The Chinese Communist Party has never been much concerned about the human cost of the massive social engineering programs they have engaged in...
National Right to Life
Editor’s note. This is adapted from a talk Mr. Mosher gave Thursday evening at NRLC 2018 convention.
My introduction to the one-child policy came in a dusty rural clinic in South China in 1980. Hundreds of local women had been arrested in the people’s commune I was living in, charged with the crime of being pregnant, then handed over to army doctors for assembly-line abortions. The sight of women 6, 8 and even 9 months pregnant being delivered of dead babies by cesarean-section is one that I—and they—are unlikely ever to forget.
Local officials explained to me that the Chinese Communist Party, then led by Deng Xiaoping, had decided that China was overpopulated. “Use whatever means you must to control China’s population,” Deng had reportedly instructed senior officials. “Just do it. With the support of the Party you have nothing to fear.”
Party officials have been “just doing it” to women ever since. Each year for the past 38 years—in the longest running political campaign in PRC history—they have arrested, fined, aborted, and sterilized millions of women for violating the rules governing childbearing.
The policy is known in China as “Planned Birth,” which every Chinese woman alive understands to mean … the Party, not you, will decide how many children you have and when you will have them. And each of the Party leaders that followed Deng, from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao and now Xi Jinping, likewise believed that China’s path to greatness depended upon keeping the wombs of Chinese women empty. Up to recently, they even bragged about having eliminated 400 million people from their population.
Now comes word that the Party is poised to abandon birth restrictions. Perhaps as early as the end of the year, Beijing will announce that Chinese women are free to have as many children as they wish.
Why is President for Life Xi Jinping doing this? Has he heard, as I did, the cries of China’s women? Is he appalled by the slaughter of tens of millions of infant girls by infanticide and abortion? Is he disturbed by the sight of the resulting “excess” men, 30 million strong, roaming China’s cities and towns, and the explosion of sex trafficking and other crimes that have followed?
I suspect that the answer is, “none of the above.” The Chinese Communist Party has never been much concerned about the human cost of the massive social engineering programs they have engaged in, from the Great Leap Forward to the One Child Policy.
Local officials explained to me that the Chinese Communist Party, then led by Deng Xiaoping, had decided that China was overpopulated. “Use whatever means you must to control China’s population,” Deng had reportedly instructed senior officials. “Just do it. With the support of the Party you have nothing to fear.”
Party officials have been “just doing it” to women ever since. Each year for the past 38 years—in the longest running political campaign in PRC history—they have arrested, fined, aborted, and sterilized millions of women for violating the rules governing childbearing.
The policy is known in China as “Planned Birth,” which every Chinese woman alive understands to mean … the Party, not you, will decide how many children you have and when you will have them. And each of the Party leaders that followed Deng, from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao and now Xi Jinping, likewise believed that China’s path to greatness depended upon keeping the wombs of Chinese women empty. Up to recently, they even bragged about having eliminated 400 million people from their population.
Now comes word that the Party is poised to abandon birth restrictions. Perhaps as early as the end of the year, Beijing will announce that Chinese women are free to have as many children as they wish.
Why is President for Life Xi Jinping doing this? Has he heard, as I did, the cries of China’s women? Is he appalled by the slaughter of tens of millions of infant girls by infanticide and abortion? Is he disturbed by the sight of the resulting “excess” men, 30 million strong, roaming China’s cities and towns, and the explosion of sex trafficking and other crimes that have followed?
I suspect that the answer is, “none of the above.” The Chinese Communist Party has never been much concerned about the human cost of the massive social engineering programs they have engaged in, from the Great Leap Forward to the One Child Policy.
The consequence of the Great Leap Forward was the death by starvation of 42 million people. The consequences of the One Child Policy are an order of magnitude larger. That policy has eliminated, by forced abortion and infanticide, of 400 million children.
China, you see, has turned Malthus’ “dismal theorem” on its head. Instead of population growth outpacing food production, as Malthus predicted, in China we see the opposite. There, it is population control that is undermining the economy.
What happens when you eliminate 400 million of the most productive, enterprising people in the world? Nothing good.
China, you see, has turned Malthus’ “dismal theorem” on its head. Instead of population growth outpacing food production, as Malthus predicted, in China we see the opposite. There, it is population control that is undermining the economy.
What happens when you eliminate 400 million of the most productive, enterprising people in the world? Nothing good.
