Can a single blind man bring down the most coercive population control program in world history? Last October, I reported in this space on Chen Guangcheng, a Chinese human rights activist who dared to wonder — in public — if women were still being forced into aborting their children in order to comply with the state's population laws. And, once he had lifted the veil of fear and secrecy, even an inch, hundreds of people came forward to tell of the human rights violations that had been committed against them. Time magazine recounted the tale of a woman named Li Juan:
The men with the poison-filled syringe arrived two days before Li Juan's due date. They pinned her down on a bed in a local clinic, she says, and drove the needle into her abdomen until it entered the 9-month-old fetus. “At first, I could feel my child kicking a lot,” says the 23-year-old. “Then, after a while, I couldn't feel her moving anymore.” Ten hours later, Li delivered the girl she had intended to name Shuang (Bright). The baby was dead. To be absolutely sure, says Li, the officials — from the Linyi region, where she lives, in China's eastern Shandong province — dunked the infant's body for several minutes in a bucket of water beside the bed.
And lo and behold China had a full-blown public relations problem on its hands.
But China knows how to handle such things. Since the inception of the one-child policy, the rest of the world seems to rouse itself to consciousness of these crimes every few years, only to eventually lose interest. All that China must do is remain patient.
China knows that the United Nations will buy its time, by trumpeting the progress, liberalization, reform in China that is always about to free Chinese women and their families. It has been this way since 1979, when the Chinese State Family Planning Commission and the United Nations Population Fund devised the one-child policy together. And so, it should have come as no surprise that, two months after Chen rose to prominence, UNFPA issued a report entitled “Easing Family Planning Rules Leads to Fewer Abortions and More Baby Girls, Chinese Province Finds.” Note the very first word — easing — not ending. We are told that the human rights violations are being “reduced” and “phased out,” as if the UN does not understand the offensiveness of telling the world to accept the perpetrators' schedule for reform, not the victims.
Chen is never mentioned; the allegations of all of those people who came to him never refuted. But UNFPA had the temerity to say that, “Chinese law prohibits the use of force to impose birth limits,” as if there is the rule of law in China when it comes to population control.
But technology may make it harder for China and UNFPA to win this time — to reduce Chen to anonymity. After Chen's story reached the West, he was put under house arrest for providing “intelligence” to foreigners. His phones were jammed. But when a power failure crippled his captors' equipment, he was able to call Reuters on a mobile phone and tell the news agency of his plight. The Reuters reporter barely knew how to describe the situation, alternating between calling his captors “thugs” or “club-wielding goons.”
“China is lawless,” Chen said. “They're worried I will expose more of their crimes.”
Douglas Sylva is Senior Fellow at the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM). His e-mail address is [email protected].
