From the "Commies are Evil" file - there is no vision of dystopia imagined by a Science Fiction writer that the Communists can't out-imagine...

...and bring into reality.

You've got your man-created famines in the Ukraine, and your intergenerational prison camps in Korea, and your one-child policy backed by forced abortions and sterilizations in China, and now you've got your abduction of "illegal children" whose parents aren't able to pay their illegal child fines:

The fines now imposed on violators of the one-child policy are, by any standards, enormous. In one Chinese county, declared by the UNFPA to be a “Model Birth Control County,” we photographed a billboard of birth control regulations that warned:

Those who illegally reproduce … will be assessed, when their illegal behavior is discovered, a “social compensation fee” based on a unit calculated from a year’s salary for urban dwellers and based on a year’s income after expenses for rural dwellers.

Those who illegally give birth to one child will be assessed a fine 3 to 5 times their annual income; those who illegally give birth to a second child will be assessed a fine from 5 to 7 times their annual income; those who illegally give birth to a third child will be assessed a fine from 7 to 9 times their annual income; those who give birth to 4 or more illegal children will be assessed a fine extrapolated from the above schedule of multiples. For those who illegally take in a child, have an extramarital birth, or have an out of wedlock birth, both parties involved will be assessed a “social compensation fee” according to the above schedule of (income) multiples.

That these fines were actually imposed was clear from our discussions with ordinary Chinese. We were told again and again that violators are fined “tens of thousands of renminbi,” or “20,000 or 30,000 renminbi.” These are enormous sums of money by Chinese standards. One woman reported that she and her husband had been forced to take out a 10-year loan to pay the 25,000 renminbi fine that had been assessed for each of her two illegal daughters. To pay off this “child mortgage,” her husband had been forced to go to work in the city.

And:

When we asked what would happen if a couple couldn’t afford to pay the fine, we were told that offenders would be visited by population control officials who would “seal off” their homes, and possibly even destroy them, as punishment for non-payment.


But these punishments pale in comparison with reports of child abduction. In Lipu county, another UNFPA Model Birth Control County, located in northern Guangxi province, we were told by a village official that “At the present time, if you don’t pay the fine, they come and abduct the baby you just gave birth to and give it to someone else.”

This practice of child abduction has recently been confirmed by the Chinese government. According to a report in the Caixin Century magazine, authorities in the southern Chinese province of Hunan have begun investigating a report that population control officials had seized at least 16 babies born in violation of strict family planning rules, sent them to state-run orphanages, and then sold them abroad for adoption. “Before 1997, they usually punished us by tearing down our houses for breaching the one-child policy, but after 2000 they began to confiscate our children,” the magazine quoted villager Yuan Chaoren as saying.

The children, reportedly from Longhui county near Hunan province’s Shaoyang city, had been abducted by who accused their parents of breaching the one-child policy or illegally adopting children. The local family planning office then sent the children to local orphanages, which listed them as being available for adoption, the report said, adding the office could get 1,000 renminbi or more for each child. The orphanages in turn receive $3,000 to $5,000 for each child adopted overseas, money that is paid by the adoptive parents. The magazine reported that at least one migrant worker said she had found her daughter had been adopted abroad and was now living in the United States.

Via Mark Shea.