On
May 7, South Korean customs authorities announced they had discovered
17,500 capsules made from the incinerated remains of human fetuses and
infants being smuggled into the country from China for sale. Coming in
the wake of the high-profile drama concerning the effort of the Chinese
government to suppress the voice of the brave, blind
anti-population-control activist Chen Guangcheng, this news has placed
the issue of the regime's brutal one-child law forcefully before the
conscience of the world. Therefore, a look at the origin and history of
this atrocity is in order.
In June 1978, Song Jian, a top-level
manager in charge of developing control systems for the Chinese
guided-missile program, traveled to Helsinki for an international
conference on control-system theory and design. While in Finland, he
picked up copies of "The Limits to GrowthandBlueprint for Survival"-
publications of the Club of Rome, a major source of Malthusian
propaganda - and made the acquaintance of several Europeans who were
promoting the report's method of using computerized "systems analysis"
to predict and design the human future.
Fascinated by the
possibilities, Mr. Song returned to China and republished the Club's
analysis under his own name (without attribution), establishing his
reputation for brilliant and original thinking. In no time at all, Mr.
Song became a scientific superstar. Seizing the moment to grasp for
greater power and importance, he pulled together an elite group of
mathematicians from within his department and, with the help of a
powerful computer to provide the necessary special effects, issued the
profoundly calculated judgment that China's "correct" population size
was 650 million to 700 million people - which is to say, some 280
million to 330 million less than its actual 1978 population.
Mr.
Song's analysis quickly found favor at top levels of the Chinese
Communist Party because it purported to prove that the reason for
China's continued poverty was not 30 years of disastrous misrule, but
the very existence of the Chinese people. Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping
and his fellows in the Central Committee were very impressed by the
pseudo-scientific computer babble Mr. Song used to dress up his theory
and even more impressed by the possibilities that arrogating the power
to permit or deny children would provide to the state.
Thus began
the most forceful population-control program since Nazi Germany. Qian
Xinzhong, a Soviet-trained former major general in the People's
Liberation Army, was placed in charge of the campaign. He ordered all
women with one child to have a stainless steel IUD inserted and to be
inspected regularly to make sure they had not tampered with it. To
remove the device was deemed a criminal act. All parents with two or
more children were to be sterilized. No pregnancies were legal for
anyone under 23, whether married or not, and all unauthorized
pregnancies were to be aborted.
Women who defied these injunctions
were taken and sterilized by force. Babies would be aborted right
through the ninth month of pregnancy, with many crying as they were
being stabbed to death at the moment of birth. Those women who fled to
try to save their children were hunted, and if they could not be caught,
their houses were torn down, and their parents thrown in prison, there
to linger until a ransom of 20,000 yuan - about three years' income for a
peasant - was paid for their release.
Babies born to such
fugitives were declared to be "black children," illegal non-persons in
the eyes of the state, without any right to employment, public
schooling, health care or reproduction. Millions have been confiscated
from their mothers and placed in "orphanages" where, if not adopted in
short order, they are left to expire without food in "dying rooms."
Local
Communist Party officials were given quotas for sterilizations,
abortions and IUD insertions. If they exceeded them, they could be
promoted. If they failed to meet them, they would be expelled from the
party in disgrace. These measures guaranteed results. Since 1983, the
combined total coerced abortions, IUD implantations and sterilizations
have exceeded 30 million per year, or nearly one billion in all.
Given
the supreme importance to rural Chinese families of having a son, both
to take care of aging parents and to continue the line and honor family
ancestors, many peasants simply could not accept a daughter as their
only child. As a result, female infanticide has become rampant. During
the period from 2000 to 2004, almost 1.25 boys were born for every girl
born - indicating that one-fifth of all baby girls in China were either
being aborted or murdered. In some provinces, the fraction eliminated
was as high as one-half. According to Chai Ling, the former Tiananmen
Square rebel leader who now heads a dissenting organization "All Girls
Allowed," the death toll now exceeds more than 100 million girls.
Such
is the horror of China's population-control policy. America needs to
take a strong stand against it and aid in every way those brave men and
women who would bring it to an end.
Robert Zubrin is president
of Pioneer Astronautics, a senior fellow with the Center for Security
Policy, and the author of "Merchants of Despair: Radical
Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of
Antihumanism (Encounter Books).
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