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  CHENGDU,
CHINA But it was a shocking tale of medicine run amok that attracted the most attention to Huang's Web site here in the capital of Sichuan province -- so much attention that last month the Chinese government shut him down. What got Huang in trouble was a tall, thin man named Zeng Quanfu, 29, with a small scar on his abdomen and a story of missing appendixes. Maybe 200,000 missing appendixes. As Zeng, who recently returned to Huang's office to talk with a foreign reporter, tells it, he had signed on in mid-1997 for a three-year stint as a cook on a Taiwan fishing boat. He'd gotten his job through the Sichuan Overseas Labor Developing Co., a provincial government employment agency. The agency promised him $50 a month, a month's annual vacation and an additional $130 for each month he worked, Zeng said. The last he could collect when he'd fulfilled his contract. Eager to escape a province where per capita income is about $200 a year, Zeng went to sea, spending most of a year off the coast of Uruguay. Problems arose when he tried to claim his vacation. Zeng was told he'd get none, no matter what his contract said. By then he already was feeling cheated, Zeng said, because the captain of the boat told him its owners paid the Chinese employment agency $400 a month per worker, more than twice what Zeng was promised. When Zeng insisted on the vacation, he was fired. Once home in Sichuan, Zeng asked for his deferred pay. Told he'd breached his contract and would not get it, he filed a complaint with a local labor arbitration board and hired a lawyer. Money was not the only thing Zeng and other fishermen lost. They also lost their appendixes. They were required to have them cut out as a preventive measure against medical emergencies at sea -- a claim the government employment agencies do not dispute -- even though fishermen on the same boats from other countries were not required to have the surgery. Zeng said he learned the appendectomies were ordered not by the Taiwan fishing companies, but by Chinese employment agencies paid $100 a year per worker by the fishing companies for health insurance. Adding insult to potential injury, the men from Sichuan had to give the agency 400 yuan (about $50) for the surgery, even though the hospitals charged only 350 yuan (about $44), he said. Convinced by Zeng, an arbitration board ordered the Sichuan Overseas Labor Developing Co. to pay him about $1,900. But the agency challenged the ruling in a local court, which sided with the agency. After Huang posted the tale on his Web site, a number of mainland and Hong Kong newspapers picked up the story. One, the Yangcheng Evening News in the southern city of Guangzhou, reported in February that it had been shown a government document confirming that more than 200,000 men from 10 mainland provinces had been required to have preventive appendectomies before being placed on Taiwan fishing boats by government-run employment agencies. The newspaper also found evidence that other peasant fishermen had been cheated out of wages. The story got so big that crews from China Central TV, the major government-run network, showed up in Chengdu twice to interview him, Huang said. But he said CCTV never ran the story, because its management decided it involved a sensitive ``human rights'' issue. Li Hong, manager of the Sichuan Overseas Labor Developing, complained in a telephone interview that the news reports critical of his agency had been inaccurate. ``They said we kept most of the fishermen's salaries,'' he said. ``Can they show us the evidence for it? They just heard it, no evidence at all.'' As for the appendectomies, he confirmed that they were required but denied they were done so the agency could pocket the insurance money. He acknowledged that appendectomies were not required of fishermen from other countries, and said he believed the Chinese were more susceptible to appendicitis at sea. ``As the laborers we sent are not from the coastal areas, they are not familiar with the sea and are different from those who grow up in the coastal areas,'' he said. ``Fishermen from the Philippines did not have the operation because they are used to working on a boat.'' Li said the controversy is a big fuss over a minor matter. ``It's just a small operation,'' he said. ``It has little influence on the human body, yet it will protect fishermen's lives from death once they work in deep water.'' Several U.S. doctors, however, said the removal of symptom-free appendixes is a strange and dangerous practice. ``You just don't open people's abdomens for any kind of preventive procedures,'' said Dr. Jay Everhart, a clinical epidemiologist at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases in Bethesda, Md. ``The risks of a knife in the colon or postoperative problems so far outweigh any possible gain that it's unthinkable.'' Many Chinese also were shocked by the forced appendectomies, and government-run employment agencies were deeply embarrassed. After an investigation, Huang's Web site was closed down because it allegedly lacked proper registration. Huang said the exploitation of peasant fishermen exemplifies the rampant human rights abuses and lack of institutional remedies in today's China. ``It was never my aim to get involved in political things,'' Huang said. ``When I opened this company to find people, I just wanted to help. But I found so many problems, so many people suffering, that I started to pay attention to political things.'' Undaunted, Huang said he and a handful of helpers soon will open another Web site, this one at the address (http://www.june-4.net/). The address recalls a sensitive date in China, the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre of democracy advocates. Huang is not naive about where his human rights activism will lead.
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