[House Hearing, 114 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
CHINA'S NEW ``TWO CHILD POLICY'' AND THE CONTINUATION
OF MASSIVE CRIMES AGAINST WOMEN AND CHILDREN
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
DECEMBER 3, 2015
__________
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CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
House
Senate
CHRIS SMITH, New Jersey, Chairman MARCO RUBIO, Florida, Cochairman
ROBERT PITTENGER, North Carolina TOM COTTON, Arkansas
TRENT FRANKS, Arizona STEVE DAINES, Montana
RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma
DIANE BLACK, Tennessee BEN SASSE, Nebraska
TIM WALZ, Minnesota SHERROD BROWN, Ohio
MARCY KAPTUR, Ohio DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California
MICHAEL HONDA, California JEFF MERKLEY, Oregon
TED LIEU, California GARY PETERS, Michigan
EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
CHRISTOPHER P. LU, Department of Labor
SARAH SEWALL, Department of State
STEFAN M. SELIG, Department of Commerce
DANIEL R. RUSSEL, Department of State
TOM MALINOWSKI, Department of State
Paul B. Protic, Staff Director
Elyse B. Anderson, Deputy Staff Director
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
----------
Statements
Page
Opening Statement of Hon. Christopher Smith, a U.S.
Representative from New Jersey; Chairman, Congressional-
Executive Commission on China.................................. 1
Pittenger, Hon. Robert, a U.S. Representative from North Carolina 3
Lieu, Hon. Ted, a U.S. Representative from California............ 4
Hultgren, Hon. Randy, a U.S. Representative from Illinois........ 5
Hartzler, Hon. Vicki, a U.S. Representative from Missouri........ 5
Eberstadt, Henry, Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy, The
American Enterprise Institute.................................. 6
Littlejohn, Reggie, Founder and President, Women's Rights Without
Frontiers...................................................... 8
Huang, Sarah, Women's rights advocate............................ 12
Li, Jennifer, Co-founder, China Life Alliance.................... 14
Mosher, Steven W., President, Population Research Institute...... 17
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements
Eberstadt, Henry................................................. 32
Littlejohn, Reggie............................................... 35
Huang, Sarah..................................................... 40
Li, Jennifer..................................................... 50
Mosher, Steven W................................................. 51
Smith, Hon. Christopher, a U.S. Representative from New Jersey;
Chairman, Congressional-Executive Commission on China.......... 57
Rubio, Hon. Marco, a U.S. Senator from Florida; Cochairman,
Congressional-Executive Commission on China.................... 58
Submissions for the Record
``How Many `Missing Females' for China's One Child Policy Era
(1981-2015)?,'' submitted by Henry Eberstadt................... 60
Op-ed from the Wall Street Journal titled, ``China's New Two-
Child Policy and the Fatal Conceit,'' by Henry Eberstadt, dated
October 29, 2015............................................... 66
Witness Biographies.............................................. 67
CHINA'S NEW ``TWO-CHILD POLICY'' AND THE CONTINUATION OF MASSIVE CRIMES
AGAINST WOMEN AND CHILDREN
----------
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2015
Congressional-Executive
Commission on China,
Washington, DC.
The hearing was convened, pursuant to notice, at 10:02
a.m., in Room HVC 210, Capitol Visitor Center, Hon. Christopher
Smith, Chairman, presiding.
Also Present: Representatives Pittinger, Lieu, Hultgren,
Pitts, and Hartzler; and Senators Brown and Daines.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. CHRISTOPHER SMITH, A U.S.
REPRESENTATIVE FROM NEW JERSEY; CHAIRMAN, CONGRESSIONAL-
EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
Chairman Smith. Good morning to everybody.
The Chinese Government has spent the past 35 years telling
couples what their families must look like.
Thirty-five years of state-sponsored violence against
women, including coerced abortions and involuntary
sterilizations, in the name of population control.
Thirty-five years of viewing children as excess baggage
from the day they are conceived, particularly the girl child.
Thirty-five years of wasting precious human capital and
potential, and 35 years of committing massive crimes against
women and children, enabled by pro-abortion, non-governmental
organizations and the United Nations Population Fund, or the
UNFPA.
Despite the platitude and applause by some being heaped on
China's announced two-child policy, the proposal does not
change the basic structure of coercive population control, and
it is not some major reversal of policy to be lauded.
And, this so-called reform is not even a done deal yet.
According to the world-famous demographer, Dr. Nicholas
Eberstadt, who will testify today, the one-child policy may
become a two-child policy, but the coercive population control
apparatus remains unchanged.
Dr. Eberstadt says, ``To be clear,'' and I quote him here,
``that shift has not yet taken place. To the contrary, just
days after the October 29 announcement, China's National Health
and Family Planning Commission, which oversees the population
program, emphasized that the new norms were not yet, `valid'
and described the two-child policy as a `proposal,' indicating
furthermore that `this proposal would have to be approved by
Beijing's legislature next year before it might eventually be
enacted.''
That said, the two-child policy may allow for more births,
if enacted, at some future date, but it does not remove the
pernicious incentives given the local officials to pressure and
force mothers to abort a child if the birth has not been
approved by the state or is the couple's third child.
Chinese families are still not free to determine the size
of their own families, nor does this policy erase the enormous
physical and psychological damage imposed on women done by
three-and-a-half decades of highly coercive birth limitations.
We should not be applauding China's policy. We should be
insisting, however, that they abolish all birth limits forever.
Chen Guangcheng, the famous Chinese legal advocate and
human rights champion, calls China's population control
policies genocide. He calls for an international tribunal to
vigorously investigate these crimes against humanity. And Mr.
Chen calls on the Obama administration to enforce existing U.S.
law and bar Chinese officials associated with the policy from
entry to the United States.
I would note parenthetically that I wrote that law in 2000.
The Admiral Nance-Meg Donovan Foreign Relations Act, there was
a provision of that law, and I wrote it, and the Obama
administration has completely and utterly failed to enforce and
implement its provisions.
Today we are sending another letter--and I have asked this
at multiple hearings over the last several years--asking the
President to just simply implement the law, which he has not
done. And, hopefully, we will get an answer back at least
giving a reason why they have chosen not to implement a human
rights law.
The Chinese Government is not the only one culpable in this
heinous crime against women and children. The U.N. Population
Fund [UNFPA], as we know, helped fund birth restrictions, fund
forced abortions and a massive and coercive family planning
bureaucracy.
Several years ago I had a face-to-face meeting in Beijing
with Madame Peng Pei-yun, the bureaucrat in charge of China's
draconian population program. Madame Peng repeatedly told me
that my concerns about coercion were unfounded and said the
UNFPA was there. They were on the ground and found no coercion
whatsoever. Of course, that is a complete whitewash.
The UNFPA has whitewashed China's crimes for decades and
continues to do so today. On their website, the UNFPA justifies
its history in China, saying that they were tasked by the
executive committee to help China and had to engage with China
as a sovereign nation.
Since 1994, the UNFPA claims that their efforts have
focused on getting China to adopt a rights-based approach to
family planning, saying they oppose coercion, violence, forced
abortion, and sterilization as a violation of basic human
rights.
Yet there is absolutely no evidence that their efforts made
one bit of difference in changing China's policy. And again,
part of the answer to critics like myself and others has always
been the UNFPA is here, on the ground, and they give us a clean
bill of health.
The UNFPA, I would submit, is complicit in China's coercive
population control policies. The United States and others who
help fund the UNFPA programs in China are also complicit. It is
a dark and bloody stain that cannot be washed away.
I would note again that the Kemp-Kasten law, current law,
it will be repeated again even in the Omnibus Bill that will be
adopted probably by the end of next week, continues the UNFPA
ban via the Kemp-Kasten, which requires a due-diligence effort
by the administration, which they have not done, and they just
send a check to New York without even going through the
motions.
I hope China will abolish all aspects of its horrific birth
control policy as soon as possible, and it ought to be looking
to compensate its victims. For me and many others opposed to
this policy, it is a matter of justice and human rights. For
the Chinese Government, it is now becoming increasingly a
matter of economic survival.
China's government says it is instituting a two-child
policy to stem the twin demographic time bombs of a rapidly
aging population and millions of men unable to find wives. But
this new policy is unlikely to solve those problems.
As the Economist has noted, by 2025 nearly one in four
Chinese citizens will be over the age of 60. At the same time,
China's working-age population has shrunk in each of the past
three years. These factors are likely to hurt not only the
government balance sheets, but also economic growth in China.
This should be of particular concern to the Chinese
Communist Party, as economic growth is the primary source of
their ill-begotten legitimacy.
The minimal policy change announced in October will do
little to address the three decades-plus decimation of the
female population.
Approximately 40 million women and girls--and I think the
number is far higher, perhaps millions more--are missing from
the population. A policy that can only be accurately described
as gendercide; the extermination of the girl child in society--
simply because she happens to be a girl. The lack of girls has
led to a dramatically skewed gender ratio. An estimated 30-plus
million--some say 40--will be unable to find wives in the
coming decades. I mean, that is unbelievable, and that has
become a magnet for human trafficking.
The Chinese Government should be concerned, as should
China's neighbors, as to the consequences of this. It is a
ticking time bomb. We now see more human trafficking and forced
marriages and sexual slavery. NGOs working in Vietnam,
Cambodia, Burma, have all reported an increase in trafficking
of women and girls into China in recent years. And even if
China ends its birth restrictions, given its current
demographics, this problem of the shortage of women in China
will only get worse in the coming decade.
I would like to now yield to Mr. Pittenger, a Commissioner,
for any comments he might have.
STATEMENT OF HON. ROBERT PITTENGER, A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE FROM
NORTH CAROLINA
Representative Pittenger. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and
thank you for your leadership in such a grave concern to each
of us.
I returned from China. I was there this fall, meeting with
the leadership in Beijing and Shanghai and Shenzhen, with
business leaders and government leaders, and had formal and
informal discussions regarding issues related to human rights,
religious liberties, freedoms of conscience, and, yes, the
issues related to forced abortions.
On one occasion, one of the leaders quietly lamented to me
that they felt that this policy was horrific and should
hopefully be changed in their culture. And they saw the impact
that it had on women's lives and was a real dark stain upon
their culture. So my hope and prayer is that that will take
place.
However, the Chinese Government has shown blatant disregard
for these basic human rights of their people. These thinly
veiled offenses against freedom of the press, expression,
religion, and speech, as well as their focused attacks on
international entities and human rights advocates paint a
picture of a stifling and oftentimes terrifying life for the
Chinese people.
China's population control policies are perhaps the most
widely known offense. These policies are particularly egregious
and are arguably the most systemically and heavily enforced in
the world, with severe emotional and physical harm on women.
China's national and provincial family planning laws and
regulations stipulate if, when, and how often Chinese citizens
may bear children. At the local level, enforcement of
population control policies has led to reports of traumatic
violations of individual rights, including forced abortions,
sterilizations, involuntary implantation of birth control
devices, and illegal children going unregistered.
Last month, China announced that their one-child policy
would become a two-child policy. While this change shows that
the Chinese Government recognized the failure of its policy, it
is, frankly, not enough.
With a rapidly aging population, shrinking workforce and a
large cohort of young men who will be unable to establish
families, China's continued adherence to its population control
policies--not only does it violate international human rights
standards, but goes against China's own interest.
We must continue unwaveringly to take a firm stand in
opposition to China's population control policies, using every
reasonable resource available to facilitate their abolition.
Thank you.
Chairman Smith. Representative Lieu?
STATEMENT OF HON. TED LIEU, A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE FROM
CALIFORNIA
Representative Lieu. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Last month I had an opportunity to go to Hong Kong,
Beijing, and Tibet with Leader Pelosi, on a CODEL. We raised
issues of religious freedom, autonomy in Tibet, and human
rights across China. It has been widely acknowledged that
China's one-child policy has been a disaster.
I look forward to hearing from the witnesses what they
think of China's new policy, which also continues to restrict
human freedom.
Thank you.
Chairman Smith. Thank you very much, Mr. Lieu.
Commissioner Hultgren?
STATEMENT OF HON. RANDY HULTGREN, A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE FROM
ILLINOIS
Representative Hultgren. I do not have much but a comment--
and that is, this is such an important subject for us to be
discussing, to figure out ways that we as Members of Congress
can highlight, really, the tragedy, the loss that has happened
there, and the need for change of policy--real change in
policy, not just talk. So I am looking forward to hearing from
our witnesses.
I yield back.
Chairman Smith. Thank you.
The distinguished gentlelady from Missouri, Vicki Hartzler.
STATEMENT OF HON. VICKI HARTZLER, A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE FROM
MISSOURI
Representative Hartzler. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am just
glad to be able to be a part today of this very important
discussion and hope that we will be able to advocate and do
something to help the women and the families of China be able
to determine their own futures.
Thank you.
Chairman Smith. Thank you very much.
I would like to introduce our distinguished panel,
beginning with Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt, who is the Henry Wendt
Scholar in Political Economy at The American Enterprise
Institute. A political economist and demographer by training,
he is a senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research
and has served on the visiting committee at the Harvard School
of Public Health, the Global Leadership Council, the World
Economic Forum, and the President's Council on Bioethics. He
has also served as a consultant to the World Bank, Department
of State, U.S. Agency for International Development, and the
Bureau of the Census.
Ms. Reggie Littlejohn is founder and president of Women's
Rights Without Frontiers, a broad-based international coalition
that opposes forced abortion and sexual slavery in China. Ms.
Littlejohn is an acclaimed expert on China's one-child policy,
having testified six times before the U.S. Congress, three
times before the European Parliament, and presented at the
British, Irish, and Canadian Parliaments as well.
She has briefed officials at the White House, Department of
State, United Nations, and the Vatican. Her Save-a-Girl
Campaign has saved more than 150 baby girls from sex-selective
abortion or grinding poverty in China.
Ms. Jennifer Li lived in China for many years and is
cofounder of China Life Alliance, a network of individuals,
churches, and ministries who seek to protect the lives of
millions in China who are threatened by abortion, infanticide,
abandonment, and human trafficking.
They do this by educating and mobilizing groups to rescue
women and save children through their safe house network, legal
aid network, coercive abortion rescue teams, and in a variety
of other ways.
We will then hear from Ms. Sarah Huang, who has personally
rescued more than 80 Chinese women and children threatened by
abortion, infanticide, abandonment, and trafficking.
Since 2013, international media has covered the efforts of
Sarah, a humble pastor in China who has been nicknamed the
Mother Teresa of China. And she courageously assists vulnerable
women who must hide their pregnancies to escape coercive
abortions from Chinese family planning cadres.
Sarah has been working closely behind the scenes with China
Life Alliance and has been pivotal in assisting numerous
Chinese families, including a number of widely reported forced
abortion cases that have been leaked into the international
media.
Sarah Li is currently pregnant with her second child and
now experiencing her own battle to save the life of her unborn
child from a mandatory abortion.
We will then hear from Mr. Steven Mosher, who is president
of the Population Research Institute and has worked tirelessly
since 1979 to fight coercive population control programs. He is
an internationally recognized authority on China and population
issues. He served as director of the Asian Study Center at the
Claremont Institute from 1986 to 1995 and was appointed in 1991
to serve as commissioner of the U.S. Commission on Broadcasting
to the PRC.
Following a period of naval service in 1979, he became the
first American social scientist permitted to do research in
China since the Communist revolution. And I would note that it
was Steven Mosher who broke the story to the world and to
Congress about what was going on, and his books and his
writings brought the bright line of scrutiny to this infamous
policy. And that was in the early 1980s. So I want to thank Dr.
Mosher for that leadership.
Dr. Eberstadt?
STATEMENT OF HENRY EBERSTADT, HENRY WENDT SCHOLAR IN POLITICAL
ECONOMY, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INTSTITUTE
Mr. Eberstadt. Mr. Chairman, Members of Congress,
distinguished co-panelists and esteemed guests, it is an honor
and a pleasure to be here with you today. With your permission,
I would like to ask that a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed I
did on this same subject be added to the record.
Chairman Smith. Without objection, so ordered.
Mr. Eberstadt. On October 29 of this year, a shift from a
one-child to a two-child norm was announced by the Central
Committee of the Chinese Communist Party at the 5th Plenum of
the 18th Party Congress. In other words, the Party signaled
that it would be abandoning the one-child policy it had
promulgated and would now be moving to allow all parents in
China to have two children.
To be clear, as the Chairman has already indicated, that
shift has not yet taken place. Suffice it to say that the
particulars of the new two-child policy thus still remain to be
seen. It is not too soon, however, to make a few basic points.
First, the end of the one-child policy will not mean the
end of coercive birth control in China. This is a critical fact
that cannot be underscored sufficiently.
The Chinese Government is not retiring its enormous
apparatus of involuntary population plan enforcement. Beijing
is not relinquishing its claim that the state rather than
parents should be the proper authority for deciding how many
children China's families may have. Instead, the Chinese
Communist Party is merely preparing to recalibrate the birth
restrictions it will impose on its subjects.
By all indications, the sorts of ugly human rights
violations that other witnesses will be describing here this
morning, up to and including criminalizing out-of-quota
pregnancies and forcibly compelling abortions against the will
of the mother, will still be very much part and parcel of
China's population policy agenda.
Second, any two-child norm would necessarily and
inescapably still expose parents who desire more than two
children to coercive birth control. For China's population
planners, there is no contradiction whatsoever between raising
the permissible birth quota and deploying the power of the
state against birth quota violators.
Third, in addition to its obvious demographic focus,
China's population program should be understood to serve more
broadly as an instrument of population control, in the more
general sense of social control. And it is not a stand-alone
policy in China in this regard.
We must bear in mind contemporary China's hukou system of
household registration and residence permits, the likes of
which is only seen otherwise today in the DPRK, i.e., North
Korea.
At this writing, a distinct majority of the young men and
women in China's big cities, thanks to this hukou program, are
de facto illegal aliens in their own country for violating
these established hukou rules. I can show you a little graphic
of this on the slide over there. The blue and red are the non-
hukou residents in big cities. The transparent is the legal
residents in big cities.
The hukou violators do not have rights to social services
in their new locales. They cannot move their families with
them. They are discriminated against economically in the cities
and they will always, always lose in any dispute with locals.
It is akin to Soweto with Chinese characteristics.
One might think that the obvious solution to this problem
would be to relax the hukou restrictions or to scrap them
altogether. But despite considerable talk of hukou reform over
the past two decades in Beijing, Chinese authorities have shown
extreme reluctance to do away with the hukou system and
practice.
Given both the nature of Chinese rule and the traditions
that predate it, we should not be surprised if authorities in
Beijing prove similarly surprisingly attached to coercive
population policy precisely because of the social control it
affords the rulers over the ruled.
Fourth, it is worth noting that some Chinese researchers
and academics are already calling for more aggressive measures
to stimulate population growth. Is it possible that Beijing
might reverse course in the future and veer from anti-natal to
pro-natal coercive birth control?
Steven Mosher is here this morning and I do not want to
steal any of Steve's thunder, but I would be a plagiarist if I
did not quote him on what he has written about this.
Steve has said ``the same Party officials who have been
responsible for decades of forced abortions and sterilizations
would presumably have no qualms over enforcing mandatory
pregnancy on young women, if they were ordered to do so.''
Finally, among the many unanswered questions concerning
coercive birth control in China, the most important and perhaps
also surprising is its ultimate demographic impact.
Strange as this may sound, demographers and population
specialists have yet to offer a plausible and methodologically
defensible estimate of just how much this extraordinarily
ambitious and ruthless adventure in social engineering has
actually altered the size and composition of China's
population. I have submitted some slides and some additional
testimony on this matter.
Let me just conclude by saying forcible birth control looks
to be the Chinese Government's preferred policy path for the
indefinite future. What is incontestable is that this path
guarantees systematic human rights abuse. Much less well
understood is what impact forcible population control stands to
exert on the demographic rhythms of Chinese society.
Demographic specialists need to pay much more attention to this
question than they have to date.
Thank you.
Chairman Smith. Dr. Eberstadt, thank you so very much.
Ms. Littlejohn?
[The prepared statement and op-ed of Mr. Eberstadt appear
in the appendix.]
STATEMENT OF REGGIE LITTLEJOHN, FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT, WOMEN'S
RIGHTS WITHOUT FRONTIERS
Ms. Littlejohn. Honorable members of the Commission,
Representative Chris Smith, Mr. Pittenger, Mr. Lieu, Mr.
Hultgren, I am grateful for this opportunity to testify here
today as we discuss China's new two-child policy, which
continues the massive crimes against women and children under
the one-child policy.
Xinhua News Agency reported on October 29 that China is
moving from a one-child policy to a two-child policy, and used
the word that they were ``abandoning'' the one-child policy.
That word is extremely misleading.
The two-child policy will not end any of the human rights
abuses that were caused by the one-child policy, including
forced abortions, forced sterilizations as well as the sex-
selective abortion of baby girls.
Coercion and control remain at the core of the two-child
policy, just as it was under the one-child policy. As Chen
Guangcheng succinctly tweeted, ``there is nothing to be happy
about. First, the CCP would kill any baby after one. Now they
kill any baby after two.''
It appears, therefore, that China plans to maintain its
iron grip over the wombs of women. The Chinese Communist Party
will continue to intrude into the bedrooms and between the
sheets of the people of China, requiring an arduous process to
get a birth permit, a system of paid informants and ultrasound
checks to make sure that a woman's IUD is still in place.
Women's Rights Without Frontiers has a network of field
workers in one area of rural China, and I have been in
communication with the head of that network over the weekend. I
want to report to you from our network on the ground in China
what the response is in rural China, in our area, to this two-
child policy.
And the response is that it is no big deal whatsoever, and
it is not going to resolve the problems in the countryside of
China.
The main reason for this is because of the continued threat
of forced sterilization, so that if a woman has a son, she is
not likely then to get pregnant again, because she has her son.
And if she has a second child, she is going to be forcibly
sterilized. These forced sterilizations not only ruin a woman's
reproductive health. They ruin a woman's general health as
well.
According to my network, a woman--before she is sterilized,
women as well as men do hard labor on the farms. After they are
sterilized, a woman cannot even pump water out of the well. And
this lasts forever. The woman is permanently disabled from
doing hard farm labor, and this is a huge, catastrophic event
for her family and the villages.
Especially a woman whose first child is a girl is going to
feel that she has to hide her second pregnancy, because if it
is a boy, she is going to be forcibly sterilized after giving
birth. But even if it is another girl, she does not want the
authorities to know about this because, number one, she will be
forcibly sterilized if she gives birth to this girl, or when
she gives birth to the girl, and number two, she wants to
preserve the ability to have a boy.
So these second daughters are either aborted--that is what
happens a lot of the time--or abandoned, or hidden so that they
have no hukou, so that the woman can then give birth, have a
third pregnancy if she has two girls.
Hukou in our area is only given to a second child after the
mother has submitted to sterilization. So the forced abortions
are continuing under the new two-child policy, because women
who are pregnant now, who have gotten pregnant before the new
two-child policy takes effect, if it does, in fact, take
effect, are still considered to be illegally pregnant; and we
are going to be hearing from Sarah Huang, who is in precisely
that situation.
According to our network, if a woman is caught illegally
pregnant and cannot pay the fine, she is still going to be
forcibly aborted, as was the case under the one-child policy.
According to the president of a local hospital and a family
planning official contacted by our network, if a woman runs
away because she knows that she is illegally pregnant and she
is caught, she absolutely will be forcibly aborted. She will
not be given any opportunity to pay a fine.
In our village, whether or not a woman is actually forcibly
aborted or given the opportunity to pay the fine depends on a
couple of factors. One is, How powerful is the woman? Does she
have any resources? Poor women, women whose families are not
connected to the Chinese Communist Party, are much more likely
to be forcibly aborted than a woman of means or a woman whose
family members work for the Party.
And similarly, the enforcement of the one-child policy is
extremely arbitrary, and it really depends on who the family
planning official is that shows up at your door. There are
people who will be merciful and give the woman an opportunity
to pay a fine and there are people who are merciless and will
not give the opportunity to pay a fine.
Women in our villages have resorted to desperate measures
to avoid a forced abortion when faced with an illegal
pregnancy.
Chairman Smith. Pardon me. Ms. Littlejohn?
Ms. Littlejohn. Yes.
Chairman Smith. There are seven votes on the floor. We are
at zero right now for the first one--we are at least 30 seconds
to go. We will take a brief recess, and I apologize to our
witnesses and to people who have come out, but we will resume
as soon as those votes are over.
If one or two of our Senators, because we understand a few
are on their way, they will resume the hearing and then we will
just pick it up when we----
Ms. Littlejohn. Okay.
Chairman Smith. Thank you.
[Whereupon at 10:30 a.m. the hearing was recessed.]
AFTER RECESS [11:17 A.M.]
Ms. Littlejohn. Okay, so you want me to continue now?
Senator Daines. You know, we are going to keep moving
forward, yeah, so I will chair here until the House Members
come back. I came over from the Senate side here.
Ms. Littlejohn. Thank you so much.
Senator Daines. Absolutely. So, I am Senator Steve Daines
from the State of Montana.
Ms. Littlejohn. It is a pleasure to meet you----
Senator Daines. No, very glad to have you here. I lived in
China for five years, working for Procter & Gamble, back in the
1990s. So I had two children born in Hong Kong and have a lot
of interest in this subject and some experience of the
underground there as well.
So anyway, Ms. Littlejohn, continue.
Ms. Littlejohn. Okay. So what I was talking about is
Women's Rights Without Frontiers has a network of field workers
in rural China, and I was talking about the reactions of women
in rural China to the new two-child policy. And I was about to
tell a story about how women get around the forced abortion
that is still required under the two-child policy.
I understand that the following situation is common in our
area. Ai Bao, which is not her real name, is a second daughter.
And when her mother found out that she was pregnant, she went
into hiding because she did not have a birth permit.
However, she was discovered, and so when the family
planning police tried to forcibly abort her, what she did is
she found another woman who was also illegally pregnant but who
was an unwed mother. Unwed mothers are never given the
opportunity to even pay a fine or anything.
She paid that woman 2,000 yuan to have an abortion in her
name so that she could then use that woman's abortion
certificate and hand it to the family planning police. So once
they had that abortion certificate, she went into hiding and
was able to give birth to her second daughter.
These are the kinds of desperate measures that people will
take to avoid the forced abortion under the one-child policy.
Also, instituting a two-child policy will not end
gendercide in China. As people in this hearing no doubt know,
there are approximately 37 million more men living in China
than women, and that the birth ratio of men and women, or boys
and girls, is about 117 boys born for every 100 girls born.
This is not going to improve, in my opinion, under the two-
child policy, because of the specter of forced sterilization.
Many women whose first child is a boy may choose not to
bear a second child because of the expense of having children
in China; and because, in our area, you cannot get hukou for
the second child without a sterilization. And these women do
not want to be sterilized because it breaks their health.
Similarly, women whose first child is a girl are going to
hide the second pregnancy, because if they give birth to
another girl, they want to have the opportunity to have another
pregnancy to have a boy. And also they do not want to be
sterilized, because if you have a second girl, you will also be
sterilized or else you will not get hukou.
In addition, there is a technology that is potentially
dangerous to girls that has found its way to China. It has
recently been discovered that cell-free DNA can be found in the
blood of a pregnant mother.
And so they have developed this test called non-invasive
prenatal testing. The ominous acronym for this is NIPT. And I
could not help but think of ``nipped in the bud,'' because this
is a new way to detect chromosomal abnormalities, and it can be
used even as early as seven weeks. But people already are using
it to determine the gender of a fetus. And I just worry that
when brutal son-preference meets with non-invasive blood test
technology, many, many millions are girls are going to be
aborted.
The hukou abuses continue. Our network reports that in our
area, unless a woman is sterilized, her second child will be
denied hukou. Without hukou, children are denied access to
health care, education, and other public benefits.
There has been recent talk about registering 13 million
people who do not have hukou. The motive here appears to be an
attempt to make the population look less unbalanced. But
Women's Rights Without Frontiers demands the unconditional end
of the hukou system as being inhumane.
Eliminating hukou by itself, however, will not end
gendercide unless it is accompanied by the elimination of the
forced sterilization that still occurs after the second
pregnancy.
Women will not register a second daughter for hukou if, by
doing so, they are going to be giving up the chance to have a
son.
So some have publicly wondered what will happen to the army
of family planning officials now that China has ``abolished''
the one-child policy. This question in itself is overly
optimistic. The two-child policy remains just as coercive as
the former one-child policy. This infrastructure of coercion
can be turned to crush dissent in any area.
There is growing unrest inside China. Internal Chinese law
enforcement data on so-called mass incidents indicates that
China has seen a sustained, rapid increase in these incidents
from 8,700 in 1993 to nearly 60,000 in 2003 to more than
120,000 in 2008.
Meanwhile, there are as many as 1 million family planning
officials in China. This 1 million army, if it were a standing
army, would tie with North Korea as being the sixth-largest
standing army in the world.
Given the unrest that is happening in China, does the army
of family planning officials, does the Chinese Communist Party
regard this as being necessary to keep down social unrest in
China? Therefore, I believe that the Chinese Communist Party
will never relinquish coercive population control.
As fully explained in my congressional testimony of April
30 of this year, I believe that the Chinese Communist Party
might slowly open up the one-child policy, but they will never
abandon coercive birth control because, number one, it enables
them to maintain their grip on power through terror. It is
social control masquerading as population control.
Number two, coercive population control is a lucrative
profit center, bringing in as much as $314 billion in fines
since its inception.
Number three, it provides an infrastructure of coercion
that can be turned to crush dissent of any sort.
And number four, it ruptures relationships of trust so that
people cannot organize--because if you do not know who you can
trust, you cannot organize for democracy.
Sending out the message that China has abandoned its one-
child policy is detrimental to sincere efforts to stop forced
abortion and gendercide in China because this message implies
that the one-child policy is no longer a problem.
In a world laden with compassion fatigue, people are
relieved to cross China's one-child policy off their list of
things to worry about, but we must not do that. Let us not
abandon the women and the babies of China who continue to face
forced abortion and forced sterilization and the girls who
continue to face sex-selective abortion and abandonment under
the new two-child policy.
The one-child policy does not need to be modified. It needs
to be abolished.
Thank you.
Senator Daines. I think we are going to go next to Ms.
Huang, actually.
[Pause.]
Ms. Huang, you have to turn on your microphone.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Littlejohn appears in the
appendix.]
STATEMENT OF SARAH HUANG, WOMEN'S RIGHTS ADVOCATE
Ms. Huang [through interpreter]. Greetings, Honorable
Chairman, Congressman Smith, Cochairman Senator Rubio, members
of the CECC and distinguished guests. I am honored to have this
opportunity to share my painful story.
And I am grateful for this country, which has provided the
necessary leadership in promoting human rights throughout the
world, including working with the international community to
persuade countries like China to adhere to international law
and universal values on the protection of human dignity.
Since the beginning of this nation, the United States has
had a great history of leading the way in protecting human
rights from the Declaration of Independence, which states that
all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
President Obama has even spoken on the importance of
answering the responsibility to speak up for those who cannot
speak for themselves. Speaking up for others is one of my core
values and one of many reasons why my husband and I continually
open our hearts and home to the vulnerable and the voiceless.
America, you have a choice. You can choose to speak up for
the innocent, or stay silent. In my country, women are told
they cannot speak out for their own bodies or for the children
in the womb.
In China, the struggle is not about pro-life or pro-choice,
but about enduring torture or enduring strict punishment for
disobeying. It is because of this that my phones ring
constantly by the very few women that are courageous enough to
defy the policy, to keep the child.
These strangers frequently call me and say, ``I am pregnant
and I have no options. I was told you can help me to keep my
child.'' Of course, I try to help them all. Unfortunately, I am
just as busy now with the Chinese Government's newly announced
two-child policy as I was with the infamous one-child policy.
Although there is an expert here today that will share--in
more detail, please allow me to share briefly about the
statistics.
Chinese Government data reports that 30 million abortions
are performed each year for an average rate of 35,000 per day.
I personally believe the number is much higher. Because these
official statistics only include hospitals that report their
figures and the most abortions occur in unauthorized ``black
clinics'' or at home.
One reason why we think the number of abortions is
considerably higher is because China is a shame-based culture.
Chinese families do not want the attention of going to an
official abortion clinic where they are required to register or
show their I.D.
As a result, most Chinese women who receive abortions
choose to do it anonymously at the unregistered clinics known
as ``black clinics.''
Now I am going to briefly share my pregnancy story. My
husband and I have wanted a second child for many years, so
after finding out we were pregnant, we were of course very
happy, especially when we heard that the one-child policy has
been abolished and thought that our problems had been solved.
We even heard in the news that everyone in China can now have a
second child.
Although we were skeptical, our immediate reaction was to
rejoice, as this would mean a lot more babies born to families
that wanted to keep them. We thought our problems were solved,
until we heard from my husband's employer, the Chinese
Government, that abortion would be mandatory until we present
the proof that I had this IUD installed.
So my husband was threatened that if I failed to present
this proof that I had the IUD installed, then I would be
subject to forced abortion. According to my experience and
observation, this newly announced two-child policy is not
applicable to every family and every couple, because this
policy has not been completely implemented yet.
For example, it does not apply to my case, nor to those
families who are currently in hiding in China. The new
announced two-child policy is not completely bad. A majority,
but not all families, will meet the criteria and be allowed to
keep their second child. However, clearly China's change to a
two-child policy is not enough.
Chinese families who attempt to have two children could
still be subject to coercive and intrusive forms of
contraception and forced abortions, which amount to torture.
Another common myth is that China's brutal Family Planning
Bureau has been dissolved, thus removing all of its corrupt
practices and acts of impunity. But it is not true; it just has
simply been renamed.
Although I do not doubt there may be some positive changes,
the truth is that the same Party members that worked for the
Family Planning Bureau are now employed by the National Health
and Family Planning Bureau. This organization still maintains a
strict quota-based system that drives employees to abuse others
in order to protect their jobs.
Another observation relates to the ``black clinics.'' They
are unregistered abortion clinics that typically have illegal
ultrasound machines that tell expectant parents the gender of
the child.
These clinics offer a variety of services from gender
identification to late-term abortions, with all services
offered on an anonymous basis.
Now I do believe that things will change, but how many must
suffer before that happens? I hope that many years from now our
children's children will remember us as the generation that did
something about this great tragedy. Because we are the ones who
are aware of what is happening in China. We have this
responsibility to take action.
I will also pray that the day will come where China will no
longer coercively control women's wombs. I believe this is one
of the most tragic events of the modern world's history. Can
you imagine the history books revealing that the Chinese
Government, through their one- and then two-child policies
having killed more babies and brutalized more women than such
events as the Plague or both World Wars combined?
These tragedies are happening, and if we do not do
something, I ask who will? If we do not say something, again,
who will?
Thank you.
Senator Daines. Thank you for your testimony, Ms. Huang.
Ms. Li.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Huang appears in the
appendix.]
STATEMENT OF JENNIFER LI, COFOUNDER, CHINA LIFE ALLIANCE
Ms. Li. Senator Daines and members of the Commission, I am
honored to be here today and to speak with you from my personal
experience of China and the new two-child policy.
I moved to China seven years ago with my husband, and I was
eager to learn the language and culture of this amazing land.
We knew at the time that a one-child policy existed, but were
unaware of the significance of it. We also knew that boys were
the more desirable gender.
And as time passed, we began to look around us, and we
noticed on the way to school in the morning, on the backs of
parents' bicycles, on the backs of grandparents' bicycles, two
boys for every girl. We would see children exercising in the
schoolyards and we noticed the same thing--boys in great number
and much fewer girls.
We began to ask questions of each other and of our friends.
Where are all the girls? Where are the children with
disabilities? Do these families want more than one child, or
are they satisfied?
As our language skills increased and as we began to make
friends among locals, we learned couples were being pressured
in draconian ways to manage their family size through
abortions. It was hard to believe, and we did not want to, but
it was real.
Despite it being illegal to tell parents the gender of an
unborn baby, thousands of black-market abortion clinics that
Sarah referred to are enabling parents to have gender-selective
abortions every day.
As to the question, do they want more than one child,
hundreds of Chinese people have answered me this question
personally and said yes, I wish I could have as many children
as I want, but I cannot.
Every single day, as I would walk the streets with my
children, I would be told how lucky I was to have many
children. And people would bemoan to me the fact that their
government would only let them have one.
We can call it a one-child policy; we can call it a two-
child policy. We can call it whatever we want, but we cannot
deny the reality that China's population control policy leaves
men and women across the country without basic human
reproductive rights and leaves millions of babies dead at the
hand of anxious relatives, sold on the black market, or dead on
abortion tables.
As our awareness of this heartbreak grew, so did our desire
to help. It started off as helping a few friends who were
pregnant. We realized quickly that this was not pro-life work
as we understood it in America.
In America, when volunteering at U.S. pregnancy resource
centers, I was taught to tell people that they had options. In
China, there were no options.
As we embraced our friends, our burden grew and we, along
with a small group of Chinese friends, started a coalition for
the purpose of helping pregnant women who wanted to keep their
babies.
After starting a variety of baby-saving initiatives and
enduring great hardships, we partnered with churches and
nonprofit groups to form the China Life Alliance, a coalition
of Chinese citizens who rescue thousands of babies each year
before they are abandoned, sold, or killed.
We do this through education, through safe houses, through
legal aid, through financial aid, and whatever other creative
solutions our team comes up with.
Over the years, we have seen unimaginable horrors. This has
been the greatest and most difficult cause of our life. I would
like to share with you two stories, before we are through, of
my close personal friends. Though their stories happened under
what we call the one-child policy, under this new child policy,
their outcome would not be changed at all.
First, I want to talk to you about Ivy. Ivy was a single
college student when she discovered that she was pregnant by
her married professor. The consequences for Ivy, when she chose
to give birth to her daughter and not abort or abandon her,
were severe. Ivy was expelled from college and her daughter was
denied a hukou, or birth certificate, which meant she could
never go to school, never be treated at a hospital or travel.
Ivy is one of the most courageous women I know. Because she
was a single mother, Ivy could not get a government-sanctioned
job. She worked for a pittance and found under-the-table work
to do. She had no support and no man would marry her because
under the one-child policy, he would not be able to have a
child of his own with her.
Her daughter is now a vivacious 16-year-old with dreams of
attending Harvard. And Ivy works with the China Life Alliance
helping other women who find themselves single and pregnant.
My second story is about Grace, who had a daughter born
with Down Syndrome. This story is felt deeply by me because I
am a mother of a child with a disability.
Population control puts dramatic pressure on parents of
disabled children. Grace is from a minority people group which,
owing to their rural situation, is allowed to have two
children.
The pressure to have both children be healthy and male in
order to earn income for the family proved to be too much for
their family. When the baby was five days old and still
receiving oxygen from a tank, her grandmother locked Grace out
of the house and attempted to kill the baby by unplugging her
oxygen for eight hours.
Miraculously, the baby survived and Grace called my Chinese
friend and me and we helped them think through options and
reasons to save their baby's life. Repeatedly, as we sat there
with the grandparents and the parents, we heard them say, it
would not be a big deal if we could just have another child.
But because this one imperfect child counted as part of their
quota, the family economics made the choice to keep her
impossible.
It is challenging for me to stay composed when I share
these stories. I see their tears and I feel their fears. I hold
their hands and I hold their story in my heart. I want the
world to see the heartbreak that population control has brought
to the people of beautiful China.
But we rejoice for those who will now be able to have two
children instead of one. I believe we must continue to speak up
for the rights of the men, women, and children whose lives are
so deeply affected by this policy and the attempts to control
their reproductive rights.
As we ask what we can do and how we can move forward, I
would like to ask you to remember the stories of Ivy and Grace.
Let us honor their courage and bring change that gives them
hope.
Senator Daines. Thanks for your testimony, Ms. Li.
Mr. Mosher?
[The prepared statement of Ms. Li appears in the appendix.]
STATEMENT OF STEVEN W. MOSHER, PRESIDENT, POPULATION RESEARCH
INSTITUTE
Mr. Mosher. I would like to start by thanking the members
of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China for holding
this important hearing and particularly for you, Senator
Daines, for chairing it at this point.
This is a hearing that is near and dear to my heart, as it
was to Jennifer's and in a sense, in almost the same way. I was
at Stanford University in 1979 when China first allowed foreign
researchers to come into that country, and I was the first
American social scientist to live on the ground in China for a
year and study rural life in China in 1979 and l980 when the
one-child policy began.
And it swept across the Chinese landscape like a terrible
hurricane, sweeping up pregnant women, women who were three and
six and nine months pregnant, telling them that their
pregnancies were illegal--they had been legal, of course, a few
weeks before, but the Party had now decreed otherwise--
arresting them for the crime of being pregnant, taking them
away from their homes and families, locking them up in holding
pens where they were subjected to morning-to-night propaganda
sessions--brainwashing sessions we should probably call them--
until they were taken by force, by coercion, under escort to a
local medical center where they were aborted. In some cases,
the third trimester abortions were done by Caesarian section
and babies were killed at birth.
I was there for this entire process, and as far as I know,
I think I am one of the only, or one of the few Western
eyewitnesses to the way the program is actually carried out in
China, with the identification of pregnant women as criminals,
with their arrest, with their imprisonment, and at the end of
the day with their forced abortion and forced sterilization.
So I was there at the beginning, and I would like to say
that I am also here at the close, at the end of this barbaric
policy, but unfortunately, that would not be true.
It is true that the Chinese Communist Party has now decided
that all Chinese couples will be allowed to have a second
child--or will soon be allowed, once they jump through the
proper legislative hoops at their rubber-stamp parliament--will
soon be allowed to have a second child, rather than being
restricted to only one child, as some are now.
But foreign observers who have greeted the apparent end of
the one-child policy with euphoria should understand that this
does not represent a new birth of reproductive freedom in
China.
Those who have publicly commended the Chinese leadership as
if they had completely decided to abolish a policy of limiting
childbearing in China that has cost so much physical,
emotional, and spiritual damage to the families of the nation,
have got it wrong, because the Chinese leadership has done no
such thing.
China is not backing away from draconian birth limits,
because Communist Party leader Xi Jinping has suddenly
developed a conscience. There is no evidence that anyone in the
senior leadership has ever lost any sleep over the hundreds of
millions of unborn children and newborn children their policy
has killed over the past 35 years, since I was first in China.
There is no evidence that any of them have shed a tear for
the hundreds of millions of young mothers forcibly aborted and
sterilized over this same period, or had a moment's regret for
China's tens of millions of missing baby girls.
What does keep them up at night, and what has prompted this
modification of the planned birth policy, is the dawning
realization that their misguided policy is crippling China's
economic growth.
For at least the past two years, China's workforce has
actually been shrinking. That is a pretty amazing statistic in
the most populous country in the world. Last year, the
potential workforce fell by a reported 3.71 million, almost 4
million workers, a significant number even by China's
standards.
At the same time, the over-60 population is exploding.
According to U.N. projections, it is expected to more than
double by 2050, reaching an astonishing 437 million people over
the age of retirement.
China is growing old before it grows rich, and the strains
on China's nascent pension programs will be enormous. And we
could, Mr. Chairman, imagine a day when the Chinese Government
also declares that the elderly are superfluous and need to be
encouraged to prematurely end their lives. That, I think, would
also fall under the aegis of the population control program.
There is another reason, even more fundamental, why I am
not celebrating the end of the one-child policy. Regardless of
whether Party leaders allow Chinese couples to have one, two or
even three children, the underlying policy has not, and
probably will not, change.
Now, Dr. Eberstadt, Reggie Littlejohn, Jennifer Li, and
Sarah Huang have all made this point. But let me just underline
the fact that the underlying policy is the policy of planned
birth--in Chinese.
And under the policy of planned birth, the Chinese state,
rather than the Chinese people, decide how many children ought
to be born in China each year, and it was none other than
Chairman Mao himself, the founder of the People's Republic of
China, who first put the planned-birth policy in place.
The great helmsman, as he was known, decided way back in
the 1950s that the five-year economic plans being drawn up by
the Chinese Communist Party should control not just production,
but reproduction, and they have, ever since.
That is why the shift to a two-child policy is occurring as
part of the next five-year plan, approved at the latest meeting
of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee. The official
communique about that meeting, which was released by the
Xinhua--the Xinhua News Agency, on October 29, made clear that
in the 13th five-year economic plan, China's leaders had
decided to ramp up both economic production and reproduction.
The communique itself is written in the almost-unreadable
pastiche of slogans that the Party resorts to on such
occasions, but I translate it as, ``promote the balanced
development of the population, resolutely carry out the basic
policy of planned births, thoroughly implement the policy of
each couple birthing two children, actively begin to address
the aging of the population.''
So the basic policy of planned births has not changed. What
has changed is the state's desire to increase reproduction, and
it will, by one means or another, increase reproduction.
Of course, it is already too late to rebalance the
population--or to stop the aging of the population. That is
already baked into the demographic cake. And it is doubtful
whether or not the new policy will have much of an impact
immediately on childbearing, unless the state steps in with
more--measures.
When the one-child policy has been relaxed for certain
segments of the population in the past, first for rural couples
whose first child was a girl, then for all rural couples, then
for urban couples where both husband and wife were only
children. The results have been underwhelming.
The last tweaking of the planned birth policy occurred just
two years ago. It was particularly disappointing to Party
leaders hoping for a baby boomlet. The government had announced
that couples in which only one spouse was an only child would
be allowed two children, and they planned for 20 million births
in the year 2014.
Actually, only 16.9 million babies materialized. Babies do
not materialize, of course; they are conceived, but in a
material society like China, we can appropriately use that
term. Out of the 11 million couples eligible to have a second
child, only 1.45 million actually applied for a permit. So the
response was something over 10 percent of the population.
These figures suggest that at least among China's urban
population--of course, more and more people are pouring into
urban centers where economic opportunities are available--
couples are not eagerly waiting to fill the maternity wards.
I think 40 years of anti-natal, anti-child propaganda has
left its mark on the Chinese psyche. The Chinese Communist
Party, because of 35 years of anti-people propaganda, has
succeeded in largely dismantling the most family-centered
culture, one of the most family-centered cultures, the planet
has ever seen.
Few of those people who grew up under the one-child policy,
who are now the second generation of people to grow up under
the one-child policy--their parents were only children and in
many cases, their grandparents were only children--they would
rather spend their limited incomes on themselves than, say,
disposable diapers.
So what will the Chinese leaders do if, as now appears
likely, the Chinese people do not procreate up to plan? At
present, couples are permitted to have a second child, but I do
not expect the matter to end there.
Soon they will be encouraged, then they will be motivated,
and finally one can imagine that they might one day be ordered
to bear children. I could at this point quote Dr. Eberstadt
quoting me, but I will refrain from doing that. [Laughter.]
If this prediction sounds a little overwrought, consider
what China has been doing to young pregnant mothers for the
better part of two generations now. They have been visited by
family planning officials, planned birth officials, who
encourage them to get abortions, who then motivate them and, at
the end of the day, ultimately take them under escort to have
abortions.
You could see how young pregnant mothers who would be
encouraged to bear children would be subject to periodic pelvic
examinations to make sure they have not secretly gotten an
abortion, and punished if they refuse to bear the children the
state wants them to bear.
At the outset of the one-child policy--in fact, when I was
in China--then paramount leader Deng Xiaoping ordered his
officials to, ``use whatever means you must'' to force the
birthrate down. He went on to say, ``with the support of the
Chinese Communist Party, you have nothing to fear.''
Chinese officials took him at his word and women were
rounded up en masse to be aborted, sterilized, and
contracepted. Even today these abuses continue, and they will
continue, because as far as I know, Central Committee Directive
Number 7 of 1983 has not been rescinded.
It requires women who have had two children to be
sterilized, as Reggie pointed out. It requires women pregnant
with out-of-plan births to be aborted, which will be the fate
of women who are pregnant with a third child. And it requires
women who have not yet been given permission to have children
to be contracepted.
That will stay in place. It will also continue to be the
case that single women in China will not be allowed to have
children, because all of their pregnancies are ipso facto out-
of-plan births.
So the same Party officials who have been responsible for
decades of forced abortions and sterilizations would have no
qualms about enforcing mandatory pregnancy.
If the higher birth rate called for by China's new planned
birth policy cannot be achieved voluntarily, I think
childbearing in China may one day become mandatory.
What should China do? Well, China's leaders should, number
one, abandon the planned birth policy altogether, the policy
that has been in place since the 1950s. They should allow
couples to freely choose the number and spacing of their
children and have as many or as few as they desire.
Number two, China's leaders should respect the consensus of
the international community as expressed in the policy of the
U.N. Population Fund. The U.N. Population Fund affirms that
couples enjoy the right to reasonably decide the number and
spacing of their children, something that China denies its own
people.
Number three, the National Health and Planned Birth
Commission, created in 2013 from the merger of the Ministry of
Health and National Population and Planned Birth Commission
should revert to its former role as the Ministry of Health, and
its planned birth arm abolished.
Only if these reforms are undertaken will forced abortions
and forced sterilizations, which have characterized China's
planned birth policy from the beginning, come to an end.
Now, is this likely to happen? Well, sadly, no. I think the
totalitarian impulse that drives these policies is far too
strong in China. From a more practical, political point of
view, the planned birth policy employs far too many people. It
generates far too much in the way of profits to corrupt
officials through the fines for having illegal children. And it
is too closely identified with the Chinese Communist Party to
ever be lightly abandoned.
The Chinese Communist Party has invested a lot of its
legitimacy in the claim that it and only it knows how to manage
the Chinese economy, and that reproduction is part of managing
the Chinese economy. Were it to abandon the planned birth
policy altogether, it would be admitting that its management
has been a failure.
It has, of course, been a failure.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Mosher appears in the
appendix.]
Senator Daines. Thank you for your testimony.
I first want to submit for the record Senator Rubio's
comments, who is the Cochair of this Commission. So ordered.
Let me start off, as someone who spent five-and-a-half
years in China, living there back in the 1990s, I was in the
private sector at the time, expatriate, working for a Fortune
20 company. And we were based in Guangzhou, but traveled
extensively around the country. So I have certainly had a
chance to witness both the positive as well as some of the
concerning developments of the region.
I remember having a set of twin baby girls dropped off at
our doorstep one morning when my wife called me at work, from a
desperate mother in a rural area. And they turned to an
American family for help. And I can tell you, through a long,
arduous process, two little baby girls are now two thriving
teenagers here, living in the United States, adopted by a
family.
I remember working with one of my employees whose wife had
become pregnant without permission, and dealing with the family
planning police, but successfully resolving it to protect that
little baby girl that they now have.
And Ms. Li, I do remember, too, the days of when we had two
children when we moved over. Then we had two more born in Hong
Kong, so we were a very lucky family, with four children. And
the comments we too would have quietly with Chinese families
who were yearning that they could have perhaps more than one
child as well.
So this is more than just a hearing for me. This is also an
experience that we had as a family and something I care very,
very deeply about.
There was a quote in Ms. Huang's written testimony that
said--she was quoting the famous William Wilberforce. And I
quote her testimony as she quoted Wilberforce when he said,
``You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say
again that you did not know.''
Mr. Eberstadt, according to the Commission's annual report,
the initial relaxation of the one-child policy that allowed
couples to have two children, if one of the parents was an only
child, only results in about a quarter of the estimated
increase in births that was expected.
What reason, if any, is there to believe that a two-child
policy will result in a different outcome and have a
significant impact on the demographic crisis currently facing
China?
Mr. Eberstadt. Well, Senator, I think you have put your
finger exactly on the question that Chinese authorities must be
thinking about today. For us social scientists who are
interested in looking at evidence and empirical results, rather
than government ideology, I think we would have to say that the
chances that this will have a substantially different impact
from the earlier tinkering, the slight recalibration, would be
very, very small.
And the reason for this is that the best single predictor
that we have as social scientists for fertility outcomes under
voluntary family planning is the desires of parents. If we look
all around the world, the best single indicator--better than
income, better than education, better than urbanization or
infant mortality or access to contraceptives--the best single
indicator is desired family size.
And if this slight recalibration does absolutely nothing to
change desired family size, as we would expect it would not, I
think we would have to presume that the impact will be minimal.
As Steven Mosher has already mentioned, moreover, China's
demographic trends for the next generation are basically
already baked into the cake.
Thank you very much.
Senator Daines. Why do you not think they would perhaps
then rethink and abolish any restrictions on children at all,
in terms of numbers?
Mr. Eberstadt. You know, my demographer friends in China
wonder about that also. And as I reflect upon it, my own
hypothesis would be that the Chinese Government does not want
to relinquish this instrument of social control, precisely
because it is an instrument of social control.
It may not have the demographic power to effect the sorts
of demographic impacts that population planners would like, but
it is still a very powerful tool of social control
nonetheless--along with other very powerful tools of social
control that the government wishes to maintain.
Senator Daines. Thank you.
Ms. Littlejohn, do you want to add to that? I have a
question for you as well.
Ms. Littlejohn. Yes, Senator. Your question: Why does China
not completely abandon all coercive population control, given
the fact that they have backed themselves into a horrific
demographic disaster in terms of the gender imbalance and the
old and young population imbalance.
That was actually the subject of my entire testimony on
April 30, 2015. And the fact that it makes no demographic sense
whatsoever for China to continue the one-child policy begs the
question of, Why are they continuing it? The one-child policy
started in the 1979-1980 timeframe. Chairman Mao had said
people are the strength of China. And he was encouraging women
to have more children.
The average fertility rate at that time was about six kids
per woman and now, under the one-child policy, has gone down to
maybe 1.3 to 1.6 kids per woman, depending on who you ask.
And that enormous population explosion under the Mao era is
now heading toward retirement. I believe that in the beginning,
when Deng Xiaoping instituted the one-child policy, that
population control was the point of the policy, and the terror
of forced abortion was a byproduct.
I believe now that the reason that it makes no sense to
continue the one-child policy is that terror has now become the
purpose of the policy. And the Chinese Communist Party is a
brutal, totalitarian regime and they are using the one-child
policy literally to terrorize people through forced abortion,
which is a form of torture.
Senator Daines. Let me ask a question about gendercide. Do
you believe the two-child policy will reduce gendercide?
Ms. Littlejohn. No, and the reason I believe that is
because of the sterilization problem. So right now, in our area
of the countryside and also, as Steve Mosher has mentioned, if
a person has had a second child, they will be sterilized.
So if a woman has had a son, then she may very well opt not
to have that second child, because she doesn't want to become
sterilized, which will disable her. And then--so that girl will
not be born. That family has a boy and then the second child
will not be born.
Then in terms of people who have a girl first, right now in
the countryside there is a two-child policy for people whose
first child is a girl, they can have a second child. But people
generally regard that as being their last chance to have a boy,
and they selectively abort and selectively abandon those second
daughters, and that will still happen under a two-child policy.
So I really do not expect the numbers to change much, if at
all, of gendercide under the two-child policy.
Senator Daines. Thank you.
My House colleagues have now returned from the battle on
the floor, and so thank you for the opportunity to chair
temporarily here. I will turn it back to Chairman Smith.
Chairman Smith. Thank you so you much, Senator Daines, and
thank you for your insights and your leadership on these
issues.
Senator Daines. Thank you. I appreciate it.
Chairman Smith. I would like to yield to Commissioner
Pittenger.
Representative Pittenger. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and
thank each of you again for your testimony today. And how
heart-rending is it to us to see your real commitment in these
life-saving measures.
Ms. Li, I would just like to ask you, without suffering
through details, describe to me the experience of a pregnant
woman coming to you seeking help, and the pressures that she is
receiving from family and from the government. And how do you
deal with these requests? And just to give us a more personal
view of this?
Ms. Li. Okay, that is an excellent question. The China Life
Alliance is, as I mentinoed before, almost all Chinese
citizens. So typically, I will not interact with a desperate
mother in the first stage of our contact.
Usually she will speak to someone like I mentioned, Ivy or
possibly one of the other women that works with us. And they
will usually establish a meeting right off the bat, and it is
actually very complex. Because this issue is so fraught with
political danger, we use technology to avoid being tracked.
Most of the workers use multiple telephones and multiple ways
of communicating, and that is how they set up their initial
contact with desperate parents.
Would you like more?
Representative Pittenger. Well, it is just the pressures
that she is under, and just----
Ms. Li. A lot of the pressure, actually when someone is
being pressured to undergo a forced abortion, it is actually
oftentimes the pressure from family or from their employer that
will prove to be too much for a person.
A lot of women, they may be told that they need to have an
abortion, but they will not go through with it until their
employer begins to threaten them. Oftentimes a male employer
will tell them, unless you show me the scans, unless you show
me proof of your IUD, these different kinds of things, I will
fire you.
And oftentimes, their home loans or their rental contracts
are connected with their job, and what a lot of these women we
deal with face is losing not just their job, but their home.
Oftentimes their car, many different aspects of their life are
challenged.
Representative Pittenger. Thank you.
Ms. Huang? I guess she can hear me----
What about women like yourself who are pregnant with a
second child before this policy has been fully implemented. Is
there any sense the government is being more lenient with you
and with other women during this transition phase?
[Pause for translation.]
Could you speak louder, please?
Ms. Huang. I believe so.
Representative Pittenger. Okay. Mr. Mosher, despite the
looming demographic crisis and calls from demographic experts
to scrap the one-child policy, the Chinese Government has
instead chosen to make incremental changes over the years.
What do you think the rationale is and how do you abolish
this entirely? Perhaps you spoke to this some, but I was not in
the room.
Mr. Mosher. Well, the underlying rationale is that the
Party has the right under a decision made by Chairman Mao
Zedong back in the early 1950s when this was under debate in
the top reaches of the Chinese Communist Party.
The Party has the right and the authority to control
reproduction under a state plan in the same way that it
controls production. So that in the same way the five-year
plan, which is passed, in general terms, by the Central
Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, and then
operationalized and concretized at various levels of the
government by the different ministries.
In the same way, that plan will detail how many tons of
steel or how many kilowatts of energy that are to be produced
in China. It will also specify how many children are to be
reproduced in China. This has been part and parcel of economic
planning in China since almost the very beginning.
So for the Chinese Communist Party to abandon this now
would be, first and foremost, an admission that perhaps to the
Chinese people it had no right in the first place to seize
authority over this area.
Second, it would be a tacit admission that it had gotten it
wrong in imposing a one-child policy, which is now playing out
to the detriment of economic advances in China and, of course,
has resulted in the destruction of the family.
And since the Chinese Communist Party's legitimacy is very
closely tied up to its most important policies, of which
planned birth is one, it will not lightly abandon this policy,
because it might very well call its legitimacy into question,
in the eyes of the Chinese people.
So I do not see them relinquishing control over
reproduction--I do not see that as very likely at all. It would
take a fundamental transformation, I think, of the political
system in China.
Representative Pittenger. Is there anything we can do in
U.S. policy to encourage this transition of this course of
policy? And what do you encourage Chinese families to do to
value their own--the Chinese people to value baby girls as
much.
Mr. Mosher. Well, I have traveled in China extensively. I
have visited villages where there are many, many large
families, families where there are equal numbers of little boys
and little girls. Those villages are Christian villages or
Catholic villages where there has been missionary effort made
in China since the Ming Dynasty hundreds of years ago, and
where they, in solidarity, protect their women from the
extortions and from the coercion of the planned birth police.
In most of China, of course, that kind of situation is not to
be found.
We can certainly encourage the Chinese Government to
respect human rights, to respect international norms when it
comes to the basic right of families to decide for themselves
the number and spacing of their children.
And we have been--well, I have been involved in this fight
for 35 years, since I was present when the one-child policy
began in China. I take any relaxation of the policy as a step
in the right direction, but the underlying problem, the problem
that will not easily go away, is the problem of the planned
birth policy itself, that the state has decreed that it, not
Chinese couples, not Chinese individuals, have the right to
determine how many children will be born in the country.
Representative Pittenger. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield
back.
Chairman Smith. Thank you.
Mr. Pitts?
Representative Pitts. I am just here to listen. Thank you.
Chairman Smith. Thank you.
I will just--I know many of the questions have been already
asked, but just a couple of questions that I would like to
point out.
To Sarah, if I could ask you and maybe others might want to
respond to it, you have said that a Chinese mother's womb is
one of the most dangerous places to be, and most do not get out
alive.
You point out that when you add up the numbers, the number
of murdered children, including and especially murdered girl
children, is more than both World Wars combined, which is
astonishing--if a foreign power were to impose upon the Chinese
population this kind of brutality and carnage, you can be sure
that the Chinese Government would respond and defend its
people.
And yet in this case it is the perpetrator of those crimes
against humanity. It is bizarre, and it certainly is a gross
violation of human rights, to say the least.
You also point out--and some of you have mentioned--the
``black clinics'' where ultrasounds are used. Do you sense any
sense on the part of the Chinese Government to rein in the use
of ultrasound imaging to determine the gender of the child,
which is really a search-and-destroy mission, as we know?
Have there been prosecutions? Having been at this not as
long as Steven Mosher, although he inspired all of our work on
this from the very beginning, there is always the apologists
who say things have changed.
I will never forget a hearing that friends on the other
side of the aisle held in the Foreign Affairs Committee in
1985. And I was, like, the lone voice objecting that there was
a great deal of hyperbole, that it was all over. The high tides
were over; 1983 was a big and bad year and China had learned
its lessons, and we had even a Foreign Service officer who said
he traveled the length and breadth of China--figuratively, not
literally--and he was reporting that all is well. And I find
that astonishing, that time and time again people are ready to
put a gloss on this and say things are fine.
But specifically, prosecutions against these ``black
clinics''; does China yet get it, that they have become the
magnet for sex trafficking because of the dearth of women,
brought about in part because of the forced abortion policy and
the one-child overlay of all of that? If any of you want to
respond to that, I would appreciate it.
Yes, Ms. Li.
Ms. Li. So I have personally been to those ``black
clinics'' multiple times. I have gone with my husband and I
have gone with Chinese friends, and I have asked questions. I
have told them I was pregnant, asked how much it would cost to
get an abortion.
Also, our Chinese friends do that, whether we are with them
or not, and there is no fear on the part of any operator in a
``black abortion clinic'' that we have been to.
They actually brag about their relationships with the
government, with police officers. They tell us how many
abortions they have performed for members of the government
Party. Yeah, no fear at all. I have never heard of one being
prosecuted in any way.
Chairman Smith. On the issue of women's emotional health, I
think one of the greatest overlooked areas here--not by you,
but by the international community--is the post-traumatic
stress, the horrific consequences of the one-child-per-couple
policy on womens' psychological health.
On one of my many trips to China, I remember meeting with
state family planning officials, and the New York Times had
just recently done a page-one story about a woman who was
clinically depressed because of the forced abortions she had
been compelled to undergo.
And when I brought that--and I had the newspaper with me
intact, the whole paper--I said, how do you respond to that?
And they said, it is a big lie. The New York Times is making it
all up. There is no consequences to this.
When a member of the People's Congress was here leading a
delegation, Madame Fu, I asked her about the 600 women
purportedly who commit suicide every day, and a number of
those, probably a large number, are attributable to the
population control program, and raised all this with her.
She says it was a lie. This was over at the Foreign Affairs
Committee where we had this exchange. Said I was making up the
statistics. So I said, ``Well, they are your statistics from
the Beijing Centers for Disease Control, which seeks to
parallel, I think, a lot of what our CDC does.'' And she
abruptly ended the meeting, after she got the documentation,
which was first contained in the country reports of human
rights practices, the China Report put out by U.S. Department
of State.
I think this unrecognized psychological impact needs to be
highlighted. Any of you would want to speak to what this is
doing to the Chinese women in particular?
Yes, Dr. Mosher.
Mr. Mosher. When the policy began in--shortly after the
policy began in 1980, there were suicides in the part of China
where I lived, suicides committed by young women who had been
forced to have an abortion. So it was clear to me from the
outset that there was a direct correlation, a one-to-one
relationship, between the forced abortion of young mothers who
had conceived their children in love and intact marriages and
were looking forward to their birth in a few weeks or months,
and their sudden--their inability to protect the child they
were carrying.
And you think, it is not their fault. They were taken under
duress. They were coerced into the forced abortion. But a
mother--and the mothers here will acknowledge this is true--the
mothers blame themselves anyway for their failure to protect
their unborn children.
One of the striking things about the suicide statistics out
of China, you have already mentioned them in part, is that in
every other country of the world, more men than women commit
suicide. In every other country of the world, it is the
elderly, middle aged and elderly, who predominantly end their
lives.
In China, it is precisely the opposite. It is young women,
and it is young women because that is the precise demographic
that is being targeted for forced abortion and forced
sterilization.
And the forced sterilization, I would add, just adds
another layer of guilt and anger to the whole process, because
what it does is it prevents a women ever from having a make-up
child, a child to make up for the child that she lost.
Chairman Smith. Yes, Dr. Eberstadt?
Mr. Eberstadt. Chairman Smith, if it is all right, I would
like to return for a moment to the question of sex-selective
abortion. I was just reflecting on your question there.
I think we have to say that there are two and only two sure
ways of eliminating sex-selective abortion anywhere. One way is
to eliminate the availability of prenatal gender determination
technology; the other way is to eliminate the availability of
abortion.
Interpreter. Ms. Huang would like to respond to the
question regarding the ``black clinic.''
Ms. Huang. Last year, I took an American reporter into one
of these clinics, who became sick to her stomach as she
witnessed a floor, stained with blood and a back room where
forced abortions were performed.
Unfortunately, these clinics are very busy and exist in
almost every city in China. They are not hard to find.
I recently began working with China Life Alliance to map
all of these clinics so abortion rescue teams could attempt
rescues. Unfortunately, we had to cancel the project because
there were way too many to count.
Chairman Smith. Thank you very much. And let me just ask
anyone who would like to take it--maybe, Dr. Eberstadt, you
might want to take the first shot at it--and that is the
numbers.
I mean, there was a human rights report, State Department
report, that suggests that there were 100 million missing
girls, and that was 15 years ago. Obviously, it is a closed
society and even demographers probably operate with a certain
amount of restraint because of government pleasure or
displeasure.
And Mara Hvistendahl who has testified before our
Committee, has pointed out that in Asia, there is 160-plus
million missing females, and that includes India, of course,
and some other countries where there is a tremendous amount of
gendercide occurring, sex-selection abortion in particular, to
lead to that gendercide.
But we never really can get a handle on how many missing
girls are there really, and it really becomes--it is important
because we want to be accurate. But it is a closed society and
they guard statistics very--we know that even with economic
data that you can be tried and prosecuted and jailed if you put
out information that is contrary to the government line.
So I am just wondering if there is any estimate that is
based on the best available science that you can convey to the
Commission.
Mr. Eberstadt. Chairman Smith, I can tell you a little bit
about my own homework. There are other people who have done
their homework and come up with somewhat different numbers.
Nobody, I think, would say that the number of missing girls
in the era of the one-child policy in China would be less than
tens and tens of millions.
The exact number is somewhat difficult to calculate,
precisely because of the incentives for hiding children in
China. If one looks at successive population censuses in the
People's Republic of China, you see something that you do not
find regularly elsewhere in the world: With each successive
population count, more people show up. More children, or
adolescents, seem to get counted for any given birth year, and
that is not because there is a lot of in-migration from abroad;
it is not because people are coming back to life.
Ordinarily, you would expect fewer from one census to the
next, with very little migration or even out-migration.
So the incentives today certainly are for hiding girls--
also hiding boys--and that makes it a little bit difficult to
tell just what the numbers are.
The United Nations Population Division, which I think has
got very good researchers working there, the U.S. Census
Bureau, likewise, excellent researchers working there, come up
with slightly different estimates of how many should be
counted. But that is based upon a certain inference they have
to make, since undercounting is accepted as being the reality
today.
Chairman Smith. Is there a number that you would----
Mr. Eberstadt. I would have to go back and take a look at
the data and some of my own work, and I will be very happy to
send that along. It would be tens and tens of millions.
Chairman Smith. And we will make that part of the record.
Thank you.
Let me--what do you think our next steps ought to be? I am
today sending another letter to the President asking him to
enforce the visa ban. I have been involved with several visa
ban pieces of legislation.
I wrote the Belarus Democracy Act, which has been well
implemented by both the Bush and now the Obama administrations,
that focuses on the dictatorship of Lukashenko in Belarus.
The Magnitsky Act has had a mixed implementation. That was
a totally bipartisan effort that obviously focuses on Russia,
and I am the prime sponsor of the Global Magnitsky Act, which
is pending, has not passed yet.
But this legislation goes--the Admiral Nance-Meg Donovan
Foreign Relations Act of 2000 and specifically a provision of
that which I put in makes clear that anyone who is complicit in
forced abortion or forced sterilization is inadmissible to the
United States.
And yet we asked the Congressional Research Service to look
at this, and less than 30 people--and I would fault the Bush
administration on this as well--they did not aggressively at
all implement it, even though they were asked to.
But the Obama administration has turned a blind eye. I have
asked at hearings, what are you doing? Who knows if we will
ever get an answer back to this? What would be your
recommendation?
You say we have got a policy that is law that can hold
people to account for--to the extent that we can do it, at
least deny them access to the United States, and we have not
done it.
What would be your thoughts on, or your message to the
administration on that or anything else it ought to be doing
right now, if they really care about the women who have been
victimized, the families, the men--because they are victimized
as well, but mostly the women, obviously, who bear the scars
disproportionately to everyone else, and then all the dead
babies?
Steven Mosher.
Mr. Mosher. If I would--add on to that, Mr. Chairman, I
would point to the very effective move to identify a half a
dozen military officers who were involved through military-
related enterprises in China and cyberattacks on the United
States. And the level of cyberattacks is apparently receding
now, in part I think in response to that.
I do not thing we would have to identify all 1 million of
the population control police in China. I think if we
identified a half a dozen senior officials who were involved in
implementing the policy, that would send a very strong message
and would get a reaction immediately in terms of decreasing the
level of coercion in China.
If they were--if Chinese officials are aware that they
would not be welcome in the United States, that they would not
be able to invest in the United States or visit their children
who are studying here at American universities or who are
looking over their American investments in real estate, as
easily, that would set them back on their heels.
Chairman Smith. Excellent idea.
Yes, Ms. Littlejohn?
Ms. Littlejohn. Chairman Smith, I know that you have been
leading the fight to defund the UNFPA on the basis of the Kemp-
Kasten violation, involvement with coercive population control,
the emphasis being the forced abortion aspect of this.
But in part of the testimony that I was giving while you
were out of the room, I wanted to convey to you that in our
villages, something that is really impacting gendercide is the
forced sterilization aspect of this.
And the thing about the sterilization is everyone agrees
that forced sterilization is a crime against humanity. People
have various issues about abortion; they might not want to
touch that topic, even if it is forced abortion. Forced
sterilization everybody agrees on, and it is the forced
sterilization that really hampers women having girls.
Because if a woman has a boy first in the village, she is
going to stop having kids. She does not want to have that
second child, because she has to be sterilized after the second
child. So then the chance for the girl to be born or that
second child does not happen, because of the sterilization.
And then at the same time, in the countryside where even
now, if your first child is a girl, you can have a second
child. Because of the forced sterilization, women are aborting
those second daughters because they want to save that second-
child place for a boy.
And so it is the sterilization after the second child that
is, I think, a huge part of keeping gendercide in place.
Chairman Smith. Excellent point.
For the record, the Kemp-Kasten language says that we will
not support any organization that supports or co-manages a
coercive population control program. So it is indeed inclusive
of involuntary sterilization.
But I think your point as to how this is leading to
gendercide needs to be emphasized, and I think that was an
excellent point. Thank you.
Anything else you would like to add before we conclude?
[No response.]
I want to thank you so much for your testimonies. Again,
both other House commissioners and I deeply regret we missed
some of it because of the voting that occurred on the floor,
seven votes. But I have read your testimonies and they were
excellent, very insightful, full of information.
And I think, Dr. Mosher, your suggestion that we compile a
list of people--and any help any of you could provide to us or
to the Commission--because we will convey that list to the
administration and also do our own due diligence to try to put
a list together. I think it is a great idea.
You do not have to get all 1 million family planning cadres
or whatever that number is these days. Focus on the leadership.
And so thank you for that idea.
With that, I guess there are no other comments, so the
hearing is adjourned. And thank you very much.
Panelists. Thank you.
[Whereupon the hearing was concluded at 12:11 p.m.]
A P P E N D I X
=======================================================================
Prepared Statements
----------
Prepared Statement of Nicholas Eberstadt, Ph.D.
december 3, 2015
Members of Congress, Distinguished Co-Panelists, Esteemed Guests:
On October 29 of this year, a shift from a One Child to a Two Child
norm was announced by the Central Committee of Chinese Communist Party
at the Fifth Plenum of the 18th Party Congress.\1\ In other words, the
Party signaled that it would be abandoning the One-Child Policy it had
promulgated in the very early 1980s, and would now be moving to allow
all parents in China to have two children.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ ``China to allow two children for all couples,'' Xinhua,
October 29, 2015, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-10/29/
c_134763645.htm.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
To be clear: that shift has not yet taken place. To the contrary:
just days after the October 29 announcement, China's National Health
and Family Planning Commission, which oversees the population program,
emphasized that the new norms were not yet ``valid,'' \2\ and described
the Two-Child Policy as a ``proposal,'' \3\ indicating furthermore that
this proposal would have to be approved by Beijing's legislature next
year before it might eventually be enacted.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ ``China denies immediate validity of two-child policy,''
Xinhua, November 2, 2015, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-11/02/
c_134774830.htm.
\3\ ``China stresses two-child policy not yet valid,'' Xinhua,
November 10, 2015, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-11/10/
c_134802823.htm.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Suffice it thus to say that all the particulars of this new Two-
Child Policy still remain to be seen. It is not too soon, however, to
make a few basic points.
First: The end of the One-Child Policy will not mean the end of
coercive birth control in China. This critical fact must be
underscored. The Chinese government is not retiring its enormous
apparatus of involuntary population plan enforcement. Beijing is not
relinquishing its claim that the state, rather than parents, is the
proper authority for deciding how many children China's families may
have. Instead, the Chinese Communist Party is merely preparing to
recalibrate the limit that it will impose on its subjects. By all
indications, the sorts of ugly human rights violations that other
witnesses will be describing here this morning--up to and including
criminalizing out-of-quota pregnancies and forcibly compelling
abortions against the will of the mother--will still be very much part
and parcel of China's population policy agenda.
Second: Any Two-Child Norm would necessarily and inescapably still
expose parents who desire more than two children to coercive birth
control. While we cannot calculate the size of this group of parents
with any great precision, it would appear that this group could include
millions upon millions of would-be parents in contemporary China. That
group would also disproportionately include China's ethnic minorities,
including those of Muslim cultural background. Last month The Economist
detailed the intensification over the past year of an anti-birth drive
against the Uighur population in China's northwestern province of
Xinjiang.\4\ For China's population planners, there is no contradiction
between raising the permissible birth quota and deploying the power of
the state against birth quota ``violators.''
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\4\ The Economist, ``Family planning in Xinjiang: Remote control,''
November 7, 2015, http://www.economist.com/news/china/21678007-
government-xinjiang-trying-limit-muslim-births-remote-control
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Third: In addition to its obvious demographic focus, China's
population program should be understood to serve more broadly as an
instrument of population control, in the more general sense of social
control. And it is not a ``stand alone'' policy in this regard. We must
also bear in mind contemporary China's hukou system of household
registration and residence permits--a system the likes of which is only
otherwise seen today in North Korea.
In principle every Chinese citizen today must have government
authorization to move outside his or her officially designated hukou
locality, for example in search of work. Persons living and working
outside their official hukou are in effect illegal aliens within their
own land, and may in theory be rounded up and deported back to their
place of origin at any time. (And this is not just a theoretical
possibility--tens of millions of idled migrant workers were sent back
to their homes during the global crash of 2008 to forestall any
possibility of unrest in the urban areas to which they had moved.) At
this writing, a distinct majority of the young men and women in China's
big cities are de facto illegal residents, violating established hukou
rules. [SEE FIGURE 1] Absent far-reaching hukou reform, an ever greater
share of China's urban population is on track to be comprised of hukou
violators, given the outlook for urbanization. One might think the
obvious solution here should be to relax these hukou restrictions--or
to scrap them altogether. Despite considerable talk about hukou reform
over the past two decades, Chinese authorities have shown extreme
reluctance to do away with hukou system in practice.
Though more intrusive and arguably abusive than pre-Communist
instruments of social control, these instruments do have antecedents in
Chinese dynastic history. Indeed, in his classic study of the vast and
oppressive bureaucratic edifice for maintaining social control over
rural China under the Qing dynasty, Kung-chuan Hsiao describes a number
of techniques (such as the baojia neighborhood surveillance system)
that would have an eerily familiar ring in China today. Over the course
of two thousand years, observed Hsiao, China's rulers strove to develop
and perfect ``an administrative apparatus which helped emperors to
assure obedience and forestall rebellions.'' \5\ Given both the nature
of current Chinese rule and the tradition that predates it, we should
not be surprised if authorities in Beijing prove themselves
surprisingly attached to coercive population policy precisely because
of the social control it affords the rulers over the ruled.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\5\ Kung-chuan Hsiao, Rural China: Imperial Control in the
Nineteenth Century, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1960), p.
3.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fourth: It is worth noting that some Chinese researchers and
academics are already calling for more aggressive measures to stimulate
population growth, and the Chinese government is at the very least
granting such voices a hearing in the state controlled media. Days
before the announcement of the new Two-Child Policy, for example, the
official China Daily carried a story titled ``Need seen as `urgent' for
boosting population,'' in which a Peking University professor is quoted
as proclaiming ``two children are good, and three are even better.''
\6\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\6\ Shan Juan, ``Need seen as `urgent' for boosting population,''
China Daily, October 17,2015, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2015-
10/17/content_22206185.htm
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Is it possible that Beijing might reverse course in the future, and
veer from an anti-natal policy to pro-natalism? If so, China would
hardly be the first postwar Asian government to conduct such an about-
face. Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and
Singapore have all done exactly that already. The distinction here, of
course, is that none of these other governments ever attempted to
enforce involuntary birth control. A coercive population policy forcing
Chinese parents to have unwanted births is certainly hard to imagine
nowadays--but that does not necessarily mean that such a program should
be dismissed out of hand as an absolute impossibility. As population
and human rights activist Steven Mosher warned shortly after the
announcement of the new Two-Child Policy, ``The same party officials
who have been responsible for decades of forced abortions and
sterilizations would presumably have no qualms over enforcing mandatory
pregnancy on young women, if they were ordered to do so.'' \7\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\7\ Steven Mosher, ``A new dawn of reproductive freedom in China?
Hardly,'' The Federalist, November 6, 2015, http://thefederalist.com/
2015/11/06/a-new-dawn-of-reproductive-freedom-in-china-hardly/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Finally: Among the many unanswered questions concerning coercive
birth control in China, the most important--and perhaps also
surprising-- is its ultimate demographic impact. Strange as this may
sound, demographers and population specialists have yet to offer a
plausible and methodologically defensible estimate of just how much
this extraordinarily ambitious and ruthless adventure in social
engineering has actually altered the size and composition of China's
population.
The problem is that we lack any clear idea of what China's
population trends over the past three and a half decades would have
looked like in the absence of coercion. Over the decade before the One-
Child Policy, China's birth rates were plummeting. [SEE FIGURE 2] At
the advent of the One-Child Policy era, demographers now estimate that
fertility levels in the Chinese countryside were well under half their
level just ten years earlier, and that fertility was far below
replacement in China's cities. Indeed, during the 1960s and 1970s,
birth levels in urban China were already apparently considerably lower
than in Hong Kong or Taiwan. [SEE FIGURE 3]
Chinese population control authorities like to claim their efforts
have averted a cumulative total of over 400 million births.\8\ They
apparently arrive at that figure by tallying up abortion totals during
the One-Child Policy era. But if so this would be a fundamentally
flawed approach to measuring the demographic impact of coercive birth
control policy. It fails to distinguish between voluntary and
involuntary abortions, while also ignoring the scope and scale of
pregnancies averted altogether in the first place under the glare of
anti-natal pressure. As an approximation of demographic impact, this
figure cannot be taken seriously--although admittedly it would be
highly meaningful to know just how many involuntary abortions Chinese
authorities believe they are responsible for.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\8\ People's Daily, ``400 million births prevented by one-child
policy,'' October 28, 2011, http://en.people.cn/90882/7629166.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Perhaps the closest approximation to the true demographic impact of
the One-Child Policy we could hope for might come from tracking the gap
between wanted family size and actual family size over time and by
region or locality for China--if such data were available. Over twenty
years ago, a path-breaking study by Lant Pritchett and Larry Summers
demonstrated that desired family size was the single best predictor of
achieved family size the world over, irrespective of a country's
culture or income level.\9\ (That same study made a powerful case that
voluntary family planning programs typically had very little impact on
overall national fertility levels.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\9\ Lant Pritchett, ``Desired Fertility and the impact of
population policies,'' Population and Development Review 20, No. 1
(Population Council, 1994): pp. 1-55. Summers withdrew his name from
the study because he had assumed a prominent position in the Clinton
Administration by the time it was ready to appear in print.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Around the world today, differences in wanted fertility can
apparently account for over 90 percent of intercountry differences in
actual fertility. [SEE FIGURE 4] This is an extremely high
correlation--but it is not perfect. In other words: even if we
possessed detailed time-series data on desired family size for China in
the One-Child Policy era, we could not be sure that any differences
between real existing fertility levels and reported wanted fertility
were completely due to coercive pressures. Moreover: it is by no means
obvious that ordinary social science survey techniques are capable of
eliciting reliable responses about desired fertility in a setting where
answers to these questions are as fraught and politicized as they
obviously are in China today. It is telling that Beijing's serious
over-estimate of the expected demographic impact of its 2013 relaxation
in the One Child Policy was reportedly due in part to survey research
in which respondents indicated they would be inclined to have an
additional child if they had the opportunity; in retrospect it looks as
if the interviewed couples may just have been trying to provide their
official questioners with the answers they thought their interrogators
wanted to hear.
The devilish difficulty of ascertaining the demographic dimensions
of the bite from China's police state population control policy has
most recently been underscored by an important study by Dr. Daniel M.
Goodkind, who has carefully re-examined the relationship between
China's population program and the country's rising gender imbalance at
birth.\10\ Many observers (including me) take it as a given that the
One-Child Policy has been the cause and the driver of rising sex ratios
at birth in China over the past three and a half decades, but Goodkind
challenges us to take a second look. Among his many other points, sex
ratios at birth are currently at least as high as China's in a number
of former Soviet states that have never been subjected to coercive
population programs.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\10\ Daniel Goodkind, ``The claim that China's fertility
restrictions contributed to the use of prenatal sex selection: A
skeptical reappraisal,'' Population Studies 69, 3 (Routledge, 2015):
pp. 263-279.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
One curious aspect of Chinese census-taking in the One-Child Policy
era is that more boys and girls seem to be enumerated for any given
birth year in every successive national population count--despite the
fact that China is a slight net out-migration country, and despite the
predictable toll that mortality must exert. All other things being
equal, we should expect the counted totals for males and females to
decline, not rise, from one census to the next. Steady increases in
enumeration for given birth years since 1980 are not characteristic, we
should note, of either India or Indonesia--two other huge Asian
populations with slight net out-migration.\11\ [SEE FIGURES 5 TO 7]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\11\ I would like to thank Mr. Alex Coblin of American Enterprise
Institute and Ms. Katherine Cole of Dartmouth for their research
assistance in preparing these figures.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
How then to explain the steadily rising count for children born in
the One-Child Policy era? China's levels of illiteracy are not higher
than Indonesia's or India's--nor would we ordinarily think of the
Chinese government's reach as distinctly more limited. Some other
explanation must account for this.
It is tempting to take these rising population counts for given
birth years in contemporary China as a reflection of a widespread
tendency for parents to ``hide'' their children from authorities at a
time when penalties for violating birth quotas could be severe. And
this may be part of the dynamic revealed in Figure 5--but no more than
part of it. For enumeration by birth year seems to keep on rising for
this generation of Chinese on into their teens, and then into their
twenties. It is difficult to envision plausible storylines for how a
forcible birth control policy could incentivize people to avoid
enumeration at those stages in the life cycle.
Forcible birth control looks to be the Chinese government's
preferred policy path for the indefinite future. What is incontestable
is that this path guarantees systematic human rights abuse. Much less
well understood is what impact forcible population control stands to
exert on the demographic rhythms of Chinese society. Demographic
specialists need to pay much more attention to this question than they
have to date.
______
Prepared Statement of Reggie Littlejohn
december 3, 2015
Honorable members of the Commission, Representative Chris Smith,
Senator Marco Rubio, distinguished fellow panelists, ladies and
gentlemen, I am grateful for this opportunity to testify here today, as
we discuss the fact that China's new Two-Child Policy continues the
same massive crimes against women and children that were committed
under the One Child Policy.
Xinhua News Agency reported on October 29, 2015 that China will
move to a two-child policy for all couples, ``abandoning its decades-
long one-child policy.''
Characterizing this latest modification as ``abandoning'' the One-
Child Policy is misleading. A two-child policy will not end any of the
human rights abuses caused by the One Child Policy, including forced
abortion, involuntary sterilization or the sex-selective abortion of
baby girls.
Coercion is the core of the policy. Instituting a two-child policy
will not end forced abortion or forced sterilization. As blind activist
Chen Guangcheng succinctly tweeted:
This is nothing to be happy about. First the #CCP would kill
any baby after one. Now they will kill any baby after two.
#ChinaOneChildPolicy
The reason given for this adjustment is entirely demographic: ``to
balance population development and address the challenge of an ageing
population.'' The adjustment is a tacit admission that continuation of
the one-child policy will lead to economic and demographic disaster.
The policy was originally instituted for economic reasons. It is ironic
that through this very policy, China has written its own economic death
sentence.
Noticeably absent from the Chinese Communist party's announcement
is any mention of human rights. The Chinese Communist Party has not
suddenly developed a conscience or grown a heart. Even though it will
now allow all couples to have a second child, China has not promised to
end forced abortion, forced sterilization, or forced contraception.\1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ ``Why Critics Are Not Satisfied with the End of China's One-
Child Policy.'' https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/
10/29/why-critics-are-not-satisfied-with-the-end-of-chinas-one-child-
policy/ 10/29/15; ``Still No Dignity for Chinese Women.'' http://
www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/opinion/china-one-child-policy-still-no-
dignity-for-chinese-women.html 11/11/15; ``Change from One- to Two-
Child Policy Won't End Forced Abortions in China.'' http://
www.cnsnews.com/news/article/penny-starr/human-rights-advocate-change-
one-two-child-policy-wont-end-forced-abortions 10/29/15; ``Horrors of
One-Child Policy Leave Deep Scars in Chinese Society.'' https://
www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/horrors-of-one-child-policy-
leave-deep-scars-in-chinese-society/2015/10/30/6bd28e0c-7e7b-11e5-bfb6-
65300a5ff562_story.html 10/30/15
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Indeed, the CCP has gone out of its way to emphasize that family
planning restrictions will remain in force. Shortly after the
announcement of the two-child policy, Vice-Minister of the National
Health and Family Planning Commission Wang Peian said that ``China
would not abandon its family planning restrictions.'' He said, ``A
large population is China's basic national condition so we must adhere
to the basic state policy of family planning.'' \2\ He also said that
``China needs to . . . promote birth monitoring'' before the two-child
policy comes into effect.\3\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ ``2-Child Policy `to fuel growth by 0.5%.' '' http://
www.chinadailyasia.com/nation/2015-11/10/content_15342620.html 11/1/15;
``China Amps Up PR Campaign Extolling `Two-Child Policy.' '' http://
www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/11/10/china-amps-pr-campaign-
extolling-two-child-policy/ 11/10/15
\3\ ``China Stresses Two-Child Policy Not Yet Valid.'' http://
news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-11/10/c_134802823.htm 11/10/15; ``No
Help for Chinese Mom Expecting Second Child: New Two-Child Policy Won't
Be Enacted in Time to Save Pro-Life Leader Facing Pressure to Abort.''
http://www.worldmag.com/2015/10/
no_relief_for_chinese_mom_expecting_second_child 10/30/15
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
It appears, therefore, that China plans to maintain its iron grip
over the wombs of women. The Chinese Communist Party will continue to
intrude into the bedrooms and between the sheets of the families in
China, requiring an arduous process to obtain a ``birth permit,'' a
system of paid informants, and ultrasound checks to make sure that a
woman's IUD is still in place.\4\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\4\ ``China's Population-Control Machine Churns On.'' https://
www.freedomhouse.org/blog/china-population-control-machine-churns 1/13/
14
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Coercion is the core of the policy. Instituting a two-child policy
will not end forced abortion or forced sterilization.
The problem with the one-child policy is not the number of children
``allowed.'' Rather, it is the fact that the CCP is telling women how
many children they can have and then enforcing that limit through
forced abortion and forced sterilization. There is no guarantee that
the CCP will cease their appalling methods of enforcement. Women will
still have to obtain a government-issued birth permit, for the first
and second child, or they may be subject to forced abortion. It will
still be illegal for an unmarried woman to have a child. Regardless of
the number of children allowed, women who get pregnant without
permission will still be dragged out of their homes, strapped down to
tables, and forced to abort babies that they want.
The Impact of China's Two-Child Policy on Women in One Area of Rural
China\5\
Women's Rights Without Frontiers runs a campaign to end the sex-
selective abortion of baby girls in China. Our network of fieldworkers
on the ground have saved almost 200 baby girls in one area of rural
China. Through this network, WRWF gets direct, up to the minute
information about coercive population control in our area of China.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\5\ While shrinking, nearly half of China's population remains
rural, accounting for some 600 million people. World Bank: ``Urban
Population (% of total).'' http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/
SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
I communicated with the head of our network over the weekend. Here
is what she said about the current condition in our villages after the
announcement of the Two-Child Policy:
Forced Sterilization continues.
The women in our villages do not see the new Two-Child Policy as a
big improvement, because of the threat of sterilization. It is a policy
that women must be sterilized after the second child--especially if
both children are girls. Women who have a boy as their first child are
not likely to have a second child, because after the second child, they
would be forcibly sterilized. These sterilizations ruin not only a
woman's reproductive health, but her general health as well. After
these sterilizations, the vast majority of women are ``never the same
again.'' They will never recover their strength. For example, in our
villages there is no running water. Women need to pump water out of a
deep well. Before they are sterilized, women are strong enough to pump
water. After they are sterilized, they are no longer strong enough to
pump water. This weakness lasts forever and is devastating, because the
family depends on the strength of the mother to do farm work.
Especially women whose first child is a girl feel they have to hide
their second pregnancy, because they will be automatically sterilized
after the second child. If their second child is also a girl, they do
not want to be sterilized, because the procedure may break their health
and because they want to try again for a boy. Many women will abort or
abandon their second daughter under the Two-Child Policy, just as they
did under the One Child Policy. The second daughters who are allowed to
be born will be hidden, and thus denied hukou, as in our villages,
hukou is given to second children only after the mother has been
sterilized. Requiring sterilization in order for your child to register
and obtain a birth certificate is an atrocity against both women and
children.
Forced abortion continues.
If a woman is illegally pregnant now with her second child, Family
Planning Officials will come to her home to demand an abortion. The
Two-Child Policy has yet to be fully implemented. Women whose child was
conceived before the implementation of the Two-Child Policy are still
subject to forced abortion or astronomical ``terror fines.'' \6\ If a
woman wants a second child, she must first obtain a ``birth permit.''
These permits are not likely to become available until well into next
year.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\6\ ``No Help for Chinese Mom Expecting Second Child: New Two-Child
Policy Won't Be Enacted in Time to Save Pro-Life Leader Facing Pressure
to Abort.'' http://www.worldmag.com/2015/10/
no_relief_for_chinese_mom_expecting_second_child 10/30/15
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
According to our network, if a woman is caught illegally pregnant
and cannot pay the fine, she will still be forcibly aborted, as was the
case under the One Child Policy. According to the president of a local
hospital and a family planning official contacted by our network, if a
woman runs away in an attempt to escape the fine, and is caught, she
will be forcibly aborted. The woman will have no recourse to a court of
law, as courts will not accept such cases.
In our villages, whether or not a woman is actually forced to have
an abortion depends on the circumstances. Women who are poor, whose
relatives do not work for the government, and who do not have any power
to defend themselves are more likely to be forcibly aborted than women
who have money or whose relatives work for the government. Another
factor is whether the Family Planning Official handling that particular
case is merciful or merciless. A pitiless Family Planning Official
confronting a poor and powerless woman will often lead to a forced
abortion.
Women in our villages have resorted to desperate measures to avoid
forced abortion when faced with an illegal pregnancy. The following
situation is common in our area:
``Ai Bao'' (not her real name) is a two-month old second
daughter, with a threeyear-old sister. Since this was an
illegal second pregnancy, Ai Bao's mother tried to hide her
pregnancy. Still, a Family Planning Officer found her and
pressed her to get abortion. Ai Bao's mother found an un-
married pregnant woman, paid that woman y2000, and arranged for
this woman to use the name of Ai Bao's mother to get an
abortion. In this way, Ai Bao's mother obtained an abortion
certification from the hospital in her own name and turned it
in to the local Family Planning Office--to escape the forced
abortion of her own daughter, Ai Bao.
Gendercide will continue.
Instituting a two-child policy will not end gendercide, the sex-
selective abortion of baby girls. Indeed, areas in which two children
currently are allowed are especially vulnerable to gendercide.
According to the 2009 British Medical Journal study of data from the
2005 national census, in nine provinces, for ``second order births''
where the first child is a girl, 160 boys were born for every 100
girls. In two provinces, Jiangsu and Anhui, for the second child, there
were 190 boys for every hundred girls born. This study stated, ``sex
selective abortion accounts for almost all the excess males.'' Because
of this gendercide, there are an estimated 37 million Chinese men who
will never marry because their future wives were terminated before they
were born. This gender imbalance is a powerful, driving force behind
trafficking in women and sexual slavery, not only in China, but in
neighboring nations as well.
There is little reason to hope that the two-child policy will
result in a significant improvement of the sex ratios at birth. Many
women whose first child is a boy may choose not to bear a second child
because of the great expense of raising a child in China. In the
alternative, they may choose not to have a second child to avoid the
forced sterilization required after two children. Women whose first
child is a girl will still abort second daughters in order to have a
son.
In addition, a technology that is potentially dangerous to girls
has found its way to China. It has recently been discovered that ``cell
free'' fetal DNA can be found in the blood of the pregnant mother.
Noninvasive prenatal testing, whose ominous acronym is ``NIPT,'' is a
new way to detect chromosomal abnormalities of a fetus through
analyzing the blood of the mother. This simple blood test given to the
mother, however, can be used to determine the gender of a fetus as
early as seven weeks into the pregnancy. Results are available within
48 hours. Where brutal son preference meets non-invasive, early sex-
determination of a fetus, inevitably baby girls will be selectively
aborted.\7\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\7\ ``Experts Worried Pre-Natal Blood Test Might Lead to Sex-
Selective Abortions.'' http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/11980660/
Experts-worried-pre-natal-blood-test-might-lead-to-sex-selective-
abortions.html. 11/6/15; ``New Method Allows Noninvasive prenatal
testing to detect more diseases: Study.'' http://news.xinhuanet.com/
english/201511/10/c_134799694.htm, 11/10/15
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hukou Abuses Continue.
WRWF's network reports that in our area, unless a woman is
sterilized, her second child will be denied household registration or
hukou. Without hukou, children are denied access to healthcare,
education and other public benefits.
For illegal extra births, Chinese Family Planning Officials may
exact enormous sums for a family to obtain hukou. Frustrated fathers
have lost control and murdered family planning officials.\8\ Some men
have resorted to suicide in protest over the excessive fines imposed by
the government.\9\ The spirit of the Cultural Revolution lives on in
the family planning police, who have been able to steal, intimidate,
torture and kill with relative impunity.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\8\ ``Crazed Chinese father-of-four stabs two government officials
to death over one child policy.'' http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/
article-2376771/Chinese-father-kills-1-child-policy-officials-
registering-4th-child.html 7/24/13.
\9\ ``Chinese father of four commits suicide over one-child policy
fines so his children can go to school.'' http://www.lifesitenews.com/
news/chinese-father-of-four-commits-suicide-over-one-child-policy-
fines-so-his-c. 5/26/14; ``Farmer drinks poison after being fined for
violations of family planning policy.'' http://www.globaltimes.cn/
content/830847.shtml 12/8/13
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
There has been recent talk of registering 13 million people who do
not have hukou. The motive appears to be an attempt to ``make the
population look less unbalanced.'' \10\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\10\ ``Plan to Register 13 Million `Unofficial' Chinese Sparks
Doubts.'' http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/plan-to-register-13-
million-unofficial-chinese-sparks-doubts-11252015100418.html 11/25/15
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
WRWF demands the unconditional end of the hukou system as being
inhumane. Eliminating hukou by itself, however, will not end gendercide
unless it is accompanied by the elimination of forced sterilization and
all coercive birth limits. Women will notregister a second child for
hukou if they will be sterilized for doing so. Women will not register
second daughters for hukou if by doing so they are giving up the chance
to have a son.
China's Massive Population Control Apparatus Will Remain Intact.
Some have publicly wondered: What will happen to the army of Family
Planning Officials, now that China has ``abolished'' the One Child
Policy? \11\ This question is overly optimistic.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\11\ ``After the One-Child Policy: What Happens to China's Family-
Planning Bureaucracy? '' http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/11/12/
after-the-one-child-policy-what-happens-to-chinas-family-planning-
bureaucracy/ 11/12/15
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Two-Child Policy remains just as coercive as the former One-
Child Policy. This infrastructure of coercion can be turned to crush
dissent of any kind. It will therefore be maintained under the Two-
Child Policy.
There is growing unrest inside China. ``[I]nternal Chinese law
enforcement data on so-called ``mass incidents''--a wide variety of
protests ranging from sit-ins to strikes, marches and rallies, and even
genuine riots--indicated that China has seen a sustained, rapid
increase in those incidents from 8,700 in 1993 to nearly 60,000 in
2003, to more than 120,000 in 2008.\12\ Meanwhile, there are as many as
1 million Family Planning Officials.\13\ This army of Family Planning
Officials can be turned in any direction to crush dissent of any sort.
Does the Chinese Communist Party regard this army as necessary to
maintain control in a tinder-box situation?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\12\ ``China's Social Unrest Problem--Testimony before the U.S.-
China Economic and Security Review Commission.'' Murray Scott Tanner,
Ph.D. http://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/
Tanner_Written%20Testimony.pdf. 5/15/14; see also, ``Rising Protests in
China.'' http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2012/02/rising-protests-in-
china/100247/. 2/17/12.
\13\ ``Family Planning: Enforcing with a smile.'' http://
www.economist.com/news/china/21638131-enforcers-chinas-one-child-
policy-are-trying-new-gentler-approach-enforcing-smile. 1/10/15; ``The
bureaucracy that oversees family planning in China is enormous.
According to official statistics of the National Health and Family
Planning Commission (NHFPC), there are over 500,000 administrative
staff and technical service providers from the central government down
to the township level devoted to both policy enforcement and family
planning generally. In addition, more than 1.2 million cadres assist in
birth planning at the village level.'' ``After the One-Child Policy:
What Happens to China's Family-Planning Bureaucracy? '' http://
blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/11/12/after-the-one-child-policy-what-
happens-to-chinas-family-planning-bureaucracy/ 11/12/15
If China's Family Planning Officials were an army, they would tie
with North Korea as the sixth largest army in the world. ``World's
Largest Armies.'' http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/
armies.htm.
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The Chinese Communist Party Will Never Relinquish Coercive Population
Control
As fully explained in my Congressional testimony of April 30, 2015,
the Chinese Communist Party will never relinquish coercive population
control because 1) it enables them to maintain its grip on power
through terror--it is social control, masquerading as population
control; 2) it is a lucrative profit center, bringing in as much as
$314 billion in fines since its inception; 3) it provides and
infrastructure of coercion that can be used to crush dissent of any
sort; and 4) it ruptures relationships of trust, so that people cannot
organize for change. I believe that the Chinese Communist Party is
maintaining its grip on power by shedding the blood of the innocent
women and babies of China.
Conclusion
Sending out the message that China has ``abandoned'' its one-child
policy is detrimental to sincere efforts to stop forced abortion and
gendercide in China, because this message implies that the one-child
policy is no longer a problem. In a world laden with compassion
fatigue, people are relieved to cross China's one-child policy off of
their list of things to worry about. But we must not do that. Let us
not abandon the women of China, who continue to face forced abortion,
and the baby girls of China, who continue to face sex-selective
abortion and abandonment under the new Two-Child Policy.
The one-child policy does not need to be modified. It needs to be
abolished.
Policy Recommendations
We respectfully request that the U.S. government urge the Chinese
government to:
Abolish the Two-Child Policy and all forms of coercive
population control;
Offer incentives for couples to have girls; \14\
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\14\ We have found in our ``Save a Girl'' campaign that the
encouragement of modest monetary support is enough to make the
difference between life and death to a baby girl. ``Twin Girls Saved
from Abortion in China, Husband's Family Only Wanted Boys.'' http://
www.lifenews.com/2014/05/30/twin-girls-saved-from-abortion-in-china-
husband-family-told-wife-they-only-wanted-boys/ 5/30/14.
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Offer pensions to couples who do not have a son,
ensuring that parents of girls will not become impoverished in
their old age; and
Abolish the hukou system, so that all children will
have access to healthcare and education.
In addition, we respectfully request that the U.S. government:
Establish principles of Corporate Social
Responsibility, to ensure that U.S. corporations do not allow
coercive population control measures to be taken against their
employees; and
Defund UNFPA, unless and until UNFPA stops supporting
or participating in the management of a program of coercive
abortion or involuntary sterilization in China, in violation of
the 1985 Kemp-Kasten Amendment.
______
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Prepared Statement of Jennifer Li
december 3, 2015
China Through My Eyes, as an American Expatriate
Honorable Chairman Congressman Smith, Co-Chairman Senator Rubio,
Members of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, and
distinguished guests:
I am honored to be here today, and to speak with you about China's
new two child policy, to share my perspective and my experience with
you.
I moved to China seven years ago. My husband and I were eager to
learn the language and get to know the culture. We knew that a one
child policy existed, and we knew that boys were considered the more
desirable gender in Chinese culture. At first, neither of these things
seemed that significant, until we began to really look around us. On
the way to school in the morning, on the backs of grandparents'
bicycles, we would see two boys for every girl. As children were doing
their exercises in the school yards, we noticed the same thing: boys in
great number, girls in lesser. We began to ask questions; ``Where are
all the girls?'', ``Where are the children with disabilities?'', ``Do
these families WANT more than one child? Or are they satisfied?''
As our language skills increased and as we began to make friends
among local families, it all began to make sense. Couples were being
pressured in draconian ways to manage their family size with abortions.
It was hard to believe, but it was real. Despite it being illegal to
tell parents the gender of an unborn baby, ``black'' abortion clinics
are enabling parents to have gender-selective abortions.
As to the question ``do they want more than one child?'' I asked
the question of hundreds of people, old and young, during my time in
China, and every single time, the answer was ``YES, I wish I could have
as many as I want. But I can't.''
I would walk down the street with my children, and every day, every
single day, one or more people would tell me how ``lucky'' I was that I
had a few children, and bemoan the fact that their government would
only let them have one.
We can call it a ``one-child policy'' or a ``two-child policy.'' We
can call it whatever we want. But we cannot deny the reality that it
leaves men and women across the country without the reproductive rights
the rest of the world thinks of as a basic human right.
As our awareness of this heartbreak in China grew, so did my
husband's and my desire to do something about it. It started off just
as helping a few friends who were pregnant. We realized quickly that
this was not ``pro-life'' work as we understood it in the west. The
common answer that I learned while volunteering in the USA at pregnancy
resource centers was ``You have options.'' In China, there were
seemingly no options. As we embraced our friends our burden grew. We,
along with a small team of local individuals, started a coalition for
the purpose of helping pregnant women who wanted to keep their
children. As time passed, we learned that there are ways to save babies
in China. After starting a variety of creative baby-saving initiatives
and enduring great hardships, we partnered with churches and nonprofit
groups to form what is now known as China Life Alliance, a coalition of
Chinese individuals and groups that rescue thousands of children each
year before they are abandoned, sold, or killed. We do this by
educating and mobilizing groups to rescue women and save children
through our safe house network, legal aid network, coerced-abortion
rescue teams, and many other ways.
Over the years, my husband, the CLA team and I have seen
unimaginable and horrible human rights violations right before our
eyes. This has been the greatest and most difficult cause of our life.
However, today I would like to step back and to share with you the
personal stories of three of my friends. Each has a unique story. Each
of them is dear to my heart. For each of them, the outcome would not
have been much different under this new, ``two-child policy.''
1) First, I want to tell you about my friend and language teacher,
Lydia. She translated for me during an ultrasound when I was pregnant.
Hospitals do not usually allow women to see their ultrasound images,
and despite having a master's degree, Lydia had never seen an image of
a baby in the womb. As she watched my child moving around inside me,
she was moved to tears by the wonder of it. Lydia had one child and had
already had one coerced abortion. A year later, when she became
pregnant again, she and her husband ended up on our living room couch
sobbing, because they did not want to end the life of their child. She
and her husband made many brave and difficult choices, and through the
support of other Chinese people they met through the China Life
Alliance, came up with solutions to save the life of their unborn
child.
2) Next, I'd like to share with you the story of my friend Ivy. Ivy
was a single college student when she discovered that she was pregnant
by her married professor. The consequences for Ivy, when she chose to
give birth to her daughter, and not abort or abandon her, were severe.
Ivy was kicked out of college and her daughter was never issued a birth
certificate, which meant she could not go to school, be treated at a
hospital, or travel. She is one of the most courageous women I have
ever met. Because she was a single mother, Ivy could not get a normal,
government sanctioned job. She spent her daughter's entire life getting
paid ``under the table'' for the work she did. She did this with
virtually no support, other than from a few people in her church. No
man would marry her, because under that one child policy, they would
not be able to have a child of their own. Now Ivy is one of the women
who works in the China Life Alliance Network to help other women who
find themselves single and pregnant.
3) Population control like this can put a dramatic pressure on
families who have a child born with a disability. My friend and I were
involved with Grace, who had a baby girl born with Down syndrome. In
their minority people group, they would be allowed to have two
children. The pressure of feeling they needed to have both children be
``healthy'' and preferably male, in order to help earn income for the
family, proved to be too much for them. Then Grace's mother-in-law
attempted to smother the infant when she was only 5 days old. Grace
called my friend and we went to try to encourage the family, and to
help them think through other options. Over and over, we heard both the
parents, as well as the grandparents say ``it wouldn't be a big deal if
we knew we could just have more kids!'' But this one ``imperfect''
child would count as part of their quota, and the family economics
couldn't figure out how to make that work.
It is hard for me to stay composed when I share these stories. I
saw the tears, I felt their fears. I held their hands and I hold their
stories in my heart. I want the world to see the reality of the
heartbreak population control has brought to the people of this
beautiful nation. While we rejoice for the few families who will now be
able to have two children instead of one, I believe we must continue to
speak up for the rights of the women, men, and children whose lives are
so deeply affected by this policy. As we ask what we can do and how we
can move forward, let us remember the stories of Lydia, Amy, and Grace.
Let us honor their courage and bring about change that gives them hope.
______
Prepared Statement of Steven W. Mosher
december 3, 2015
A New Dawn of Reproductive Freedom in China?
Despite the new Two-Child Policy, the Chinese Communist Party remains
as firmly in control of fertility as ever.
introduction
The Chinese Communist Party has decided that all Chinese couples
will soon be allowed to have a second child, rather than being
restricted to only one, as some now are.
Foreign observers have generally greeted the apparent end of the
one-child policy with euphoria, as if it somehow represents a new birth
of reproductive freedom in China. Some have publicly commended the
Chinese leadership as if they had decided to completely abolish a
policy that has caused so much physical, emotional, and spiritual
damage to the families in the nation.
But the Chinese leadership has done no such thing. China is not
backing away from draconian birth limits because Communist Party leader
Xi Jinping has suddenly developed a conscience. No one in the senior
leadership has ever lost any sleep over the 400 million unborn and
newborn children their policy has killed over the past 35 years, or
shed a tear for the hundreds of millions of young mothers forcibly
aborted and sterilized over this same period, or had a moment's regret
for China's tens of millions of missing baby girls.
What keeps them up at night is the dawning realization that their
misguided policy is crippling China's future economic growth. For at
least the past two years, China's workforce has been shrinking. Last
year, the potential workforce fell by 3.71 million, a significant
number even by China's standards. At the same time, the over-sixty
population is exploding. According to U.N. projections, it is expected
to more than double by 2050, reaching an astonishing 437 million. China
is growing old before it grows rich, and the strains on China's nascent
pension programs will be enormous.
The parallels between China's current demographic and economic
malaise and Japan's demographic and economic decline are striking. The
Japanese economy has never really recovered from its ``demographic
recession'' that began in the nineties, brought on by a shrinking
workforce and a rapidly aging population. China may not recover either
(as the leadership is now belatedly coming to understand) despite the
move to a two-child policy.
But there is another reason, even more fundamental, why I am not
celebrating the end of the one-child policy. Regardless of whether
Party leaders allow Chinese couples to have one, two, or even three
children, the underlying policy has not--and probably will not--change.
What underlying policy, you may ask? I am referring to the policy
of ``Planned Birth''--jihua shengyu in Chinese--under which the Chinese
state, rather than the Chinese people, decide how many children are to
be born in China each year.
It was none other than Chairman Mao himself, the founder of the
People's Republic of China, who first put the Planned Birth policy in
place. The Great Helmsman, as he was known, decided way back in the
1950s that the five-year economic plans being drawn up by the Chinese
Communist Party should control not just production, but reproduction.
And they have, ever since.
the planned birth policy: coercive from the beginning
Not long after the founding of the People's Republic of China, the
Party-State undertook to control the fertility of the Chinese people. A
national Planned Birth program was in place and operational by 1953
which--except for periods of major political upheaval--has continued to
the present day. Some imagine that these early days were a kind of
``golden age'' where women were merely ``informed'' about their
``reproductive choices,'' and then left to use the drugs, devices, and
surgeries of their choice. This has never been the case. As a general
rule, the Chinese Party-State has never been content to simply provide
education in, and encouragement to use, family planning methods.
Rather, it has always viewed population as a mathematical equation to
be solved, and been all-too-ready to resort to quotas and widespread
compulsion when its proposed ``solution'' meets resistance from the
masses. This tendency to use coercive measures is literally ``built
into'' the Planned Birth program, not to mention into the Dictatorship
of the Proletariat itself. When a one-party dictatorship draws up a
plan, the masses are expected to follow in lockstep. Opposition to the
plan is seen as seditious, and is oftentimes even characterized as
counterrevolutionary. The Planned Birth campaign is no exception.
The first phase of this program of state-planned births ran until
1958, when it was derailed by the economic chaos of the Great Leap
Forward and the mass famine that followed. The campaign resumed in
1962, but this second phase was barely under way before it was abruptly
terminated in 1966 by the virtual civil war that was Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution. After the People's Liberation Army was called in
to restore order in 1969, the campaign resumed. From that point
forward, the Planned Birth campaign has continued more or less
continuously to the present day.
Strong-arm measures were already apparent in the first phase of the
Planned Birth campaign. Although they were less noticeable in the
second, truncated phase, they increased markedly during the third phase
even before the start of the one-child policy. The two main strategies
used by the Party during the early-to-mid 1970s--often linked in the
Planned Birth propaganda of the time--were (1) to delay age at marriage
and (2) to mandate that multiparous women wear IUDs. Although the
state-run media remained largely silent on the question of coercion,
there are credible reports that officials sometimes resorted to forced
IUD insertions and forced sterilizations during this period. The end
result was that the Chinese birth rate plummeted as the decade
progressed.
Coercion in the 1970s
When the Party-State began to function again in 1969, it resumed
its efforts to control China's population. No longer would China's
children be allowed to run riot as Red Guards; instead, their numbers
would be drastically restricted. The Central Committee of the Chinese
Communist Party, in conjunction with the State Council, soon issued a
``Directive on Promoting Planned Birth Conscientiously'' which left no
doubt about who would decide how many babies were to be born in China.
It read:
To promote Planned Birth in cities and in densely populated
rural areas and to appropriately control the natural population
growth rate so that the problem of births will gradually turn
from a state of no planning to a state of planning is a
confirmed policy of socialist construction in our country.
(italics added)
The Party began by having its propaganda outlets attack the
``feudal custom'' of early marriage and repudiate what it called ``the
reactionary theory on marriage'' that had supposedly been ``advocated
by Confucius and Mencius,'' who were all-purpose whipping boys in those
late Cultural Revolution days. Late marriage, on the other hand, was
exalted as part of the ``thought of Mao Zedong'' and an important
aspect of the ``class struggle.'' Nationalism was also used to whip up
enthusiasm for birth planning by describing it as an essential part of
a ``patriotic health campaign.'' As the Party-State apparently
intended, this harsh ``class struggle'' campaign rhetoric inspired
equally harsh measures on the part of lower-level officials to control
births. The Shanghai Party Committee, for instance, designated the week
of January 25, 1970 as ``shock week'' for the promotion of birth
control and late marriage. During this week, the Committee ordered, the
masses were to be ``mobilized,'' every family was to be visited by
officials ``in a penetrating and vigorous manner,'' and ``remedial
measures'' were to be taken ``whenever problems are discovered.''
``Remedial measures,'' of course, are a veiled reference to coercive
practices such as forced IUD insertion and worse. Similar campaigns
were soon being undertaken in other cities and in rural areas.
In January 1971 the People's Daily made the astonishing claim that
``to promote with great effort late marriage and planned births and
mobilize commune members to practice Planned Birth'' was one of the
``demands'' of Chinese women.(italics added) In fact, there was
considerable opposition to the de facto two-child policy that the
Party-State was effectively imposing on the Chinese people by insisting
that all women who had borne two children wear IUDs. But, in typical
fashion, the Party-State blamed opposition on ``class enemies'' rather
than admit to the existence of popular dissent. PRC President Liu
Shaoqi, who was purged by Mao during the early stages of the Cultural
Revolution, was a particular target. It was Liu's ``poisonous
influence'' that was responsible for the opposition to the planned
birth campaign, went the official line, for he had spoken
``disparagingly'' of the Party-State's efforts to regulate births.
In contrast, planned birth was said to have been encouraged by the
Great Helmsman himself. Direct statements by Chairman Mao Zedong on the
policy are hard to find, although he was said to have remarked during
the 1950s that childbearing in China was ``in a state of anarchy.''
Other than this we find his name invoked in a more general way:
Planned Birth is a work of momentous significance promoted by
great leader Chairman Mao and the Party Center and is an
important measure for carrying out Chairman Mao's great
strategic plan, ``Be prepared against war, be prepared against
natural disasters, and do everything for the people.'' . . .
Thus, Planned Birth is an important thing bearing on the health
of the nation, not a trifling matter concerning [only] an
individual or a family. . .
Elsewhere we find the People's Daily asserting that Planned Birth work
was ``in accordance with Chairman Mao's brilliant instruction that
mankind has to control itself and to multiply in a planned way.'' When
local cadres proved reluctant to impose the Planned Birth policy on
their fellow villagers, whom they lived among, Mao's earlier remark
that childbearing in China was ``in a state of anarchy'' was
resurrected, but without attribution:
Planned Birth is a social revolution aimed at changing the
customs and habits, breaking the old and building the new. On
the question of childbirth, to go over from a state of anarchy
to the practice of planning will inevitably meet with
resistance. Such resistance comes mainly from the sabotage of
the class enemies and from the influence of old ideas and old
concepts left over from several thousand years. (italics added)
It is not surprising that most couples in China were upset, even
angry, over the Party's usurpation of their traditional prerogatives in
childbearing. Rather than bowing to the popular will, however, the
Chinese leadership doubled down. It launched a nationwide propaganda
campaign which claimed that opposition to the new policy was being
fomented by ``class enemies'' and ``counterrevolutionaries,'' even as
it acknowledged that ``feudal ideas'' about childbearing were deeply
etched in the minds of the Chinese people. By making opposition to the
state's Planned Birth policy tantamount to treason, the Party raised
the stakes for those--both within Party circles and among the
population at large--who might otherwise have opposed it.
At the same time the Party's propaganda machine went into overdrive
to try and create at least the perception of popular support.
Newspapers like the Guangzhou ribao insisted that state birth planning
was not only in ``the interests and aspirations of the masses of
people,'' but was in fact ``an urgent demand of the broad masses of the
people.'' Not only that, but Planned Birth was ``gradually becoming the
compelling demand and spontaneous action of the masses.'' The Party's
broadsheet was in effect claiming that Chinese couples were so excited
by the prospect of limiting their progeny that they were lining up and
demanding to be contracepted, sterilized, and aborted. State-run radio
broadcasts were similarly over the top. Radio Hangzhou breathlessly
asserted that a large-scale sterilization and IUD-insertion campaign
carried out locally in Zhejiang province had not only been a success,
but had won ``the acclaim of the masses.'' Like the Guangzhou ribao, it
made the highly dubious claim that ``the spontaneity of the masses for
practicing late marriage and Planned Birth control for the revolution
is being continuously enhanced.''
By August 1974 the Chinese Party-State was ready to announce to the
world, through its official news agency, XINHUA, that the country's
Planned Birth policy had ``achieved initial success.'' Anticipating
that the international community might suspect that this ``success''
had been achieved through coercion, XINHUA's English-language
dispatches insisted that Chinese families had merely been ``advised to
have no more than two children'' and that the Planned Birth policy was
being carried out ``on a voluntary basis under state guidance,'' Later
that month, that same chilling line--that the policy followed the
principle of ``voluntary with state guidance''--was repeated in the
English language journal Beijing Review. How the Planned Birth policy
could be ``voluntary'' when couples were expected to follow ``state
guidance'' in bearing children was not explained. Later, I was to
witness the Party's version of ``voluntarism'' in action as groups of
three or four officials would ``guide'' distraught pregnant mothers to
a local clinic for ``voluntary'' second- and third-trimester abortions.
These several articles also asserted that oral contraceptives,
IUDs, and sterilization were generally accepted, that the program was
now being spread to the countryside, and that it was there meeting with
increasing success. In February 1975 XINHUA touted one of these
supposed successes: Nangong county, located in Hebei province, had
reportedly seen its population growth rate drop by 74% in the two years
since the policy had been implemented in 1973. ``Wherever you go [in
the county],'' the official news agency boasted, ``you can hear people
saying `Planned Birth is good.''' The policy had become ``deeply
embedded in the hearts of the people throughout the county,'' making
Nangong a ``model'' for other counties to emulate.
In spite of the fact that, according to Party propagandists, the
enthusiasm of the masses over this new policy knew no bounds, local
radio broadcasts from this time suggest that there was considerable
resistance both from cadres and locals in large parts of the country.
Why else would these broadcasts urge local cadres to ``strengthen
leadership'' over the work, grasp it ``firmly and well,'' ``mobilize
the masses,'' and make the Planned Birth campaign a top priority? Why
else would they need to ``grasp the class struggle'' and the struggle
between the ``two lines'' (revolutionary and reactionary) in order to
``enhance the spontaneity'' of the cadres and the masses? Above all,
why else would they be told that they must ``consolidate the
dictatorship of the proletariat,'' an ominous phrase which meant that
that they were now free to use the mailed fist of state power to crush
any and all opposition to the Planned Birth policy of the Party? Still,
as some reports noted, the ``fierce struggle between the two classes''
in planned birth work continued, and ``sabotage'' by class enemies
remained a problem. All localities reported ``successes'' in the
efforts to implement the policy--they could hardly do otherwise--but
not a few admitted that, despite their ``successes,'' the work was
``uneven'' and they had been unable to meet the ``demands'' (i.e.,
targets and quotas) laid out by the Party.
The Planned Birth campaign rhetoric of the early 1970s reflected
the harsh, aggressive tone of the Cultural Revolution, a time when
every statement of the authorities was freighted with ideological
overtones, and every act charged with political menace. This was a time
when Lin Biao, Vice Chairman of the CCP and Chairman Mao's designated
successor, attempted to flee Mao's wrath but died when the plane he had
commandeered crashed in Outer Mongolia. It was a time when Mao's third
wife, Jiang Qing, an ambitious woman who had arrogated more and more
power to herself as Mao slipped into his dotage, made the planned birth
policy a centerpiece of the continuing Cultural Revolution.
Lin Biao's name was quickly added to the political invective of the
day. Along with his fellow ``counterrevolutionary'' Liu Shaoqi, and the
long-dead ``reactionaries'' Confucius and Mencius, Lin was accused of
having ``sabotaged'' the Planned Birth campaign. Every provincial,
county, and commune-level cadre in China was ordered to help expose his
``towering crimes'' against the campaign and publicly criticize him.
Since there was absolutely no evidence that he did any such thing, the
already strident Planned Birth propaganda of the time now began to read
like the paranoid ravings of a mad political zealot:
We must seriously organize the masses to study the theory of
the dictatorship of the proletariat, implement and propagate
Chairman Mao's instructions and the Party's policy on Planned
Birth and grasp well the struggle between two lines and two
kinds of ideology on Planned Birth work. We must criticize the
reactionary fallacies on the question of family, marriage, and
childbearing preached by Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao, and Confucius
and Mencius. . . We must eradicate their poison. We must
enhance the masses' spontaneity for practicing late marriage
and Planned Birth. We must train a large number of activists in
planned birth work and give full play to the backbone and
vanguard role of revolutionary cadres, Party members, China
Youth League members, and militiamen.
In other words, all of the organizations controlled by the Party-
State were to be enlisted into the struggle to impose the Planned Birth
policy on ``the masses.'' And ``the masses'' were going to like it--
``spontaneously'' of course--or else. Or again:
To practice Planned Birth is a profound revolution in the
ideological sphere. To carry out this ideological revolution
for `getting rid of the old and establishing the new' and
`changing existing habits and customs,' we must thoroughly
break away from the traditional relations of ownership [of
children], the traditional concepts, and eradicate the old
ideas and habits on the issue of marriage and parenthood left
behind over the past several thousand years. Therefore, to make
a success of Planned Birth work is an important aspect of
consolidating and developing the victorious achievements of the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The remnant poison of
the reactionary fallacies spread by Confucius and Mencius. . .
is very extensive and their influence is extremely deep.
Bourgeois rights also are reflected in the issues of marriage
and parenthood. The class enemies also try by every way
possible to carry out sabotage. Therefore, in order to
institute Planned Birth, we must also take the class struggle
as the key link, persist in the Party's basic line, seriously
study the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat,
persist in exercising all-around proletarian dictatorship over
the bourgeoisie, firmly grasp the struggle between two classes,
two lines, and two kinds of ideology in marriage and
parenthood, develop revolutionary mass criticism deeply and
protractedly, criticize thoroughly the reactionary fallacies
advocated by Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao, Confucius, and Mencius on
the issue of the family, marriage, and parenthood, and
eradicate their remnant poison.
In Junan Commune, located in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong
province, where I did my original field research in China, these were
the years in which virtually every women of childbearing age with three
or more living children was either inserted with an IUD, or given a
tubal ligation. Interviews with local women who had been sterilized
under duress convinced me that local cadres had followed their orders
to the letter. They had indeed ``firmly grasped the struggle between
the two lines'' and ensured that ``the dictatorship of the
proletariat'' had carried the day. The ``reactionary fallacy'' that
couples could have as many children as they wanted was in retreat,
replaced by the new Party line: the Chinese Communist Party, and the
state apparatus that it controlled, would henceforth be in charge of
regulating births under a state plan.
childbearing under a state plan will continue
This is why the shift to a two-child policy is occurring as part of
the next five-year plan, approved at the latest meeting of the CCP
Central Committee. The official communique about the meeting, released
by China's official Xinhua News Agency on October 29th, made clear that
in the 13th Five-Year Economic Plan, China's leaders had decided to
ramp up both production and reproduction.
The communique itself, written in the almost unreadable pastiche of
slogans that the Party resorts to on such occasions, read: ``Promote
the balanced development of the population; resolutely carry out the
basic policy of Planned Births; thoroughly implement the policy of each
couple birthing two children; actively begin to address the aging of
the population.''
Of course it is already far too late to ``rebalance'' the
population in order to stop the rapid ``aging of the population.''
Those trends are already baked into the demographic cake, as it were.
No spike in planned births, however robust, is going to offset the
hundreds of millions of ``planned'' deaths that preceded it.
Moreover, it is doubtful whether the new policy will have much of
an impact at all. When the one-child policy has been relaxed in the
past--first for rural couples whose first child was a girl, then for
all rural couples, then for urban couples where both the husband and
wife were only children--the results have been underwhelming.
The last tweaking of the Planned Birth policy, which occurred just
two years ago, was particularly disappointing to Party leaders hoping
for a baby boomlet. The government had ``announced'' that couples in
which only one spouse was an only child would be allowed two children,
and planned for 20 million births in 2014. Only 16.9 million babies
actually materialized. And out of 11 million couples eligible to have a
second child, only 1.45 million had applied for a ``permit'' by May of
this year.
These figures suggest that, at least among China's urban
population, millions of couples are not eagerly waiting to fill the
maternity wards. Forty years of anti-natal, anti-child propaganda has
left its mark on the Chinese psyche. Few Chinese young people, who are
themselves only children (and often the children of only children), are
inclined to be generous when it comes to having children of their own.
They would rather spend their limited incomes on themselves than, say,
disposable diapers.
The Chinese are not alone in having below-replacement fertility.
Every developed Asian country, from Japan and South Korea, to Taiwan
and Singapore, is suffering from the same demographic malaise. The
difference is that these countries grew rich before they began growing
old. China, as a result of its misguided one-child policy, is growing
old before it is rich.
What will the China's leaders do if, as now appears likely, the
Chinese people do not procreate up to plan?
At present couples are permitted to have a second child, but I
don't expect the matter to end there. Soon they will be ``encouraged,''
then ``motivated'' and finally ``ordered'' to bear children. A
government bent on regulating its population under a state plan will do
whatever necessary to ``produce'' the number of children it has ordered
reproduced.
If this prediction sounds, well, a little overwrought, consider
what China has been doing to young, pregnant mothers for the better
part of two generations now.
At the outset of the one-child policy, Paramount Leader Deng
Xiaoping ordered his officials to ``Use whatever means you must'' to
force the birthrate down. ``With the support of the Communist Party,
you have nothing to fear,'' he assured them. They took him at his word,
and women were rounded up en masse to be aborted, sterilized, or
contracepted.
Even today, these kinds of abuses continue. As recently as two
months ago, a mother was forced to sacrifice the life of her unborn
child to save her husband's job. She was eight months pregnant. Not
long before, a Shaanxi woman was taken by force from her home by a gang
of Planned Birth officials and given an abortion. She was seven months
pregnant, according to reports from the Guardian.
The same Party officials who have been responsible for decades of
forced abortions and sterilizations would presumably have no qualms
enforcing mandatory pregnancy on young women, if they were ordered to
do so.
An example of just this kind of coercive pro-natal policy comes
from neighboring North Korea, one of the most rigidly controlled
countries on earth. Dictator Kim Jong-un, worried about the country's
falling birth rate, has just ordered ob-gyns to stop inserting IUDs,
and has declared that abortion will henceforth be illegal.
If the higher birthrate called for by China's new Planned Birth
policy can not be achieved voluntarily, China's leaders may take
similar actions. Childbearing may become mandatory. Regular pelvic
examinations will be instituted to monitor menstrual cycles and plan
pregnancies. Abortion may be forbidden. Such measures, long in place in
China to restrict childbearing, may be instituted to increase the
number of children born.
recommendations
1. China's leaders should abandon the Planned Birth policy
altogether. They should allow couples to freely choose the number and
spacing of their children, and have as many, or as few, as they desire.
2. China's leaders should respect the consensus of the
international community as expressed in the policy of the UN Population
Fund, which affirms that couples enjoy the right to responsibly decide
the number and spacing of their children.
3. The National Health and Planned Birth Commission (NHPBC),
created in 2013 from the merger of the Ministry of Health and the
National Population and Planned Birth Commission, should revert to its
former role as a Ministry of Health, and its Planned Birth arm
abolished.
4. Only if these reforms are undertaken will forced abortions and
forced sterilizations, which have characterized China's Planned Birth
policy from the beginning, come to an end.
______
Prepared Statement of Hon. Christopher Smith, a U.S. Representative
From New Jersey; Chairman, Congressional-Executive Commission on China
december 3, 2015
The Chinese government has spent the past 35 years telling couples
what their families must look like.
Thirty-five years of state sponsored violence against women
including coerced abortions and involuntary sterilizations in the name
of population control.
Thirty-five years of viewing children as ``excess baggage'' from
the day they are conceived, particularly the girl child.
Thirty-five years or wasting precious human potential.
And, thirty-five years of committing massive crimes against women
and children enabled by pro-abortion non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).
Despite the platitude and applause by some being heaped on China's
announced ``Two-Child Policy''--the proposal doesn't change the basic
structure of coercive population control and it is not some major
reversal of policy to be lauded. And this so called reform isn't a done
deal yet. According to world famous demographer Dr. Nichoals Eberstadt,
who will testify today, the ``One-Child Policy'' may become a ``Two-
Child Policy'' but the coercive population control apparatus remains
unchanged.
Dr. Eberstadt says, ``To be clear: that shift has not yet taken
place. To the contrary: just days after the October 29 announcement,
China's National Health and Family Planning Commission, which oversees
the population program, emphasized that the new norms were not yet
``valid'' and described the Two-Child Policy as a ``proposal,''
indicating furthermore that this proposal would have to be approved by
Beijing's legislature next year before it might eventually be
enacted.''
That said, the ``Two-Child Policy'' may allow for more births--if
``enacted'' at some future date--but it does not remove the pernicious
incentives given to local officials to pressure or even force mothers
to abort a child if the birth hasn't been approved by the state and is/
or is the couple's third. Chinese families are still not free to
determine the size of their own families. Nor does this policy erase
the enormous physical and psychological damage imposed on women done by
three and a half decades of highly coercive birth limitations.
We should not be applauding China's policy, we should be insisting
they abolish all birth limits--forever.
Chen Guangcheng, the famous Chinese legal advocate, and human
rights champion, calls China's population control polices ``genocide.''
He calls for an international tribunal to vigorously investigate these
crimes against humanity. And Mr. Chen calls on the Obama Administration
to enforce existing U.S. law and bar Chinese officials associated with
the policy from entry to the United States--I wrote that law, and the
Obama Administration has completely failed to enforce and implement its
provisions.
The Chinese government is not the only one culpable in these
heinous crimes against women and children. The UN Population Fund
helped fund birth restrictions, fund forced abortions, and a massive
and coercive family planning bureaucracy. Several years ago, I had a
face to face meeting in Beijing with Peng Peiyun, the bureaucrat in
charge of China's draconian population program. Madame Peng repeatedly
told me repeatedly that my concerns were unfounded and repeatedly said
that UNFPA found no coercion whatsoever--a complete whitewash.
The UNFPA whitewashed China's crimes for decades and continues to
do so today. On their website, the UNFPA justifies its history in
China, saying that they ``were tasked by the Executive Committee'' to
help China and had to ``engage with China as a sovereign nation.''
Since 1994, the UNFPA claims that their efforts have focused on
getting China to adopt a ``rights-based approach'' to family planning,
saying they opposed ``coercion, violence, forced abortion, and
sterilization as a violation of basic human rights.''
Yet, there is no evidence to show their efforts made one bit of
difference in changing China's policies. No evidence that UNFPA
officials intervened to stop coercion and violence. For the past three
and half decades, UNFPA funding gave China's policies an international
stamp of approval.
The UNFPA is complicit in China's coercive population control
policies. The United States and others who helped fund the UNFPA
programs in China are also complicit. It is a dark and bloody stain
that cannot be washed away.
I hope China will abolish all aspects of its horrendous birth
control policy as soon as possible and compensate its victims. For me
and many others opposed to this policy, it is a matter of justice and
human rights. For the Chinese government, this is a matter of economic
survival.
China's government says it is instituting a ``Two-Child Policy'' to
stem the twin demographic time bombs of a rapidly aging population and
millions of men unable to find wives, but this new policy is unlikely
to solve these problems.
As the Economist has noted, by 2025, nearly 1 in 4 Chinese citizens
will be over the age of 60. At the same time, China's working-age
population has shrunk in each of the past three years. These factors
are likely to hurt not only government balance sheets but also economic
growth in China. This should be of particular concern to the Chinese
Communist Party, as economic growth is the primary source of their ill
begotten legitimacy.
The minimal policy change announced in October will do little to
address the three decade decimation of female population. Approximately
40 million women and girls--perhaps millions more--are missing from the
population--a policy that can only be accurately described as
gendercide. The extermination of the girl child in society simply
because she happens to be a girl.
The lack of girls has led to a dramatically skewed gender ratio. An
estimated 30 million young men who will be unable to find wives in the
coming decades.
The Chinese government should be concerned--as should China's
neighbors and the international community--of the consequences of 30
million men, unable to find companionship, unable to start families,
and coming of age precisely at the time that China's economy is
creating fewer jobs to employ them. That is a ticking time bomb with
the potential of dramatic consequences.
We continue to see increased human trafficking for forced marriages
and sexual slavery. NGOs working in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Burma have
all reported an increase in trafficking of women and girls into China
in recent years. Even if China ends its birth restrictions, given the
current demographics, this problem of a shortage of women in China will
only get worse in the coming decade.
In the long line of Chinese Communist Party mistakes, the brutal
enforcement of population control may be one of the deadliest and most
hated. The ``Two-Child Policy'' recently announced does little to
fundamentally change the past and should not be celebrated.
The international community, led by the United States, must insist
that China abolish all birth restrictions, dismantle its family
planning apparatus, compensate the victims of forced abortions and
sterilizations, raise the legal and inheritance status of girls, and
permanently close a dark and deadly chapter in Chinese history.
______
Prepared Statement of Hon. Marco Rubio, a U.S. Senator From Florida;
Cochairman, Congressional-Executive Commission on China
december 3, 2015
For over three decades, China's barbaric One-Child Policy condemned
millions of unwanted or ``surplus'' Chinese girls to abortion,
infanticide, abandonment and human trafficking.
Following China's recent announcement that it is adopting a
universal two-child policy, media reports profiled individual Chinese
families and the trauma they've experienced at the hands of their own
government: women still grieving the child they were robbed of, parents
adrift after losing the only child the government allowed them to have,
families who are too old to take advantage of this policy change.
Sadly, these types of stories will continue under the new policy.
Ultimately, China's new two-child policy is as indefensible and
inhumane as the one-child policy it replaces. In fact, China's new
policy should be known as the ``forced abortion of child #3'' policy.
China needs to recognize that its problem isn't that it has too many
innocent children; it's that they have too many repressive communist
adults with blood all over their clenched iron fists.
It would be a mistake to assume this change in any way reflects a
newfound respect for human rights by Beijing. It is still a population
control policy and still, at its heart, repressive. When couples
conceive a third child, the Chinese government will force them to
eliminate him or her, by any means necessary. There are also doubts
about those second children conceived in the months between the policy
announcement and its ultimate implementation at the provincial level.
China's vast population control apparatus will continue to exist. Birth
permits will still be required. And second children, already born in
violation of the previous policy will continue to face tremendous
challenges--denied the most basic rights of Chinese citizenship.
A government that possesses such little regard for its own people--
parents and children alike - cannot be relied upon to adhere to other
international norms.
This is China's shameful legacy. According to the latest census,
men outnumber women by at least 33 million. Estimates suggest that
there will be a surplus of 40-50 million bachelors in China through the
mid-to late 21st century.
Couples who have violated the one-child policy have historically
faced a variety of punishments, from fines and the loss of employment
to forced abortions and sterilizations. The Annual Report of the
Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), which I co-chair,
noted that last year local governments directed officials to punish
non-compliance with the one-child policy with heavy fines termed
``social compensation fees,'' which compel many couples to choose
between undergoing an unwanted abortion and incurring a fine much
greater than the average annual income of the locality. This is a
``choice'' no parent should have to make.
Today, I joined with CECC Chairman, Representative Chris Smith in
urging Secretary of State John Kerry to provide an update on the
administration's implementation of the ``Girls Count Act'', which was
signed into law on June 12. As this law's chief sponsor in the Senate,
I was motivated by the fact that every year approximately 51 million
children under the age of five are not registered at birth, most of
whom are girls, leaving them susceptible to marginalization and
exploitation. This law directs current U.S. foreign assistance
programming to support the rights of women and girls in developing
countries by working to establish birth registries in their countries.
There is a massive problem regarding children for whom no official
records exist because they were not registered at birth--this is, of
course, especially true in China. The legislation also prioritizes a
variety of rule of law programs intended to raise the legal and
financial status of girls in order to help address the cultural and
financial rationale for sex-selective abortions. Again, this component
has particular relevance to China.
As a father of four, I believe it is vital that the United States
continues advocating for the complete elimination of government-forced
population planning as well as the fundamental rights of all Chinese
citizens, including the unborn, to live up to their God-given
potential. The One-Child Policy does not need to be changed; it needs
to be eliminated entirely. Ultimately, I believe the unborn children we
are fighting for will form a new generation of Chinese children who
will lead its transition to a peaceful and democratic nation. China's
children--all of them--represent the country's best hopes for the
future, not the fading crony communists fighting to eliminate them.
Submissions for the Record
----------
How Many ``Missing Females'' for China's One Child Policy Era (1981-
2015)?
Some Approximate Illustrative Calculations
Nicholas Eberstadt
Henry Hendy Chair in Political Economy
American Enterprise Institute
[email protected]
In this note we offer a few simple illustrative calculations that
should help to bound the range of plausible estimates for the size of
the population of ``missing girls and women'' from the cohorts born
during the One Child Policy era in China (1980-2015).
The emphasis is on `simple' here--what we show below are a few
benchmark calculations.
A more sophisticated set of estimates could be derived from formal,
and more methodologically sophisticated, demographic projections. We
offer simpler calculations here because the additional value from a
more elegant set of projections is not self-evident, given the
magnitudes of the uncertainties in officially reported Chinese data.
In a world with perfect information, we could provide an
approximate estimate of the total ``missing females'' from the One
Child Policy era as a differential--the sum total of the gap between
the number of girls and women actually enumerated on the one hand, and
the ``expected'' number of girls and women we would predict to be
counted under ``normal'' conditions on the other. Note that there are
assumptions--about the ``normal'' sex ratio at birth and ``normal''
mortality trends for the groups in question, among other things--in
such calculations, and they affect the results even under conditions of
perfect information. But the effect on results would be relatively
small: such differences would matter a lot to demographers, of course,
but they probably would not really matter that much to people who
simply wanted a ``ball park'' approximation of the magnitude of this
problem.
For better or worse, Chinese demographic data today are far from
perfect. Vital registration of births and deaths is not yet complete or
even near-complete.\1\ China's most recent national population count
was conducted in 2010, and as with earlier Chinese censuses in the One
Child Era, an under-counting of children and youth appears to have
taken place. This should not be surprising: in addition to the
perennial potential for undercounts that besets all census exercises,
Beijing has created special additional incentives for misrepresenting
the numbers of children and youth to enumerators. Parents might wish to
hide their true number of children because they had an ``out of quota''
birth, for example, or because they wanted another chance for a son.
Young adults could be invisible to enumerators if they began life as
``hidden children'' and were never assigned hukou registration and
identification papers. No one knows just how many Chinese today exist
outside the state's hukou registration system, but recently authorities
in Beijing indicated they believed China's non-hukou population might
total 13 million persons.\2\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Shiwei Liu et al., ``An integrated national mortality
surveillance system for death registration and mortality surveillance,
China.'' World Health Organization 94, no. 28 (2016): 46-57,
www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/94/1/15-153148.pdf.
\2\ Yining Peng, ``13m unregistered people to be given hukou
recognition,'' China Daily, November 25, 2015, http://
www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2015-11/25/content--22516606.htm
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rather than base our estimate of missing females on official
Chinese demographic as reported, we will work instead with the
reconstructions and projections offered by independent demographic
experts. The two foremost sources for such work are the US Bureau of
the Census, through its continually updated International Data Base,\3\
and the United Nations Population Division, through its typically
biennial ``World Population Prospects'' series.\4\ Both of these teams
released their latest estimates and projections for China in the summer
of 2015, so we are working here with fairly up-to-date assessments of
China's demographic profile.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\3\ United States Census Bureau, International Data Base, ``Mid-
year population by single year age groups,'' available at: http://
www.census.gov/population/international/data/idb/informationGateway.php
\4\ Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social
Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, World Population Prospects:
The 2015 Revision, http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Census Bureau and the UN Population Division reconstructions of
China's 2010 population profile can be contrasted with China's
officially released 2010 census returns. [SEE TABLES 1 AND 2] By
convention, the Census Bureau and UN Population Division estimates are
for midyear (July 1); for its part, China's 2010 census used November 1
as its ``hour zero.'' All other things being equal, this should mean
that the totals from the official Chinese count would be a little
higher than the Census Bureau and UN Population Division estimates, due
to intervening population growth. But as we can see, both the Census
Bureau estimates and the UN Population Division estimates conclude
there was a substantial undercounting of China's younger population in
2010. By the Census Bureau's reconstructions, the Chinese 2010 census
undercounted the country's under-30 population (i.e., the persons born
since 1980) by almost 24 million--over 15 million males and over 8
million females. By the UN Population Division's reckoning, the
undercount would have been over 20 million: more than 13 million males
and nearly 7 million females. The Census Bureau and UNPD
reconstructions both conclude that the degree of undercount varied not
only by sex, but also by year of birth--but they do not agree entirely
amongst themselves on the extent of under-enumeration by age and sex
for China's younger population. These two reconstructions thus reflect
somewhat different sets of expert assumptions about China's true
fertility and mortality patterns.
The One Child Policy Era was formally inaugurated in September
1980, with an open letter by the Central Committee of Chinese Communist
Party in People's Daily. In October 2015, a statement from the Central
Committee via Xinhua News Agency announced that the One Child Policy
would be shelved. For the purposes of our calculations, we treat the
One Child Policy Era as 1980-2015 (even though it would of course be
possible to date the policy as beginning somewhat earlier, and also
extending later--after all, the nationwide termination of the policy
thus far has only been announced, not actually implemented).
In their population projections for 2015 for China, both the Census
Bureau and the UN Population Division estimate the total male
population from birthyears 1980-2015 at a bit over 352 million, and
both place the total female population from birthyears 1980-2015 a
little above 316 million. These aggregates are strikingly similar
(though if we were to dig a little deeper we would see some
discrepancies in the projections for each birthyear).
Both series indicate a gap of about 36 million between males and
females born during the One Child Policy era. Some of this difference,
however, can be considered natural, insofar as our species is
biologically programmed to produce slightly more male than female
offspring. How much of this gap is ``normal'', and how much should be
regarded as ``missing females'' ?
We can illustrate a plausible range of rough approximations for
total numbers of ``missing females'' from the 1980-2015 birth cohorts
with three scenarios, applied to both the Census Bureau and the UN
Population Division projections: 1) the sex ratio in China should be
105 males per 100 females for ages 0 through 35; 2) the sex ratio
should be 103 males per 100 females for ages 0 through 35; and 3) the
sex ratio in China should be 105 males for every 100 females at age 0
(i.e. for the group that has not yet reached its first birthday) but
should gradually decline to 103 males per 100 females at age 35.
These scenarios are perforce arbitrary, but they are not entirely
unreasonable. In China's 1953 and 1964 censuses--the national
population counts, that is to say, before the dawn of the One Child
Policy--the enumerated sex ratios for China's babies less than one year
of age were 104.9 and 103.8, respectively \5\--i.e., they fell between
103 and 105 for age group 0.\6\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\5\ Thomas Scharping, Table 32 in Birth Control in China 1949-2000:
Population policy and demographic development (New York: Routledge,
2013).
\6\ A technical demographic point: the sex ratio at birth and the
sex ratio of babies less than one year of age are not identical
quantities because infant mortality rates may differ by sex and usually
do, typically being higher for boys than girls. China did not report
sex ratios at birth in its 1953 and 1964 census counts and we do not
deal with SRBs in this note, as sex ratios for each age group afford us
the simple approach we use in this note.
A second and somewhat more technical point concerns the possible
relationship between mortality levels and age 0 sex ratio in a
hypothetically ``normal'' China. In 1953 and 1964, when China's first
two censuses were conducted, China was a high mortality society--but
mortality levels were much lower in the China of the One Child Policy
era. Some might surmise that improvements in mortality might affect
China's sex ratio at age 0 and take the society outside of the range of
sex ratios we have stipulated here. While recognizing this theoretical
possibility, we do not attempt to deal with such counterfactuals in
this note.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
If we believed survival schedules for males and females were the
same from 0 through 35, and that differential migration played no role
in shaping China's sex ratios (as we will indeed assume throughout this
exercise), then boundaries for the size of the ``missing females''
group might be established by calculating how many babies, girls and
women should be expected at a sex ratio of 103 or 105, given the number
of males estimated from each birthyear, subtracting the actually
estimated number of females in question, and summing the differences
for all birthyears in question.
These were the assumptions for scenarios 1 and 2. But of course in
almost all contemporary populations, women can expect to live longer
than men--and in most societies today female survival schedules are
more favorable than male schedules for the 0-35 period.
Scenario 3 is an effort to take into account the reality of male-
female differentials in mortality. We can get a sense of the magnitude
of the relevant differentials from the Human Mortality Database \7\
estimates of mortality patterns for Taiwan in the year 1980--i.e., for
a culturally Chinese population before the dawn of sex-selective
abortion, and where severe discrimination against girls and women was
not in force. On survival trajectories from that year, 96.7% of
Taiwanese females could expect to live to age 35--as against 94.5% of
Taiwanese men. Differential mortality, in other words, would have
reduced the sex ratio by a bit more than two percentage points by age
35. (China's overall life expectancy at birth today is believed to be a
few years higher than was Taiwan's in 1980 but we may still want to use
this two percentage point differential, not least for the sake of
simplicity.) Consequently, our scenario 3 begins with a sex ratio of
105 males per 100 females at 0 and ends with a sex ratio of 103 males
per 100 females at age 35, interpolating the sex ratio for intervening
ages.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\7\ Human Mortality Database, University of California, Berkeley
and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Taiwan Data Series,
http://www.mortality.org/cgi-bin/hmd/country.php?cntr=TWN&level=1
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Table 3 displays the results of these calculations. [SEE TABLE 3]
Under scenario 1 (a sex ratio of 105 at all ages), we would calculate
the ``missing female'' total for the One Child Policy era to amount to
around 19-20 million. Under scenario 2 (a sex ratio of 103 at all ages)
the ``missing female'' total would be calculated at around26 million.
Under scenario 3 (a sex ratio of 105 for those not year one year of
age, gradually shifting to 103 by age 35), the ``missing female'' total
would be calculated at around 23 million.
Our central estimate for the number of ``missing females'' from the
One Child Policy era (1980-2015) is thus around 23 million--although,
as we have just seen, alternative assumptions could result in estimates
a few million higher or a few million lower. More detailed and
sophisticated approaches might of course propose more precise numerical
answers to the question in the title of this note--but given the
significant uncertainties inherent in the Chinese data upon which such
approaches would have to rely, the risk of false precision would be
high.
By way of perspective on our calculations: our figures would be
roughly in the same league as the total population for Taiwan (23.5
million as of July 2015, according to the Republic of China Statistical
Bureau).\8\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\8\ Statistical Bureau of the Republic of China (Taiwan), ``Latest
Indicators,'' http://eng.stat.gov.tw/point.asp?index=9.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Finally: note that our calculations scale the dimensions of the
``missing women'' problem in relation to ``existing men''. We have no
way of knowing just how many additional males would have been born in
China over the past three and a half decades absent population control.
This is arguably an additional aspect to the ``missing women''
question--but one we have no readily reliable method for addressing.
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
[From the Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2015]
China's New Two-Child Policy and the Fatal Conceit
(By Nicholas Eberstadt)
It is the latest twist in the most ambitious and ruthless social-
engineering program ever undertaken by a modern state: Beijing
announced Thursday that the Chinese Communist Party will officially
abandon its one-child policy. Yet it has no plans to relinquish
authority over its subjects' birth patterns; rather, Beijing has simply
changed the ration. Now two children per family will be permitted.
The first partial relaxation came two years ago, when Chinese
authorities decreed that spouses who were both an only child would be
allowed to have two children. This fine-tuning was expected to result
in several million additional births--but only a fraction of that
number of couples even applied for a second ration coupon. Now, after
3\1/2\ decades of attempted one-child enforcement, the government can
no longer ignore that its policy of forcible population control has
been a disaster. As the Communist Party prepares for its 13th five-year
plan, it must survey what its quest to remold the Chinese family has
wrought.
The one-child mandate is the single greatest social-policy error in
human history. After Mao Zedong's death in 1976, his legatees were
horrified to discover how little they had inherited. Despite almost
three decades of ``socialist construction,'' China was still
overwhelmingly rural and desperately poor. More than 97% of the country
lived below the World Bank's notional $1.25 a day threshold for
absolute poverty, according to recent Chinese estimates. With a
population still rapidly growing, China seemed on the brink of losing
the race between mouths and food.
In their attempt to process these facts, Chinese leaders stumbled
into an elementary neo-Malthusian misdiagnosis. Rather than focus
solely on undoing the crushing inefficiencies of their Maoist economy,
they blamed abysmal productivity on the childbearing patterns of their
subjects. The outcome was involuntary birth control, promulgated
through a vast scheme of quotas and an army of family-planning agents.
This was Socialist ``scientism''--ideology masquerading as
science--of the highest order. The broad outline was established on
calculations by a Moscow-minted engineer in China's nuclear program.
These computations bore no relation to the actual ways in which Chinese
men and women thought about family life. As soon as the policy was
rolled out in 1980 and 1981, it collided with human realities.
First came alarming reports that female infanticide, an ancient
practice, had once again erupted throughout the countryside. China's
1982 census, released some years later, showed an unnatural imbalance
in the sex ratio for birth-year 1981 on the order of hundreds of
thousands of missing baby girls.
Infanticide was then replaced by mass sex-selective abortion, made
possible in the late 1980s by increased rural access to ultrasound
machines. China's sex ratio climbed to nearly 120 baby boys for every
100 baby girls, where it plateaued around 2000. Although a war against
baby girls is evident in other countries--India and Taiwan among them--
leading Chinese demographers have suggested that half or more of
China's imbalance may directly result from the one-child policy.
The precise long-term effects have yet to be accurately estimated.
Chinese authorities claim that the country has 400 million fewer people
due to the one-child policy, because they have overseen that many
abortions. But this misleading metric ignores the distinction between
forced and voluntary abortions.
To the extent that the policy has achieved its objective, it
magnified the demographic problems that Communist planners are
apparently only now beginning to acknowledge. Fertility levels in urban
China were already well below replacement by 1980. Today the country is
on track to go gray at a shocking tempo. Two years ago, working-age
manpower began to decline, according to Chinese authorities. The only
close comparator is post-bubble Japan: not a cheering vision for what
remains a relatively poor society.
And China's cities are now producing a new family type utterly
unfamiliar to Chinese history: only children begotten by only children.
They have no siblings, cousins, uncles or aunts, only ancestors (and
perhaps, one day, descendants). But in a low-trust society, extended
social networks, known in Chinese as guanxi, play a vital economic
role. They reduce uncertainty and transaction costs by providing the
reassurance supplied elsewhere by rule of law and transparency. How
will Chinese economic performance be affected by the atrophy of the
extended family?
Beijing's latest adjustments to population plans seem to have been
prompted by economic concerns, yet these changes will have only modest
demographic repercussions. Like other East Asian locales without forced
population control, the average desired family size in China appears to
be far below replacement. Beijing also can't rely on immigration for
demographic help. Even modest gains from the new policy will take
decades to have an economic impact.
Contemporary China has a host of top-flight demographers and
population economists--and so far as I can tell, almost all are critics
of their country's population program. Some are concerned with human-
rights violations; most pragmatically regard the one-child policy as
painfully, obviously counterproductive. A number of these experts wrote
a letter to the State Council a decade ago urging ``reconsideration''
(translation: complete scrapping) of the one-child norm--to no effect.
Why has Beijing stubbornly ignored the advice of its own top
talent? My baffled Chinese colleagues speculate on possible
explanations: the difficulty of re-tasking the vast army of population-
control bureaucrats; the value of the hefty fines exacted for out-of-
quota births; the neo-Malthusian ideology to which China's bosses still
seem to be slave.
All of these are plausible, but they overlook a key piece: the
Chinese government's undying claim to totalitarian control over the
most basic details of its subjects' lives, revealed as well by the
retrograde hukou system of residence permits that makes urban China's
migrant workers illegal aliens in their own country. For all the talk
of ``reforming''--and we have been hearing it overseas for almost two
decades now--the Chinese government has been unwilling to dispense with
these instruments of social control precisely because they are
instruments of social control.
The ``fatal conceit'' (to borrow Friedrich Hayek's term) of China's
population planners was that they could micro-calibrate the behavior of
the men and women under their command. The new two-child policy suffers
the same flaw. As long as Beijing deforms Chinese society with these
misbegotten tools, the nation's future will be compromised, poorer and
sadder than it otherwise could be.
Mr. Eberstadt is a political economist at the American Enterprise
Institute in Washington, D.C.
______
``China's New `Two-Child Policy' and the Continuation of Massive Crimes
Against Women and Children''
december 3, 2015
Witnesses
Nicholas Eberstadt, Ph.D., Henry Wendt Scholar in Political
Economy, American Enterprise Institute
Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political
Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. A political economist and
demographer by training, he is a senior advisor to the National Bureau
of Asian Research, and has served on the visiting committee at the
Harvard School of Public Health, the Global Leadership Council at the
World Economic Forum and the President's Council on Bioethics. He has
also served as a consultant to the World Bank, Department of State,
U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Bureau of the
Census. With numerous publications on demographics in East Asia, Dr.
Eberstadt received his Ph.D., M.P.A., and A.B. from Harvard University,
and his M.Sc. from the London School of Economics.
Reggie Littlejohn, Founder and President, Women's Rights Without
Frontiers
Ms. Reggie Littlejohn is Founder and President of Women's Rights
Without Frontiers, a broad-based international coalition that opposes
forced abortion and sexual slavery in China. Ms. Littlejohn is an
acclaimed expert on China's One-Child Policy, having testified six
times before the U.S. Congress, three times before the European
Parliament, and presented at the British, Irish, and Canadian
Parliaments. She has briefed officials at the White House, Department
of State, United Nations, and the Vatican. Her ``Save a Girl'' campaign
has saved more than 150 baby girls from sex-selective abortion or
grinding poverty in China. A graduate of Yale Law School, Ms.
Littlejohn was named one of the ``Top Ten'' people of 2013 by Inside
the Vatican magazine. She and her husband are raising as their own the
two daughters of jailed pro-democracy dissident Zhang Lin.
Jennifer Li, Co-Founder, China Life Alliance
Ms. Jennifer Li lived in China for many years and is a co-founder
of China Life Alliance, a network of individuals, churches, and
ministries who seek to protect the lives of millions in China who are
threatened by abortion, infanticide, abandonment, and trafficking. They
do this by educating and mobilizing groups to rescue women and save
children through their safe house network, legal aid network, coerced-
abortion rescue teams and a variety of other ways. As an American
expatriate, wife, and mother who has raised her children in China,
speaks Chinese, and has Chinese friends, Jennifer offers a unique
perspective of the pressures that Chinese women face. Since 2001,
Jennifer has been actively advocating for women and children and is a
highly sought after speaker on the topic of women's rights and China's
One Child Policy.
Sarah Huang, Activist
Ms. Sarah Huang has personally rescued more than 80 Chinese women
and children threatened by abortion, infanticide, abandonment, and
trafficking. Since 2013, international media has covered the efforts of
Sarah, a humble pastor in China who has been nicknamed the ``Mother
Teresa of China,'' as she courageously assists vulnerable women who
must hide their pregnancies to escape coercive abortions from Chinese
family planning officials. Sarah has been working closely behind the
scenes with China Life Alliance and has been pivotal in assisting
numerous Chinese families, including a number of widely reported forced
abortion cases that have been leaked into the international media.
Sarah is currently pregnant with her second child and is now
experiencing her own battle to save the life of her unborn child from a
mandatory abortion.
Steven W. Mosher, President of the Population Research Institute
Mr. Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research
Institute (1995 to present) and has worked tirelessly since 1979 to
fight coercive population control programs. He is an internationally
recognized authority on China and population issues and an acclaimed
author of a number of books, including ``Population Control: Real Costs
and Illusory Consequences'' and the best-selling ``A Mother's Ordeal:
One Woman's Fight Against China's One-Child Policy.'' He served as the
Director of the Asian Studies Center at the Claremont Institute from
1986-95 and was appointed in 1991 to serve as Commissioner of the U.S.
Commission on Broadcasting to the PRC. He was educated at the
University of Washington and Stanford University and, following a
period of naval service (1968-76), in 1979 became the first American
social scientist permitted to do field research in China since the
Communist revolution.
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