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An End to the One-Child Quota?
The scholar who exposed China’s brutal population-control campaign warns Western readers to be skeptical about reports that the government has eased its policies.

By Scott Weinberg

Late in the summer of 1999, many Western newspapers carried the welcome news that the Chinese government was no longer rigidly enforcing the quota that had allowed only one child for each married couple. But Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute has raised serious questions about the accuracy of those reports.

Mosher—whose 1984 book Broken Earth provided a detailed account of the Chinese policies, which routinely led to forced abortion and sterilization—believes that the reports of an easing in Beijing’s stance were the product of an international campaign to encourage American support for population control. Speaking at a Washington, DC conference on human rights in China, Mosher explained that in 1988, the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) had lost its American government funding because, in violation of a promise to the US Congress, the group had resumed its collaboration with the Chinese government. To mitigate congressional anger at its duplicity, Mosher speculated, the UNFPA then began a media campaign to try to convince the world that China’s one-child policy was a thing of the past.

However, Mosher continued, the UNFPA supporters who promoted that story “did not reckon on word of this campaign getting back to China. But it did.” Mosher continued:

On October 13, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji thought it necessary to correct the record. “China will continue to enforce its effective family planning policy in the new century,” said Premier Zhu, stressing that China would continue to make “family planning” a fundamental state policy.

In reality, Mosher insisted, there is no evidence that China is likely to ease up on enforcement of its family-planning campaign. On the contrary, he said: “The Chinese government has made it clear that the one-child policy will be continued into the foreseeable future.”

What is “voluntary”?

What does China mean, then, when it claims that its one-child policy is voluntary? Mosher explained:

There are cases in China where brute force is used to perform abortion and sterilization. But more commonly, the Chinese government abides by its own Orwellian definition of voluntary, which is to say that you can fine the woman; you can lock her up; you can subject her to morning-to-night brainwashing sessions; you can cut off the electricity to her house; you can fire her from her job; you can fire her husband from his job; and you can fire her parents from their jobs. All of this psychological mauling, sleep deprivation, arrest, and grueling mistreatment is inflicted upon these women in order to break their will to resist. But as long as the pregnant women walk the last few steps to the local medical clinic under their own power, then the abortions that follow are said by the government to be “voluntary.”

Mosher said that the Chinese government has failed to consider the social consequences of its policy:

In enforcing a one-child policy, the Chinese government has put the Chinese people in a position of having to reject their daughters in their desire to have sons. It has put parents in the position of having to choose between a son, who will support them in old age, or having a daughter who will go to live with her husband’s family upon marriage. The result is that little girls have to run a gauntlet from conception through birth. Many of them do not survive that gauntlet.

The first part of that gauntlet is sex-selective abortion. The second part is female infanticide. Mosher revealed: “Reports throughout the length and breadth of China reveal that little girls are dying shortly after birth in mysterious circumstances.” After twenty years of discouraging births, he added, the country is now observing a serious demographic imbalance between the sexes, so that “now there is a shortage of 30 million brides in China.”

China’s population-control policies are enforced with special vigor for members of ethnic minorities, Mosher reported, “in accord with China’s 1987 eugenics law which reflects a desire to ‘breed a better Chinese man, and a better Chinese woman.’” He argued that the Beijing regime is targeting minorities such as the Uyghur people in order to depress their birthrates below replacement. “In a few generations,” he concluded, “a declining Uyghur people will cease to be a threat to China’s ‘territorial integrity.’”

Scott Weinberg is director of communications for the Population Research Institute in Virginia.

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