President’s Page; The Population Controllers and Their War on People, part II

Last month I began sharing with you excerpts from my latest book. As I told you last month, from the reports I have heard from inside China, I felt forced to write another book on the situation. In the September/October issue of Population Research Institute Review, I began with the first half of the introduction, giving a short overview of the situation in China, past and present, personal experience of women there, world support for the one-child policy in China and efforts to carry it outside China. As promised, this issue holds the second half of that introduction. In future issues, I hope to share more excerpts. Again, thank you for your support which allowed me to write The Population Controllers and Their War on People.

Steven W. Mosher

The China Model

Two years later, in April 1991, Sadik made an equally breathtaking claim, gushing to a Chinese reporter that “China has every reason to feel proud of and pleased with its remarkable achievements made in its family planning policy and control of its population growth over the past 10 years. Now the country could offer its experiences and special experts to help other countries.”1 She added that the UNFPA was going to help “popularize China’s experiences in population growth control and family planning” in other countries.2

Those who wished to export the Chinese program, however, like Nafis Sadik, had a problem. Few governments were willing, and fewer still able, to implement the Chinese model in its totality. One of the few exceptions was Vietnam, whose government proved willing to accept the UNFPA’s help in designing a “two-child” policy similar to China’s, and which has a political system almost identical to its giant neighbor to the north. Today, just as in China, the UNFPA runs “model county” programs in Vietnam.

Although the Chinese model has proven difficult to export in its entirety, that hasn’t deterred the UNFPA and other population control organizations from imposing the program piecemeal on other countries. Governments have been encouraged by the UNFPA and other population control organizations to adopt Chinese-style (1) targets and quotas, (2) bribes and punishments, (3) organizational structures, and (4) promotional propaganda. Where these techniques have been successfully transplanted, they have given rise to systematic coercion, even in countries lacking a high degree of control. All that is required for this to happen, as John Aird has observed, is “a politically inert, uneducated, impoverished population and an established pattern of bureaucratic authoritarianism.”3 Quite a few countries in the developing world fit this description.

National Targets

China, in its effort to “control reproduction under a state plan,” has been setting targets since the 1970s for all kinds of population indices. There is a target for total population, a target for the birth rate, and a target for actual numbers of babies born. There are targets for the population increase rate and for how much the population can increase in absolute numbers in a given year. There are even targets for how many third births can be allowed (few to none), and for the numbers of women who must be sterilized and contracepted. And of course the “one-couple, one-child” policy is itself a target for family size.4

Following China’s lead, the UNFPA and other international agencies always insist that governments, at a minimum, set 10 or 15 year targets for family size and total population. Targets for such things as “number and percentage of contraceptive acceptors,” or “numbers and percentage of women sterilized,” are also pushed. Governments reluctant to set targets have been told by the World Bank and USAID that they will not receive grants and loans until they do.5 Targets and quotas, it should be noted, were banned by the 1994 Cairo population conference on the grounds that they always lead to abuses, but this prohibition has been largely ignored.

Bribes and Punishments for Officials

To keep its millions of population control cadres and officials on task and on target, China developed what it calls the “job responsibility system.” Each year, officials at each level of government pledge in writing to their superiors that they will meet their assigned birth control targets and quotas. Those who do so receive public commendations and cash awards, and are slotted for advancement. Those who fail are publicly reprimanded and fined, and may even be demoted. Repeated failure ends in complete disgrace: Loss of Party membership and dismissal from one’s post. Meeting targets is thus a career-maker — or breaker. No one should be surprised when Chinese officials pressure a pregnant woman into aborting an “over-quota” child, or lock up a mother of two until she “agrees” to sterilization. China’s leaders certainly aren’t: They designed the “job responsibility system” to ensure precisely this kind of outcome.6

Promoting the Chinese approach, international aid agencies such as the World Bank and USAID often make continued assistance to developing countries contingent on their attainment of family planning targets.7 National authorities, anxious over future funding prospects, then bear down on local officials, suggesting that assigned targets are to be attained by whatever means necessary, as happened in India. This approach has led Indian officials to compel submission to sterilization by withholding food rations, confiscating salaries, issuing strongly worded threats, and even resorting to the out-and-out use of physical force.8

Population Control Abuses Travel Outside of China

The Chinese practice of giving local administrators public commendations and awards for their achievements has also led to abuses in places like in Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Even national goals that have been set (with foreign encouragement) “for planning purposes only” have encouraged compulsory measures when local officials are judged on how well they meet them.9 Regional leaders in Indonesia may have imagined that they were only setting “planning” targets for numbers of contraceptive acceptors in their areas, but when local officials were then held responsible for maintaining them, massive abuses ensued.10

Bribes and Punishments for Families

Heavy pressure is brought to bear directly on families by a combination of bribes, threats, and punishments. Those who go along with the one-child policy are promised that their children will have preferential access to inoculations, education, and employment. Those who break the rules are not only denied such benefits (which adversely affects the welfare of their children}, but are threatened with extraordinarily heavy fines. According to regulations adopted in 1991 in Beijing municipality, the penalties for having a second child range from 5,000 to 50,000 yuan, and for having a third 20,000 to 100,000 yuan.11 Considering that the average rural family earns less than 1,000 yuan a year, fines of such magnitude seem spectacularly out of proportion, until one realizes that their true purpose is to deter couples from continuing out-of-plan pregnancies and submit to abortions. As incomes have risen in China, so have the fines been escalating, having been increased again as recently as 2002.12 They are deliberately kept so high as to be virtually unpayable.

Chinese-style threats and fines have been adopted in Indonesia, for example, where in the 1980s Balinese Hindus who refused to use birth control were threatened with expulsion from their villages.13 Even incentives can have the force of compulsion if they relate to vital necessities, as happened in Peru under the infamous sterilization campaign of dictator Alberto Fujimori.14 Poor, hungry women were told that to qualify for free food, or to receive needed medical care, they must submit to sterilization. Similar abuses occurred in Bangladesh in recent years, where the Chinese model has explicitly held up as one to be emulated.15

Group Pressure Tactics

To further discourage couples from having children outside the plan, the Chinese government deliberately generates “peer pressure” against potential rule-breakers by means of group rewards and punishments. Heilongjiang province, for example, bowed to peasant desires for sons (and rising rates of female infanticide) by announcing in 1988 that it was partially relaxing the one-child policy in the villages, but only if everyone cooperated. Rural couples whose first child was a boy would still have to stop at one. Couples whose first child was a girl would get a second chance at a male heir, but on one condition: There could be absolutely no unauthorized births in their village.16 Neighboring Liaoning province adopted a variant of the same policy, requiring that a village have no unauthorized births and all of its married women on birth control before it could qualify for second births. If even one illegal baby was born, all second births would be forbidden that year. The policy was said to have “strengthened group awareness” among Liaoning’s peasants.17 No doubt it did, for it forced families expecting legal second children to be constantly alert for women pregnant outside the plan. For if even a single slacker gave birth, then they would all have to have abortions. It is hard to imagine the intense hostility, even hysteria, that this policy would generate in a small, tightly knit rural community toward anyone who threatened to break the rules. No wonder the head of China’s State Family Planning Council, Ms. Peng Peiyun, publicly praised this pressure tactic as a way of “tightening up” family planning work, recommending that it be implemented throughout the country.18

Similar tactics are used in the cities, where the one-child policy continues to be strictly enforced. Workers in a given factory or department are denied bonuses, awards, expansion plans, and other benefits if even one of their number has an unauthorized child. Women who get pregnant outside the plan are immediately ostracized by their fellow workers and put under tremendous pressure to abort.19 As a result, as China demographer John Aird has observed, in urban China compliance with the one-child rule is almost total.20

These Chinese group pressure tactics have been put to effective use elsewhere. In India, some villages have been denied access to irrigation water at subsidized prices until they came up with the required number of sterilizations.21

Long-Term Contraception/Sterilization

From the beginning of the one-child policy, the Chinese authorities have followed a simple rule: Sterilize or implant IUDs in a woman after the birth of her first child; sterilize her after the birth of her second. The advantage for China’s family planning officials of such methods is obvious: They no longer have to maintain constant surveillance over women of childbearing age to make sure that they are not trying to start an unauthorized pregnancy or concealing one. In China the government-run clinics will remove an IUD on request only if it is causing severe side-effects, and then only if the woman agrees to use another birth control method, preferably a long-term implant like Norplant or an injectable like Depo-Provera. For a woman to remove her own IUD is defined as a criminal act. Those who wish to do so must rely on illegal operations that often involve dangerous methods and unsanitary conditions. Back-alley IUD removals, one might call them.

This component of the Chinese program has proven so successful in China that it is becoming a standard feature of family planning programs worldwide. This shift from contraceptives, such as birth control pills and condoms, that are controlled by the user, to more permanent measures — intrauterine devices, sterilization, and long-term implants and injectables — more easily imposed on the user, has been underway for two decades now. The result has been marked decrease in the freedom of couples in the developing world to decide for themselves the number and spacing of their children.

Women pressured into adopting such measures may change their minds later, but there is often little they can do about it, especially if the family planning clinics refuse to reverse the sterilization or remove the IUD, or charge exorbitant fees for doing so. In Bangladesh and Haiti women suffering from acute side-effects from Norplant implants accepted as part of an “experimental” program were reportedly told the device could not be removed.22 Too poor to seek alternate medical care, they had no choice but to endure their debilitating chemical sterilization until the five-year implant had run its course.

Promotional Propaganda

China’s state-controlled media has bombarded the Chinese for a quarter century with anti-people propaganda, to the point where many otherwise educated Chinese believe the Party when it claims that China’s principal problem is too many people (rather than, say, absence of democratic rule. massive official corruption, lack of the rule of law, insecure property rights, etc., etc.) Dissenting voices are not tolerated. In January 1994 two Chinese newspapers were reportedly punished for printing articles favoring second births and “opposing family planning.”23

The Chinese are constantly told that the country’s demographic situation is “grim,” that economic progress is imperiled, and that even the food supply is in grave danger because of excessive population growth.24 Not only does the government propaganda machine constantly churn out claims that population control is vital to China’s continued economic development in the long run, it insists that even failing to meet current targets will mean social and economic ruin for the whole country. Thus does the propaganda help to justify coercion. Even if Chinese couples were not subject to compulsion where the bearing of children was concerned, the constant barrage of propaganda (“persuasion,” in Chinese Communist parlance) would forge anti-natal fetters on their minds.

One-Sided Propaganda

One-sided propaganda does not require a controlled press. In much of the world, all it requires is money. Even in democratic countries, including the United States, media discussion of population problems is dominated by the deep pockets of the anti-people movement. Literally tens of millions of dollars are spent each year by the movement to convince the world’s press — and through them the world’s people — of the gravity of the “population crisis.” The UNFPA alone devotes approximately $25 million, or 10 percent of its quarter-billion dollar budget, to conjuring up specters of calamity and catastrophe. This headline-grabbing effort has paid off, as the U.S. media has repeatedly run with the UNFPA bad news bears:

  1. “The United Nations yesterday asked people everywhere to pause July 11 [1987] and contemplate the bleak future of Baby 5 Billion, the child whose birth will push the Earth’s population over the 5 billion mark.”

  2. “Nutrition levels are dropping and infant mortality may once again be on the rise.” [1987] [Not true, as we will see in Chap. 5]

  3. “‘The world’s population is growing by three people every second. And unless this is curbed, most gains so far achieved and improving quality of life will be swept away,’ the U.N. Population Fund said today.” [Not true. as we will see in Chap. 5]

  4. “U.N. report warns of population ‘catastrophes.”’

  5. “U.N. says 4 billion will be living in hunger by the year 2050.” [2001] [This is many times higher than the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) would claim or project.]25

Propaganda Means Money

In the U.S. and other developed countries, the purpose of such propaganda is to generate popular and political support (read: funding) for more population control programs. Even when these efforts fail, as when the Bush administration announced in 2002 that it would no longer fund the UNFPA, the major media accepted that organization’s sob story that it was an innocent victim of U.S. abortion politics. The incontrovertible fact that it was deeply involved in real abuses in China was largely ignored.

In the developing world, as in China, such propaganda has a different purpose: It is designed to directly affect couples’ reproductive behavior by predisposing them not to have additional children, and thus help meet national targets. As John Aird has noted, “[Such] one-sided propaganda . ., does not meet international standards for “freedom of information” and would not even if the contraceptive decisions of individual… couples were entirely voluntary.”26

The UNFPA in China Today

The controllers’ symbiotic relationship with Chinese-style family planning continues. Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, newly appointed executive director of the UNFPA, told a PRC journalist in January 2002 that “China, having adopted practical measures in accordance with her current situation, has scored remarkable achievements in population control. In recent years, the UNFPA and China have carried out a series of favorable and positive cooperation with more than 100 cooperative items of assistance established in the country.”27

The most curious development occurred in 1998, when the UNFPA announced that it had been invited by the Chinese government to set up “model family planning programs” in 32 of China’s counties, or county-level municipalities. Nafis Sadik, then-director of UNFPA, let it be known that the Chinese government had agreed to suspend the one-child policy during the next four years. In her words, “In the project counties couples will be allowed to have as many children as they want, whenever they want, without requiring birth permits or being subject to quotas.”28 In a later letter to the U.S. Congress about the new program, Sadik was even more specific. Within the UNFPA’s 32 model counties, she said,

  1. reproductive health programs are fully voluntary;

  2. women are free to voluntary select the timing and spacing of their pregnancies;

  3. targets and quotas have been lifted;

  4. abortion is not promoted as a method of family planning;

  5. coercion does not exist.

Although her claim to have set up a “no-coercion zone” in China was later to be proved false by Population Research Institute investigators, it was by itself a remarkable, if backhanded, admission of the real state of affairs in China. For up to that point it had been the steadfast position of the Chinese government — maintained also by the UNFPA itself — that the one-child policy neither relied upon birth quotas and targets, nor required parents to obtain a birth permit prior to having a child. Anyway, why would the Chinese government abandon controls that had successfully driven down the birth rate for two decades? “The Government of China is keen to move away from its administrative approach to family planning to an integrated, client-centered reproductive health approach,” the UNFPA sought to explain.29 (italics added) But the Chinese government did not have to be sold by the UNFPA or anyone else on the idea of replacing direct coercion with the more subtle forms of threats, bribes and propaganda that the controllers commonly employ to stop Third World families from having children. Senior Chinese family planning officials have always urged their juniors to employ such techniques to meet their quotas, reserving forced abortions and forced sterilizations for the truly recalcitrant.

Josephine Guy Visits China

We at PRI thought UNFPA’s claims to have de-fanged China’s family planning program extravagant. So in September 2001 we organized a team of investigators, led by paralegal Josephine Guy, to go undercover into a UNFPA “model county.” After four days in Sihui county, Guangdong province, Ms, Guy reported back that people had flocked to tell her about the abuses that they and their families have suffered as a result of still-coercive family planning policies. As she was later to testify before the International Relations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives:

We were told of efforts by many women to hide their pregnancies from government officials, in an attempt to escape forced abortion, so they could give birth to a child they desired. We were told of women having to hide their children, to escape retribution from officials for not having an abortion. We were told of the many so-called “black” children in the region who are born out of accord with local birth regulations. We were told of the punishments inflicted on those who wish to freely determine for themselves the timing and spacing of pregnancy.

We were told of the non-voluntary use of IUDs and mandatory examinations so that officials can ensure that women have not removed IUDs in violation of policy, and the strict punishments which result from non-compliance with this coercive and inhumane policy. .… The interviews we conducted were recorded in notebooks, on audio and videotape, and additional photographic evidence was obtained. The abuses we documented during this investigation are recent, ongoing, rampant, and unrelenting. And they exist in a county where the United Nations Population Fund claims that women are free to determine the timing and spacing of pregnancy.

At a location not far from [the UNFPA] office, a woman testified that she became pregnant despite an earlier attempt by family planning officials to forcibly sterilize her. That attempt failed. She became pregnant, and was forcibly sterilized a second time by family planning doctors and officials. Had she refused, she told us on videotape, then family planning crews would have torn her house down.30

Everyone Ms. Guy spoke with had a story to tell — a sister who had been sterilized, a friend who had been forcibly aborted. People spoke of women who had gone underground to save their babies, and of family members arrested and homes destroyed in an effort to force them out of hiding. Young women told of how they had been ordered in for abortions, because they had conceived children before the legal age of marriage.31 There is no voluntarism in Sihui, she concluded, despite UNFPA claims to the contrary.

UNFPA Works Hand-in-Glove with Local Family Planners

On her last day in Sihui, Ms. Guy and her team set out to locate the office from which the UNFPA directs its “model family planning program.” To her surprise, she was directed to the Sihui county family planning office, where she found the single UNFPA representative sitting in the midst of government family planners. The significance of this arrangement was immediately apparent: The Chinese government and the UNFPA were working hand-in-glove to enforce the one-child policy.

Thoraya Obaid ducked an invitation to testify at this same congressional hearing, lamely responding that UNFPA’s China program is completely “voluntary” and does not “condone coercion.” In an argument echoed by many of her camp followers, she suggested that UNFPA is a force for the good in China. In actuality, there is reason to believe that UNFPA’s “model county” program may be making things worse, not better. Why? Because being designated a “model” anything in China brings with it not only increased benefits — in Sihui’s case a grant from the UNFPA — but also increased scrutiny from the central government. Local officials in Sihui are doubtless under considerable pressure from on high to prove that the county is indeed a “model” in family planning. And how would they do so’? By contracepting all women with one child, sterilizing all women with two, and aborting all women pregnant outside the plan, that’s how. As one family planning victim told Ms. Guy, “Family planning policies involving coercion and force are stricter today than ever before.”32

PRI and Bush Administration

Population Research Institute’s investigation of China prompted the Bush administration to undertake one of its own, sending a three-member assessment team to the PRC in May 2002. The “official” nature of the visit constituted a tremendous handicap for the team, for it ensured that the Chinese state was able to monitor their comings and goings, and ensure that they did not come into direct contact with cases of coercion. Nonetheless, visiting one UNFPA “model county” the team discovered that women who have more than one child are hit with a crippling fine equivalent to two to three years’ income. These “social compensation fees” are deliberately set high, the team concluded, in order to force mothers to have abortions. The team also noted that UNFPA supplies computers and medical equipment to family planning offices engaged in coercive practices. “In the context of the PRC,” the Bush administration concluded in a later review, “supplying equipment to the very agencies that employ coercive practices amounts to support or participation in the management of the program.” Computers allow Chinese family planning officers “to establish a database record of all women of child-bearing age in an area and to trigger the issuance of ‘birth-not-allowed’ notices.” UNFPA also helps to “propagate the government’s distinction between legal births and out-of-plan births … [and] takes credit for posted documents that note that is forbidden ‘to prevent legal births’ — thus bearing partial responsibility for disseminating the message that it is not forbidden for government employees to prevent out-of-plan births.”33 On 21 July 2002 Secretary of State Colin Powell dropped the ax: “UNFPA’s support of, and involvement in, China’s population-planning activities allows the Chinese government to implement more effectively its program of coercive abortion. Therefore, it is not permissible to continue funding UNFPA at this time.”34 The $34 million appropriated by Congress for FY 2002, he went on, will go instead to Child Survival and Health programs.

Powell called on the UNFPA to stop “support[ing] a program of coercive abortion,” but the population control agency appears determined to mire itself even more deeply in the muck of China’s program. The agency reacted to the cut-off in U.S. funding by expanding its program in China from 32 to 42 counties. The new, multi-million dollar deal with China will carry through 2007.

The China Model

The UNFPA’s support for China’s one-child policy began in 1979, the year I first arrived in China. But our reaction to the unfolding campaign could not have been more different. It took me about six months to conclude that the forced abortions and forced sterilizations I was witnessing on the local level in Guangdong were not provincial aberrations, but part of a centrally inspired campaign of coercion by design. A quarter century later, the UNFPA not only refuses to pass judgment on the coercive aspects of China’s program, it denies this fundamental. observable fact about life and death in China. Why? And, even more importantly, why has it continued to praise, fund, and promote a coercive program in China despite overwhelming evidence of its compulsory character?

China’s one-child policy constitutes a kind of acid test of the character of the population control movement, for it pits their beliefs against their principles. Here was a country they believed was desperately overcrowded and on the brink of disaster (it wasn’t and isn’t, as we shall see). Here was a country which, in solving its own “population problem,” would simultaneously relieve “population pressure” throughout the globe. Or so they believed. The problem was that China’s forced-pace measures violated certain fundamental principles that the movement claimed to hold dear, namely, voluntarism and human rights, specifically the right of couples to freely determine the number and spacing of their children.

Failure

The population control movement has failed this test, sacrificing their principles (and, it must be said. their humanity) on the altar of their beliefs. They fell prey to the fallacy that China must reduce its numbers at all costs, even if fundamental human rights are systematically, even brutally, violated along the way. For if they won’t condemn the forced abortion of women who are nine months pregnant, then there is no birth control measure they will not praise. If they will not reject the forced sterilization of a woman who desires more children, then there is no form of involuntary contraception they will not embrace. If they do not reject China’s program as a great evil, then there is no population control program, however horrific, that they will not accept as good as long as the birth rate is falling. In the end, only the numbers count.

China is often portrayed in the media as an extreme case of population control, but what does that say about the UNFPA, the IPPF, and other international organizations which have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Beijing all these years? What you see in China — the generous foreign funding and repeated endorsements from leading elements of the population control establishment, the promotion of China’s program as a model for other “overpopulation” countries — suggests that, despite occasional twinges of discomfort occasioned by the more Draconian manifestations of China’s policy, there is essentially no difference between the Chinese state and its control-minded friends on population matters. They are joined at the hip.

Decrease Population

The population controllers continued sponsorship of the “China model” also sends an unmistakable, if unspoken, signals to Third World governments. What else are they to conclude from this shameless embrace of China than:

Moderation in pursuit of family planning is no virtue. The urgency of world population problems, in the view of international agencies, demands targets and forced-pace measures to reach them.

Extremism in pursuit of population targets is no vice. Coercion will be viewed with tolerance, if not approval, by international agencies providing development assistance.

International aid for family planning and other forms of development assistance will never be called into question for being too severe, regardless of the level of human rights abuses. (And its corollary: Funding will be in jeopardy if programs are seen as either too lax or as ineffective in reducing the birth rate.)

This message — that anything goes in the name of population control — is underscored each time the controllers extol China’s one-child policy, as Thoraya Obaid did upon taking office in January 2001. Obaid “praised that (sic) over the past 20 years, China has seen notable achievements made in population control by implementing the family planning policy. It has thereupon played an active role in curbing the population growth across the world.”35 (italics added)

The only thing that really matters to the controllers, you see, is getting the birth rate down. “Just do it,” as Deng Xiaoping said. And the controllers said, “amen.”

Editor’s Note: Watch future issues of Population Research Institute Review for other interesting installments of The Population Controllers and Their War on People.

Endnotes

1 XINHUA-English, Beijing, 11 April 1991, Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), Daily Report: China, no. 91–071, 12 April 1991, pp. 8–9; See also John Aird, “The China Model,” PRI Review 4:4 (July-August 1994), p. 1.

2 Although Sadik did not know it at the time, the same month that she endorsed the Chinese model, Party leaders had ordered a new crackdown on out-of-plan births. Family planning officials throughout the country resorted to more direct forms of coercion, and the Chinese birth rate plummeted to unprecedentedly low levels. News of the crackdown finally broke in April 1993, embarrassing the UNFPA and other foreign supporters of China’s “voluntary” program. Sadik, eager for the U.S., to resume funding her organization, aired the possibility of withdrawing from China. When the newly installed Clinton administration proved willing to resume US funding of the UNFPA in spite of its involvement in China’s coercive program, all talk of withdrawal was dropped. See Nicholas D. Kristof, “A U.N. agency may leave China over coercive birth control,” The New York Times, 15 May 1993, p. 1.

3 John Aird, “The China Model,” PRI Review 4:4 (July-August 1994), p. 3.

4 John Aird, “The China Model,” PRI Review 4:4 (July-August 1994), p. 3.

5 Also see Betsy Hartmann, “Population Control as Foreign Policy,’ Covert Action 39 (Winter 1991–92), p. 28.

6 For example, according to Article 4 of the Tianjin Municipality Regulations of Planned Birth, which were promulgated on 15 April 1994, this major city in North China holds the heads of work units “duty-bound, Authorized, and accountable” for meeting birth quotas set by their superiors. Xinnanliuxing Village of Dongpuhwa Township in Wuqing County, Tianjin, which has a population of 500, is allowed a quota of 5 children every two years. As Harry Wu comments, “If [officials] fail to meet their quotas], they will lose their promotions and risk dismissal or punishment. This is the principal reason why Communist cadres at all levels resort to desperate, barbaric practices of forcing abortion and sterilization, and killing infants. Such a practice relates directly to the security of their jobs.” See Harry Wu, “China’s population policy,” PRI Review 11:4 (September-October 2001), p. 7.

7 Also see Betsy Hartmann, “Population Control as Foreign Policy,’ Covert Action 39 (Winter 1991–92), p. 28.

8 John Aird, “The China Model,” PRI Review 4:4 (July-August 1994), p. 3.

9 Donald P. Warwick, Bitter Pills: Population Policies and Their Implementation in Eight Developing Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 203–204; Margot Cohen, “Success brings new problems,” Far Eastern Economic Review, Hong Kong, 18 April 1991, pp. 48–49; Wardah Hafidz, Adrina Taslim, and Sita Aripurnami, “Family planning in Indonesia: the case for policy reorientation,” Inside Indonesia, March 1992, pp. 19–22; and Judith Banister, “Vietnam’s evolving population policies,” International Conference on Population, New Delhi, September 1989, (Liege: International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, 1989), pp. 156–60.

10 Donald P. Warwick, The Indonesian Family Planning Program: Government Influence and Client Choice 12:3 (September 1986), pp. 453–490.

11 Cited in ‘Tao-tai Hsia and Constance A. Johnson, “Recent legal developments in China’s planned births campaign” (unpublished memorandum), 9 July 1991, p. 2. Beijing municipality includes extensive rural areas and populations. Quoted in John Aird, “The China Model,” PRI Review 4:4 (July-August 1994), p. 3.

12 Damien McElroy, “China’s One-Child Policy Fine Rises,” The London Telegraph, 30 July 2002.

13 Donald P. Warwick, “The Ethics of Population Control,” Godfrey Roberts (ed) Population Policy: Contemporary Issues (New York: Praeger, 1990), p. 26.

14 See Chapter 2.

15 “In December 1991 the president of Bangladesh, welcoming a family planning delegation from China headed by Peng Peiyun, the Minister of China’s State Family Planning commission, praised China’s success in population control and expressed the hope that Bangladesh and China could learn from each other’s experiences. XINHUA-English, Beijing, 9 December 1991, FBIS, no 910237, 10 December 1991, p. 20.

16 Haerbin radio, Heilongjiang Provincial Service, 20 April 1988, FBIS, No 88–82, 28 April 1988; Meng Fang and Chen Fenglan, “Heilongjiang sheng kaizhan cang wu jihua wai shengyu cun houdong qude chengxiao” (Heilongjian Province carries out activities to create villages with no unplanned births and obtains results,”) Zhongguo renkou bao (China Population) (ZGRKB), Beijing, 7 October 1988, p. 2. Quoted in John Aird, “The China Model,” PRI Review 4:4 (July-August 1994), p. 3.

17 Yin Su and Li Zheng, “Liaoning Kaizhan cangjian ‘Jihua shengyu hege cun’ quanmian quanche jihua shengyu xianxing zhengce” (“Liaoning carries out activities for establishing ‘qualified family planning villages’ “and “Implements the current family planning policy fully”), ZGRKB, 30 September 1988, p. 1. Quoted in John Aird, “The China Model,” PRI Review 4:4 (July-August 1994), p. 3

18 Peng Peiyun, “Guanyu 1989-nian de gongzuo” (“On the work in 1989”), ZGRKB, 24 February 1989, p. 1. Quoted in John Aird, “The China Model,” PRI Review 4:4 (July-August 1994), p. 3.

19 For example, see the policy as described in a letter from a Chinese factory manager to a Chinese employee studying in the U.S. who had an unauthorized pregnancy that I quote in my article, “The long arm of ‘one-child’ China,” The Washington Post, 10 April 1998, B4. See also my A Mother’s Ordeal: One Woman’s Fight Against China’s One-Child Policy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993).

20 John Aird, “The China Model,” PRI Review 4:4 (July-August 1994), p. 3.

21 Donald Warwick, pp. 197–198.

22 UBINIG, “The Price of Norplant is TK.2000! You Cannot Remove It,” Issues in Reproductive and Genetic Engineering 4:1 (1991), p. 46. Cited in John Aird, “The China Model,” PRI Review 4:4 (July-August 1994), p. 4.

23 “Propaganda department tightens control on press,” Ming bao, Hong Kong, 15 January 1994, FBIS, no. 94–011, 18 January 1994, p. 17.

24 These arguments are still being advanced despite the continuing growth of the Chinese economy in the high single digits. China’s grain production is reported to have increased by 50 percent between 1929 and 1993 while the population grew by less than 22 percent. The grain figures are given in XINHUA-English, Beijing, 16 September 1993, FBIS, no. 94–027, p. 37.

25 The headlines come from Nicholas Eberstadt, “UNFPA: A Runaway Agency,” PRI Review 12:3 (May-June 2002), p. 1.

26 John Aird, “The China Model,” PRI Review 4:4 (July-August 1994), p. 4.

27 People’s Daily, March 2001, quoted in Christopher Smith, “Judging a Civilization,” PRI Review, 11:4 (September-October 2001), p. 8.

28 Letter from Nafis Sadik to Mr. Bill Richardson dated 7 January 1998 and quoted in “Aiding a Holocaust: New UNFPA Program Designed to Tidy Up One-child Horror,” PRI Review 7:2 March/April 1998), p. 14. Of course, since the Founding Charter of the UNFPA says that “couples have the rights to decide the number and spacing of their children,” and given that China has from the inception of the one-child policy denied that right, the only honorable course of action for the UNFPA is to withdraw from China — but that it refuses to do.

29 Kirsten Trone, the UNFPA program director for China, quoted in “Aiding a Holocaust: New UNFPA Program Designed to Tidy Up One-child Horror,” PRI Review 7:2 (March/April 1998), p. 14.

30 Josephine Guy, “Women and Child Abuse in China,” Testimony before the Committee on International Relations of the U.S. House of Representatives, 17 October 2001. See also PRI Review 11:4 (September-October 200l), p. 3.

31 See the stories of Li Aihai and Ah Fang with which this chapter begins.

32 Josephine Guy, “Women and Child Abuse in China,” Testimony before the Committee on International Relations of the U.S. House of Representatives, 17 October 2001. See also PRI Review 11:4 (September-October 200l), p. 3.

33 “Analysis of Determination that Kemp-Kasten Amendment Precludes further Funding to UNFPA under Pub. Law 107–115,” attachment to letter from Secretary Colin Powell to Patrick J. Leahy, Chairman Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, Committee on Appropriations, U.S. Senate, 21 July 2002.

34 Letter from Secretary Colin Powell to Patrick J. Leahy, Chairman Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, Committee on Appropriations, U.S. Senate, 21 July 2002.

35 People’s Daily, March 2001, quoted in Christopher Smith, “Judging a Civilization,” PRI Review 11:4 (September-October 2001), p. 8.

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