NewHebei parents seek daughter two decades after she was taken by one-child policy enforcers

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Mother Xia Fengge outside the Gaobeidian People's Court on Monday. Screenshot via Sina Weibo.

Published: 1:30pm, 5 Dec 2013Updated: 4:11pm, 2 Nov 2015

Eleven days after the third child of a farmer couple, a daughter, was born in the summer of 1995 in Quantou township, she was taken away from her parents by local cadres. The couple had violated China’s one-child policy and never saw their daughter again.

Liu Laogen and Xia Fengge have not given up on finding their daughter, and have petitioned and sued the local government. Their case was heard in a court in the central Chinese province of Hebei on Monday.

Their lawyer Lin Feng, working pro-bono, said he expected the court’s decision to come soon. It will come at a time of reform, just one month after the Communist Party leadership announced a relaxation of the one-child policy at the Central Committee’s third plenum.

It also comes at a time when China’s highest judges in the Supreme People’s Court have spoken out repeatedly in favour of making the country’s justice system more just. Courts are still subject to the decisions of local-level governments and are often more bound by local orders and sometimes personal ties than to the law.

Liu and Xia’s fate has a been very different from another family with three children, renowned filmmaker Zhang Yimou, who was only approached by family planners when public pressure mounted after a media exposé showed him having at least three children in May.

The farmer couple had tried in vain in 2003 to seek information on their daughter’s whereabouts from Anxin County, where their township is located, but the case was struck down in court, said Lin.