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 hinese
officials have launched a new coercive family-planning campaign
taking direct aim at the poor rural regions of China. Recent results
from China's 2000 census have been both encouraging and discouraging
to PRC officials. According to their estimates, 300 million less
children were born since 1990 as a result of its "one-child"
policy; however, in some rural areas of China, the number of couples
adhering to the one-child-policy rule has failed to meet government
expectations.
The brutal
response of PRC officials has been to launch another population-control
crackdown in targeted areas, including the township of Huaiji. In
China's Huaiji, 20,000 more unborn babies are facing abortion this
year to comply with a new PRC quota. As a result, thousands of women
in the impoverished mountainous region of Guangdong will be forcibly
aborted in the next six months. Also, Huaiji women who have received
permits to give birth will be forcibly sterilized. This township
has a population of fewer than one million people. Implementation
of the PRC's brutal quota in Huaiji will require nearly 100% of
all pregnancies to be terminated by abortion by the end of the year.
According to
Hong Kong-based The Telegraph, "Many of the terminations
will have to be conducted forcibly on peasant women to meet the
quota. As part of the campaign, county officials are buying expensive
ultrasound equipment that can be carried to remote villages by car.
By detecting which women are pregnant, the machines will allow Government
doctors to order terminations on the spot. At the Huaiji county
hospital, where most of the operations will take place, it is not
only women with unauthorised pregnancies who are facing traumatic
surgery in insanitary conditions. Officials said that, as part of
the drive to meet the quota, doctors had been ordered to sterilise
women as soon as they gave birth after officially approved pregnancies."
Like many mothers
in the world — poor and rich alike — Chinese women, despite decades
of Maoist indoctrination — continue to regard their children as
treasures and as a result have disregarded China's one child policy.
In Huaiji, they are being now punished for this.
Population
control was originally opposed by Chairman Mao who believed the
more Chinese, the better — until he faced growing economic problems
during the Cultural Revolution. Mao then changed his mind and abandoned
the Chinese people's rich tradition of honoring growing families
and ancestors. His successors have also given up on Chinese families.
In China, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, and even cousins
may no longer exist.
While population-control
advocates continue to justify China's one-child policy by challenging
the populous nation's ability to feed itself, they ignore facts
that show how the global rate of population growth has never outpaced
their ability to produce adequate food supplies. Densely populated
countries, including Taiwan and Japan, are self-sufficient capitalist
countries. Even Israel, with little arable soil, uses technological
advances to grow food for its people. With these examples, China
must consider shifting its focus away from reducing the number of
their countrymen and look toward new ways to equitably and efficiently
produce and distribute adequate food products.
China's one-child
policy was first mandated by open letter by the Chinese Communist
Party in 1979, stipulating that each couple is allowed to give birth
to only one child — but they must apply for birth permits before
starting pregnancy. After having the permitted number of children
(one in most areas, two in some rural areas if the first child is
a girl) women are required to undergo IUD insertion or be sterilized.
Results of unauthorized pregnancies are forcible abortions- even
as late as the 9th month — and forced sterilization.
In 1991, the
government issued new regulations tying the evaluation of the performance
of local population control officials with their ability to meet
birth quotas for their area. This has led to the use of local informants
to discover unauthorized pregnancies, monitoring women's menses
at the work place, and the implementation of draconian measures
which include violence against women, forcible late-term abortions,
forced IUD insertion, forced sterilization, the detention of pregnant
women or their family members, and destruction of "over-birth"
families' homes.
Beijing's propaganda
and policies have encouraged a wide array of government departments
to participate in the enforcement of population control policies
throughout China. In addition to having heavy fines imposed, a couple
or a woman found to be in violation of the one-child policy may
face job loss, loss of residency permit, loss of business licenses,
loss of driving licenses, expulsion from China's Communist Party,
refusal of loans and refusal of passports.
The one-child
policy has also resulted in discrimination against "illegal"
children — those children who had no permission to be born — and
particular discrimination and violence against the girl child. Local
enforcement of this policy has at times resulted in cruel stories
that recently include one where PRC officials drowned a second illegal
child. "Illegal" children are often deprived of the identification
papers necessary to receive education and health care. Because of
traditional preferences for boy children, especially among the rural
population, unwanted girls have been subject to sex-selective abortions,
abandoned after birth or killed.
A major consequence
of the one-child policy has been a serious imbalance between male
and female infants in China today. Ultra-sound aided sex-selected
abortion (though officially outlawed) has been largely to blame.
In China, the current nationwide ratio is believed to be 117 boys
born for every 100 girls, and in rural China, the ratio is as high
as 120 boys for every 100 girls. This skewering of the natural ratio
has resulted in the "little emperor syndrome", and many
"bachelor villages" where a woman is like a prized possession.
Reports also detail the rise in kidnapping and sale of women as
brides in China.
The PRC defends
its one-child policy in part on the claim that it will increase
the quality of China's population. This frightening eugenic mindset
encompasses a list of policies that are designed to weed out persons
with severe mental or physical disabilities, including policies
that permit for the sterilization of individuals with severe mental
impairments or physical disabilities. Carriers of certain genetic
diseases and diseases that are communicable during childbirth are
also sterilized. Recently there has been a movement to make this
practice official Chinese law.
Chinese oncologist Peter Huang, a dissident now residing in Canada,
sadly recalled one afternoon during a break in medical school in
his native land. He and his classmate had gone fishing and had cast
out their nets into one of China's rivers. They almost caught a
group of aborted babies as they floated by. Dr. Huang threw out
his net again hoping this time to bring in one of the babies. "Don't
touch it," his friend reminded him, "It's politics."
While Dr. Huang's
anecdote is dated ten years, it may foretell a commonplace occurrence
as families in Huaiji are forced to comply with a new quota of 20,000
more abortions this year.
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