[House Hearing, 112 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
CONTINUED HUMAN RIGHTS ATTACKS ON FAMILIES IN CHINA
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON AFRICA, GLOBAL HEALTH,
AND HUMAN RIGHTS
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED TWELFTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
JULY 9, 2012
__________
Serial No. 112-168
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Affairs
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.foreignaffairs.house.gov/
or
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/
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COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida, Chairman
CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey HOWARD L. BERMAN, California
DAN BURTON, Indiana GARY L. ACKERMAN, New York
ELTON GALLEGLY, California ENI F.H. FALEOMAVAEGA, American
DANA ROHRABACHER, California Samoa
DONALD A. MANZULLO, Illinois DONALD M. PAYNE, New Jersey--
EDWARD R. ROYCE, California deceased 3/6/12 deg.
STEVE CHABOT, Ohio BRAD SHERMAN, California
RON PAUL, Texas ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York
MIKE PENCE, Indiana GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York
JOE WILSON, South Carolina RUSS CARNAHAN, Missouri
CONNIE MACK, Florida ALBIO SIRES, New Jersey
JEFF FORTENBERRY, Nebraska GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia
MICHAEL T. McCAUL, Texas THEODORE E. DEUTCH, Florida
TED POE, Texas DENNIS CARDOZA, California
GUS M. BILIRAKIS, Florida BEN CHANDLER, Kentucky
JEAN SCHMIDT, Ohio BRIAN HIGGINS, New York
BILL JOHNSON, Ohio ALLYSON SCHWARTZ, Pennsylvania
DAVID RIVERA, Florida CHRISTOPHER S. MURPHY, Connecticut
MIKE KELLY, Pennsylvania FREDERICA WILSON, Florida
TIM GRIFFIN, Arkansas KAREN BASS, California
TOM MARINO, Pennsylvania WILLIAM KEATING, Massachusetts
JEFF DUNCAN, South Carolina DAVID CICILLINE, Rhode Island
ANN MARIE BUERKLE, New York
RENEE ELLMERS, North Carolina
ROBERT TURNER, New York
Yleem D.S. Poblete, Staff Director
Richard J. Kessler, Democratic Staff Director
------
Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights
CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey, Chairman
JEFF FORTENBERRY, Nebraska KAREN BASS, California
TOM MARINO, Pennsylvania DONALD M. PAYNE, New Jersey--
ANN MARIE BUERKLE, New York deceased 3/6/12 deg.
ROBERT TURNER, New York RUSS CARNAHAN, Missouri
THEODORE E. DEUTCH,
FloridaAs of 6/19/
12 deg.
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
WITNESSES
Pastor Bob Fu, founder and president, ChinaAid Association....... 9
Ms. Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president, Women's Rights
Without Frontiers.............................................. 23
Mr. Steven Mosher, president, Population Research Institute...... 33
Mr. T. Kumar, director of international advocacy, Amnesty
International.................................................. 41
Ms. Yanling Guo, victim of China's population control policies... 43
LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC., SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING
Pastor Bob Fu:
Letter from Chinese scholars on the repeal of the family
planning law................................................. 12
Prepared statement............................................. 17
Documents relating to the capture of and fines levied against
Ms. Guo translated into English.............................. 57
Ms. Reggie Littlejohn: Prepared statement........................ 27
Mr. Steven Mosher: Prepared statement............................ 36
Ms. Yanling Guo: Prepared statement.............................. 45
The Honorable Christopher H. Smith, a Representative in Congress
from the State of New Jersey, and chairman, Subcommittee on
Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights: Material submitted for
the record..................................................... 67
APPENDIX
Hearing notice................................................... 76
Hearing minutes.................................................. 77
CONTINUED HUMAN RIGHTS ATTACKS ON FAMILIES IN CHINA
----------
MONDAY, JULY 9, 2012
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health,
and Human Rights,
Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2 o'clock
p.m., in room 2172, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon.
Christopher H. Smith (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Mr. Smith. The subcommittee will come to order and good
afternoon to everyone. China's one-child policy has been in
effect since 1979, is state sponsored murder, and it
constitutes massive crimes again humanity. The Nuremberg War
Crimes Tribunal properly construed forced abortion as a crime
against humanity. Nothing in human history compares to the
magnitude of China's 33-year assault on women and children.
Abortion is a weapon of mass destruction and millions have been
exterminated.
Today in China, rather than being given maternal care,
pregnant women without birth-allowed permits are hunted down
and forcibly aborted. They are mocked, they are belittled and
they are humiliated. In recent days, the exploitation and
forced abortion at 7 months of Feng Jianmei has sparked global
outrage and deep concern for her welfare and for that of the
women in China. As a matter of fact, I would note
parenthetically, in early July, the European Parliament
condemned China's one-child-per-couple policy with its reliance
on forced abortion.
While Feng remains in a hospital she calls a prison, her
husband Deng has been beaten. Feng's gross mistreatment,
however, is far too commonplace. Feng Jianmei was forced to
undergo an abortion on June 2, 7 months into her pregnancy.
Many reports indicate that local officials in northwestern
Shaanxi Province held Ms. Feng for 3 days, blindfolded, and
coerced her to consent to the abortion. With the supposed
consent, it took five men to hold her down and administer the
drug that induced the 48-hour labor. The injection was given
directly to the child's head. Ms. Feng's husband, Deng, posted
graphic photos of his wife and the dead baby online;
embarrassing the government. Deng Jicai, Mr. Deng's sister, and
her brother and sister-in-law, had refrained from speaking to
the media but decided to speak to German reporters who traveled
to Shaanxi when the government did not produce investigation
results as promised.
Ms. Deng reported to the media that the local government
organized a backlash against the family members, calling them
traitors and keeping them under surveillance apparently angered
over the family contact with journalists. Local residents took
a long bus ride to the hospital where Ms. Feng was recovering
from the abortion and demonstrated with banners like, ``beat
the traitors soundly,'' and ``expel them from the township.''
Family members claim that the demonstration seemed to be a
campaign organized and funded by local authorities, but made to
look like a spontaneous public gesture.
Mr. Deng reportedly was also beaten and labeled a traitor
for speaking about the crime committed against his wife. The
China Daily reported that there was no legal basis for the fine
of $6,300 for the second pregnancy that Ms. Feng refused to
pay. The local government also has admitted that Ms Feng's
legal rights were violated. Publicity surrounding the forced
abortion prompted the firing of two local government officials
and warning or demerits being issued against five others. Mr.
Deng escaped from the hospital where both he and his wife were
being forcibly detained. He traveled to Beijing and hired a
lawyer to sue the local government. Mr. Deng's location is now
unknown, but it is believed that he is in hiding. And of
course, Ms. Feng is still being held in the hospital.
Their lawyer, Zhang Kai, said recently that he sent a legal
request on behalf of the Feng's husband asking local police and
prosecutors to investigate criminal infractions in the case.
Deng is also seeking unspecified compensation from the
government.
The widespread circulation of the photos posted by Mr. Deng
has prompted renewed debate in China and the world regarding
the one-child policy, possibly including within the government
itself. Researchers with a center affiliated with China's State
Council, the equivalent of China's cabinet, argued in an essay
published in the China Economic Times newspaper on July 3 that
China should adjust the one-child policy as soon as possible to
head off a potential demographic crisis.
The Wall Street Journal on July 6 also reported that a
group of prominent Chinese scholars issued an open letter on
Thursday calling for a rethink of the one-child policy. The
group argued that the policy in its current form is
incompatible with China's increasing respect for human rights
and need for sustainable economic development. The letter comes
less than a month after Feng's photo and story ignited the
public anger.
``The birth-approved system built on the idea of
controlling population size as emphasized in the current
`Population of Family Planning Law' does not accord with
provisions on the protection of human rights contained the
nation's constitution,'' the authors of Thursday's letter
wrote, adding that the rewriting of the law was ``imperative.''
The list of signatories to Thursday's letter included
several high profile figures, including Beijing University
sociologist Li Jianxin and Internet entrepreneur James Liang.
``This is a time during which people all over the world have
realized that there are problems with the [one-child] policy,''
Mr. Liang, the co-founder and chief executive of a Chinese
online travel site, told The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Liang has
spent the past 5 years pursuing a Ph.D. in economics at
Stanford and just published a book challenging the notion that
China has too many people. Mr. Liang said he has felt a recent
opening up of discussion around the one-child policy.
Mr. Liang also advocates a complete dismantling of the
family planning system rather than a two-child system put
forward by others. He said he initially became interested in
the one-child policy when he came across research showing that
innovation and entrepreneurship are dominated by young people.
He said he feared a shrinking of the population of young people
would hamper the country's efforts to evolve beyond being
merely the world's factory.
``From an economic perspective, the one-child policy is
irrational,'' he wrote. ``From a human rights perspective it is
even less rational.''
Today we will hear testimony from Guo Yangling who will
tell us how she, like Feng, suffered a brutalizing late-term
abortion. She notes that heading out to breakfast, she was
stopped by an older woman in her 50s and asked if she had a
birth permit. Again, without a birth permit, a child simply
cannot be born. ``Then two staff members from the Family
Planning Commission came and asked me where I was from, and
where I lived, and what my name was. I tried to walk away but
they wouldn't let me go,'' she will say. ``Help,'' she said,
``somebody help,'' but no one came to help. Then two vans
arrived, the doors opened, and she was put into the van.
And she said on her way while she was complaining, they
stuffed a rag into her mouth to gag her. She then went on to
say that when she got to the second floor of the abortion mill,
there were a number of female victims sitting on the benches in
the corridor, their eyes filled with tears of anxiety, terror
and sadness. ``A woman dressed in white and wearing a surgical
mask told me to get on the delivery bed immediately. I
refused,'' she said, ``so they pinned me down on the bed by
force. After the person in white pressed my belly with her
hands and felt the position of my baby's head,'' she goes on to
say, ``she stuck a big long fatal needle into the abdomen.''
And then she said, ``my unborn baby had been murdered and I
lost heart.'' She will be testifying today before this hearing.
This is the grim reality of the one-child-per-couple
policy: Broken women and dead babies. As we have known for
three decades, there are no single moms in China, except those
who somehow evade the family planning cadres and concealed
their pregnancy. For over three decades brothers and sisters
have been illegal. Anyone in this room, anybody who might hear
about this hearing, anybody in the world who has a brother or
sister, not so in China, they are illegal. The mother has
absolutely no right to protect her unborn baby from state-
sponsored violence.
The price of failing to conform is absolutely staggering.
If you have an out-of-plan illegal child, your other child, if
there is one, could be denied education, health care, marriage
and the fines, again, are unbearable. Ms. Feng was told she had
to pay a $6,300 fine or else her child would be killed at 7
months, sometimes that fine, called a social compensation fee,
goes as high as 10 times the combined salaries of the mother
and the father.
Her trauma, women in China like Feng and Guo is
incomprehensible and it is a trauma she shares to some degree
with every woman in China. The World Health Organization says
something on the order of 500 women per day in China commit
suicide. Unlike any other country in the world, these women are
suffering the trauma of being forcibly aborted and many take
their own lives.
The result of this policy is a nightmarish, brave new
world, with no precedent in human history. Where women are
psychologically wounded, girls fall victim to sex selection
abortion. In some provinces, 140 boys are born per every 100
girls. And most children grow up, as I said before, without
brothers, or sisters, or aunts, or uncles, or cousins.
Over the years, I have chaired 37 congressional hearings
focused in whole or in part on China's one-child policy. At
one, the principle witness was a woman named Wuijan, a Chinese
student attending university here in the United States who
testified how her child was forcibly murdered by the
government. She said the waiting room was full of moms who had
just gone through a forced abortion. Some moms were crying,
some were mourning, some moms were screaming. One mom was
rolling on the floor with unbearable pain, she testified. Then
Wuijan said it was her turn, and she described through tears
what she called her ``journey in hell.''
At another hearing right in this room in the mid 1990s, a
woman who was the director of the family planning clinic in
Fujian province said that by day, she was a monster; by night a
wife and mother of one. Harry Wu arranged for her testimony. It
was very difficult to get her into this country, and when she
told her story, you could have heard a pin drop.
Women bear the major brunt of the one-child policy not only
as victimized mothers, but again, because girls are selected;
sex selection abortion is huge in China with a catastrophic
impact on the girl child as well as this gendercide that has
lead to an unimaginable increase in human trafficking.
Some of you may know I am the author of the Trafficking
Victims Protection Act of 2000. Well, this year's TIP released
on June 19 points out that China's birth limitation policy
coupled with a cultural preference for sons creates a skewed
sex ratio in China which served as a key cause, I repeat, a key
cause of trafficking of foreign women as brides for Chinese
men, and for, of course, prostitution.
The report goes on to say that the government took no, that
is to say, the Chinese Government, took no discernible steps to
address the role that its birth limitation policy plays in
fueling human trafficking in China with gaping gender
disparities resulting in shortages of female marriage partners.
On June 26th, an op-ed in The People's Daily, the official
paper of the Chinese Party, shed light on this emerging
demographic catastrophe that is in China. The article entitled
``Leftover Men to Be a Big Problem,'' admits there is a
``bachelors crisis'' that will ``trigger a moral crisis,''
these are their words, ``of marriage and family.'' We have
heard that before, many of our witnesses have spoken to this,
in some cases for decades, that there is a huge disparity of
males to females. Nicholas Eberstadt, the world renowned
demographer, has said what are the consequences for a society
that has chosen to become simultaneously more gray and more
male.
Let me just say, finally, last August, Vice President Joe
Biden visited China and told an audience that he was fully
aware and fully understood the one-child policy, and he was not
second-guessing the state of China for imposing it. I would
say, first, to my colleagues, what would the public reaction be
if the Vice President or any public official, House, Senate or
White House or anywhere else in the world said that he fully
understands and is not second-guessing copyright infringement?
A gross violation of intellectual property rights? Or torture?
Or religious persecution?
The one-child-per-couple policy is the most egregious and
vicious attack on women ever in its scope, pervasiveness, and
it is done with impunity every day. Ms. Feng's case is one of
tens of millions that happened over the last 30 years. I would
just say that I am concerned as well that we continue to fund
organizations like the U.N. Population fund.
In May 1984, 28 years ago, I offered the first amendment
ever to a foreign aid bill to deny funding to any organization,
including the U.N. Population Fund that are complicit with
China's forced abortion policy or its involuntary sterilization
policy. It passed, and that language matriculated into the
Kemp-Kasten Amendment after Jack Kemp of New York offered it
through an appropriations bill.
After all these years, it is astonishing that policymakers
remain indifferent or supportive of these massive crimes
against women and children. The Obama administration has long
enabled this policy by its silence and financial support to the
tune of $165 million over the past 3 years to UNFPA, an
organization that supports, plans, implements, defends, and
whitewashes these crimes against humanity.
I have met with the leaders of the Chinese population
program, I remember Peng Peiyun on one particular trip, and she
launched into a defense of their program claiming that the
UNFPA was in town, was there and they defended it, and said it
was a totally voluntary program.
Finally, in 2000, I wrote a law called the Admiral James W.
Nance and Meg Donovan Foreign Relations Authorization Act for
Fiscal Years 2000 and 2001. Section 801 of Title VIII of that
Act is still in effect today. It requires the Secretary of
State not to issue any visa to, and the Attorney General not to
admit to the United States, any foreign national whom the
Secretary finds based on credible and specific information to
have been directly involved in the establishment or enforcement
of forced abortion or forced sterilization. Owing to a glaring
lack of implementation, only a handful of abusers of women have
reportedly been denied visas to the United States. That, too,
must change.
I would yield too my good friend, Ms. Bass, for any
openings comments that she would make.
Ms. Bass. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, this hearing covers a
topic of international concern for which this committee has, as
you recounted, received testimony on a number of occasions. And
you have certainly been outspoken on China's one-child policy.
And I know that several of today's witnesses have, on numerous
occasions, expertly argued the China's one-child policy raises
considerable concern and is absolutely egregious.
Today's witnesses have also drawn our attention to numerous
other human rights violations with respect to women in China.
It is my hope that today's hearing will speak not nearly on
behalf of the countless women in China, of course, who endured
grave harm to their minds and bodies, but on behalf of women
and girls everywhere who are under threat each and every day,
who live in perpetual fear, and who must endure unimaginable
pain and suffering, due, for no other reason, than because of
their gender.
You will recall in 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. At this
hearing, Secretary Clinton unequivocally condemned the forced
abortion and sterilization practices in China. She said at that
hearing, ``I consider any governmental imposition that imposes
government policy on women to be absolutely unacceptable. And I
feel strongly about forced sterilization, forced abortion, or
any other egregious interference with women's rights.''
The Secretary State spoke clearly on practices that I, too,
find deplorable and, frankly, unacceptable. I believe the women
and men at the State Department have worked and will continue
to work with the Chinese to address this very serious human
rights issue. And I was actually surprised to hear of the
comments of the Vice President, because, actually, I have heard
very much the opposite from him as well as from the
administration in terms of their considering the one-child
policy to be absolutely deplorable.
The measure in health, the society is based on how we treat
our citizens and the people found within our borders, while
these words have been said time and time again, these words and
their meaning are critically important to all our societies,
whether we are American or Chinese. It is a measure of the
society before us and of a future society where peace, freedom
and justice is an idea worth achieving. It is a reminder that
while governments, no matter how powerful, may make and carry
outlaws, it is people who are the truest measure of these laws.
While nations should be able to set policies and laws that
are in the best interest of its people, nations must do so with
the deepest respect and in accordance with international
standards and with an eye toward observing always human rights.
These human rights instruments that have been passed before
by the United Nations among many others are more than mere
words on a page. They were crafted after much deliberation from
expert scholars, civil societies and the aftermaths of events
that made us question the very essence of our humanity, such as
the convention on the elimination of all forms of
discrimination against women are the international covenant on
civil and political rights. These instruments are fundamental
to prevent atrocities of all forms from taking place today and
into the future. They are our guides to a global society that,
despite cultural difference, uphold inalienable rights that
cannot be undermined or struck down. Thank you very much.
Mr. Smith. Ms. Bass, thank you very much for your opening
statement. I would like to yield to Ann Marie Buerkle,
gentlelady from New York.
Ms. Buerkle. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you also to our
witnesses for being here today. Your courageous efforts to
bring attention to human rights abuse in China are exemplary
and future generations will be indebted to you for your courage
and your devotion to the cause of creating a free and fair
China. Thank you very much for being here.
Over the course of the past decade, China's rapid
advancement has fascinated people around the globe. It seems
every day, there are more and more reports about China's
increasing strength. Today, there is no doubt that China is a
major player on the world stage and challenges America's
leading role in world affairs. Sadly, there is an ugly
underbelly to China's impressive assent. Our fascination with
China's advancement is matched by our horror of China's human
rights abuses. While China's economic and technological
development has sped forward, civil and human rights in the
nation have remained very backwards.
The story of Ms. Feng is heart-wrenching. Seven months into
her pregnancy, the 23-year-old Ms. Feng was forced to undergo a
horrific abortion procedure. Her case is a perfect
demonstration of both the general persecution Chinese citizens
face at the hands of the Chinese state, and the particular
atrocious practices of governmental officials who have resorted
to forced abortions and sterilizations to comply with China's
one-child policy.
There is no question that China is becoming a leader in the
global community and therefore it is up to the global community
to hold China to a human rights standard. We cannot stand by
while China continues to commit human rights abuses. For this
reason, it is essential that the Obama administration pursues
Ms. Feng's case to a proper and just conclusion.
The case that she presents to America is an opportunity for
America to take a lead in condemning China's abominable
practice of forced abortions. As a Nation, and as a world, we
must demonstrate the courage to assert what is right and to
help this horrific phenomenon. I yield back.
Mr. Smith. Thank you, Ms. Buerkle. I yield to Chairman Joe
Pitts, the gentleman from Pennsylvania.
Mr. Pitts. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for permitting me to
sit with your panel today, and thank you to the witnesses for
coming forward with your testimony. I would like to, first,
thank you for holding this important hearing, Mr. Chairman.
Just a few weeks ago, when I received the first report on
forced abortion performed on Feng Jianmei who was 7 months into
her pregnancy, I immediately took to the House floor to decry
this horrible practice and violation of human rights and this
instance of violation of the human rights of this young lady.
Although China's Central Government denies culpability for
forced abortions by blaming them on the local officials that
act outside the law, China's one-child policy is undeniably the
culprit. The Central Government's coercive policy relating to
childbirth has led to the stigmatization of having multiple
children. This is especially the case for having a baby girl.
In recent years, the effects of China's one-child policy
are finally being manifested by China's precarious population
growth and gender gap. It now seems that consensus in China is
building toward reforming the policy. Advocates for reform make
arguments relating to China's economic prowess and its
demographic future. I advocate that China break with the policy
to put forced abortion to an end so that it might live up to
its human rights obligations.
China must end the policy at the Central Government level
and hold those issuing forced abortions responsible for their
crimes. The government can start by seeing that justice is done
in the case of Feng Jianmei and her baby girl.
Again, I thank Chairman Smith for holding this important
hearing and I look forward to hearing the testimony of our
witnesses today and I yield back.
Mr. Smith. I would thank Chairman Pitts for joining us and
for his leadership on human rights for many years, especially
as it relates to China. Without objection, I do recognize
myself for an additional 2 minutes just to, again, point out
that a picture is worth a thousand words. And the picture of
Ms. Feng's baby having been aborted at 7 months gestation, and
then crudely put next to her in the bed is a picture that has
awakened the conscience and the concerns of people around the
world. That picture, sadly, is replicated and has been done
over and over again, tens of millions of times throughout
China, but in this case, there is a picture, and now it is
posted and people are finally, at long last, seeing the
gruesome reality of China's one-child-per-couple policy with
its reliance on forced abortion, which is cruelty beyond words.
And that is what that picture has helped to spark. Hopefully
people within the Government of China itself will look at that,
because it is has made its way throughout all of China as well
and realize that that kind of barbaric behavior toward children
and mothers and women is absolutely unacceptable in any
civilized society.
I would like to now, having completed my opening statement,
just make a statement for the record: I would like to point out
for the record that the written testimony of T. Kumar from
Amnesty International, who has been before this committee many
times before had not been presented to the subcommittee, the
subcommittee was not notified about Mr. Kumar's participation
at the hearing until last Friday evening. He was not noticed
publicly until 11:52 a.m. today. Therefore, without objection,
in this exceptional circumstance and pursuant to rule 6(b) of
the committee rules, Mr. Kumar's statement, as well the written
statement of all our witnesses, will be submitted for the
record if he would like to submit one. Welcome, Mr. Kumar.
I would like to now introduce our distinguished witnesses
beginning first with Pastor Bob Fu, who was a leader in the
1989 student democracy movement in Tiananmen Square, and then
became a house church pastor that he founded along with his
wife. In 1996, authorities arrested and imprisoned them for
their work in China. After their release, they escaped to the
United States, founded the ChinaAid Association; ChinaAid
monitors and reports on religious freedom in China and provides
a forum for discussion among experts on religion law and human
rights in China. Pastor Fu is frequently interviewed by media
outlets around the world and has testified before congressional
hearings, including the Congressional-Executive Commission on
China hearing held a few weeks ago where we were able to hear
directly from Chen Guangcheng.
Then we will hear from Ms. Reggie Littlejohn, who is
founder and president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, an
international coalition that opposes forced abortion,
gendercide and sexual slavery in China, and frankly, anywhere
else in the world where it occurs.
She has legally represented Chinese refugees in their
political asylum cases as an attorney, and testified before the
European and British Parliaments, the White House and Congress.
Ms. Littlejohn has served as an expert on China's one-child
policy for ChinaAid, and Human Rights Without Frontiers has
issued several ground-breaking reports about the incalculable
suffering caused by the coercive enforcement of the one-child
policy.
Then we will hear from Mr. Steve Mosher, who is the
president of the Population Research Institute, and the author
of numerous books on China. I have read three of his books,
including A Mother's Ordeal, and it brought great insight to me
and to anyone else who took the time to read those powerful
books.
In 1979, he became the first American social scientist
permitted to conduct field research in China since the
Communist Revolution. He was the man who broke the story of the
one-child-per-couple policy. Frontline, 60 Minutes, the Beijing
bureau chiefs of The Washington Post and others back in the
early 1980s relied on his breakthrough research about what
women were experiencing as the direct result of the horrific
one-child-per-couple policy. He has worked on human rights
issues ever since and has brought great insight to this issue.
We will then hear from Yanling Guo who was forced by the
Chinese officials to undergo a forced abortion at 8 months. Her
husband was subjected to a forced sterilization as well, as
well as torture and multiple imprisonments. They have three
children and have been fleeing Chinese authorities for 21
years. They are now in Bangkok and have applied for refugee
status through the UNHCR.
And finally we will hear from Mr. T. Kumar, who is Amnesty
International's Director for International Advocacy. He, too,
has testified before the U.S. Congress on numerous occasions to
discuss a broad array of human rights abuses. He has served as
a human rights monitor in many Asian countries, as well as in
Bosnia, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Sudan, and South Africa.
He also served as director of several refugee ships and
camps. T. Kumar was a political prisoner for over 5 years in
Sri Lanka for his peaceful human rights activities. Amnesty
International adopted him as a prisoner of conscience when he
was incarcerated. He started his legal studies in prison, and
eventually became an attorney at law and devoted his entire
practice to defending political prisoners.
Pastor Fu, if you would begin.
STATEMENT OF PASTOR BOB FU, FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT, CHINAAID
ASSOCIATION
Pastor Fu. Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee,
thank you so much for organizing this timely hearing today.
Again, I am very grateful this committee gave the platform to
really make those vulnerable voices heard.
On June the 2nd, in Zeng Family town in the city of Ankang
of Shaanxi Province, Ms. Feng Jianmei, more than 7 months
pregnant, was abducted by local government officials and taken
to a hospital where she was forcibly aborted of her unborn
baby.
On June 6, local family planning officials and government
officials in Changsha, Hunan Province, dragged Ms. Cao Ruyi,
who was 5 months pregnant to a hospital, beat her and were
about to force an abortion on her. However, due to the
immediate advocacy of ours and especially a timely letter from
Mr. Chairman, Congressman Chris Smith to the Changsha
Government in Hunan Province. I still remember I received your
phone call even on the Sunday, Sunday morning in the church. As
well as the efforts of the international community, Ms. Cao
Ruyi and her unborn baby are safe for the moment.
On June 19, a pregnant Hu Xia of Zhengjiamen village of
Shangche, Hubei Province, was forcibly taken to People's
Hospital by local officials and given an injection to induce a
miscarriage. Two days later, she delivered that nearly 8-month
fetus.
These three cases in June alone expose the government's
rule in forced abortions in China, shocked the international
community and set off a wave of criticism. However these cases
are only the tip of the iceberg; numerous forced abortion
tragedies occur every single day in China. The massive
violation of the rights of women and their unborn babies
through government action and by legal means in the
implementation of China's forcibly enforced one-child family
planning policy has been going on for over 30 years already.
The international community is late in expressing its
concern and criticism. In this context, even more does U.S.
Congressman Mr. Smith, Mr. Chairman, deserve or respect for
your long but persistent cries and efforts to end China's
forcibly enforced one-child policy. Your contribution will be
remembered in the history of human rights in China and the
world.
I will give a brief introduction to the Feng Jianmei's
case. On June 11, after Mr. Huang Qi a veteran political
dissident from Sichuan Province, who himself suffered
tremendous persecution over the years, was the first to post
Feng Jianmei's story on his Web site called the 64Tianwang,
accompanied by that picture that you just showed on the screen.
It attracted worldwide attention and condemnation. Feng
Jianmei, a villager from Zhenping County, Ankang City, Shaanxi
Province was abducted by the officials and taken to the
hospital by June 1 while her husband, Deng Jiyuan was working
out of town. On June 3, her 7-month-old unborn baby was
forcibly aborted. Upon learning of Feng Jianmei's case Mr.
Zhang Kai, a young, well-known Chinese Christian lawyer, wrote
on his blog publicly announcing that he was willing to take on
this case.
Mr. Yang Zhizhu, a former law professor at the China Youth
College of Political Sciences, who has long been concerned
about, and has condemned the one-child policy, also started to
take part in this rights defense case. In the face of powerful
condemnation from the international community, China's official
media reported on June 15, that Ankang City officials in
Shaanxi province had visited the forced abortion victim Feng
Jianmei and her family the previous evening and apologized to
her, and said they would hold accountable the officials who
were involved.
On June 22, the government retaliated by beating Feng
Jianmei's husband, Deng Jiyuan, and putting him under
surveillance. On June 24, the government sent people to display
a banner in front of their home that read, ``beat up traitors,
run them out of Zeng family town.''
After dinner that day Deng Jiyuan shook off his tails and
escaped. In the following 3 days, about 83 hours, he avoided
multiple closely guarded government checkpoints. And on the
night of June 27, boarded a train in Shiyan City, Hubei
Province. After he arrived in Beijing on the morning of the
June 28, he met with lawyer Zhang Kai and Professor Yang Zhizhu
and signed papers authorizing them to be his legal
representatives in filing lawsuits and applying for state
compensation.
The Zhenping County official director, the newly appointed
mayor of the Zeng family town and village official from Yuping
Village where Deng Jiyuan lives went to Beijing, and on July 1
at 3 o'clock p.m., they met and talked with lawyer Zhang Kai
and Yang Zhizhu. They were hoping to see Deng Jiyuan in person.
During the meeting, the village officials continued to claim
that abortion was not a big deal where they are from.
On July 7, lawyer Zhang Kai sent a legal letter to the
Public Security Bureau and Procuratorate of Ankang City,
Shaanxi Province, requesting them to place the case on file and
start a criminal investigation.
The Chinese society and the international community should
make every effort to end this ongoing tragedy of China's
forcibly enforcing the family planning policy. That Feng
Jianmei's case attracted such widespread concern from the
Chinese public and the international community so quickly is
attributable to three main factors: The larger context of the
recent Chen Guangcheng incident, the photo showing the 7-month
dead fetus and the despair on the mother's face, and the timely
participation of many lawyers, including Christian lawyers in
China. This is the result of the united efforts of people
inside and outside of China who stand for justice.
On July 5 the European Parliament voted on and passed a
resolution on the forced abortion scandal in China in response
to the tragedy of Feng Jianmei's forced abortion, strongly
condemning the human rights abuses committed in the enforcement
of China's one-child policy. This is a historic step made by
the international community in attaching great importance to
the rights of women and children. On the same day in China, in
response to Feng Jianmei's case, five prominent Chinese
scholars and another 10 of corporations, including corporation
leaders, issued an open letter cosigned by other influential
academics to the National People's Congress and its standing
committee.
The cosigners were 10 others from of China's top
universities, including Beijing University, Qinghua University,
China's People's University, Chinese University of Political
Science and Law, Beijing Normal University. The letter asked
legislators to completely revise the population and the family
planning law to repeal restrictions on citizens' reproductive
rights, and to abolish the birth approval system and the system
of social child raising fees.
Mr. Chairman, I want to request to put the record of this
open letter by these brave 15 scholars, and because of the time
restraints, we are not able to complete the translation this
morning, we will make sure by tonight we will send you the
translation of these very important open letter.
Mr. Smith. Without objection, so ordered, and we will keep
the record open until we receive the English translation.
[The letter referred to follows:]
----------
Pastor Fu. Thank you. Now in Feng Jianmei's case we see not
only the great force of justice in Chinese society and the
international community, but also that in a Chinese society
where political corruption and a bankrupt moral ethics prevail,
the Christian faith is providing strong support to the people's
pursuit of justice and love. Also giving them the courage to
stand up to evil forces. The forced abortion victim Feng
Jianmei and her husband, Deng Jianmei, are both Christians. On
the very night when Deng Jianmei fled to Beijing, he
fellowshipped with lawyer Zhang Kai and Yang Zhizhu. As a
Christian rights defense organization, ChinaAid in its 10 years
of ministry has witnessed the Christian faith bringing great
changes to the life of the Chinese people and the Chinese
society. These changes will eventually bring forth a prosperous
China that upholds justice, love and peace and actively
shoulders its international responsibilities.
Feng Jianmei's tragedy is repeated hundreds and thousands
of times each day in China. Recently, China Aid learned of more
such cases. Guo Yanling who will testify later today, also a
Christian, from Guangxi Province was persecuted by the
government for having more than one-child and forced into exile
for 21 years with her husband and three children. The wife of
Wu Liangjie from Xianyou City, Fujian Province was abducted and
held by the government. On April 6 this year, she was forcibly
aborted of her more than 7-month unborn baby boy.
We at ChinaAid are willing to work with everyone in and
outside of China to end this long and violent war against the
millions of women and children in China. We call upon Congress
and the administration to follow the examples of the European
Parliament in taking specific measures and steps to help China
and this cruel one-child policy, and the evil practices of
forced abortion and forced sterilization. We urge the Obama
administration to add this issue of human rights abuses and
family planning to the agenda of bilateral talks on human
rights and the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue. We
ask the Senate and the House to pass a strong joint resolution
to express the will of the American and Chinese people to work
toward the abolishment in China of the one-child policy.
Finally, those abusive officials should be held accountable
according to international law for their evil illegal behavior
in harming women and unborn babies. The State Department should
place travel bans on individuals like them who carry out
China's forced abortion policies, and make sure that no U.S.
funds go to assist China's family planning agencies.
And by the mercy and grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, let us
make concerted efforts for the arrival of that day. Thank you
very much for hearing me.
Mr. Smith. Thank you so very much for your leadership and
your for your testimony.
[The prepared statement of Pastor Fu follows:]
Mr. Smith. Ms. Littlejohn, please proceed.
STATEMENT OF MS. REGGIE LITTLEJOHN, FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT,
WOMEN'S RIGHTS WITHOUT FRONTIERS
Ms. Littlejohn. Thank you, Chairman Smith, and also members
Buerkle and Pitts for the opportunity to be here. This feels
like home to me right now because to my right is Bob Fu, and as
you know, I started out as the expert on the one-child policy
for ChinaAid and now I have my own organization. And to my left
is Steve Mosher who broke this news to the West in the 1980s
and whose book was one of the most important books that I read
in deciding to become involved with this.
And, of course, T. Kumar and Amnesty International have
taken a leadership role on all of this forced abortion in China
condemning it on human rights bases.
I am also thrilled that the European Parliament has passed
a resolution strongly condemning forced abortions and
sterilizations globally and has called for a review to assure
that funding it ceases from these various organizations.
Now as this committee is aware, there have been several
cases that have happened in quick succession in June of forced
abortions. Number one is the case of Feng Jianmei, whose
photograph and story Women's Rights Without Frontiers actually
broke to the West on our blog. We have heard some detailed
testimony about this.
The next case is that of Cao Ruyi of Changsha City, Hunan
Province, who also, at the same time, within a few days of the
Feng Jianmei case, it was reported she, at 5 months pregnant,
was being dragged out for a forced abortion and being fined the
American equivalent of $24,000, an astronomical amount in
China. And due to intervention of various organizations and
Christopher Smith, she was able to get out of the clutches for
the time being with a lesser fine, but she remains in jeopardy.
I also want to bring up the efforts of another outstanding
organization, Women's Rights in China, President Jing Zhang who
has been in touch with Feng Jianmei and Cao Ruyi and actually
had arranged for Cao Ruyi and her husband to be in hiding right
now.
Then there is the case of Hu Jia, June 19, 2012. It was
reported in China's Southern Metropolis Daily that she was
forcibly aborted at nearly 8 months. And the fact that this
case was reported by a major Chinese newspaper indicates that
there may be a turning of the tide inside of China that major
news organizations now are willing to step in and condemn these
abuses.
And then finally, there is the case of Zhang Wen Fang of
Hubei province, her forced abortion occurred at 9 months, but
it was in 2008. However, she stepped forward seeing the other
women step forward and not only was she forcibly aborted at 8
months, but she had her uterus, her cervix and one of her
ovaries removed. She been a successful business owner before
this happened, and now she is completely disabled in a
wheelchair. She said her son is like an orphan, her older child
is like an orphan and she is dependant on her aging mother.
Now why is it that all of these cases have sprung forth so
quickly? Is it that there has been a crackdown in China? There
are more forced abortions happening right now? No, I do not
believe that's the case. Forced abortion in China has been
happening for decades. And it is not that there is a sudden
crackdown. I believe that the reason that these cases have
emerged has to do with the fact that just 2 weeks before the
first cases emerged, Chen Guangcheng came to the United States.
Chen Guangcheng is the moral towering figure over this entire
issue and has sacrificed more than anyone else on behalf of the
women and babies of China and his miraculous escape, his coming
to the U.S. Embassy, the whole drama that ensued there that
finally ended up with him coming to Newark, New Jersey on May
19 is something that gripped the world, but also China.
And instrumental to, I believe, both Chen Guangcheng's
release and to the publicity within China that resulted in
these cases coming forward was the efforts of Voice of America.
Voice of America stands alone as the voice of the West being
able to penetrate and get over that firewall in China. I have
been interviewed for Voice of America over 10 times, I can tell
you that the first time I was interviewed, many people called
in and said they never heard of Chen Guangcheng or don't
believe that forced abortion is happening in China. And by the
time that Chen Guangcheng was coming to the United States,
everybody knew who he was and everybody know about the reality
of forced abortion in China.
And so I believe that this ability to reach the Chinese
people with the truth through Voice of America was instrumental
both in building the movement insides of China's free Chen
Guangcheng, and also giving women the courage inside of China
to come forward, because if the miraculous could happen, if
Chen Guangcheng could escape as a blind sick man from Dongshigu
Village with a broken foot and make his way to the Embassy and
come to the United States, if the impossible can happen for
him, then it can happen for the women in China. That is why I
believe that these women have come forward.
Now at the same time, there has been an international
movement in the one-child policy and that has to do with the
publicity that has been generated by the West. And Congressman
Chris Smith has stood head and shoulders above anybody else in
this, hearing after hearing after hearing about Chen Guangcheng
and about the one-child policy. And as I mentioned to
Congressman Smith last week, there was a very similar case that
came out in the hearing on November 10th, 2009, Wang Li Ping
was also forcibly aborted at 7 months, we also had a picture of
her lying on the bed next to her forcibly-aborted baby, it was
equally heart rending. And then there was also the case of Lu
Dan who died during forced abortion at 9 months.
Those two cases were in my original report in 2009, they
are equally serious as the current cases and yet it never made
it into the mainstream media. Why? I believe it is the
incremental effort of Congressman Chris Smith, all of these
hearings, the people sitting around me, Voice of America and
other media, case by case, hearing by hearing, press release by
press release, getting the word out, getting the word out,
getting the word out, to the point now where we have a major
international movement which could actually lead to the end of
this horrific policy.
So leading that charge right now is the European Parliament
of all places. I have testified twice at the European
Parliament. In fact, when I was there in 2008, I was told I was
the first person ever to have testified there exclusively on
the one-child policy. In 2008, I was one of a dozen experts, I
had 8 minutes. In 2011 when I testified again, I had 1 hour and
15 minutes and I was the only person testifying. That is an
indication of the growth and importance that this issue has
taken over the years because of all of our efforts.
So they have now passed a resolution strongly condemning
forced abortion in China, specifically naming Feng Jianmei and
also specifically admitting that they are funding programs that
do population control or family planning in China and asking
for an inquiry to be made to make sure these programs--which
would include the UNFPA and IPPF--are not complicit with forced
abortions. I am very excited about this inquiry because I
firmly believe that any unbiased inquiry is going to reveal
complete complicity between the UNFPA and International Planned
Parenthood, and forced abortion in China. You cannot help the
Chinese Communist Party with their population control program
without being complicit with forced family planning. And I have
to say when we see forced abortions and forced sterilization,
infanticides happening all over the place, on one hand and on
the other hand, we hear silence from organizations like UNFPA
and IPPF, silence is complicity.
Furthermore we have now seen within China a building
movement, and the first of which is that according to the China
Economics Times, several researchers in the Developmental
Research Center, a prestigious government-affiliated think
tank, have cited the coming demographic disaster as a reason to
move away from a one-child policy and they have now proposed a
two-child policy.
I just want to say I do not think that a two-child policy
is the answer to the one-child policy. And if China moved to a
two-child policy, you are not going to be hearing Women's
Rights Without Frontiers declaring victory. There are two
problems with a two-child policy: Number one, in the
countryside of China today, they already have a two-child
policy in the sense that if your first child is a girl, you can
have a boy and that--you can have a second child. And the way
that is interpreted by many couples is they have a second
chance to have a boy, and that is where this gendercide comes
in. Demographers have found that for the first child, they are
willing to let nature take its course, but when they have a
girl and they have one child left, that is where you get on the
second child 140 boys born for every 100 girls born on average.
And there are two provinces in China, Jiangsu and Anhui, where
on that second child, there are 190 boys born for every 100
girls born. So, that is gendercide, the sex-selective abortion
of baby girls that happens in the context of a two-child
policy.
The second reason I don't think that a two-child policy is
a solution to the one-child policy is that, for me, the issue
is not whether the government allows a woman to have one child
or two children; the issue is that the government is telling
people how many children they can have and enforcing that limit
coercively. So even if there is a two-child policy, women are
still going to have to have a birth permit, and they will still
be subject to forced abortion if they don't have one on that
first and on that second child.
The second group calling for reform within China is a group
of very prominent and brave scholars who have criticized the
one-child policy on the basis that it violates human rights.
And one of their leaders, James Liang, is calling for the
abolition of the one-child rule. And I just salute his courage.
Now, Women's Rights Without Frontiers has come up with six
policy recommendations, and they are all in my testimony. I
just want to highlight one of them, which is that we should
pass--we would encourage Congress to pass an act concerning
United States corporate responsibility in China. I just think
that this would be absolutely essential. We are talking about
governmental efforts from our Government to their government,
and we have--Women's Rights Without Frontiers has a number of
recommendations on that front, and I think that they are all
very important; however, I think that there is a major role
that United States corporations can play.
I would like to recall to this committee the testimony of
Ping Liu, who testified actually before this very committee on
September 22, 2011, and she testified to the fact that she had
five forced abortions. She couldn't have contraception because
she had a kidney problem, so she just kept having abortions.
But what she talked about, and this was in the 1980s, is
that in her factory they had this surveillance system. They had
family-planning officials like a department in the factory, and
they had collective punishment, so that if one woman on her
floor or in her group were pregnant, the entire group would be
punished. So all of the women were watching each other. They
were basically exposing each other for forced abortions. Every
month women had to undress, and in the nude they had to present
themselves before family-planning officials to demonstrate that
they weren't pregnant.
So what I would like to know is are these practices still
going on in China? This testimony is on practices from the
1980s. We don't have any more recent testimony on this. I would
like to find somebody who is a recent person that has come over
from China and has experienced what happens in factories. But I
would also be very surprised if U.S. or other foreign factory
owners--whether the women in those factories get a free pass on
the one-child policy because their factory happens to be owned
by a foreign country or a foreign corporation.
It might be very difficult to investigate this, very risky,
but I think it would be a great thing for the United States
Congress to pass a corporate responsibility act for
corporations that are doing business in China to say that they
will not comply even with Chinese law to the extent that that
law would cause them to commit crimes again humanity,
including, but not limited to, forced abortion.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Littlejohn follows:]
----------
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much, Ms. Littlejohn, for your
testimony, and your recommendation, I think, is a good one. We
are looking into it. You have raised this before, and I thank
you for that.
I would like to now ask Steve Mosher if he would proceed.
STATEMENT OF MR. STEVEN MOSHER, PRESIDENT, POPULATION RESEARCH
INSTITUTE
Mr. Mosher. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this
important meeting, and, Congresswoman Buerkle and Chairman
Pitts, for taking the time to attend. I appreciate your
interest in this issue. I believe that every minute of
attention that we can focus on China's one-child policy saves
lives in China.
I would like to focus on one particular aspect of the one-
child policy, and that is the support that it receives,
financial and otherwise, from international organizations,
chiefly the United Nations Population Fund. In fact, I have
entitled my testimony ``China's One-Child Policy and the U.N.
Population Fund: A Deadly Partnership'' because I believe it is
the case, and I believe we have collected evidence in an
unbiased inquiry of the U.N. Population Fund's continued
involvement in forced abortion and forced sterilization. Let me
tell you what I mean.
Thirty-two years ago I was an eyewitness to the forced
abortion of several dozen women, who, like Feng Jianmei, were
7, 8, and even 9 months pregnant. Now, the Chinese Government
at the time, this was in 1980, echoed by the U.N. Population
Fund, claimed that these were local aberrations, these were
overzealous local officials, and certainly this was not in any
way supported by or encouraged by national policy. This was not
true then, and it is not true now.
Beijing continues to vigorously pursue its one-child
policy, ignoring human rights violations, the skewed sex
ratios, the labor shortages, the massive infanticide and sex-
selective abortion of baby girls. And China continues, after
all these decades, to be supported in these atrocities by the
U.N. Population Fund, and supported in very, very specific
ways. Now, let me detail the U.N. Population Fund's
involvement.
I know that you, Mr. Chairman, remember in the late 1990s,
the U.N. Population Fund was very proud of the fact that it was
setting up model birth control counties in China. In fact, it
wrote a letter to the U.S. Congress--the then-head of the U.N.
Population Fund wrote a letter to the U.S. Congress saying in
those counties there will be no abuses. In these 32 counties
where they were taking over the management of the birth-control
program, the program would be fully voluntary. It would be
untainted by coercion. There would be no targets and quotas.
There would be no abortion as a method of family planning.
Women would be free, the letter said, to voluntarily select the
timing and spacing of their pregnancies.
Now, several years later, 5 years later to be exact, the
U.N. Population Fund added another 40 counties to the list of
model birth control counties, so there are now 72 model birth
control counties run by the UNFPA, or so it claims, in China.
And in those counties, it claims, there are no abuses of the
kind that we have heard this morning.
Well, we at the Population Research Institute, and I
personally, have visited five of these model family-planning
counties where the UNFPA officials are supposedly in charge of
the program and where there are no violations: Fengning County
in Hebei Province; Luan County in Hebei; Wenshui County in
Shaanxi; Sihui County in Guangdong. The list goes on. And in
those counties we found forced abortions. We found targets and
quotas for abortions and sterilizations. We found cases of
late-term abortions. We found all of the abuses that have
characterized China's family-planning program, one-child
policy, from the beginning in these counties where the program
is managed by the U.N. Population Fund.
So I believe on the basis of our inquiry, it is very clear
that U.N. Population Fund officials who are managing these
programs, and who are trained by the U.N. Population Fund, and
who may, in fact, be paid by the U.N. Population Fund, are, in
fact, overseeing a program of forced abortion, forced
sterilization, late-term abortion, infanticide, and all the
rest.
I believe there is compelling evidence to suspend funding
to the UNFPA this time not on a temporary basis, but this time
by law and permanently.
A couple of other things that I will just mention in
passing. The population-control authorities in China, echoed by
the U.N. Population Fund, have long claimed that minorities,
because of their minority status, because of their limited
numbers, are exempted from the one-child policy. The county,
Fengning County, in northern Hebei Province that we visited and
collected evidence in, in fact is a Manchu autonomous county.
It has a majority of Manchus living there. The Manchus that we
talked to said, no, we have the one-child policy imposed on us,
just like our neighboring Han Chinese do.
Secondly, the punitive fines which exist in model family-
planning counties, couples who give birth to a second child,
one document from a model family-planning county says, will be
assessed a fine from five to seven times their annual income.
Those who illegally give birth to a third child will be
assessed a fine from seven to nine times their annual income.
And those who give birth to four or more illegal children--I
don't know how they do it, but the rule is there--will be
assessed a fine extrapolated from the above schedule of
multiplists. So it could be 10 or 12 or even higher times the
annual income.
There is child abduction and child trafficking in these
model family-planning counties. We were told by local
officials, quote, deg.``At the present time, if you
don't pay the fine, they come and abduct the baby you just gave
birth to and give it to someone else''; give it in some cases
to local orphanages, which then adopt these babies out and make
a profit on that transaction as well. So we have child
trafficking as part of the program.
This morning, a friend of mine sent me another story about
women or couples who are ``selling their second children.''
Pregnant with an illegal child, realizing that they couldn't
afford the fine, realizing that they would be, when located by
the population control officials, taken in by force and
forcibly aborted, they were looking for people to give their
children to, to sell their children to.
Now, the government professes to be shocked by this
development of selling unborn babies to the highest bidder and
determined to stamp it out. This is the height of hypocrisy. It
is hypocritical for the Chinese Government to complain about
the buying and selling of babies, because it is the Beijing
regime itself that has turned babies into commodities by
putting a price on their heads, a price of tens of thousands of
dollars on their heads, and allowing them to be sold by state-
run orphanages.
I will only mention one specific case. We interviewed a
woman in China who, in order to throw the population control
police off her scent, gave--went when she was 6 months pregnant
to a neighboring village, gave birth to the baby safely there,
left it in the custody of a cousin of hers, and then on the way
back home, knowing that she was going to be visited by the
population control police, stopped by an abortion clinic and,
after paying a small bribe, was given the dead body of a baby
girl who had been aborted the day before, brought home the
corpse to her house.
As soon as the population control officials heard that she
had returned to her village, they came to either collect the
money or collect the baby. She held the corpse of the dead baby
girl out, didn't say a word. And they said, oh, your baby died,
and left. That illustrates the extremes to which couples in
China have to go to protect their children.
So conclusions, there are three. First, China's one-child
policy constitutes the longest-running and most far-reaching
violation of human rights the world has ever seen, both in the
sheer number and in the duration of the human rights
violations. Four hundred million Chinese children, give or take
a few tens of millions, are dead because of this policy which
has left their mothers wounded in both body and spirit and
killing themselves in large numbers.
Second, the one-child policy is, as it has always been,
coercive not by accident, but by design. The abuses we have
talked about today are not occasional missteps by overzealous
officials, they are the very lifeblood of the program. The one-
child policy, like all political campaigns launched by the
Chinese Communist Party, is deliberatively coercive. The
extraordinary pressure that the highest levels of the Chinese
Government put on lower level officials to collect fines and
meet quotas can have no other outcome than brutality, cases
like Feng Jianmei's.
And finally, the U.N. Population Fund has been complicit in
China's one-child policy from the inception of the one-child
policy. It does not merely turn a blind eye to abuses, but it
facilitates them in various ways. This is nowhere more clearly
illustrated than in the U.N. Population Fund's model family-
planning counties, model birth-control program, where UNFPA-
trained officials oversee the enforcement of the one-child
policy, and where human rights abuses are nonetheless rampant.
And I have just one policy recommendation, Mr. Chairman. I
would repeat what I said to you probably back in 1983: The U.N.
Population Fund should be defunded; this time, however, the
cuts should be permanent.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Mosher follows:]
----------
Mr. Smith. Mr. Mosher, thank you very much for your
incisive testimony and for your decades--again, having been the
man that broke the story itself.
And I would note parenthetically, and I think the
subcommittee members are aware of this, Stanford University
actually retaliated against you. It was so bad, I will never
forget it, the Wall Street Journal did an editorial in your
favor, and it was entitled ``Stanford Morality.'' And it talked
about how, in the interest of having access and the continued
programs with China, they were willing to throw a human rights
whistleblower who documented exactly what he saw and broke the
story to the world--to put you in a--to deny you the ability to
get your doctorate there. So thank you for that bold and
tremendous leadership.
I would like to now yield to T. Kumar from Amnesty
International and welcome him back to the committee.
STATEMENT OF MR. T. KUMAR, DIRECTOR OF INTERNATIONAL ADVOCACY,
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
Mr. Kumar. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
First of all, Amnesty International would like to thank the
committee collectively and you personally to inviting us and
for all of the leadership you have done to lead human rights
abuses around the world, and also Members of Congress who are
here. Thank you very much.
Amnesty International have documented human rights abuses
in China over several decades, and one of the issues we
documented is the one-child policy and abuses connected to it
to enforce those policies. We have documented what other
victims have previously said: Forced abortion, forced
sterilization, and also family members have been caused or
imprisoned or detained in reeducation-through-labor camps for
objecting, or to exert pressure on the women who have been
pregnant so far. We also have documented when some women tried
to petition against forced abortion and sterilization cases,
they have been detained in reeducation-through-labor camps and
also imprisoned there for quite some time.
So overall, what we have seen is this practice of enforcing
one-child policy has contributed to numerous human rights
abuses not only to these women, but also to the family members.
Due to pressures by you as well as other leading
governments around the world--and I will say you are the main
champion--the Chinese Government took a very important step
about 10 years ago. In 2002, they passed a new law pretty much
humanizing or saying that they want to make sure that no human
rights are violated in the process of enforcing the one-child
policy. It is not that they got rid of the one-child policy or
anything else; they said, you know, it should not be used for
detaining or any other form of abuses.
That was a landmark turnaround. We thought then that the
abuses would be stopped. But to our disappointment, despite
that particular law that was passed, to this day what we are
seeing is the same abuses are continuing there. There is no
political will from the government. This particular law came
into effect primarily because of international pressure. So
what says to us, to everyone, is that when the pressure is
there, it has its impact. That is what this hearing also is
going to achieve.
Even according to the law they should have arrested certain
officials who have been committing these abuses, but from
Amnesty International's point of view, we could not able to
find a number of cases of officials who have been detained or
imprisoned. So by raising this issue, we want to see what can
be done from an accommodation point of view.
There is an opportunity that is coming out in 2 weeks'
time. China-U.S. human rights dialogue is going to be taking
place in Washington July 23-24. That is an opportunity for the
U.S. Government to raise this issue, as well as other issues,
with Chinese authorities. This is something you can take the
leadership in exerting pressure on the administration to make
sure that human rights is being discussed in a meaningful
manner.
Every year U.S. Government discusses human rights with
China, but to our knowledge, discussion for the sake of
discussion is taking place. It is not part of the mainstream
dialogue that is being taken care in the name of security and
economic data. So we would urge the U.S. Congress to urge the
administration to include human rights as part of the dialogue
of security and economic dialogue. It should be called
security, human rights and economic dialogue, where human
rights enjoys part and parcel of the whole issue of other
importance that U.S. plays in terms of dealing with China.
Before I close, I just want to highlight other human rights
abuses that are taking place. The reason is that it is all
interrelated. No one human rights abuses can stand alone if
others systems are in place. For example, even one-child policy
will not stand alone if others, like the reeducation-through-
labor system, is not there, if freedom of expression is there.
So as a result, we have to address in a holistic manner, by
giving importance to certain issues that can be highlighted,
like one-child policy should.
The reeducation through labor, there are almost 0.5 million
people who have been detained without charge or trial. That
figure varies because we don't know exactly what happens there.
But the conservative figures we have come up is that system of
reeducation through labor sent chills through the citizens
where they can be locked up without charge or trial.
Secondly, the lawyers, the legal profession, faces enormous
pressure from the government if they speak out on human rights-
related issues. That also falls under this one-child policy
issue or forced abortion. They can't take a position on this,
so that issue also should be raised.
Religious persecution, even though it is not directly
involved, I would urge that the religious persecution issue is
also at the top of the agenda for the U.S. Government when they
deal with China. That penalty--again, I mean, you can argue
whether the death penalty has decreased there or not. To this
day China executes more people than the rest of the world
combined despite all the amendments they brought in to reduce
the number of sentences and executions.
And finally, two more regions. One is Xinjiang and Tibet.
In Xinjiang, Mr. Chairman, you knew, Rebiya Kadeer's two
children are in custody. It should be raised at every meeting
that the United States has.
In Tibet, the issue of Panchen Lama, who was selected 15
years ago by the Dalai Lama, still not to be seen, and the
situation is getting worse.
So in closing, Amnesty International urges you to ensure
that during the upcoming dialogue, the U.S.-China human rights
dialogue, human rights is discussed in a serious manner, and if
they fail, then Congress should exert pressure to make sure
that human rights is part and parcel of security and economic
dialogue.
Thank you very much for inviting us.
Mr. Smith. Mr. Kumar, thank you very much for your
testimony.
I would hope, as you indicated, that the dialogue would be
of some meaning. The problem has been is that it is often a
gabfest with very little relationship to deeds. And the people
who engage in it, listen and talk. These issues, if they are
brought up, certainly are not brought up with the seriousness
that they need to be brought up with.
I think, you know, especially in light of the worsening
instability of China because of its demographic nightmare that
it is experiencing, the missing girls and the aging population
vis-a-vis young people, that that instability, as Valerie
Hudson testified here at a hearing we had last year, portends a
very, very dangerous future for China internally that could
very quickly become an expression of war or war actions
internationally. She pointed out in her testimony that Japan
and Taiwan were the two most likely victims of that kind of
instability on the short and intermediate term. And, of course,
others could be at risk futurewise. So it ought to be
incorporated.
To date, it is in my experience, and I would love to be
proven wrong, that when these issue are brought up, they are
brought up as an obligatory--if they are brought up--obligatory
mention rather than a heartfelt expression of solidarity with
the women of China, as well as with their children, including
their unborn children.
But thank you for that very strong point. It is a good one.
We do have our next witness via telephone.
Ms. Guo, you have got the floor. And thank you for
testifying. Bob Fu will be translating for you. And, again, we
deeply appreciate your willingness to speak.
STATEMENT OF MS. YANLING GUO, VICTIM OF CHINA'S POPULATION
CONTROL POLICIES
[The following testimony was delivered telephonically
through an interpreter.]
Ms. Guo. Honorable Congressman Chairman Chris Smith and
honorable members of the committee, friends for Chinese human
rights, human rights in China, the following is my account that
I was forced to abort my baby. The year was 1995. I was already
8 months pregnant. At that time I was staying at my sister's
house. It was in the morning on the day that the incident
happened, and I was heading out to buy breakfast. I was dragged
by the family-planning officials. Then I was forcibly dragged
into a car, a van, by these family-planning officials. In the
van, I was crying out and asked for help. Help, somebody rescue
me, save me. But they grabbed me and held me down, and I had a
cloth used to wipe cars stuffed into my mouth.
I was then taken to the second floor of the hospital. As I
was in the hospital, I saw a number of female victims sitting
on the benches in the corridor and waiting to be forcibly
abortion--for forced abortions. Later on, I was pinned down on
the bed by force by these family-planning officials. And the
person in white pressed my belly with her hands and felt the
position of my baby's head. And she stuck a big, long, fatal
needle deep into my abdomen.
After about an hour later, because of my poor health, the
baby was born by dragging. So at that point the person guarding
me went to fetch a person and pull the baby out and put it on a
small table less than 3 feet from me. It was a baby boy, my
son. My son.
[The following testimony was delivered telephonically
through an interpreter by Mr. Deng on behalf of Ms. Guo.]
Ms. Guo. By then my unborn baby had already been murdered.
After that, the Chinese Communist Party's family-planning
officials captured me, and then I was forcibly sterilized. I
was beaten and without any strength to work anymore, I had to
flee.
I just want to seek justice after these wounds. Those
officials didn't even admit any mistakes and what they have
done to me. Not only that, I was also handcuffed by these
family-planning officials. They used electric shock batons and
electrified my hands. And I was imprisoned twice for this, for
violations of China's one-child policy. And we were forced to
pay heavy fines, and even our house was destroyed. In order to
flee from the dangers, we had to escape. So we have been
wandering around outside for 21 years. We finally managed to
get to Thailand without any living supplies.
I do hope the United States Government and all friends
sitting around here today help us to seek justice and find
justice, and find justice, and to really find justice for the
Chinese women; and also to help the many babies, wounded
babies; and remove this evil family-planning system, and
restore our human rights, and support us with humanitarian aid.
I also want to thank you once again for all your help. Mr.
Chairman, I want to thank you for today's opportunity you gave
to me.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Guo follows:]
----------
Mr. Smith. Thank you so very much for your courage in
testifying. And again, through your tears, we are again
reminded of the horrific impact this barbaric policy has had on
not just the children, but on the mothers.
Pastor Fu. Mr. Chairman, allow me to just add a few words
about Ms. Guo's case. I was here this morning trying to test
the quality of the phone call, and Ms. Guo's husband told me a
story that happened last night that explains, you know, the
price and the toll, the trauma that had been done permanently
almost to women like Ms. Guo.
He told me, he said last night as Ms. Guo was preparing to
testify today, her husband heard very strong weeping, crying in
the restroom. And later on her husband described to me that Ms.
Guo walking out of the restroom with her arms like this as if
holding a baby. And her husband said, ``Honey, why do you do
this?'' and she said she was in the restroom and saw her son.
She said, ``Our son is back''; not only their 8-month son, she
said she saw many hundreds of thousands of babies following
her.
And I think, you know, it is traumatic. I mean, you can
tell if you read the rest of her testimony, not only she
herself experienced, but she saw, you know, many other women
around her that very day, and she saw actually a bag of trash
of babies in the trash can, and she couldn't identify to say
goodbye to her dead son.
Certainly, you know, I hope with her testimony and the
hearing today, it could become a reality that more and more,
hundreds and maybe thousands of babies could be rescued as a
result of her testimony today. So that is my prayer. Thank you.
Mr. Smith. Mr. Fu, thank you so very much. You know, it
just underscores the trauma that goes on for years and is
lifelong, and Ms. Guo is dealing with that still in the
hospital. And people today as we meet, it is happening to them.
It is so grossly underappreciated by Congress, by the White
House, and by Parliaments around the world, although there is
hope with the European Parliament recently taking its action,
just how traumatized these women really are, when we have
pointed out the number of suicides, far in excess of any other
nation on Earth.
I remember I met with Peng Peiyun, a woman who ran the
program for years, and brought up an article that had been in
The New York Times and pointed out--it started off about how
this woman was essentially clinically depressed over what she
had experienced. And she just said it was rubbish, it was just
nonsense, it was just made up; that the women of China do not
have those problems. Of course, she also said there was no such
thing as a forced abortion either in the People's Republic of
China. So she certainly was lying and deceiving, but just
completely discounted the impact on women like we just heard.
In previous hearings when we have had women who had
suffered the cruelty of forced abortion, without exception they
have been unable to finish their testimonies.
During the Clinton administration, in this room, I had
invited women who were on the Golden Venture program that
President Clinton had changed our asylum policy from to
preclude asylum protections for women fleeing forced abortion.
He did it by Executive Order, and when he did that, these women
had credible cases before the administrative law judge, but
when the policy was changed, they were in no man's land and
were being not coerced, but compelled in many ways to go back
to China. And lawyers were fighting to keep them here.
Well, I invited them to testify. To get them here we almost
had to resort to a subpoena because they did not want them to
tell their stories. But a woman sat right where Reggie
Littlejohn is sitting, who found an abandoned baby girl, made
that girl her own, and the family-planning cadres knocked on
her door and then forcibly aborted her because she had her one.
She could not finish her testimony, nor could the others, just
like we heard. Wujian, in 2009 when she testified, broke down
several times.
So I think, if anything, if the press could convey and if
lawmakers could better understand the trauma that women are
suffering, the helplessness that they feel is without
parallel--to have their babies not only stolen, but then
murdered by the state. And they feel there is nothing they can
do to stop it.
So I would like to thank our panel. I have a couple of very
brief questions, and then I will yield to my distinguished
colleagues.
I am wondering if you could tell us what you think we can
do to mitigate any further retaliation against Ms. Feng, her
husband, and the lawyers who are taking up her case. I have
been amazed and in awe over these lawyers in China who take up
cases, and then like Chen--Chen Guangcheng--and then they
themselves become subjected to punitive actions, including
incarceration and torture. You can go through the long list of
very brave men and women. I am wondering what we could do. I
mean, this woman and her husband and the lawyers now, but
certainly those two and their family have been traumatized. How
do we prevent further retaliation against them as we have
already seen the beginning manifestations when the so-called
townspeople showed up to call them betrayers? Would anyone like
to take that?
Pastor Fu. This is the update about the lawyer situation. I
was able to talk with a lawyer, Zhang Kai, who has signed the
agreement to represent Feng Jianmei and her husband, Deng
Jiyuan's case. He says so far he only received one phone call
from the security officer from the Domestic Security Squad
Division and a gentle warning. He has not received a sort of
visible, direct threat for taking up this case. And, of course,
the local officials even went to Beijing. And remember what had
happened to Chen Guangcheng on numerous occasions in the past
when he escaped to Beijing, and Chen Guangcheng was abducted,
kidnapped, by the officials from the Linyi or Shandong Province
right in front of Dr. Yang Zhizhu, a professor of law and
himself a lawyer, and they were beaten.
So I think we should continue to raise this case. And
certainly as Mr. Kumar suggested, this month, July 23 and 24,
during the human rights dialogue with China, I think Secretary
Clinton should raise this case during the dialogue.
With regard to Ms. Guo Yanling's case, we received her cry-
out petition after the Chen Guangcheng case was exposed. And
she and her husband actually with their three children escaped
to Thailand August 7 last year and registered in the UNHCR, the
High Commissioner on Refugees, in Bangkok. And, of course,
after this hearing she is exposed, and I would hope that this
committee and the Congress and the administration, especially
the Bureau for--the PRM, Population, Refugee and Migration,
should pay attention and send a priority one request to the
United Nations--the refugee bureau, refugee agency in Bangkok
to let them at least speed up their process of approval for
their refugee protection. I think these are the things we can
do immediately to help protect them.
Mr. Smith. Mr. Mosher, you mentioned the UNFPA model birth
control counties, and I think what is, again, underappreciated
by most is the obsession level with regard to promoting
population control in general, and in China particularly. I
remember Harry Wu wrote a book called ``Better Ten Graves than
One Extra Birth,'' and what he was merely putting as the name
of his book was a big slogan that he had a picture of, as you
pointed out. You have a number of--you have taken pictures of
those slogans that are really part and parcel of the policy--
``Better Ten Graves than One Extra Birth.''
I just read a very interesting book called, ``Unnatural
Selection,'' I wasn't fully aware until I read the book just
how sex selection was included as a way of lessening
population. If you kill the baby, the girl child in the womb,
she will never be a mother and will never give birth to
children who will lead to an increase in population. A staple,
a mainstay of the population control movement propaganda, and
China swallowed that hook, line and sinker with its one-child
policy and then the consequences of sex-selection abortions.
I wonder if you could speak to, elaborate on this--you
know, when you talk about these--and I remember in 1985, there
was a hearing on the one-child-per-couple policy which brought
out of a lot of the information you had provided that led to 60
Minutes stories and other things. There was a 1985 hearing run
by the majority--I was a minority Member then--and our
witnesses were telling us, it's all over basically. I don't
exaggerate. It was basically the high tides of China's
population control program had reached its zenith, and now it
was going toward normalcy. And, of course, Michael Weisskopf's
three-part expose in The Washington Post completely obliterated
that thesis for that hearing. But we have heard that over the
years, over and over again. These were injustices, if they ever
occurred, of the past.
When you talk about these model birth control counties, it
reminds me of Srebrenica in a whole different context, a place
that the U.N. called a ``safe haven'' during the terrible war
in Yugoslavia, and it became a mustering zone for the killing
of about 8,000 men with full acquiesce by the Dutch UNPROFOR
peacekeepers.
Maybe not a good analogy, but it is certainly similar,
because at the bottom, at the core of those model counties,
they are still implementing the government policy of one child.
Could you just elaborate on that, if you could?
Mr. Mosher. Well, I think you are perfectly correct in
pointing out the repeated attempts to convince the outside
world that the policy is undergoing modifications and some
changes, and the abuses are a thing of the past. Once you hear
that five or six times, it loses credibility. And the most
recent efforts, of course, which appear to originate separately
from the government, among academics and so forth, are the
first real sign of hope that I have seen in the past few
decades.
Government bureaucrats who respond to criticism are simply
trying to defuse foreign criticism. They are not going to make
fundamental changes in the program, and to see the beginnings
of Chinese civil society now reacting, and at great personal
risk, as the attorneys do, as some people in the media do is
very heartening. It doesn't mean that the battle is over, but
perhaps now the program is entering its final years.
We shouldn't forget that the Chinese Government has pledged
to continue the program until 2050. That is a long time in the
future. We also shouldn't forget that every Chinese leader
beginning with Deng Xiaoping, through Jiang Zemin, through Hu
Jintao has endorsed the policy, which means that it is not an
issue that local-level officials or middle-level officials can
discuss with impunity because the center has set a policy, and
their job is to follow that policy.
I have long thought that much of what comes out of China in
terms of modification of the one-child policy is simply done
for reasons of saving international face.
Secondly, I have also believed that one of the reasons why
for decades the Chinese Government authorities have ignored the
slaughter of little baby girls is because they understand that
this contributes to the solution of what they consider China's
overpopulation problem, because the tens of millions of young
men who are unmarried and who will never marry because their
brides have been killed in utero or after birth will not
contribute to population growth in the future. They will not
have any children. So if you eliminate a woman, you eliminate
all of the children that she would have had and all of her
children's children on down through the generations.
Finally, going back to the point that Reggie made about
going from a one-child policy to a two-child policy or three-
child policy, the problem here is that the government has taken
control of all of the reproductive systems in China. It has
usurped the authority of parents to decide for themselves the
number and spacing of their children. This did not begin in
1979 or 1980 with the one-child policy. This began in the early
1950s in which there was a discussion held between Chairman Mao
and his senior officials as to whether or not it was the proper
role of government in China to dictate how many children should
be born in that country; whether or not it was the role of the
state not just to control all the means of production under the
high tide of communism, but also to control the means of
reproduction, which is to say the male and female reproductive
systems of all Chinese. And the decision that was made by
Chairman Mao in the early 1950s was that the state had a
legitimate role in controlling reproduction, and in the 1950s
he exercised that role by encouraging the Chinese to have
larger families. And then, of course, things came full circle.
But the problem here is the state has taken over control of
reproduction. This is a fundamental human right, and until the
Chinese state decides it has no business interfering with the
reproductive systems of couples in China, the problem will
continue. Whether or not there is an end to the one-child
policy, whether or not there is a move to a two-child policy or
three-child policy, the fundamental problem lies here.
Mr. Smith. Ms. Buerkle.
Ms. Buerkle. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The testimony that we just heard is a--you know, we sit
here almost in the abstract and discuss this issue. But when
you hear the anguish in that woman's voice about the loss of
her child this many years later, as a mother of six, I can only
just begin to appreciate her grief. So, thank you, Pastor, for
allowing her testimony to be translated today, and, again,
thank you to all of you for your willingness to be here and
defend human rights.
My questions are directed to anyone who would be willing to
answer or able to answer.
One of the things we hear are the apologists who say that,
well, the vast majority of Chinese women support this policy.
Can any one of you speak to that? And also we hear that the
policy only affects urban dwellers or government workers, and
so if you could flesh that out for us, I would appreciate it.
Ms. Littlejohn. Well, with respect to your second question,
it is interesting because some people say, oh, well, that only
happens in the urban centers, or that only happens in the
countryside. So you are talking about the people who say it
only happens in the urban centers, and I want to point out a
case that came out in March of this year. It was an anonymous
posting, but it was a posting--and I think many people will
remember this--it was an image of a full-term baby floating in
a red bucket. That happened in Linyi. That is where Chen
Guangcheng is from. A woman had given birth. She had been
forcibly aborted at 9 months. I guess the needle slipped and
passed the baby's head because the baby was born alive, cried,
and that baby was drowned in a bucket. And there was a picture
that was posted on Weibo and went all over the world.
Now, Chen Guangcheng comes from the countryside of China.
He comes from Dongshigu Village. If you want to read some of
the most horrific cases you have ever read in your life, just
read the Chen Guangcheng report, which I posted and also broke
to the West in the hearing on September 22, 2011, of this
subcommittee. That all happened in the countryside. Women
aborted, 7, 8, 9 months.
Men, there is a man that was killed. There was a man who
committed suicide; a grandmother and her brother were forced to
beat each other; whole families, extended families, that were
brought in because of a family-planning violation of one person
in their family. Because of implication, they were all brought
in and tortured together and forced to pay 100 yuan a day in
family-planning learning fee tuition.
All of this happened in countryside. Homes were destroyed.
And yet things have been happening in the city as well. There
was a case that happened I think it was in October 2010 of a
woman in Xiamen--this was broken by al-Jazeera--who was
forcibly aborted at 8 months. It happens in the cities, and it
happens in the countryside. It happens everywhere in China.
Ms. Buerkle. I will just follow up, and then please feel
free to answer. Some will say the Chinese accept this policy.
That is what I would like you to speak to as well. Just what is
their feeling about this, and have they accepted this policy?
Pastor Fu. To say or claim that the majority of Chinese
women support the cruel one-child policy is a flat-out lie. I
think no women in China will be happy to see their wombs being
owned by the family-planning officials from the day of their
marriage to the day really they were forcibly sterilized. Every
woman has a book, a book recorded. Every month they have to
undergo mandatory and forcibly undergo a physical check to see
whether they are pregnant, whether there are any signs of
pregnancy. Of course, once they are found escaping, then the
whole family, the neighbors, other relatives will be in big
trouble. So no woman will support that kind of policy. Yes, it
is a lie.
Ms. Buerkle. Just one last question, Mr. Chairman.
I guess my question is to all of you. How can we best
combat and call attention to this? Whether it is the American
community or the global community, what can we do to combat any
apathy, or ignorance, or just a disregard of this tragic
policy?
Ms. Littlejohn. Well, having hearings is really at the top
of the list. I think this kind of thing really does help
publicize public policy. I would also like to remind this
committee of an Act that was sponsored by Congressman Chris
Smith, H.R. 2121, the China Democracy Promotion Act of 2011. I
think Congress could pass an Act like this, and what that would
do, it would enable the President to deny entry into the United
States for Chinese human rights abusers. I think that that
would be a major thing.
And I would also mention that part of ending the policy is
giving people within China the hope that it can end and helping
them to continue to be informed about this. And again, I want
to lift up Voice of America, which is constantly under attack,
and getting, I understand right now, that they have cut the
funding for interpreters so that people who speak English can
no longer appear, so I will not be able to be on there,
Congressman Smith will not--only Chinese speaking people will
be able to appear on Voice of America. That cuts out a lot of
Americans to be able to speak into China about these issues.
So that's another thing to keep the visibility going on
within China as well, and Voice of America is the major organ
for that.
Mr. Mosher. I would return to the point of delegitimizing
China's one-child policy by taking funding away from China that
comes to it from the International Planned Parenthood
Federation, which has been active in China since 1979, the U.N.
Population Fund which has also been active in China from that
same year. The fact that the Chinese Government gets funding
for its one-child policy from prestigious international
organizations that are, in part, funded by the United States is
used by the Chinese Government to justify and explain the
program to the Chinese people. The government says to the
people if the United Nations, which represents the collective
views of the people around the world, thinks that we are doing
a good thing by embarking on the one-child policy, they say who
are you to resist, or who are you to think it is a bad idea?
So we need to end that source of support for the one-child
policy, and I believe that will embolden a lot of people of
China to speak out where they haven't before.
Mr. Kumar. Coming back to your first question of the
support among women. When there is no need to forcibly abort
a--you know people support, why do they have to force it? So
that pretty much nullify that particular argument.
Coming back to the issue of how best to begin to address
this, of course, all the recommendations we support but after
sitting here and listening to this testimony from Bangkok, I
think the angle of what happened to women who undergo this from
the--is missing. That should be brought to light, how a woman
who have been forcibly aborted, not abortion, this is forcibly
aborted, feels and undergoes the pain and suffering, that
should be brought in. I will say that that will have a
immediate impact on people around the world and everyone. So I
would recommend that you try to hold a hearing only for women
who have gone through this experience, forced abortion
basically, I am not going to complicate with other issues. Try
to find the women who we just heard from Bangkok, that will
have an impact here because you have to have impact here as
well, not only in China. Thank you.
Ms. Buerkle. Thank you, I yield back.
Mr. Smith. A few final questions, why has the U.N. system
so failed the women of China? As I think all of you know, we
have tried and under both Reagan and Bush, and Bush, defunded
the UNFPA only to have its supporters, particularly in the
European Union and elsewhere, seek to fill the gaps, if you
will, and increase their funding which, again, sends that
message that Mr. Mosher just conveyed to us that ``who are you
to question this when the UNFPA is here?''
And I have seen that myself, as I indicated earlier, when
the UNFPA is pulled out as a defense against all critics and
they simply say it is a voluntary program, and that is the end
of the story. So we have, in this year's foreign operations
appropriations bill, there will be a defunding on the House
side. In all candor, the Republicans will seek to take out
funding for the UNFPA. The Obama administration will oppose it
vigorously, as will the Senate, and at the end of the day, we
are less likely to get a cut or an elimination of the funding
for the UNFPA, that doesn't mean we are not going to try.
I think to be complicit in these crimes against humanity,
in my opinion, suggests that the UNFPA itself ought to be at
the Hague answering for such crimes and complicity in such
crimes. And that story will come out someday, and we know it,
but the Chinese people, I think will, especially the women of
China will be extraordinarily chagrinned and angered that the
U.N. played such a pivotal role in their repression. We will
try, I can assure you, we will try, and we will try hard to do
that.
Let me ask you, if I could Ms. Littlejohn, you mentioned
H.R. 2121 a bill that I have introduced. We need, I believe,
and your thoughts on this, to do more under current law and I
wrote it so I know it is there. It is the Admiral James W.
Nance-Meg Donovan Foreign Relations Act, Fiscal Years 2000,
2001; it is still in effect. It requires that a visa be denied
to those who are complicit in these crimes and of forced
abortion and forced sterilization.
We have found after doing some investigations of this that
a total number of 18 individuals, since its enactment back in
2000, have been denied entry into the U.S., which is a very
poor and ineffective compliance record.
I would note parenthetically that I am the author of the
Belarus Democracy Act of 2004, where we have a similar
provision about denying entry visas to those coming in from
Belarus. And there are some 200 people on a list who are human
rights abusers who were denied entry.
I think our next step really needs to be the promulgation
of lists and the invitation to those who know abusers to come
forward with their names so that the State Department, so that
the U.S. Government will deny visas to the United States based
on these crimes against women. So that is a follow up item I
think we really need to go forward with.
And finally, with regard to trafficking, the Chinese
Director of the Ministry of the Public Security Anti-
Trafficking Task Force stated in the reporting period that the
TIP Report covered, ``The number of foreign women trafficked to
China is definitely rising'' and that, ``Great demand from
buyers, as well as traditional preference for boys in Chinese
families are the main culprits fueling trafficking in China.''
So what many of us have predicted for years is now coming
to fruition in a very, very terrible way with more women from
outside the country being brought in and being abused. Any of
your thoughts on that? It seems to me that if this policy is
not immediately and irrevocably reversed, and it will take time
to reverse its consequences, this problem of human trafficking
will only be exacerbated and China will become the ultimate
magnet for the buying and selling and the commodification of
women in the world. Your thoughts?
Ms. Littlejohn. Mr. Chairman, I would like to agree with
you and am very glad that the TIP Report is finally including
this after we have been pressing this issue for years.
I just want to bring forth the plight of North Korean
girls, because there is definitely a confluence between the
vacuum of women, and China just basically sort of sucking up
women from many of the surrounding countries, and the way that
it is violating international refugee law in this sense.
As you know, if human rights is worse anywhere in the world
than in China, it is North Korea and people risk their lives to
get over that border. Sometimes young women and girls they come
over the border into China thinking that they have finally
escaped a horrific situation and they might be able to find
some kind of safety in China, and then they immediately get
snapped up in the sexual slavery trade. And these young girls
can get beaten, they can get raped, they can get murdered, and
there is nothing they can do, there is no one they can appeal
to, because if they then go to the authorities and say, look, I
have been trafficked, help me, the Chinese authorities will
say, oh, you are an illegal economic migrant and repatriate
them to North Korea in contravention of international refugee
law, and these girls can end up in the North Korean death camps
or possibly executed.
I have heard credible reports of members of their families
being executed as well. So this is something that I would like
to highlight in the context of the way the one-child policy is
causing devastation to women and girls internationally,
especially in North Korea.
Mr. Smith. Pastor Fu.
Pastor Fu. I just want to actually elaborate on the issue
of how or why there has been silence even from some women's
organizations on this forced abortion issue. And I, of course,
came from China without knowing a lot of American politics and
before I was already receiving accusation that somehow to help
rescue Chen Guangcheng, maybe even a part of the right-wing
conspiracy. I don't even know this term.
This is not a political issue, this is not a partisan
issue, this is women's, children's rights issues, this is life
and death issue. I think it should not be regarded as American
domestic political issue. And we cannot play them, or even drag
them into the U.S. political field. The women like Ms. Guo,
they are crying out, they have nowhere to go. And if we just
use--whatever way if this issue is regarded as part of the U.S.
politics, and I think it sent a very chilling signal, I think,
indirectly actually played by the Chinese Government, and to
make more women and children into more miserable conditions. I
think I would urge those women organizations like the National
Organization for Women to come up.
Really these are the women's issues, these are their sister
issues. It should not be regarded as a political issue, to pay
attention on these issues and to stand up and speak up for
these vulnerable women, millions of them suffering in China
because they are pregnant with their second, third baby. And
they are dragged, you know, like pigs, and Ms. Guo, her
testimony, she shared about--we have actually received this
thick stack of documentation showing how she was captured,
arrested with official stamps and to say that one town she was
forced to pay a fine already after escape to another township,
they force her to pay another fine and she cannot pay, she
cannot afford to pay when she was imprisoned.
It was well-documented, so I have already sent to the
committee for the translation of these documentation. I also
want to request that it be put as part of the record.
Mr. Smith. Without objection, so ordered.
[The information referred to follows:]
----------
Mr. Smith. Mr. Mosher.
Mr. Mosher. Mr. Chairman, I came back to the United States
from China almost as politically naive as my good friend, Bob
Fu, never having been interested in domestic politics where
abortion to population control was concerned until I was
forcibly confronted with it in China. And my first thought in
the early 1980s was to go to the National Organization for
Women. And I did and I talked with Eleanor Smeal, who was the
head of the National Organization of
Women. And I presented her with documents about forced
abortions in China, pictures that I had taken and so forth, and
she looked sober-faced at my presentation, my evidence. And
then she said, well, I am personally opposed to forced
abortion, but China does have a population problem and that was
the end of it. They would not do anything.
Now maybe their views today would be different. Maybe the
compilation of evidence that you and Reggie and others have
brought together over the years will convince them to overcome
their reticence to condemn forced abortions in China and
everywhere. We should continue to go to everyone, all people in
goodwill and encourage them to take action against this. It is
true that in the United States, if you did a poll on forced
abortion, you would probably find over 90 percent of Americans
oppose forced abortion. We find that 86 percent of Americans
oppose sex-selective abortion, which is happening in China at
epidemic levels.
So this shouldn't be a political issue not because of the
partisan divide, but it is a simple matter of human rights that
women should not be forcibly aborted, that the little girls
should not be eliminated simply because of their sex after
birth and before birth. And I think on that ground we will
finally find consensus.
Ms. Littlejohn. May I just add to that? I think there are
grounds for hope here, Women's Rights Without Frontiers from
the very beginning have been saying this is a human rights
issue. When it comes to forced abortion, whether you are pro-
choice or pro-life, you don't support it because forced
abortion is not a choice. And several people from the pro-
choice movement have come forward recently, Victoria Nuland
from the State Department, in the case of Cao Ruyi, said we
have seen reports of the Chinese women as being detained and
possibly pressured into a forced abortion and that we oppose
forced abortions.
Then Nancy Northup, from the Center for Reproductive
Rights, wrote a letter to The New York Times, dated July 4th of
this year saying that she opposes forced abortion and
specifically citing Feng Jianmei. I think this is a
breakthrough. This is the first time one of these pro-choice
groups has come through and finally said we oppose forced
abortion. And in this regard, I just want to mention the
forerunner of all this, who was Cori Schumacher who about a
year ago, it was the 2011 reigning world women's longboard
surfing champion, and an ardent pro-choice feminist, and she
boycotted the 2011 world women surfing championship tour
because one of the events took place in China. Citing the
testimony before Lantos Commission which you chaired in 2009
and citing the Web site of Women's Rights Without Frontiers,
she said she will have nothing to do with a country that is
forcibly aborting women.
So I just think that that is great. She was a forerunner of
this, so I see that now finally, perhaps because of this
confluence of forced abortion cases that have recently come
out, the pro-choice people are finally seeing the light forced
abortion is not a choice.
Mr. Smith. Thank you. Mr. Kumar.
Mr. Kumar. I would recommend that as I mentioned earlier,
that it is important to bring the issue that this is forced
abortion, and in the impact it has on women and of course, we
should keep on pushing the administration to keep this as one
of the priorities, opportunities as mentioned earlier of
upcoming dialogue. Thank you, thank you.
Mr. Smith. Thank you. I would just disagree with you in
terms of keep it as one of the priorities, I would say make it
one of the priorities, but we disagree. I would like to ask
unanimous consent that a report by the Laogai Research
Foundation, Harry Wu's foundation called Human Rights, Abuses
Caused By the One-Child Policy As Seen From Official Documents
be made a part of the record. Without objection so
ordered.More to come from Mark deg.
[The report referred to follows:]
Mr. Smith. And I would like to thank our very distinguished
panel and our very distinguished guest from Bangkok who
testified via phone for her contribution today, for, again,
reminding us the consequence the one-child-per-couple policy
has had on women in her case going back to 1995 in her case,
and Feng's case going back just a few weeks ago. I would like
to thank you all for your tremendous testimony. This hearing is
adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4:22 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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