China’s One-child Policy Revisions Change Little

Communist Government Will Continue to Force Women to Have Abortions, Sterilizations, Experts Say 

 by Brian Fraga

Recent news that China is looking to ease its controversial one-child policy and abolish the “reeducation through labor” camps are considered small positive steps, but experts do not believe that the Chinese Communist Party is suddenly embracing human rights.

The real motivations behind those reforms might have more to do with economic and demographic concerns, as well as an understanding that positive headlines heralding a relaxation of the one-child policy make for good public relations in the West, they said.

“I simply cannot summon any enthusiasm when I hear news like this,” said Nathan Faries, an English professor at the University of Dubuque and author of “The ‘Inscrutably Chinese’ Church: How Narratives and Nationalism Continue to Divide Christianity.”

Faries told Our Sunday Visitor that China still considers its “wrongheaded” one-child policy to be correct and successful, and that the Communist Party regularly tweaks the policy to great fanfare in the press.

“The best I could say is that all these relaxations of policy finally could, in a very optimistic view, end in an accumulation of small freedoms that might make China in 50 years look somewhat different in its human rights landscape than it does today,” Faries said.

Continued atrocities

Meanwhile, Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, a coalition of human rights activists and organizations that lobby against forced abortions, gendercide and sexual slavery in China, told OSV that Chinese women will still continue to be sterilized and forced to have abortions under the adjusted policy, which will likely remain in place for several more decades.

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Brian Fraga writes from Massachusetts