At a hearing Thursday, Congressman Chris Smith (NJ-04) called on the Administration to use existing U.S. law to block entry into the U.S. for Chinese government officials responsible for implementing China’s coercive, brutal population control policies.
In his testimony, blind activist and legal advocate, Chen Guangcheng calls China’s violent population control efforts “genocide” and calls for a U.N. tribunal to “investigate crimes committed by the Communist regime in China…particularly [the] genocide” created by the 35 year enforcement of the “One-Child Policies.”
“We should hold China to universal standards that apply to all states and that China itself claims to uphold,” said Smith, chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and the chairman of the House panel that oversees international human rights. “As a nation, we must not turn a blind eye to the Chinese government’s continuing acts of silencing dissent, committing crimes against its own people, and repressing its citizens’ fundamental human rights. It has been a gross failure for the Obama Administration to fail to enforce existing law. We already have a law in place, the Admiral Nance and Meg Donovan Act which I authored, that will bar visas to Chinese officials, but unfortunately, it is not being used. ”
Congressman Smith’s opening statement can be found here.
The hearing, entitled “Population Control in China: State-Sponsored Violence Against Women and Children,” was held by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), which Congressman Smith chairs, along with Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. It examined the economic and security problems associated with China’s draconian “One-Child Policy,” including an increased gender imbalance favoring males, making China a regional magnet for sex and bride trafficking of women from neighboring countries. The hearing webcast can be viewed here.
During the hearing, Rubio said: “Nearly thirty-five years ago, the communist regime in China enacted its “One-Child Policy,” one of the most disastrous and immoral social policies in human history. It was the communist regime’s ill-conceived “solution” to help curb population growth and boost economic development.”
He continued: “The One-Child Policy banned most Chinese couples from having more than one child. When couples conceived a second child, the Chinese government forced them to eliminate him or her, by any means necessary- including forced abortions. However, because of cultural norms that place a premium on boys, the policy’s victims also included first-conceived children simply because they happened to be girls. In addition, Chinese women who gave birth to baby girls were indirectly victims of this policy because many ended up being shunned by their husbands, families, and society.”
“For over three decades, China’s One-Child Policy, combined with the preference for sons, has condemned an unknown number of Chinese girls – who the policy helped deem unwanted or “surplus” – to abortion, infanticide, and abandonment. The result is a radically skewed sex ratio, and—by the Chinese government’s own estimates—30 million more men than women by 2020. No one knows for sure what such a large surplus of males will mean for Chinese society, but many experts have predicted, among other consequences, an increase in human trafficking for the purposes of prostitution and forced marriages. Many of China’s neighbors can attest to this reality,” Rubio added.
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The hearing included expert witnesses including Valerie Hudson from Texas A&M, Nicholas Eberstadt from the American Enterprise Institute, Reggie Littlejohn and Chai Ling, founders of the women’s rights advocacy groups Women’s Rights Without Frontiers and All Girls Allowed, respectively. The hearing also included Chinese human rights leader Chen Guangcheng, who was imprisoned in China for four years for his advocacy for women.
Littlejohn said the one-child policy has been a forced abortion disaster that has resulted in massively skewed gender ratios in China.
Littlejohn states, “We are all aware of the demographic disaster the one-child policy has caused in China, with its aging population, shrinking work force and unsustainable gender imbalance. Why, then, does the Chinese Communist Party insist on keeping the policy?”
She continued: “My answer is a dark one: I believe that the CCP is keeping the one child policy because the one child policy is keeping the CCP in power. I believe that the CCP is using coercive population control as an instrument of terror; that it is extremely profitable for them; that they can use the army of family planning officials to put down dissent; and that they use the system of paid informants to rupture relationships of trust, so that people cannot organize for democracy. Bottom line, I believe that the CCP is maintaining its stranglehold on power by destroying women and babies. This is the hallmark of Communism: the peacetime murder of their own citizens.”
Smith said it is time for China to reverse the policy.
Said Congressman Smith, “China’s one-child policy is state sponsored violence against women and children, despite small changes made last year to the policy, it remains coercive, it remains intrusive, and remains a threat to the birth of any girl child—tens of millions who were lost because families chose to have boys with the one child they were allowed to have. This is unacceptable, it is horrific, it is tragic, and it is wrong. I urge the government to do what is right, not only of its people, but what is clearly in its own interest, and end this policy now.”
The Congressional-Executive Commission on China, established by the U.S.-China Relations Act of 2000 as China prepared to enter the WTO, is mandated by law to monitor human rights, including worker rights, and the development of the rule of law in China. Its members are a bipartisan combination of Congress and White House appointees.
