Kong Qing, a former artillery soldier, is slumped in the corner, weeping and cursing, a bloodstained bandage wrapped around his head. ‘Fucking Communists,’ he cries, ‘depriving me of my son. My branch of the family has been extinguished . . .’ When the family planning squad came banging on his gate yesterday, he and his wife, who was heavily pregnant with their third child, escaped through a secret tunnel and fled to the tall reeds near the reservoir. In the evening, his father took them food, unaware that the police were trailing him. He quacked like a duck – their usual secret signal – and as soon as Kong Qing and his wife emerged from the reeds they were pounced upon by the police. The wife was dragged to the school, where family planning officers strapped her to a wooden desk and injected two shots into her abdomen. The aborted fetus is now lying at Kong Qing’s feet in a plastic basin. It has its father’s flat nose and small eyes. Scraps of congealed amniotic fluid are still stuck to its black hair.
‘Former Village Head, you must stand up for us,’ says Kong Zhaobo, a prominent member of the clan who attended high school in Hexi and now owns the only motorbike in the village. ‘Filial piety demands that we produce sons and grandsons. The male lines must continue. We can’t let the Party sever them.’
‘And anyway, the authorities said that we peasants can have a second child if our first one is a girl,’ says a man nicknamed Clubfoot, who is sitting by the television clutching his walking stick. ‘So why are they bunging IUDs in women who’ve only had one child? If this carries on, we’ll become a village where the children have no brothers or sisters, uncles or aunts. What kind of future is that?’ Clubfoot is always searching for ways to make money. Last year he bought a desktop computer, surfed the internet and informed everyone that a fortune could be made rearing a breed of wild duck that lays golden-yolked eggs. His house stands on the site of an ancestral temple to Confucius which was built by Kongzi’s grandfather and demolished in the Cultural Revolution.
A frail, spindly woman, whose third daughter, Xiang, Kongzi once taught, speaks up. ‘The family planning squad came to our house today and demanded a 10,000-yuan back payment for Xiang’s illegal birth. She’s twelve years old now, for God’s sake! I told them we didn’t have any cash on us, but they searched our house, and found the two thousand yuan my eldest daughter sent us after slaving in a Shenzhen factory for a year. They took the cash, our bags of rice, our pots and pans, even our kitchen clock, and they want us to pay them the rest of the money by the end of the week.’
‘And you know where all that money will go?’ Clubfoot says, rubbing the handle of his walking stick. ‘Straight into the mouths of the corrupt bureaucrats in Hexi Town. Have you seen the new District Party headquarters they’ve built themselves? It’s vast. As grandiose as Tiananmen Gate. And after they’ve guzzled our money, they come to murder our babies. Well, this time, we can’t let them get away with it. We must fight back!’
‘No, that would be madness,’ says Kongzi’s father, stubbing out his cigarette and smoothing back his white hair. ‘The road out of the village has been blocked and a police boat is patrolling the reservoir. We’re trapped. If we put up a fight, they’ll crush us.’
‘The squad officers have the names of the one hundred women of childbearing age in the village,’ says Kong Wen, chair of the village family planning team. ‘We had to send them the list last week. Forty of the women will be subjected to an IUD insertion, and the sixty who have two or more children will be sterilised.’ Kong Wen worked in a Guangzhou clothing factory for three years, sewing zips into trousers. Almost every woman in the village is now wearing a pair of the Lee jeans she brought back with her. When she was informed that this crackdown was imminent, she gave her pregnant sister a letter of introduction stamped with an official seal and told her to escape to Beijing. As a result, she’s been given the minor role of record keeper during this crackdown, and once it’s over will probably be sacked.
Yuanyuan pushes her way into the house, reeking of