"Dead" Chinese want their records resurrected

BEIJING (Reuters) - Hundreds of Chinese villagers are protesting that reports of their death have been greatly exaggerated after they were registered as dead and struck from village lists.

The taxes villages pay to higher levels of government, and the social warfare payments allocated by the central government, are both based on the number of households.

By recording the false deaths, local officials held back payments. And the victims are also deprived of newly established medical insurance and pension schemes.

The 300 members of Zhouzhuang village -- a sixth of the population -- discovered they were "dead" when a man tried to apply for a new identity book for his parents, according to a report on China National Radio's website (www.cnr.com) seen on Wednesday.

Most were struck from the rolls between 1996 and 1998.

In China, every person is entered in a household record at birth, and the record is deleted after relatives report the death.

"There has been no information on us for nearly 10 years," one villager was quoted as saying.

Online commentators mocked the village officials' contention that they could not re-enter the villagers on the rolls, and urged a public investigation.

"People need to show a lot of evidence to claim a person's death, so how come that was so easily accomplished?" read one comment on the Xinhua news article.

The China Youth Daily said the problem was not unique to Henan, a poor province known for its lawlessness. It had also cropped up in Jilin in the northeast and Guangxi in the southwest.

(Reporting by Huang Yan and Lucy Hornby; Editing by Nick Macfie)