The head of an organization that fights for the rights of women, especially in oppressive societies like China, is blasting the American government for upgrading Beijing's human rights rating even though there has been no substantive improvement.
The U.S. government's promotion of China from Tier 3 to Tier 2 status on its Watch List is "baseless and unwarranted," asserted Reggie Littlejohn, president of Womens Rights Without Frontiers.
"The Chinese government's efforts to remedy the problems that brought it to a 'Tier 3' status range from ineffective to non-existent," she said.
"WRWF urges the State Department to reconsider this promotion and return China to its rightful 'Tier 3' status."
Her organization has reported the Chinese government threatens women with "illegal" children, obstetricians there are caught trafficking infants and 200 million girls have simply "vanished" from Chinese society.
Littlejohn personally got involved when two Chinese sisters asked President Obama to help free their father, who was jailed in China for advocating for an education for them.
Her new comments followed the release by Washington of its 2014 Trafficking in Persons report.
"The report appears to attribute this promotion to a technical modification of the One Child Policy," Littlejohn said.
The State Department reasoned that the Chinese government "maintained efforts to prevent trafficking in persons."
"In November 2013, the government modified its birth limitation policy to allow families with one single-child parent to have a second child, a change that may affect future demand for prostitution and for foreign women as brides for Chinese men – both of which may be procured by force or coercion. TIP Report, p. 134."
Littlejohn said the fact that China "tweaked the one-child policy does not signify that it 'maintained efforts to prevent trafficking in persons.'"
"Allowing a relatively small number of families to have a second child will not end gendercide or sexual slavery in China," she said.
"The selective abortion and abandonment of baby girls is most prevalent in the countryside, where couples already can have a second child if the first child is a girl," Littlejohn explained. "Even if the most recent modification were to improve gender ratios at birth, the impact on sexual slavery would not be felt for decades to come."
She asked what will happen to all the women and girls who are being trafficked now.
"The TIP Report does not cite any effective new initiatives by the CCP to help current victims of sexual slavery," she said.
As WND reported, instead of requiring that both parents be only children in order to allow a second child in a family, it's now enough for one parent to be an only child.
Littlejohn has been a vocal critic of those who have argued that China is "easing" the one-child policy by lifting the ban on a second child under those circumstances.
"This minor modification does nothing to end the coercion that is the core of the policy," she said. "The problem is not whether the Chinese government allows a woman to have one child or two children. The problem is that the government is telling women how many children they can have and is enforcing that limitation with forced abortion."
She said forced abortion continues in China.
"WRWF is currently strategizing on how best to help a woman in China escape the forced abortion of her second child."
The 2013 report had demoted China to Tier 3, putting it in the same classification as Iran, Sudan and North Korea.
The 2013 report noted the deterioration in China's human rights, citing nations from which women are trafficked into China because years of the one-child policy combined with a preference for male heirs have left millions of Chinese men unable to find a wife.
"Women and children from neighboring Asian countries, including Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Singapore, Mongolia, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), as well as from Russia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, are reportedly trafficked to China for commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor," the 2013 report said.
"In the 2014 TIP Report, none of this has changed," Littlejohn said. "The 2013 and 2014 TIP Reports concerning China are substantially similar. The Chinese government has done nothing effectively to remedy the reasons it was demoted to a 'Tier 3' status. To the contrary, the 2014 TIP Report states that 'The People’s Republic of China did not provide detailed data on law enforcement efforts to combat trafficking in persons.'"
In calling for the State Department to review and reverse its decision, Littlejohn contended, "Equally unjustified is the 2014 TIP Report's claim that the Chinese government is abolishing the infamous RTL – Re-Education Through Labor, or Laojiao system."
Hundreds of thousands of people reportedly are detained arbitrarily without judicial review in that system and then subjected to forced labor and torture.
Littlejohn's organization said China has ignored the hundreds of millions of children killed through the nation's forced abortion one-child policy and practice.
She said it was the ultimate hypocrisy for the nation to be observing an international "Children's Day" while destroying its own children.
WRWF has launched its "Save a Girl" program to undermine China's one-child policy, which encourages couples to abort their female babies in favor of males, because of the culture's emphasis on male offspring.
According to Littlejohn, her group's network of fieldworkers on the ground in China visits women who are thinking of aborting or abandoning their baby girls.
"We offer them monthly stipends for a year to help them keep their daughters. The program has met with great success – women are choosing to keep their baby daughters, with our encouragement and help."
She said one recent example involves the mother of babies Bao-yo and Hui-ying, whose names have been changed for security reasons.
When their mother learned she was pregnant, she was thrilled, Littlejohn said.
"Soon, however, her in-laws began pressuring her to have a boy, so she went to a local hospital to have an ultrasound performed to determine the sex of the child," she said. "If it were a boy, she would have the baby. If it were a girl, she would abort. What would have been double her happiness turned to double despair: she was pregnant with not one, but two girls. When her husband's family found out the news, they were furious with their daughter-in-law. She didn't know what to do."
Littlejohn said a Women's Rights Without Frontiers' undercover fieldworkers found the frightened woman and told her about the group's 'Save a Girl' campaign.
"The pregnant mother and her husband could not believe an American organization would care about their daughters," she said. "Our fieldworker showed them pictures and told them stories of other families we have helped, other families who chose to join with us in believing that girls matter just as much as boys."
Littlejohn said the couple was "convinced and overjoyed."
"Through the aid of one year of WRWF monthly stipends, they chose to keep their baby girls and soon precious twins were born. Now, the mother-in-law who had been so furious has changed her attitude. She enjoys the two new angels in her life."
Littlejohn was in Hong Kong for the premier of a new movie about gendercide in China, "It's a Girl"Â She told WND it appears the world is becoming increasingly more aware of the violence perpetrated against infant girls in China and elsewhere.
See Women's Rights Without Frontiers explain "gendercide":
See the movie trailer: