Mosher argues that post-Mao China remained a one-party dictatorship with severe human rights abuses, from forced abortions to the persecution of Christians, Falun Gong practitioners, Tibetans, and Uyghurs — a system he says breeds “sociopathic megalomaniacs” absent democratic checks and balances. He recounts witnessing the one-child policy’s launch in March 1980, when local officials in his commune were ordered to cap population growth at 1 percent, resulting in house-to-house searches for “illegally” pregnant women. Early-term pregnancies were aborted with reluctant compliance, but 18 women in their seventh to ninth months refused; the CCP forcibly aborted them via cesarean section after lethal injections, with Mosher present in the operating room. He states the policy eliminated roughly 400 million people from China’s population, a fact a former Chinese health official bragged about in 2012 as a contribution to fighting global warming. The policy continued under Deng Xiaoping’s successors — Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping — until 2016, when China discovered a labor shortage. Relaxations to two- and then three-child policies failed to raise birth rates, which fell to just 12 million in 2020, near famine-era lows from the man-made Great Famine of 1960–62, which killed 42.5 million people. Mosher attributes low birth rates to decades of anti-natal propaganda and the crushing economic burden on only children caring for four grandparents. He predicts China may eventually mandate childbearing through coercive state control, just as it once mandated abortion.
1 How many people does the former head of China's National Health Service claim were eliminated by the one-child policy?
2 What method did the CCP use to forcibly abort women who were in their seventh to ninth months of pregnancy?
3 Under which leaders did the one-child policy continue after Deng Xiaoping?
4 Why did China finally begin relaxing the one-child policy in 2016?
5 What caused the Great Famine of 1960–1962, which killed 42.5 million people?
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