One-Child Crackdown
China’s latest family-planning campaign.

By Ann Noonan, policy director, the Laogai Research Foundation
August 16, 2001 9:15 a.m.

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.