Dear Steve,
I am a Woman’s Studies major at the University of Florida and have been working on a project concerning the Bush Administration’s de-funding of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). As I am sure you are aware, the administration has used China’s Law on Population and Family Planning to justify its refusal to fund the UNFPA since 2002, alleging that its presence in China constitutes a violation of Kemp-Kasten restrictions. In a 2004 column for the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star, Rick Mercier claims that it was at the urging of your organization that the President decided to investigate and eventually de-fund the UNFPA for its work in China, and your website makes it clear that this is an issue about which the Population Research Institute (PRI) is passionate. However, while China’s family planning program is in no way defensible, the way in which your institution frames the issue is rather problematic and leads to responses, which are less about constructive engagement than punition and moral imperialism.…
By focusing solely on the coercive aspects of China’s family planning program, the United States has missed out on opportunities to engage with Chinese reformers and has ignored the concrete realities of women all over the world in favor of promoting its own conservative agenda which not only ignores the needs of poor women but actively works against them. As Susan Greenhalgh reminded us in her address to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China in 2002, “the promising changes [occurring] in China have stemmed not from foreign criticism, but from a combination of international critique and constructive engagements with international organizations.” Thus, while China’s population control program may very well violate its citizens’ human rights, we will never effect positive change by denying funding to what Werner Fornos, president of the Population Institute, calls “virtually the only agency working to promote voluntarism in [China].’” Rather than simply criticizing China’s program and focusing on its negative features, I urge your organization to encourage our government to engage constructively with Chinese activists and government officials and support rather than punish organizations — like the UNFPA — who are currently working in a coercive context in the hope that it will someday become one in which women’s agencies in regards to fertility planning are recognized, promoted, and respected.
Amy L. Long, Florida
Dear Ms. Long,
Thank you for your long letter in defense of the UN Population Fund. I would like to confirm your suggestion that we played a key role in the defunding of this UN organization. This is a matter of public record, as is the fact that its complicity with China’s one-child policy caused it to forfeit any claim it might have on the U.S. taxpayer.
You fault us for “focusing solely on the coercive aspects of China’s family planning program,” but you will grant that the millions of forced abortions, sterilizations and IUD insertions continuing to occur in China each year are hard to ignore. As for S. Greenhalgh ’s claim saying a full quarter-century after the policy was put in place, that there are “promising changes “ in China, I do not believe that it is supported by the evidence.
Foreign apologists for this harsh and brutal program have been claiming almost from its inception that it was moderating and softening. Yet I am reliably informed by senior Chinese government officials that the PRC will continue the one-child policy indefinitely. The bare facts that a one-party dictatorship has a one-child policy is obviously the limiting factor here, not the intentions of foreigners, well-meaning or not.
Nor do I subscribe to the notion that anyone in China has made truly significant “internal critiques” of a policy that continues to be enforced against all opposition through extremely punitive measures, as even the New York Times and Time magazine have recently reported.
You suggest that instead of defunding the UNFPA, we should be encouraging our government to engage constructively with Chinese activists. Who can you possibly be referring to here? Certainly not the blind activist who, for his “crime” of reporting forced abortions of local women to the authorities, is now beaten by state goons every time he sets foot outside of his house (Had he not attracted notice in the Western press, of course, his fate would have been much, much worse. Need I describe it to you?)
As for Werner Fornos, whom you also quote in the UN Population Fund’s defense, he has long refused to debate me on this or any other topic, presumably because he is still recovering from our earlier, bruising encounters. What you must understand about Werner is that, like many others on your side of the issue, he is not a disinterested party. Not only is he a passionate population controller but — the last time I checked — his institute receives a generous annual subsidy from the UNFPA. It is extremely unlikely that, whatever atrocities China visits upon its young mothers under the watchful eye of the UNFPA, Werner will not continue to lick the hand that feeds him.
If you have not read A Mother’s Ordeal: One Woman’s Fight Against China’s One-Child Policy, then l urge you to do so. It accurately describes the way that China’s population control policy is being carried out today. It will also help you to escape from the rarefied accents of foreign apologists, and come to grips with the policy in the same gritty, concrete, and specific way that it impacts the lives of tens of millions of women in China today.
Steven W. Mosher
