The Myth of Overpopulation Part 3: The Chinese Model
The Myth of Overpopulation Part 3 - The Chinese Model
Note: The following is excerpted from Steven Mosher’s book, Population Control-Real Costs, Illusory Benefits.
We have had sufficient experience now with population programs to realize that they can easily become a vehicle for elite pressure on the poor. I fear that the elevation to legitimacy of “beyond voluntary family planning” measures lends itself to precisely such pressure. … Of course one might claim that such measures are in the 'ultimate' interest of the poor, but this view leaves one in the uncomfortable position of having to define the person, group, or institution that is better able to judge the interests of the poor than the poor themselves.
From Richard Easterlin,
World Development Report 1984 Review Symposium 1.
Li Aihai, happily married and the mother of a 2½-year-old girl, had a problem. She was four months pregnant with her second child. Sihui county family planning officials had come to her home and told her what she already knew: She had gotten pregnant too soon. She hadn’t waited until her daughter was four years old, as Chinese law required of rural couples. The officials assured her that, because her first child had been a girl, she would eventually be allowed a second child. But they were equally insistent that she would have to abort this one. It was January, 2000.
She pleaded that she had not intended to get pregnant. She was still wearing the IUD that they had implanted in her after the birth of her first child, as the law required. They were unsympathetic. Report to the family planning clinic tomorrow morning, they told her as they were leaving. We’ll be expecting you.
Aihai had other plans. Leaving her little daughter in the care of her husband, she quietly packed her things and went to stay with relatives in a neighboring county. She would hide until she brought her baby safely into the world. Childbirth-on-the-run, it was called.
When the county family planning officials discovered that Aihai had disappeared, they began arresting her relatives. While her father-in-law managed to escape with her daughter, her mother-in-law and brother-in-law were arrested. Her own mother and father, brother and sister, and three other relatives were also imprisoned over the next few weeks. In all nine members of her extended family were arrested, hostages to the abortion that was being demanded of her.
But Aihai, knowing that her family supported her pregnancy, stayed in hiding. And her relatives, each refusing to tell the officials where she had gone to ground, stayed in jail.
Three months later the family planning officials struck again. The date they chose, April 5, was an important one on the Chinese traditional calendar. It was the festival of Qingming, or “bright and clear,” a day on which rural Chinese men, by ancient custom, “sweep the graves” of their ancestors. Starting with the grave of their own deceased parents, they visit in turn the graves of grandparents, great-grandparents, and ancestors even further removed. At each stop they first clean off the headstones and weed the plot, and then set out a feast for the deceased, complete with bowls of rice, cups of rice liquor, and sticks of incense.
Why did the family planning officials pick this day of all days? Was it a further insult to the Li family, several of whom were languishing in their jail? Or was the day chosen for a very practical reason: With most of the men and boys away in the hills feting their ancestors, the village would be half-deserted, and they could carry out their plan without opposition.
The family planning officials came to the village in the company of a wrecking crew armed with crowbars and jackhammers. These fell upon Aihai’s home like a horde of angry locusts. They shattered her living room and bedroom furniture into pieces. They ripped window frames out of walls and doors off of hinges. Then the jackhammers began to pound, shattering the brick walls, and to knocking great holes in the cement roof and floors. By the time they completed their work of destruction, you could stand on the first floor of Aihai’s home and look up through two stories and the roof to the blue sky above. The wrecking crew then moved on to her parents’ house, and then to her in-laws’. At day’s end, three homes lay in ruins. The family planning officials confiscated the family’s livestock and poultry, and then disappeared.
Aihai remained in hiding, out of reach of the family planning officials, for two more months. It wasn’t until her child was actually born, she knew, that he would be safe. Abortions in China are performed up to the very point of parturition, and it is not uncommon for babies to be killed by lethal injection even as they descend in the birth canal. Only after she had given birth—to a beautiful baby boy—did she make plans to return home.
Aihai came back to find her family in prison, her home destroyed, and family planning officials furious that she had thwarted their will. Underlying their anger was hard calculation: Every “illegal” child born in their county was a black mark on their performance, depressing annual bonuses and threatening future promotions. But family planning officials, like most Chinese officials, have access to other sources of income. If you want your relatives released, they now told Aihai, you must pay a fine of 17,000 Renminbi (RMB) (about US$2,000). Now this is a huge sum by Chinese standards, the equivalent of two or three years' income. It was many days before she was able to beg and borrow enough from family and friends to satisfy the officials’ demands, and win her family’s release.
No sooner had she paid one fine than she was told she owed another, if she wanted to regularize her son’s status. He was currently a “black child,” family planning officials explained to her. Because he was conceived outside of the family planning law, he did not exist in the eyes of the state. As a nonperson, he would be turned away from the government clinic if he fell ill, barred from attending a government school of any kind, and not considered for any kind of government employment later in life. He would not even be allowed to marry or start a family of his own. The government had decreed that “black children” would not be allowed to reproduce; one generation of illegals was enough. There was an out, however. If she were able to pay another fine of 17,000 RMB, however, her son would be issued a national identity number, and would be treated like everyone else—almost. She would still be required to pay double fees for his school supplies.
She was not surprised when she was ordered to report for sterilization. The population control regulations, she knew, were unyielding in this regard. Two children and your tubes are tied. This time she made no effort to resist the authorities. Having a second child had bankrupted her family. Having a third was out of the question. Her newborn son would have no younger siblings.
Even so, Aihai considers herself far more fortunate than Ah Fang, the wife of a neighboring villager. Married at 19 to an older man in a time-honored village ceremony in front of dozens of relatives and friends, Ah Fang is considered by everyone she knows to be his wife. Everyone, that is, but the local Communist authorities, whose unbending family planning regulations prohibit women from marrying until they reach the age of 23.
When Ah Fang became pregnant there was no chance that she would be allowed to carry her child to term, even though it would have been her first. The one-child policy does not apply to couples who are, in the view of the Chinese state, merely cohabiting. For them—and for single mothers of all ages—there is a zero-child policy. Ah Fang was ordered to present herself at the local clinic for an abortion. She went in as instructed on September 27, 2001. She has been careful not to criticize the authorities, but her friends have been less reticent. “She wanted to keep her baby,” they complain openly, “but the law forbade it.”
Such personal tragedies, far from being rare, could easily be multiplied almost beyond belief. I met many “Li Aihai”s and “Tang Ah Fang”s (the names are, of course, pseudonyms) while living in a village in Guangdong province from 1979 to 1980, and have met many in the years since. But it would be impossible to know them all. For the history of China’s 25-year experiment in “controlling reproduction under a state plan” is littered with literally millions—no, tens of millions—of such victims of forced abortion and forced sterilization.
At the beginning of 1980, the Guangdong provincial government secretly ordered a 1 percent cap on population growth for the year. Local officials complied the only way they could—by launching a family planning “high tide” soon thereafter to terminate as many pregnancies as possible. The rules governing this high tide were simple: No woman was to be allowed to bear a second child within four years of her first, and third children were strictly forbidden. Furthermore, all women who had borne three or more children by November 1, 1979, were to be sterilized.
Over the next few weeks I became an eyewitness to every aspect of this draconian campaign. I went with young mothers to family planning “study sessions” where they were browbeaten by senior Party officials for getting pregnant. I followed them as they were unwillingly taken under escort to the commune clinic. I watched—with the permission of local officials who were eager to demonstrate their prowess in birth control to a visiting foreigner—as they were aborted and sterilized against their will. I will never forget the pain and suffering etched on the faces of these women as their unborn children, some only days from birth, were brutally killed with chemical weapons—poison shots—and then dismembered with surgical knives.
The demands of China’s family planners escalated as the eighties unfolded. The one-child policy, first suggested by Deng Xiaoping in a hard-line 1979 speech, was in place nationwide by 1981. The “technical policy on family planning” followed two years later. Still in force today, the “technical policy” requires IUDs for women of childbearing age with one child, sterilization for couples with two children (usually performed on the woman), and abortions for women pregnant without authorization. By the mid-eighties, according to Chinese government statistics, birth control surgeries—abortions, sterilizations, and IUD insertions—were averaging more than thirty million a year. Many, if not most, of these procedures were performed on women who submitted only under duress.
The principal modification of the one-child policy occurred in the mid- to late-eighties when, in response to rising rates of female infanticide, the government relaxed the policy in the countryside for couples whose first child was a girl. In some parts of China this has devolved into a de facto two-child policy. Some rural officials found the selective enforcement of a mixed policy—one child for couples whose first child was a boy, two children for couples who first child was a girl—impossible to manage. Others, including the officials who run Sihui County in Guangdong province, where Li Aihai lives, are doing quite well at giving everyone two chances at a son, but no chance for two sons.
A quarter century after the Chinese got deadly serious about family planning, the program continues to be carried out against the popular will by means of a variety of coercive measures. In presenting the program to foreigners, who can be squeamish about such things, Chinese family planning officials are careful to emphasize “voluntarism.” In speaking to their own cadres, however, the only form of coercion ever condemned is the actual use of physical force—tying down pregnant women for abortions, for instance. But while force is frowned upon, it is never punished. Home-wrecking, unlawful detentions, heavily punitive fines, and like measures continue to be, as they have been from the late 1970s, the whip hand of the program. Women are psychologically and physically pressured to abort unauthorized children to the point of being dragged to the abortion mill. Networks of paid informants are used to report on unauthorized pregnancies of neighbors, family, and friends. Entire villages are punished for out-of-plan births. Officials conduct nighttime raids on couples suspected of having unauthorized children, and they keep detailed records on the sexual activity of every woman in their jurisdiction—so much for privacy. And to make the coercive regime complete, the “family planning centers” have prison cells—complete with bars—to detain those who resist forced abortion or sterilization. Forced sterilization is used not only as a means of population birth control, but sometimes as punishment for men and women who disobey the rules.
The result of this systematic and relentless coercion is that millions of IUD insertions, sterilizations, and abortions continue to be performed each year. The national family planning journal continues to issue thinly disguised injunctions to get the job done at all costs. Officials are exhorted to take “real action” and “effective measures” to achieve “practical results.” In short, Deng Xiaoping’s no-holds-barred approach still dominates the program. “Use whatever means you must [to reduce China’s population],” China’s paramount leader ordered Party officials back in 1979, “Just do it.”7 They have been “just doing it” ever since.
The Chinese government maintains that abuses are the exception, not the rule, and constitute deviations—local aberrations—from national policy. But when the Guangdong provincial government orders 25,000 abortions to be carried out in Huaiji County, as it did in 2001 in response to reports of laxity in the local family planning program, this can hardly be described as a “local aberration.” Nor can the forced abortion campaign undertaken by the Guangxi provincial government in the spring of 2007, complete with huge remedial fines for those who had successfully birthed babies outside of the state plan, be regarded as anything other than the expression of national policy. The Chinese program remains highly coercive not because of local deviations from central policies but as a direct, inevitable, and intentional consequence of those policies.
This is no secret. Articles in the Chinese media openly speak of the need for coercion in family planning, and senior officials continue to endorse the policy as currently practiced. Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, for instance, said on October 13, 1999 that “China will continue to enforce its effective family planning policy in the new century in order to create a favorable environment for further development.” (italics added.) And in its White Paper on Population, released on December 19, 2000, the PRC avows that it will continue the one-child policy for another fifty years. The White Paper actually sets a population target of 1.6 billion people by the year 2050.
Chinese officials, as they have for the past two decades, sought to suggest to the outside world that these targets and quotas will be achieved by “education” and “persuasion,” rather than coercion and compulsion: The velvet tongue, rather than the mailed fist. As an example of the effectiveness of “education” and “persuasion,” the White Paper reported that women were postponing childbirth. While in 1970 they gave birth to their first child at 20.8 years of age, by 1998 they were putting off childbearing until they were almost three years older, age 23.6, to be exact. But this claim is disingenuous. Women are giving birth later in the PRC not because officials have gently whispered in their ears, but because they are strictly forbidden to marry until age 23, and hustled off for an abortion if they become pregnant out of wedlock. Ah Fang would have given birth at 20, had she not been ordered to terminate her pregnancy. As it is, she will be 23 or older when she has her first (and perhaps her only) child.
Powerful images of China’s teeming multitudes, dating back to the time of Marco Polo, are scratched deeply on Western minds. The wandering Venetian found much to admire in Cathay’s ancient greatness, civilization and art, but it was the sheer number of Chinese that left him astounded. Skeptical contemporaries gave him the mocking title “Il Milione” for the frequency with which he used this superlative to describe the populations of China’s cities and provinces, the numbers of her civil functionaries, and the seemingly endless ranks of her men under arms.
But Marco Polo was, in this respect, a perfectly reliable witness. The world had never seen a more populous empire than the thirteenth-century Sung Dynasty of his acquaintance. It had a population of some 110 million occupying a continent-sized territory with a standing army of . . . a million. It dwarfed contemporaneous Western states, such as the England of Henry II, in every respect. Moreover, it had been in existence, in one dynastic guise or another, for over 1500 years. China’s population was already 60 million at the time of Christ and reached ever-greater peaks during later dynasties—80 million in the ninth-century Tang Dynasty, 110 million at the time of Marco Polo’s sojourn, 200 million in the sixteenth-century Ming, 425 million in the nineteenth-century Qing. Throughout these long centuries, China’s large population was rightly seen as an indispensable element of its national greatness and imperial power, both at home and abroad.
But there is another, darker Western perception of China’s population, dating back to the Mongol hordes of the non-Chinese Genghis Khan, which sees them “as a faceless, impenetrable, overwhelming mass, irresistible once loosed.” And a mass, it might be added, that was thought to be feverishly multiplying. If all of the Chinese people were formed up into a column five abreast, went a cocktail riddle popular in the 1920s, how long would it take the entire column to march past a fixed point? “Never!” was taken to be the correct answer. The column would turn out to be endless, because the Chinese would simply breed faster than they marched. Or so it was wrongly supposed. The image of China’s population as a “yellow peril” was brought vividly to life again in the 1950s, when a sea of Chinese flooded across the Yalu River into Korea, and “human wave” attacks were reported by American troops. The lurid and hyperbolical reporting of China’s “overpopulation problem” over the past twenty years arises in part from these same dark fears—and further incites them. In the view of the new Malthusians, China was a boiling pressure cooker of people, who at any time could explode beyond her borders in a human flood of illegal immigration—or conquest.
Supporting China’s One-Child Policy.
The controllers welcomed China’s 1979 foray into population control with a mixture of euphoria and relief. Euphoria that the world’s most populous nation was last getting serious about its numbers. Relief because China would now dam up its seas of people before they could inundate the world. Not that they were content to stand idly by while the Beijing regime put the fix on one-fifth of humanity. No, they would roll up their sleeves and pitch in. They would help the design and implement a program that would turn China, everyone’s brutish infant of overpopulation, into a poster child of family planning. China would become a model for other countries. Depressing the birthrate in China—important in itself—would in this way help them to further depress birthrates worldwide. It would move the controllers at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and elsewhere that much closer to their global goal, as stated by UNFPA Executive Director Nafis Sadik, of “achieving the lowest level of population in the very shortest time.”
No one stopped to think about China’s abysmal human rights record. No one expressed concern that the Chinese government, in dictating how many children a couple might have, was violating parental rights. No one worried that, in enforcing the one-child policy, the government might resort to coercion, as it had done in past political campaigns. Everything—economic development, democracy and even human rights—would have to await the taming of her numbers.
Note: The following is excerpted from Steven Mosher’s book, Population Control-Real Costs, Illusory Benefits.
We have had sufficient experience now with population programs to realize that they can easily become a vehicle for elite pressure on the poor. I fear that the elevation to legitimacy of “beyond voluntary family planning” measures lends itself to precisely such pressure. … Of course one might claim that such measures are in the 'ultimate' interest of the poor, but this view leaves one in the uncomfortable position of having to define the person, group, or institution that is better able to judge the interests of the poor than the poor themselves.
From Richard Easterlin,
World Development Report 1984 Review Symposium 1.
Li Aihai, happily married and the mother of a 2½-year-old girl, had a problem. She was four months pregnant with her second child. Sihui county family planning officials had come to her home and told her what she already knew: She had gotten pregnant too soon. She hadn’t waited until her daughter was four years old, as Chinese law required of rural couples. The officials assured her that, because her first child had been a girl, she would eventually be allowed a second child. But they were equally insistent that she would have to abort this one. It was January, 2000.
She pleaded that she had not intended to get pregnant. She was still wearing the IUD that they had implanted in her after the birth of her first child, as the law required. They were unsympathetic. Report to the family planning clinic tomorrow morning, they told her as they were leaving. We’ll be expecting you.
Aihai had other plans. Leaving her little daughter in the care of her husband, she quietly packed her things and went to stay with relatives in a neighboring county. She would hide until she brought her baby safely into the world. Childbirth-on-the-run, it was called.
When the county family planning officials discovered that Aihai had disappeared, they began arresting her relatives. While her father-in-law managed to escape with her daughter, her mother-in-law and brother-in-law were arrested. Her own mother and father, brother and sister, and three other relatives were also imprisoned over the next few weeks. In all nine members of her extended family were arrested, hostages to the abortion that was being demanded of her.
But Aihai, knowing that her family supported her pregnancy, stayed in hiding. And her relatives, each refusing to tell the officials where she had gone to ground, stayed in jail.
Three months later the family planning officials struck again. The date they chose, April 5, was an important one on the Chinese traditional calendar. It was the festival of Qingming, or “bright and clear,” a day on which rural Chinese men, by ancient custom, “sweep the graves” of their ancestors. Starting with the grave of their own deceased parents, they visit in turn the graves of grandparents, great-grandparents, and ancestors even further removed. At each stop they first clean off the headstones and weed the plot, and then set out a feast for the deceased, complete with bowls of rice, cups of rice liquor, and sticks of incense.
Why did the family planning officials pick this day of all days? Was it a further insult to the Li family, several of whom were languishing in their jail? Or was the day chosen for a very practical reason: With most of the men and boys away in the hills feting their ancestors, the village would be half-deserted, and they could carry out their plan without opposition.
The family planning officials came to the village in the company of a wrecking crew armed with crowbars and jackhammers. These fell upon Aihai’s home like a horde of angry locusts. They shattered her living room and bedroom furniture into pieces. They ripped window frames out of walls and doors off of hinges. Then the jackhammers began to pound, shattering the brick walls, and to knocking great holes in the cement roof and floors. By the time they completed their work of destruction, you could stand on the first floor of Aihai’s home and look up through two stories and the roof to the blue sky above. The wrecking crew then moved on to her parents’ house, and then to her in-laws’. At day’s end, three homes lay in ruins. The family planning officials confiscated the family’s livestock and poultry, and then disappeared.
Aihai remained in hiding, out of reach of the family planning officials, for two more months. It wasn’t until her child was actually born, she knew, that he would be safe. Abortions in China are performed up to the very point of parturition, and it is not uncommon for babies to be killed by lethal injection even as they descend in the birth canal. Only after she had given birth—to a beautiful baby boy—did she make plans to return home.
Aihai came back to find her family in prison, her home destroyed, and family planning officials furious that she had thwarted their will. Underlying their anger was hard calculation: Every “illegal” child born in their county was a black mark on their performance, depressing annual bonuses and threatening future promotions. But family planning officials, like most Chinese officials, have access to other sources of income. If you want your relatives released, they now told Aihai, you must pay a fine of 17,000 Renminbi (RMB) (about US$2,000). Now this is a huge sum by Chinese standards, the equivalent of two or three years' income. It was many days before she was able to beg and borrow enough from family and friends to satisfy the officials’ demands, and win her family’s release.
No sooner had she paid one fine than she was told she owed another, if she wanted to regularize her son’s status. He was currently a “black child,” family planning officials explained to her. Because he was conceived outside of the family planning law, he did not exist in the eyes of the state. As a nonperson, he would be turned away from the government clinic if he fell ill, barred from attending a government school of any kind, and not considered for any kind of government employment later in life. He would not even be allowed to marry or start a family of his own. The government had decreed that “black children” would not be allowed to reproduce; one generation of illegals was enough. There was an out, however. If she were able to pay another fine of 17,000 RMB, however, her son would be issued a national identity number, and would be treated like everyone else—almost. She would still be required to pay double fees for his school supplies.
She was not surprised when she was ordered to report for sterilization. The population control regulations, she knew, were unyielding in this regard. Two children and your tubes are tied. This time she made no effort to resist the authorities. Having a second child had bankrupted her family. Having a third was out of the question. Her newborn son would have no younger siblings.
Even so, Aihai considers herself far more fortunate than Ah Fang, the wife of a neighboring villager. Married at 19 to an older man in a time-honored village ceremony in front of dozens of relatives and friends, Ah Fang is considered by everyone she knows to be his wife. Everyone, that is, but the local Communist authorities, whose unbending family planning regulations prohibit women from marrying until they reach the age of 23.
When Ah Fang became pregnant there was no chance that she would be allowed to carry her child to term, even though it would have been her first. The one-child policy does not apply to couples who are, in the view of the Chinese state, merely cohabiting. For them—and for single mothers of all ages—there is a zero-child policy. Ah Fang was ordered to present herself at the local clinic for an abortion. She went in as instructed on September 27, 2001. She has been careful not to criticize the authorities, but her friends have been less reticent. “She wanted to keep her baby,” they complain openly, “but the law forbade it.”
Such personal tragedies, far from being rare, could easily be multiplied almost beyond belief. I met many “Li Aihai”s and “Tang Ah Fang”s (the names are, of course, pseudonyms) while living in a village in Guangdong province from 1979 to 1980, and have met many in the years since. But it would be impossible to know them all. For the history of China’s 25-year experiment in “controlling reproduction under a state plan” is littered with literally millions—no, tens of millions—of such victims of forced abortion and forced sterilization.
At the beginning of 1980, the Guangdong provincial government secretly ordered a 1 percent cap on population growth for the year. Local officials complied the only way they could—by launching a family planning “high tide” soon thereafter to terminate as many pregnancies as possible. The rules governing this high tide were simple: No woman was to be allowed to bear a second child within four years of her first, and third children were strictly forbidden. Furthermore, all women who had borne three or more children by November 1, 1979, were to be sterilized.
Over the next few weeks I became an eyewitness to every aspect of this draconian campaign. I went with young mothers to family planning “study sessions” where they were browbeaten by senior Party officials for getting pregnant. I followed them as they were unwillingly taken under escort to the commune clinic. I watched—with the permission of local officials who were eager to demonstrate their prowess in birth control to a visiting foreigner—as they were aborted and sterilized against their will. I will never forget the pain and suffering etched on the faces of these women as their unborn children, some only days from birth, were brutally killed with chemical weapons—poison shots—and then dismembered with surgical knives.
The demands of China’s family planners escalated as the eighties unfolded. The one-child policy, first suggested by Deng Xiaoping in a hard-line 1979 speech, was in place nationwide by 1981. The “technical policy on family planning” followed two years later. Still in force today, the “technical policy” requires IUDs for women of childbearing age with one child, sterilization for couples with two children (usually performed on the woman), and abortions for women pregnant without authorization. By the mid-eighties, according to Chinese government statistics, birth control surgeries—abortions, sterilizations, and IUD insertions—were averaging more than thirty million a year. Many, if not most, of these procedures were performed on women who submitted only under duress.
The principal modification of the one-child policy occurred in the mid- to late-eighties when, in response to rising rates of female infanticide, the government relaxed the policy in the countryside for couples whose first child was a girl. In some parts of China this has devolved into a de facto two-child policy. Some rural officials found the selective enforcement of a mixed policy—one child for couples whose first child was a boy, two children for couples who first child was a girl—impossible to manage. Others, including the officials who run Sihui County in Guangdong province, where Li Aihai lives, are doing quite well at giving everyone two chances at a son, but no chance for two sons.
A quarter century after the Chinese got deadly serious about family planning, the program continues to be carried out against the popular will by means of a variety of coercive measures. In presenting the program to foreigners, who can be squeamish about such things, Chinese family planning officials are careful to emphasize “voluntarism.” In speaking to their own cadres, however, the only form of coercion ever condemned is the actual use of physical force—tying down pregnant women for abortions, for instance. But while force is frowned upon, it is never punished. Home-wrecking, unlawful detentions, heavily punitive fines, and like measures continue to be, as they have been from the late 1970s, the whip hand of the program. Women are psychologically and physically pressured to abort unauthorized children to the point of being dragged to the abortion mill. Networks of paid informants are used to report on unauthorized pregnancies of neighbors, family, and friends. Entire villages are punished for out-of-plan births. Officials conduct nighttime raids on couples suspected of having unauthorized children, and they keep detailed records on the sexual activity of every woman in their jurisdiction—so much for privacy. And to make the coercive regime complete, the “family planning centers” have prison cells—complete with bars—to detain those who resist forced abortion or sterilization. Forced sterilization is used not only as a means of population birth control, but sometimes as punishment for men and women who disobey the rules.
The result of this systematic and relentless coercion is that millions of IUD insertions, sterilizations, and abortions continue to be performed each year. The national family planning journal continues to issue thinly disguised injunctions to get the job done at all costs. Officials are exhorted to take “real action” and “effective measures” to achieve “practical results.” In short, Deng Xiaoping’s no-holds-barred approach still dominates the program. “Use whatever means you must [to reduce China’s population],” China’s paramount leader ordered Party officials back in 1979, “Just do it.”7 They have been “just doing it” ever since.
The Chinese government maintains that abuses are the exception, not the rule, and constitute deviations—local aberrations—from national policy. But when the Guangdong provincial government orders 25,000 abortions to be carried out in Huaiji County, as it did in 2001 in response to reports of laxity in the local family planning program, this can hardly be described as a “local aberration.” Nor can the forced abortion campaign undertaken by the Guangxi provincial government in the spring of 2007, complete with huge remedial fines for those who had successfully birthed babies outside of the state plan, be regarded as anything other than the expression of national policy. The Chinese program remains highly coercive not because of local deviations from central policies but as a direct, inevitable, and intentional consequence of those policies.
This is no secret. Articles in the Chinese media openly speak of the need for coercion in family planning, and senior officials continue to endorse the policy as currently practiced. Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, for instance, said on October 13, 1999 that “China will continue to enforce its effective family planning policy in the new century in order to create a favorable environment for further development.” (italics added.) And in its White Paper on Population, released on December 19, 2000, the PRC avows that it will continue the one-child policy for another fifty years. The White Paper actually sets a population target of 1.6 billion people by the year 2050.
Chinese officials, as they have for the past two decades, sought to suggest to the outside world that these targets and quotas will be achieved by “education” and “persuasion,” rather than coercion and compulsion: The velvet tongue, rather than the mailed fist. As an example of the effectiveness of “education” and “persuasion,” the White Paper reported that women were postponing childbirth. While in 1970 they gave birth to their first child at 20.8 years of age, by 1998 they were putting off childbearing until they were almost three years older, age 23.6, to be exact. But this claim is disingenuous. Women are giving birth later in the PRC not because officials have gently whispered in their ears, but because they are strictly forbidden to marry until age 23, and hustled off for an abortion if they become pregnant out of wedlock. Ah Fang would have given birth at 20, had she not been ordered to terminate her pregnancy. As it is, she will be 23 or older when she has her first (and perhaps her only) child.
Powerful images of China’s teeming multitudes, dating back to the time of Marco Polo, are scratched deeply on Western minds. The wandering Venetian found much to admire in Cathay’s ancient greatness, civilization and art, but it was the sheer number of Chinese that left him astounded. Skeptical contemporaries gave him the mocking title “Il Milione” for the frequency with which he used this superlative to describe the populations of China’s cities and provinces, the numbers of her civil functionaries, and the seemingly endless ranks of her men under arms.
But Marco Polo was, in this respect, a perfectly reliable witness. The world had never seen a more populous empire than the thirteenth-century Sung Dynasty of his acquaintance. It had a population of some 110 million occupying a continent-sized territory with a standing army of . . . a million. It dwarfed contemporaneous Western states, such as the England of Henry II, in every respect. Moreover, it had been in existence, in one dynastic guise or another, for over 1500 years. China’s population was already 60 million at the time of Christ and reached ever-greater peaks during later dynasties—80 million in the ninth-century Tang Dynasty, 110 million at the time of Marco Polo’s sojourn, 200 million in the sixteenth-century Ming, 425 million in the nineteenth-century Qing. Throughout these long centuries, China’s large population was rightly seen as an indispensable element of its national greatness and imperial power, both at home and abroad.
But there is another, darker Western perception of China’s population, dating back to the Mongol hordes of the non-Chinese Genghis Khan, which sees them “as a faceless, impenetrable, overwhelming mass, irresistible once loosed.” And a mass, it might be added, that was thought to be feverishly multiplying. If all of the Chinese people were formed up into a column five abreast, went a cocktail riddle popular in the 1920s, how long would it take the entire column to march past a fixed point? “Never!” was taken to be the correct answer. The column would turn out to be endless, because the Chinese would simply breed faster than they marched. Or so it was wrongly supposed. The image of China’s population as a “yellow peril” was brought vividly to life again in the 1950s, when a sea of Chinese flooded across the Yalu River into Korea, and “human wave” attacks were reported by American troops. The lurid and hyperbolical reporting of China’s “overpopulation problem” over the past twenty years arises in part from these same dark fears—and further incites them. In the view of the new Malthusians, China was a boiling pressure cooker of people, who at any time could explode beyond her borders in a human flood of illegal immigration—or conquest.
Supporting China’s One-Child Policy.
The controllers welcomed China’s 1979 foray into population control with a mixture of euphoria and relief. Euphoria that the world’s most populous nation was last getting serious about its numbers. Relief because China would now dam up its seas of people before they could inundate the world. Not that they were content to stand idly by while the Beijing regime put the fix on one-fifth of humanity. No, they would roll up their sleeves and pitch in. They would help the design and implement a program that would turn China, everyone’s brutish infant of overpopulation, into a poster child of family planning. China would become a model for other countries. Depressing the birthrate in China—important in itself—would in this way help them to further depress birthrates worldwide. It would move the controllers at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and elsewhere that much closer to their global goal, as stated by UNFPA Executive Director Nafis Sadik, of “achieving the lowest level of population in the very shortest time.”
No one stopped to think about China’s abysmal human rights record. No one expressed concern that the Chinese government, in dictating how many children a couple might have, was violating parental rights. No one worried that, in enforcing the one-child policy, the government might resort to coercion, as it had done in past political campaigns. Everything—economic development, democracy and even human rights—would have to await the taming of her numbers.
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