Only her unusual name hints at a tale to be told &ndash Ji Huansheng means brought back to life

Only her unusual name hints at a tale to be told – Ji Huansheng means “brought back to life by journalists”. Ji Huansheng enjoys the deep sleep treasured by parents of any four-month-old infant. Cradled on the mud bed of her village home, her peaceful face belies the trauma that makes her mother weep, and the drama of her short life. Only her unusual name hints at a tale to be told – Ji Huansheng means “brought back to life by journalists”.
This is the miracle baby who refused to submit to the deadly enforcers of birth control, Chinese-style They tried to abort her, but she survived. They took her from her parents and left her to die, unclothed and unfed.

But Ji did not die, and continues to trouble the authorities who ordered her death.The bloody consequences of China’s “one-child” policy have long confirmed the West’s worst suspicions about the Communist giant. Even as Beijing attempts to promote choice over coercion, at a local level, abuses of the system remain commonplace Yet now, they are also more likely to come to light. The journalists and nurses who saved Ji Huansheng are typical of growing numbers of Chinese who still accept the goals of family planning but challenge its brutal enforcement.There is no hiding from China’s “womb police”. On 23 April, Zhang Chunhong was picking through piles of rubbish when they came for her, in Wang Ha village, on the outskirts of Harbin in Heilongjiang province.

Despite her padded peasant clothes, Zhang’s bulge betrayed her guilt. She was pregnant again, with another “out of quota” fetus, and this one would have to be terminated.Family planning officials drove Zhang to hospital in Harbin. An ultrasound scan showed the 31-year-old Zhang was 35-weeks pregnant, well past the government’s 24-week upper limit for abortion. Yet the next day, nurses penetrated her womb with a long needle, and injected a saline solution to induce a stillbirth.Zhang was resigned to the treatment. Even without an extra mouth to feed, it was hard enough raising her three young boys on the slim pickings she and her husband glean from recycling urban waste. “I didn’t know I was carrying a baby until I was four or five months pregnant,” she admits “But we didn’t have money for an abortion. This time, they said I didn’t need to pay.”As she lay in the operating theatre, she heard a baby’s cry The poisoning attempt had failed.

“I asked them to show the baby to me,” Zhang remembers, “but the nurses refused.” Her husband Zhai Zhicheng snatched a glimpse of their newborn daughter. “I saw her and she looked healthy, but when I asked them to bring her back, they told me there was an order not to give us the baby.”"One nurse said: ‘She’s had the drug, so even if she’s not dead, she’ll be retarded.’ The next day, I asked for my baby girl again, but they said she was dead,” Zhai recalls. “I felt a pain in my heart – she was our flesh and blood.” The couple, unable to persuade the nurses to show them the child, returned miserably home.Back in the Daoli District Maternity Hospital, their baby was fighting for her life. Plaques at the entrance praise the “model” and “civilised work unit” within, yet when the director Yuan Yinghua learned on 25 April of the botched abortion, she ordered nurse Wang Weimin to “starve her, or freeze her to death”, by leaving the baby girl, wrapped in a gauze cloth, on the open balcony outside the abortion room.Even in April, temperatures on the Manchurian plain of north-east China remain between 0C and 10C.