Dear Colleague:

China continues to persecute women who violate that country's one-child
policy, yet the UNFPA and old Europe could not care less.  No one seems
outraged over the fact that 56% of the world's female suicides occur in
China; yet one more indication of the Beijing regime's inhumanity towards
women.

Steven W. Mosher
President

PRI Weekly Briefing
20 December 2004
Vol. 6 / No. 40

China's Persecution of Women and Children: More of the Same
By Joseph A. D'Agostino
 
New House International Relations Committee hearings chaired by Rep. Chris
Smith (R.-N.J.) and held December 14 told the same old sad story: the
Chinese government continues to persecute women who exceed their allotted
quota of children.  The same basic story has some new twists, however.
Even domestic Chinese population experts now quietly admit that China's
population control program coerces women.  And, in a new low for the
Communist Chinese regime, a peaceful protester against China's one-child
policy, Mao Hengfeng, has been imprisoned and is being tortured.  Beijing
expects its women to submit quietly to the abortions and sterilizations
required of them.

Depending on the region, Chinese couples are allowed to have one or
occasionally two children.  That's it.  Any woman who has more than her
quota faces heavy "social compensation fees"-up to ten times annual
household income in China-and often the following: loss of employment,
loss of some health care coverage and educational opportunities for her
children, imprisonment, forced abortion, and legally mandated
sterilization.  Her husband faces the same with the exception of the last
two.  China, with approximately one-fifth of the world's people, has 56%
of the world's female suicides-and participants in the hearings said that
they believed that the one-child policy contributes to that statistic.
The World Bank estimates that Chinese women's suicide rate is five times
the world average.  "Five hundred women a day commit suicide in China,"
said Smith.

Leftist elites love to talk about the paramount importance of women's
choices when it comes to procreation, but Western European nations and
Canada couldn't care less about China's 30-year-old coercive population
control program.  Same for the United Nations and the International
Planned Parenthood Federation.  The U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) continues
to assist China's population control program.  And if any American
feminist groups sent representatives to Tuesday's hearings, I didn't
notice them.  A check conducted December 17 of the websites of the
National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Abortion Rights Action
League (NARAL), the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), and
the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) found nothing on
the hearings, not even a little throwaway press release deploring China's
abuses.  NOW's website did have something on the plight of Sudanese women
on its front page, and IPPF's front page did feature a link on China, but
this couldn't have had less to do with the suffering of Chinese women:
"More Than 80% of MSM in China Know Little About HIV/AIDS," the IPPF
proclaimed.  (MSM stands for "men who have sex with men" and may be an
up-and-coming fashionable term preparing to replace "gay" and "bisexual,"
just as those terms have largely replaced the term "homosexual," which
replaced "sodomite.")  The silence of Western elites and leftist activists
in the face of the massive and systematic abuse of Chinese women and
families is deafening.  Does anyone really believe that such people truly
care about "choice" and "freedom?"

"China's one-child policy is still in effect, according to statements by
Chinese officials, but in recent years articles in foreign media have
sometimes asserted that the once rampant coercive family planning measures
that sustained it have now become rare. . ." John Aird testified at the
Smith hearings.  "However, the Chinese domestic media present a rather
different picture.  Articles in Chinese professional journals and
statements by high Chinese officials indicate that the program remains
coercive. . . . In the last four or five years, foreign journalists in
China have cited instances of violent family planning measures more
extreme than any reported previously in the one-child policy's 25-year
history."  Aird is a former Senior Research Specialist on China at the
U.S. Census Bureau and author of Slaughter of the Innocents: Coercive
Birth Control in China (1990).

Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Arthur Dewey testified, "China's birth
planning law and policies retain harshly coercive elements in law and
practice.  Forced abortion and sterilization are egregious violations of
human rights, and should be of concern to the global human rights
community, as well as to the Chinese themselves.  Unfortunately, we have
not seen willingness in other parts of the international community to
stand with us on these human rights issues."  He said that Chinese
government officials have recently promised to roll back some of their
coercive measures but noted that it is "practical implementation of these
measures that matters, not public pronouncements."

Ma Dongfang gave testimony of her own experience with China's population
control program.  Few Chinese women are willing to do so publicly because
even if they escape the Communist country, the relatives they left behind
face retaliation if they speak out.  "In 1988 I gave birth to my first
child, and I was required to get a certificate for having only one child
under China's one-child policy," she said.  "In 1991, I became pregnant
again, and I was forced to abort this child like many other women in China
who got pregnant with their second child, because it was a violation of
Chinese government policy.  After the abortion, the doctor inserted an IUD
device into my uterus without either my knowledge or permission.  I soon
became very sick as a result of the IUD and endured months of horrible
pain and discomfort.  I suffered excessive bleeding, weight loss, and
fatigue.  I begged the doctors to remove the device, but they refused to
do so.  If they had it removed, they would be breaking the law."
Eventually, she fled to the United States and obtained asylum.
Ma also told the story of another woman she knew who was forced to have an
abortion when her unborn child was six months old.  "Her child was born
alive" during the abortion procedure, said Ma.  "She saw him and screamed,
'He's still alive!'"  Medical personnel killed the newborn infant.

Amnesty International is one organization that has taken notice of China's
abusive program, sending T. Kumar to testify.  Harry Wu, former Chinese
political prisoner and executive director of the Laogai Research
Foundation, also testified along with two other State Department
officials, Michael Kozak and Joseph Donovan.  In addition to Smith,
Ranking Member Tom Lantos (D.-Calif.) and Rep. Tom Tancredo (R.-Colo.)
returned to Washington to attend the hearing as members of the
International Relations Committee.  Lantos gave a statement before leaving
the hearing room.

"As Mr. Lantos said, our allies in Europe and elsewhere don't seem to care
about China's policy," said Smith.  UNFPA officials, he said, have
"whitewashed the crimes.  They are like Holocaust deniers."  He praised
President Bush for denying American funding to UNFPA and said, "Since
1979, UNFPA has been the chief apologist and cheerleader for China's
coercive one child per couple policy.  Despite numerous credible forced
abortion reports from impeccable sources, including human rights
organizations like Amnesty International, journalists, former Chinese
population control officials and, above all, from the woman victims
themselves, high officials at UNFPA always dismiss and explain it all
away.  UNFPA has funded, provided crucial technical support and, most
importantly, provided cover for massive crimes of forced abortion and
involuntary sterilization."

As for Mao Hengfeng, she is in a Re-education Through Labor (RTL) camp in
China, where she is being tortured according to reports from Human Rights
in China.  "In RTL, credible sources report that in August she was beaten,
and that camp police have bound Mao's wrists and ankles with leather
straps and pulled her limbs apart for a period of two days to force Mao to
acknowledge wrongdoing," said Smith.  "On November 19, she lost an appeal
in a Shanghai court to receive welfare payments but was seen with
blood-blisters and swelling around her wrists and ankles, indicating
ongoing abuse.  More recently, family members report she is being
force-fed an unidentified medicine which turns her mouth black, that she
is held for hours in restraints, and that she is incarcerated with two
narcotics offenders who are reportedly free to abuse her."

The hearings also explored the predictable social problems that have
resulted from the one-child policy: Since boys are favored over girls so
strongly in China, and in the absence of a Christian tradition regarding
the sanctity of human life, restricting most couples to one child has led
to sex-selective abortion and female infanticide, and a resulting shortage
of girls and women.  According to Dewey, there were 117 men for every 100
women in China in 2000.  "The imbalance has already contributed to a rise
in prostitution in China and an increase in trafficking in infants and
women," Aird reported.  "Chinese and foreign media reports between 2000
and 2004 tell of tens of thousands of women being enticed by false job
offers, then kidnapped, beaten, and raped until they agree to be sold as
slave wives far from their homes."  Dewey also said there were not enough
children to support China's aging population-the Chinese version of
America's Social Security crisis.  On the other hand, Smith noted that
China has no problem with illegitimate children since unmarried women
aren't allowed to give birth.

Wu brought with him a local population-planning document that demonstrated
just how focused government officials are on their population quotas-and
how couples' desires are not important.  "Jieshi, located on the northern
part of Lufeng City, Guangdong Province, has an area of 124 km and a
population of 200,000," Wu testified.  "Document No. 43 of Jieshi Township
from August 26, 2003 gave orders that the fall 2003 family planning
assignment should begin on August 26, and within 35 days (ending on
September 30), the goals must be achieved: to sterilize 1,369, fit 818
with an IUD, induce labor for 108, and carry out 163 abortions."

Hearing attendees expressed hope that the upcoming 2008 Olympics in
Beijing could be used to pressure the government to alleviate its human
rights abuses.  PRI strongly seconds that motion.

Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the
Population Research Institute.

PRI
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Email: jad@pop.org
Media Contact: Joseph A. D'Agostino
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