To all kind-hearted people of the world: Greetings!
We, former ant farmers of the Yilishen Company in Liaoning Province, China, kneel before the kindhearted people of the world, with tears in our eyes, to ask you for your help. Please extend your compassion to us helpless victims.
Yilishen was a health food company that used ants as a major ingredient. As ant farmers, we were asked to pay a guarantee surcharge for breeding the ants. We were then given boxes of ants to take home for breeding. The number of ants we received was based on how much of a guarantee we offered. What the ant farmers earned was a service charge for the breeding, while the guarantee was more or less a kind of deposit. A deposit does not equal to an investment and there shouldn't have been any risk involved. But our guarantees were misused by the company's president, Wang Fengyou, to bribe the governor of Liaoning. The governor of Liaoning used the Yilishen Company to gain a political advantage. As a result, the Yilishen Company, which had been ranked 489th among Asia's top 500 companies, declared bankruptcy overnight.
In a market economy, it is quite normal for enterprises to go bankrupt, and we can accept that. But Liaoning authorities illegally handled the Yilishen case, overriding relative laws such as the Constitutional Law and the Bankruptcy code. First, the Liaoning authorities abruptly denied the ant farmers' service fee which they were legally entitled to. Second, though Yilishen had promised to refund 20% of the guarantee each time, now the ant farmers who had already taken back 80% of their guarantee would not be allowed to register as creditors. In some areas, ant farmers who had taken back 60% of their guarantee were registered as creditors, while in other areas they were refused. Whether they could be identified as creditors depends on their attitudes. If they adopted a proactive attitude to appear tougher, they could be recognized as creditors. If they had more yielding attitudes, they would not. The law was held in contempt! The Liaoning authorities suppressed the creditors' legal rights, and purposefully left the Yilishen incident unresolved. That's why numerous ant farmers were reduced to poverty and total ruin.
The ant farmers' right to survival had been jeopardized, and many of the farmers were driven to suicide. On November 18, an ant farmer in Benxi ended his life by jumping off a tall building near Yilishen Company. On November 21, 2007, an ant farmer in Jinzhou killed himself by taking 200 sleeping bills outside the Yilishen Company. On November 23, an ant farmer in Wushun committed suicide by cutting his wrists outside the Yilishen branch. In December 2007, an ant farming couple in Liaoyang had arguments over appealing against the Yilishen bankruptcy. The husband accidentally hit his wife to death, and killed himself by swallowing poison. In January 2008, a mother of a military officer of the Chinese People's Liberation Army put an end to her life by drinking poison. Her older daughter is an ant farmer who became insane after her arrest for making an appeal. About 50 such cases of suicide happened in Liaoning alone. But, because the government blocked the related news, outsiders have no access to it.
After Yilishen filed for bankruptcy, the Liaoning authorities not only blocked the provincial media, but also decentralized the ant farmers by assigning supervision duty to local law enforcement. Farmers who tried to appeal to higher authorities to safeguard their rights were badly beaten by policemen without IDs or badges. The police even put female ant farmers to shame. They strictly monitored QQ and UC (instant message tools popular in China) numbers and their Internet usage. In Yilishen, they even went as far as unlawfully confiscating computers. If more than three ant farmers get together, they are detained because it's considered an unlawful assembly. In addition, lawyers are prohibited from representing the ant farmers. During the meetings of the National People's Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), there was an open column on Sina.com "Ask the Prime Minister," but topics about the Yilishen event were not allowed to be posted! It is just a private enterprise declaring bankruptcy. So why is it treated as things were during the Cultural Revolution?
Human rights, laws and justice do not belong to the Yilishen ant farmers because the authorities don't treat them like human beings! The government officials paste the label "people" everywhere: people's government, people's police and people's service. But take a look at what they have done for the people: They enjoy rich, comfortable lives while taking from the people, harming their integrity and social stability!
Students from families of some ant farmers have had to drop out of school because they could no longer afford the tuition. Some ant farmers are looking for a job even though they are very ill. Some are struggling for survival by rag-picking. Other ant farmers subside on only one meal a day. They live in the depths of an abyss of suffering! We can bear the pain of such a life, but we will not reconcile ourselves this unfairness. We must safeguard our rights! However, there are only a few hundred ant farmers who can access the Internet, and oftentimes they are kicked out by webmasters when talking about Yilishen. It's difficult to organize more than 1,000 people to make an appeal to the higher authorities, which is not as many as the police officers assigned to deal with us, so we fail again and again! In order to successfully defend our rights and get back our hard-earned money, we have to get all the ant farmers together. However, because ant farmers are vastly dispersed among the province, it's difficult to coordinate effective communication. All we can do right now is to call each other.
However, because many ant farmers are already broke, they cannot even afford the telephone charges. We just collect limited amounts of money to make a few phone calls each time. Therefore, we are requesting help from any friends around the world. Please donate anything possible to support are effort in making these phone calls. We have to safeguard our rights! We have to survive! Tigers and bears are now being protected, right? Why are we treated as less than animals?
Who will save us? Who will care about morality, conscience and justice? Who will deliver our bleeding and broken hearts from this misery?
1.3 million ant farmers in Liaoning Province, China
February 28, 2008
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