And John Boehner urges White House action to go along with a vice presidential aide’s talk. The Speaker of the House actually raised the issue of human-rights abuse with Chinese President Hu Jintao when the Chinese president was in Washington, D.C., earlier this year.
Meanwhile neither the president nor vice president has taken leadership on the matter — when Hu Jintao was here and when Biden was in China this weekend. To the contrary, as Chai Ling and Reggie Littlejohn have pointed out.
Boehner writes:
If the Obama Administration truly opposes the one-child policy and truly cares about undoing the damage the Vice President’s comments have caused, the Vice President himself – or his boss, the President of the United States – should personally go on record immediately and unequivocally right the wrong.
Secondly, if the Obama administration is serious about its opposition to the one-child policy, the President should immediately halt U.S. contributions to the U.N. Population Fund, which has been linked in China to the one-child policy. President George W. Bush stopped U.S. contributions to the UNFPA in 2002, but they were resumed by President Obama when he took office in 2009, on the grounds that the fund doesn’t “directly” support abortion.
Until these two basic actions have been taken, the effect of the Biden incident is that the perpetrators of the one-child policy – the people with the power and authority to reverse it, and end the forced sterilizations and coercive abortions the policy has spawned – have been given further reason to believe that the United States government does not object to the one-child policy and doesn’t mind if it continues. They have been left with the impression that while some American leaders strenuously object to the policy – such as Speaker Boehner, who raised concerns about the one-child policy directly to Chinese President Hu Jintao in a meeting earlier this year – there are other American leaders, including the Vice President and President of the United States, who are willing to offer a wink and a nod, and let the Chinese government simply carry on with its reprehensible business.