby-trafficking gang in Hunan Province.

‘I did no sin in my whole life. I myself have child(ren) too’. She said.

And she didn’t think baby-trafficking was wrong, ‘I’m helping parents realize their dreams.’ she tried to convince the anti-trafficking volunteer who pretended to be a potential buyer, ‘It’s adoption, not baby-trafficking’.

Does that opinion ring a bell?

Maybe it reminds some people of the famous ‘anti-Family-Plan professor’ Yang Zhizhu, who tried to defend those parents who sold their own children, and even intended to legalize such activities, just several years ago.

And Yang thinks child-trafficking is something benevolent that could ‘accumulate merit and virtue’.

By the way, Yang Zhizhu is also a friend of Yi Fuxian and both of them came from Hunan Province, just as that ‘Kele Gang’ did. It seems that such opinion is widely accepted in that province.

But, as the famous ‘independent demographer’ well-known across the whole world, Yi Fuxian, who graduated from Hsiang-Ya Medical College and now is a senior scientist of University of Wisconsin-Madison, both among the most respected medical training organizations in China and USA, must be well aware what other people, especially people of the civilized world, would think of child-trafficking.

It’s one of the ugliest and the evilest crime in modern society. There is nothing benevolent that could ‘accumulate merit and virtue’ in it.

So lying becomes necessary for Yi in that ‘demographic research’ of his.

But it’s not the first time Yi Fuxian lied. I had exposed such academic misconducts of him again and again . And every time he could get away with it, thanks to the sustained supports he got from some of the most famous media of the world, such as SCMP, WSJ, NYT and RFA. It seems that they never did any fact-checking before spreading the conclusion of his suspicious ‘demographic research’.

In recent years, news about young women being trafficked to China from neighboring countries sometimes would appear on certain international media, such as NYT. But none of them mentioned those Chinese girls trafficked from inland provinces to eastern or northern provinces such as Fujian, Jiangxi, Henan or Shandong since as early as 1970's. The journalists all blame this crime to the One-Child Policy.

Why they behave so ignorantly? 

Maybe people could find some clues in my analysis above too.

The only problem is, if they refuse to face or admit the truth, such crimes would continue even if the Family Plan Policy was totally abolished.

And the girls and women in and abroad China would continue to become the victims of human trafficking, because of the ignorance or dishonesty of some journalists and "scholars".