Despite some changes, China's one-child family planning program remains a source of coercion, forced abortions, infanticide and perilously imbalanced boy-girl ratios, US State Department officials said.
Testimony before the US House International Relations Committee on Tuesday focused on a Shanghai woman who, since her second pregnancy in the late 1980s, has been assigned to psychiatric wards, coerced into an abortion, and removed from her job. She is reportedly subject to torture in a labor camp.
Mao Hengfeng, said US Con-gressman Christopher Smith, "is the most egregious example of China's mistreatment of women who do not comply with China's draconian policies, but there are thousands of other victims."
China in the 1970s launched a one-child policy to slow the growth of its population, now at 1.3 billion. Couples who have unsanctioned children have been subject to heavy fines, job losses and forced sterilization.
There have been some modifications, allowing second children for ethnic populations and rural families whose first child is a girl. In 2002, under strong US pressure, Beijing enacted a law aimed at standardizing birth-control policies and reducing corruption and coercion.
Arthur Dewey, the US State Department assistant secretary for population, refugees and migration, said there were some encouraging signs that China "may be beginning to understand that its coercive birth-planning regime has had extremely negative social, economic and human rights consequences for the nation."
Dewey added, however, that "China's birth-planning law and policies retain harshly coercive elements in law and practice."
Among those effects have been female infanticide in rural areas where there is a strong desire for male heirs, imbalances in the sex ratio that has been estimated to be as much as 122 boys for every 100 girls, soaring rates of female suicide, and human trafficking.
"The one-child policy is the most pervasive source of human-rights violations in China today," said Harry Wu, a human-rights activist who spent 19 years in the Chinese labor camp system.
Wu cited a 2003 document from an area of southern Guangdong Province where party secretaries and village heads were told their salaries would be cut in half if, in a 35-day period, they did not reach a goal of sterilizing 1,369 people, fitting 818 with IUDs and carrying out 163 abortions.
The case of Mao, said Michael Kozak, the State Department's acting assistant secretary for democracy, human rights and labor, highlights four serious abuses in the Chinese system: Coercive family planning, continued use of "re-education through labor" camps, forced incarceration in psychiatric hospitals and torture.
"Mao's case is an example of what can and does go wrong in China," Kozak said.
Mao, who had twins in 1987, was confined to a psychiatric ward for six days in 1989 after another pregnancy sparked a fight with her work unit. She was fired from her job after protesting her treatment despite agreeing to abort another pregnancy, was sent back to a psychiatric hospital where she said she was tortured, and last April was given an 18-month sentence in a labor camp.
Smith, a leading critic of China's human rights and abortion record, said he was "very fearful that the torture may lead to her death."
US President George W. Bush's administration, in addition to pressing the Chinese on human-rights issues, has for the last three years barred US funds for the UN Population Fund, charging that the UNFPA's support of China's population planning programs allows China to implement its policies of coercive abortion.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching