The news that China was “abolishing” its one-child policy swept the cyberworld Thursday, trailing only stories about Rep. Paul Ryan’s ascension to the U.S. House speakership and Russian warplanes buzzing a U.S. carrier.
But the human rights atrocities, including forced abortion, that result from the policy won’t stop, according to the chief of an organization that has worked for years to abolish the policy.
News coverage has been misleading, because China is merely moving to a 2-child limit, said Reggie Littlejohn, the president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers.
“Instituting a two-child policy will not end forced abortion, gendercide or family planning regulations in China,” she told WND. “Couples will still have to have a birth permit for the first and the second child, or they may be subject to forced abortion.
“The core of the one-child policy is not … the number of children the government allows. It’s the fact that the government is setting a limit on children, and enforcing this limit coercively,” she said. “That will not change under a two-child policy. The one-child policy does not need to be modified. It needs to be abolished.”
She said women will still be forcibly aborted under a universal two-child policy.
“We need to keep up the pressure until China abandons all coercive population control,” she said.
China’s announcement was trumpeted by some of the world’s biggest media outlets, including the Daily Mail of London.
There, the headline read “China announces the end of its controversial one-child policy after growing fears over aging population.”
The report cited a communique from the ruling Communist Party.
The Daily Mail said there have been “growing concerns” because the population of China is aging and not replacing itself.
The birth limit was enacted nearly four decades ago.
Two years ago, China’s communists leaders admitted there were problems with the policy and said some families would be allowed two children.
But Littlejohn said the nation has created its own “demographic disaster,” because in a society that values male offspring, tens of millions of unborn females have been destroyed. Gone are the brides, wives and mothers that would have been helpmates for tens of millions of Chinese males who likely will never marry.
The Daily Mail had reported this week that a Chinese economics professor has suggested poor bachelors in China “group together and share a wife.”
The blog post by Xie Zuoshi, a professor at Zhejiang University of Finance, was a response to new statistics indicating China will have 30 million more men than women by 2020, because of the one-child policy.
The professor, who has had over 3 million visitors to his blog, deleted his Oct. 14 post, the Daily Mail said, but numerous Chinese news outlets have reported it verbatim.
The London paper said the policy means “tens of millions of men will remain single for their entire lives and grow old and die alone.”
“Within Chinese culture, this is unthinkable and has stirred considerable debate.”
Littlejohn called Xie’s proposal “an outrage” that “underscores the fact that the largest social experiment in the history of the world – the one-child policy – has resulted in an unmitigated demographic and social disaster.”
“Xie’s proposal ignores the fact that the reason there are 30 to 40 million more males living in China than females is that the females were selectively aborted – the ultimate form of discrimination against women,” she said.
“Now, Xie offers a ham-handed supply and demand analysis, with women as the ‘goods.’ The women who survived this ongoing gendercide epidemic are expected to be wives to ‘several’ men. The misogyny expressed in the selective abortion of baby girls would then lead to the commodification of women as wives of several men. The impetus driving this proposal is concern for the needs of men, without any concern for the rights or feelings of women.”
She said the “bizarre nature of Xie’s proposal – about which Xie insists he is ‘not joking’ – underscores the urgency of addressing China’s intractable gender imbalance, the greatest of any nation in the world, because of the unique pressure of the one-child policy.”
“Gendercide will not subside in China until the Chinese government abandons coercively enforced low birth limits,” she said.
She said Women’s Rights Without Frontiers calls on the Chinese government to enforce its ban on sex-selective abortion.
Her organization runs a Save a Girl Campaign, which sends a fieldworker to “appear at the door of a woman who is pregnant or who has just given birth, and is being pressured to abort or abandon her daughter, just because she is a girl.”
“We extend encouragement and practical help, offering a monthly stipend for a year to empower women to keep their daughters. We have saved almost 200 girls and are ending gendercide, one baby girl at a time.”
WND reported last month when President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping were back-patting each other at a joint appearance at the White House.
Xi, in comments that were translated, said at the White House that China and the United States have made “important progress” in their relationship.
“To grow our relationship under the new conditions, we must adapt to the changing times and to seize the positive momentum. I come to the United States this time to promote peace and advance cooperation,” he said.
Obama, likewise, was effusive.
“The United States is enriched by millions of proud Chinese Americans, including those who join us here this morning. So this visit reflects a history of friendship and cooperation between our two great peoples.”
But Women’s Rights Without Frontiers says the happy exchange of best wishes ignores reality.
In an open letter to the Chinese leader, the group wrote: “Today marks the 35th anniversary of the official institution of China’s barbaric One Child Policy, which has caused incalculable suffering to hundreds of millions of women and families of China. On this somber anniversary, you are in Washington D.C. on an official state visit.
“It is time for the coercive enforcement of the One Child Policy to end. It will not work to replace it [with] a ‘two-child policy’ as some of your advisers have suggested. Rather, official, state-sponsored forced abortion under the One Child Policy should be eradicated from the face of the earth, because it has caused more violence toward women and girls than any other official policy on earth, and any other official policy in the history of the world. Your government has boasted that it has ‘prevented’ more than 400 million births through this policy. These births have been prevented through forced abortions, involuntary sterilizations, confiscatory ‘terror fines,’ gendercide and infanticide – all in violation of international human rights law.”
A short time earlier, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers took a complaint about China’s “forced abortions, sexual slavery and gendercide” to the United Nations.
WND also reported the most recent Trafficking in Persons report from the U.S. blamed the problem partly on China’s failure to drop the practice of forced abortions.
The report said the Chinese government’s “birth limitation policy and a cultural preference for sons create a skewed sex ratio of 117 boys to 100 girls in China, which may serve to increase the demand for prostitution and for foreign women as brides for Chinese men.”
