Congressman on China’s One-Child Policy Abuses: “People need to know the impact of this preposterous crime against mankind”
Posted on | November 4, 2011 by Lisa Correnti |
Yesterday the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing to review the egregious human rights abuses documented in the 2011 report issued by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC). The hearing called by Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen was the first although the commission has been issuing the report since its inception in 2000, as a result of the U.S.- China Relations Act which gave China favorable trade status.
In her opening remarks Chairwoman Ros-Lehtinen recalled her opposition to China being granted favorable trade status due to its “abysmal human rights record.” Ros-Lehtinen cited the continued abuse of women including, “trafficking for sexual exploitations, forced labor, and forced marriage, as a major impediment to the achievement of full equality for women.”
Congressman Chris Smith who chairs the China Commission testified before the full committee stating that this tenth report meticulously documents “escalating – human rights crimes, including torture, forced abortion, religious persecution, and ethnic persecution – committed with impunity by government personnel at all levels and an ubiquitous secret police.
Congressman Smith highlighted some of the “profoundly troubling conclusions” in the report in regards to population control in enforcing the one-child policy. Smith noted that in “official speeches and government reports…authorities used the phrase ‘spare no efforts’ to signify intensified enforcement methods and less restraint on officials who oversee coercive population planning implementation methods…”
Citing report findings of accelerated and coercive efforts by government officials to enforce the one-child policy, Smith stated that “massive mobilizations dubbed ‘enforcement campaigns’ continued and that in the Yangchun province, family planning officials were exhorted to adopt ‘man-on-man military tactics.’
Individual incidents of these “man-on-man military tactics” were given in the testimony of one of the China policy expert witnesses, Tiananmen Square student leader survivor and founder of All Girls Allowed, Chai Ling. In Ling’s testimony she described a recent eyewitness case involving a young woman who was seven months pregnant, Ma Jihong. Ma was chased down by a dozen family planning agents in a cotton field near her home in Lijin County and dragged into a van. Her family was notified that night that she had died.
In Ling’s testimony she advocated for the passage of the visa ban bill, H.R. 2121, the China Democracy Promotion Act of 2011, which she believes will improve human rights conditions in China. The bill gives authority to the President to “deny the entry into the United States of certain members of the senior leadership of the Government of the People’s Republic of China and individuals who have committed human rights abuses in the People’s Republic of China, and for other purposes.” It was introduced by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ).
In follow-up questions to witnesses, Rep. Dan Rohrabacher (R-CA) asked whether feminist women’s rights groups were standing up for the Chinese women against the human rights abuses of the one-child policy. All five witnesses responded that they were not. Rohrabacher expressed dismay that there was no assistance from these groups since these are “basic human principles they say they stand for.”
In a response to Chai Ling who stated that over 400,000,000 babies have been aborted, Rep. Rohrabacher stated, “people need to know the impact of this preposterous crime against mankind.”
