Murderous Mayhem in a Chinese County

By Dave Andrusko

No one who has followed the international abortion scene for very long needs to be reminded that the Communist Chinese government has a record of forced abortion, coerced sterilization, and infanticide second in viciousness to no country on earth.

Almost as ignoble as the Chinese government's cruelty toward its own people has been the indefensible practice of many American newspapers to deny, downplay, or excuse away some of the most egregious violations of human rights of the last two decades. Indeed in the past few weeks stories that the Chinese had lightened up have once again popped up in the prestige press.

However a story in the August 5 London Sunday Telegraph brought back the old sense of nausea. According to Damien McElroy, "A Chinese county has been ordered to conduct 20,000 abortions and sterilizations before the end of the year after communist family planning chiefs found the official one-child policy was being routinely flouted."

This pattern of savagery--echoes of which extend back to the 1980s--was defended by Sven Burmester.

"For all the bad press, China has achieved the impossible," said the UN Population Fund representative in Beijing. "The country has solved its population problem."

Officials in the mountainous region of Huaiji have been given what the Telegraph described as a "draconian" target by provincial authorities in Guangdon (formerly known as Canton). Blame was square placed on the victims:
people had "routinely flouted" the one-child-per-family policy. What unleashed the campaign were census reports that the average family in Huaiji county has five or more children.Although women certainly have voluntary abortions, according to the Telegraph, many of the abortions will be forcibly conduced on peasant women. To expedite the killing, county officials have purchased expensive ultrasound equipment that they can cart around to villages.

"By detecting which women are pregnant," McElroy writes, " terminations" will be ordered "on the spot."

Nor will the reign of terror be confined to "unauthorized" pregnancies. To meet the quota, women with "officially approved births" will be immediately sterilized as soon as they give birth.

There is local resistance not only to the forced abortions and sterilizations, according to the Telegraph. Local county officials are also deeply angry that evidently up to half of their salaries will be garnisheed to pay for the expensive ultrasound equipment.

The paper uses the latest atrocities to go back and retrace some of the history of the Chinese government's viciously repressive 20-year campaign to curb population growth. For example, McElroy writes about reports of babies drowned in fields by officials, which were a staple of reports that leaked out in the 1980s.

Then there was the 1998 congressional testimony of Gao Xianoduan, a former family planning official, who said (according to the Telegraph) that "heavily pregnant women were often forced to have abortions" - - sometimes as late as 8 1/2 months.

Were this not bad enough, the other reason the number of abortions in Guangdon is soaring is "a trend for young women in the cities to have multiple terminations from an early age as a form of birth control."

This is a devastating, depressing profile of careless disregard for human life on the part of individuals and a regime that has no more respect for basic human dignity of its citizens or their unborn children.

Remember this the next time your local newspaper insists things are "getting better" in Communist China.

dave andrusko can be reached at dha1245@juno.com