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December 6, 2012

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Former village head has 4 wives and 10 children

A FORMER legislator currently under investigation in the northern Chinese city of Taiyuan has been revealed as having four wives and 10 children.

Details of Li Junwen's personal life were widely known in the area but the district authority turned a blind eye to villagers' complaints and just said: "That is his ability," yesterday's Legal Weekly reported.

China's marriage law forbids polygamy and its one-child policy allows a second child only under special circumstances.

Also, under family planning rules, a child born out of marriage cannot get a hukou, or registered residency. However, nine of his children had obtained residency certificates.

Li, a former deputy to Xiaodian District People's Congress and once head of Xiaodian-administered Xicuan Village, married Hu Yongxian in the early 1990s and the couple had four daughters. His second wife, Hu Yanyan, gave birth to their first baby when she was 20 in 2003 and his third wife, Li Honghong, also raised children for him from the age of 21, villagers said.

In 2010, the 43-year-old fell in love with Wang Fumei, the report said. She was a worker in his concrete mixing plant, and last December the couple had a son.

Li's marriages were registered only in his village, where he was elected head in 2003, and so couldn't be checked at the Xiaodian District Civil Affairs Bureau or the Archives Bureau, the report said.

Family planning officials in Xiwen County, which administers Xiaodian, said they would never issue birth certificates without the parents' marriage registration. As for the hukou, that was a police matter, they said.

The county police department said they were unable to help as their computer system was down, the newspaper said.

It was unclear how Li's wives and children got hukou, and the authorities would never give them an answer, villagers said. It appeared that Li had never been punished for violating family planning policy, the magzine report said.

In May, a couple in eastern China's Zhejiang Province who had a second child were fined 1.3 million yuan (US$208,780).

Before Li's polygamy came to light, he has been suspended from his job as a district legislator for alleged involvement in 11 intentional injury cases between June 2010 and April this year.

Police cracked five of the 11 cases and apprehended 20 suspects, all of whom said they were recruited by Li, villagers said.

No further details were disclosed. A police source said Li was on bail and the investigation was ongoing.

He refused to comment on the allegations or the revelations about his family life.




 

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