I'm not really sure how to even start talking about this. Here: Did you catch this Reuters story today?

That's a link to what a journalist might call a "second-day angle" on a story out of Guangxi province. People there are rioting over too-harsh applications of the One-Child Policy, including, witnesses say, pregnant women being forced to have abortions.

A "second-day angle" is what a writer does with a story in which the primary facts are already known, but the series of events appears to be ongoing. One looks for a new way to present the facts - a human interest angle, or a new discovery. The thing that stands out to me here is that this is, evidently, now an ongoing story. The riots are ongoing, too.

Xinhua, the state-owned newswire, is reporting that official vehicles have been set on fire and protestors have messed up a couple of government buildings.

You may have picked up on some mentions of the previous trouble in Guangxi in the International Herald Tribune earlier this week, or last week in a
few other places.

According to that news release, the troubles started because officials had decided to tighten up on the One-Child enforcement, which included collecting a lot of fines and, some folks are saying, rounding up women who were either pregnant with a second child or else single and pregnant (equally a no-no) and, in some cases, as far along as nine months, and terminating their pregnancies.

The New York Times story on that first round of riots says as many as 3,000 people stormed government offices, and at least 28 of them were arrested. (That's in Bobai County - today's news was on protests in Rongxian County.)

The L.A. Times has a few quotes from local people, saying things like:

"I know a young woman who was six or seven months pregnant with twins," said a woman villager interviewed by phone who was only willing to give her surname, Wang. "She did not have a permit to give birth. So she had to have an abortion. It was such a tragedy."

The Bobai riots were even mentioned as an afterthought in this story about Chinese quintuplets, which was really about women taking fertility drugs to have multiple births to get around the One-Child Policy regulations.

Seems like there's resistance at the grassroots. And it might just be spreading....