On May 9, 1994, the State Department issued a long report for use by immigration officials in evaluating asylum claims by Chinese nationals. Referring to fines for those who violate the Chinese government’s population policy, the report said unpaid fines “can result in confiscation of personal property, or even destruction, such as tearing down of houses, but we believe this occurs — relatively rarely .… “
On April 25, 1993, the New York Times had reported: “Villagers say that if they cannot pay the fines, officials confiscated a cow, a pig, an important farm tool or household belongings like furniture or a television. Sometimes they simply smash the items, and often they knock down the house as well.”
On September 11, 1991, a London paper, The Independent, carried a report by a Chinese woman who had seen government employees capture women for forced abortions and sterilizations. Some women escaped, she said, and their families were warned that if the women didn’t report for abortions, “their houses would be pulled down. This was no bluff. On the way back from the raid, I saw six collapsed houses.”
Her account continued: “When I first visited the county hospital, I could not believe what I saw. Hundreds of women — some more than six-months pregnant — were packed in dark corridors and makeshift tents, waiting to be operated on.” In the nearby public toilet, she said there was “a line of waste-bins: the aborted babies — some as old as eight months — were put there, then dumped somewhere else.”
Many Chinese who have tried to enter the U.S. illegally on the Golden Venture or other ships have come from Fujian Province. The State Department report claimed that U.S. consular officials had visited that province and found “relatively lax local implementation of population policy!” They even described the implementation as “liberal.”
In January, 1994, Judge Thomas S. Ellis III of the U.S. District Court in Alexandria,Va., found a Golden Venture passenger, eligible for asylum because, he had fled coercive population control. According to a New York Times report, Judge Ellis said that Mr. Guo and his wife showed their opposition to China’s population policies by refusing to comply with sterilization orders, and by fleeing from their home village in Fujian Province. The local government then confiscated their property and destroyed their home, he said.
