China Desperately Needs More People After Population Control Killed Millions

For decades, it was the worst human rights abuse in the world. The People’s Republic of China, a communist, single-party state, resorted to brute force on the most personal level to ensure most of its families had only one child. The policy lasted nearly 40 years and led to massive financial penalties, forced abortions and sterilizations, and the family separation and hiding of children whose conception and birth were not pre-authorized by the state. Today, the PRC, with a total fertility rate of 1.2 children per woman, barely half of replacement-level fertility, isn’t celebrating the achievement of its one-child goal but desperately trying to reverse it and its toxic effects. The campaign is not going well.

As Western media gaze at the Chinese situation with grim fascination, transfixed by similar demographic trends in the West for wholly different reasons, it’s easy to forget how most of the elite political leadership in Washington, D.C., Turtle Bay, Brussels, and elsewhere cheered on the Chinese tyranny and assailed U.S. voices, like that of Rep. Christopher Smith of New Jersey (R), who raised the alarm about China’s actions. Beijing’s blood-soaked deeds were not war crimes, but peace crimes committed against families and communities. Nor were these crimes only actions to take individual lives, grotesque as they were — instead, they were acts of societal homicide, breaking down networks of values and relationships that gave homes, towns, and states their structures of care and support. Merely stopping the individual cruelties cannot reknit so much torn fabric, and the question remains, “What will repair the damage?” The answer will not please China’s oligarchs, but the reversal of the one-child policy won’t occur until the nation’s atheistic communist system recognizes its collapse and is gone.

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Reckonings, no matter how necessary, are slow to come. In the past decade, Planned Parenthood officials in the United States have been forced to address (and denounce) their founder Margaret Sanger’s embrace of coercion for society’s “unfit,” a label she affixed broadly. Her forays overseas brought her into the company of a variety of figures who tolerated or encouraged forced sterilization and other practices inimical to human rights and dignity. The amount of private and public money poured into these campaigns was massive, through groups like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Population Crisis Committee and its Draper Fund, which issued reports calling on global leaders to follow communist China’s lead in population policy. The International Planned Parenthood Federation was likewise comfortable with these initiatives, including China’s Family Planning Association as an affiliate from 1983 on. The world’s richest people, from Bill Gates to Warren Buffett to George Soros to the Packard Family, donated heavily to campaigns for abortion and sterilization worldwide. Their efforts have spanned decades and include major spending on legal abortion in the United States.

The toll in China alone has been immense. By 2013, as the government began to relax the mandatory family restriction policy, the government reported that over the previous 40 years, more than 330 million abortions had been performed and 196 million Chinese men and women had been sterilized. How many of these operations were forcible is unclear. Looking back at accounts of the draconian experience, particularly those by Stephen Mosher, John S. Aird, Reggie Littlejohn, and human rights activist Chen Guangcheng, it’s astonishing to realize that these protests were minority views, unavailing until communist leaders themselves could no longer look past the demographic collapse occurring across China.

One Fulbright scholar who lived in China during the latter stages of this period wrote with a mix of wonder and understanding that many Chinese accepted the government’s direction regarding having just one offspring. She wrote, “I spoke with many young women and men in China, and although a few told me that it would be ‘nice’ to have two children, all told me that they would have only one child. They cited the country’s overpopulation and the expense of raising two children, but first and foremost, they cited their responsibility to abide by the government’s rules, which they believe are in their best interest. ‘It’s good for us,’ they told me. Others were more explicit: ‘My government tells me it is good.’”

Is it possible to imagine such attitudes prevailing in the United States or other nations with a tradition of ordered liberty? No, but the possibility of forgetting is real. Even if large portions of the population of China accepted or submitted to the state’s depredations, it’s likely that many did not and, like the lone individual who stood in the path of a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square, we will never hear their stories or know their names. The same is likely true for the functionaries who carried out Beijing’s policies, the family planning cadres who held down women to be forcibly aborted or checked for birth control implants in Chinese factories with mandatory birth control policies. These acts of obedience to government commands would not happen here, but it is apparent that they can be forgotten here. Rep. Smith noted in a 1998 House hearing that the only instance of a cadre being punished for its enforcement of the one-child policy was a case where the cadre was deemed too permissive — allowing a baby marked for destruction to be born rather than killed.

The most potent sign of forgetting is believing that a policy is past when, in fact, it has merely been changed for a season. As Littlejohn points out at the website of the group she founded to fight the one-child policy, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, a three-child policy is not an answer to China’s past practices, it’s more of the same. “China’s move from a two-child policy to a three-child policy is nothing to celebrate,” she writes. “China should abolish all coercive population control. It is not the business of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to ‘allow’ couples, or single women, to have children of whatever number. A ‘three-child’ policy keeps the womb police in business. They will still be tracking women’s fertility and birth and punishing those who find themselves ‘illegally pregnant’ … These gross violations of women’s rights and human rights must be stopped, effective immediately.”

The people of China will not soon forget, or recover from, what these statist policies have done to them and to their families. The actual “news” in the CNN story last week is an announcement from the national government that it will award Chinese parents an annual sum of 3,600 yuan ($500) for every child until age three, retroactive to January 1 of this year. CNN found considerable evidence that this subsidy is having little effect on the nation’s young adults, however. As one said, “The cost of raising a child is enormous, and 3,600 yuan a year is a mere drop in the bucket.” He went on, “[Having kids] would only bring more hardship. I’m not a capitalist or anything, and my kid probably wouldn’t have much of a good life either.” The speaker notes he is anxious about his job prospects and contemplating pursuing a PhD.

China’s dilemma is a worst-case scenario, exceeded only by those of Singapore and Japan, whose Total Fertility Rates hover around 1.0. Much of the developed world is on a similar trajectory. National child limitation policies are not yet understood for the full damage they do. They do not merely destroy individual babies’ lives and trample on parents’ rights, but they crush underfoot the pre-governmental institutions of family and faith that the state exists to serve and is bound to honor. A pro-natalist mindset that thinks solely or primarily in terms of rates and quantities descends from the same materialist worldview and will tend to perpetuate it. China is reminding us of this truth, as are some of the champions of boosted child production in the Silicon Valleys of the West.

In one of the most important books of the last half-century, “The Case for Polarized Politics: Why America Needs Social Conservatism,” the late scholar and commentator Jeffrey Bell detailed how social conservatism is essential to the future of freedom and why it has faltered in Europe and in China. The grounds are different. In Europe, the whole political system has moved away from close representation of the people to rule by elite and distant bureaucracies. In China, the government long ago recognized and suppressed the key rivals for the people’s allegiance. “Beginning in 1978,” Bell wrote, “political elites shed their ideological commitment to a government-run Marxist economy. But when it comes to the Party’s ongoing commitment to suppressing the independence of society’s two most powerful social institutions, the traditional family and religion, they have remained rigidly loyal to their ideology.”

It is now apparent how that ideology shatters the most basic of human dreams and desires. The road to a better future ultimately runs through the church and the home and not, in the end, through better zoning laws and the tax code.

LifeNews Note: Chuck Donovan is a 50-year veteran of the national debate over the right to life and served from 1981-89 as a writer in the Reagan White House.He is the former Executive Vice President of Family Research Council.

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