Why little Miss Li paid a man £1,600 to break her legs

 

 Li Ping, an attractive 23-year-old from Beijing, split up with her boyfriend, checked into a clinic and paid doctors £1,600 to break her legs, just because she felt a little on the short side.

Over the next few weeks, the fractured ends of her tibias were braced, pinned and gradually screwed apart to extend the bones as they fused together again.

Miss Li was and remains an enthusiast for an extreme form of the current Asian fashion for cosmetic surgery - artificial leg extensions.

She is also an example of the dangers posed by an expanding and often unscrupulous private health care system in China, in which state-trained doctors can nowadays branch out for money with very little supervision or regulation.

Miss Li's legs failed to grow together properly. Despite the dramatic nature of the surgery, she was sent home in 20 days. Six months later she was in great pain and still unable to walk properly.

She is one of at least 10 cases of patients crippled by the same clinic, attached to the Fragrant Hills Hospital in western Beijing, which led to its being closed down this week and warnings from the ministry of health of the surgery's dangers.

But officials admit that though the clinic was not of the necessary standard to carry out the procedure, it may have done nothing illegal.

The transactions were arranged through a registered website, and the clinic did not fall under the ministry's supervision.

Leg extension surgery is a recognised form of treatment for severe cases of orthopaedic disorder such as dwarfism, with a few operations every year in the West.

But in China it has become a popular way to boost height for the short and even the not-so-short. Miss Li, who has been given a pseudonym at her request, was just over 5ft 1in before her operation, but wanted to grow two and a half inches.

Other women having the operation at the same time, she said, were over 5ft 4in, above the average woman's height in China.

Dr Xia Hetao, who runs Beijing's largest leg extension clinic and is now trying to repair the damage done to Miss Li and other victims, said that of his 150 patients a year, only five per cent suffered severe leg deformities.

Just under four in five could be called short, while for the other 17 per cent the treatment was purely cosmetic.

There is status attached to being taller in China, where height is seen as sign of wealth and Westernisation. Employers happily admit considering both looks and height important in applicants. As well as more obvious careers in the police and military, the Foreign Ministry has a minimum height requirement for recruits, as it does not want its diplomats to be looked down upon in negotiations.

But Miss Li, who was training as a pharmacist, had no career reason for her decision. "I just felt too short," she said at Dr Xia's Guangji Hospital, just before a new operation to readjust the angle at which her bones have grown back.

Xiangshan Hospital said that it had closed its leg extension clinic since the reports of injuries.

It did not explain why it allowed the hospital to be used by a web-based firm set up by an entrepreneur for operations carried out by surgeons with no specialist expertise.

The entrepreneur, Zhang Chunjiang, is now said to be in hiding. Thousands of women have been maimed in simpler forms of cosmetic surgery, including a case where breast implants made of a chemical that is banned in the west leaked into women's bodies and rotted flesh tissue.

Miss Li said she still did not regret having the operation.

She has been told that by next April she will be able to walk normally again – at her new height.

By Richard Spencer in Beijing

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