The long effort of the eugenics movement to get "more from the fit and less from the unfit" is by no means ended, although both parts of this program are frequently overlooked. The savage and bloody part, of course, is the assault on the "unfit," the unwanted, the surplus people, the useless bread gobblers.

Some of this elitist selection goes on within the United States, but most of it occurs overseas. This does not mean, though, that Americans can leave the problem to others; the American government has promoted racist population control policies for decades. Some Americans today argue that we should take care of our own problems, and not try to fix the world. Other people, including most churches, urge a more generous engagement with the entire human family. But even the new isolationists must admit that since the United States pushed depopulation programs for decades, we have an obligation to undo the damage.

So what is population control, and where is it a problem?

For many years now, the worst population control program has been in China. The Chinese government decided to reduce population, and set out to do so systematically, with an official policy of permitting only one child per family. The policy has had loopholes at various times for various reasons; for example, the ethnic Mongolians are treated more leniently. But the policy is nationwide, and it is very strict.

The Chinese family policy uses forced abortion, forced sterilization and forced insertion of IUDs. Family planning workers monitor menstrual periods for the women in their assigned areas or workplaces, and start to ask questions when a woman misses her period. In some factories, menstrual periods are charted on the wall, so that everyone can keep track of everyone else.

In 1985, The Washington Post ran a three-part series (January 6-8) on China's brutal policy. Michael Weisskopf reported, "Any mother who becomes pregnant again without receiving official authorization after having one child is required to have an abortion, and the incidence of such operations is stunning — 53 million from 1979 to 1984, according to the Ministry of Public Health — a five-year abortion count approximately equal to the population of France."

Family planning workers prefer to avoid pregnancy, and they have pushed sterilization. According to Weisskopf, "local officials use methods ranging from cash rewards to coercion to get those eligible to the operating table." And these methods produced results. "Official statistics show a high level of success: 31 million women and 9.3 million men were sterilized between 1979 and 1984, totaling almost one third of all married, productive couples in China." The policy was not based on "choice." The Washington Post reported:

A roundup in frigid northern China near the Mongolian border illustrates how the process works. The campaign, which was described by a participating doctor, began in November 1983, when officials from every commune in the county searched their records for women under the age of 45 who had two or more children. Then they broadcast their names over public loudspeakers and set dates by which each had to report to the clinic for surgery.

There was a warning to potential evaders: a loss of half of their state land allotment, a fine of $200 — equal to about a year's income — and a late fee of $10 for every day they failed to report.

Several couples initially defied the warning but were quickly brought into line. Officials went to their homes, confiscated valuables, such as sewing machines and building materials, and threatened to sell them within three days unless they submitted to the operation.

The surgical team left in early January after completing its goal of 16,000 sterilizations in two months, according to the doctor.

Despite the reports in the Washington Post, and similar stories in the New York Times and other respected media, the Chinese government and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) have continued to deny that there is coercion in their program.

Steven Mosher worked in southern China when he was a graduate student at Stanford University. He broke the story of forced abortion and coercive population policies. The Chinese government was outraged and demanded that Stanford punish him. Stanford found reason to throw Mosher out of their doctoral program.

The savage program did not come to an end in the 1980s. In 1998, Rep. Christopher Smith, Chairman of the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights, held Congressional hearings on forced abortion and sterilization in China. One of the witnesses at the hearing was Gao Xiao Duan, who had been the administrator of a planned birth office in Fujian Province in China just two months before.

Mrs. Gao worked in an office with a sign over the entrance: "No permit, no marriage; no permit, no pregnancy; no permit, no baby." She had a box where informers could drop reports about their neighbors who were pregnant without authorization. The building had a detention facility to hold violators.

Mrs. Gao's testimony was detailed and powerful, with stories like the following:

I vividly remember one time that I led my subordinates to Yinglin Town Hospital to check on births. I found that two women in Zhoukeng Town had extra-plan births. I led a planned-birth supervision team composed of a dozen cadres [trained personnel] and public security agents. With sledge hammers and heavy crowbars in hand, we went to Zhoukeng Town and dismantled their houses. We were unable to apprehend the women in the case so we took their mothers in lieu of them and detained them in the planned birth offices detention facility. It wasn't until about a half a month later that the women surrendered themselves to the planned birth office. They were sterilized, fined heavily, and their mothers were finally released. I myself did so many brutal things, but I thought that I was conscientiously implementing the policy of our party and that I was an exemplary citizen and a good cadre.

Once I found a woman who was nine months pregnant, but did not have a birth-allowed certificate. According to the policy, she was forced to undergo an induced abortion. In the operating room, I saw the child's lips were moving and how its arms and legs were also moving. The doctor injected poison into its skull and the child died and it was thrown into the trash can. Afterwards the husband was holding his wife and crying loudly and saying, "What kind of man am I? What kind of husband am I? I can't even protect my wife and child. Do you have any sort of humanity?"

Whenever I saw these things, my heart would break, and I felt like to help the tyrant do evils was not what I wanted. I could not bear seeing all these mothers grief-stricken by induced delivery and sterilization. I could not live with this on my conscience because I too am also a mother. These cruel actions are against what I believe in.

All of those 14 years I was a monster in the daytime, injuring others by the Chinese Communist authorities' barbaric planned birth policy. But in the evening I was like all other women and mothers, enjoying my life with my children. I couldn't go on living with such a dual life anymore.

Here to all those injured women and to all those children who were killed, I want to repent and say sincerely that I'm very sorry, sincerely sorry. I want to be a real human being.

Just a few months before the Congressional hearings, the UNFPA announced its cooperation in a four-year, $20 million family planning program in China, and stated that China wanted an approach "based on the principles of free and voluntary choice." Nafis Sadik, executive director of the UNFPA, told Rep. Chris Smith that the Chinese policy was "purely voluntary," and denied that there was any such thing as a license to have a birth.

It is tempting to set aside the words of Nafis Sadik as flat lies. They may be, but to understand the debate over population control, it is important to know about a variety of subtle distinctions in the language. For example, when Mrs. Gao led a team to Zhoukeng town, where they smashed two houses and arrested the mothers of the pregnant women, was that coercion? The women eventually came to the birth center on their own feet; they were not dragged in by the police. They could have chosen to leave their mothers in jail while they gave birth to their own children. Most people would consider smashing your house or jailing your mom to be coercive. But to some people, coercion means using physical force on another person's body.

There are other tools and terms used in population control debates. One of the most important tools for national policy-makers is setting targets for the whole program and quotas for their subordinates. Quotas set at the national level can lead directly to coercion at the local level. At the national level, the government can establish a target of reducing births to an average of three per family within the next five years. To achieve that target, they might tell regional or local family planning workers that they will be expected to meet a quota of so many IUDs inserted and so many people sterilized. If the quotas are too ambitious, the local workers might decide that they must use coercion — but the national program does not say anything about force. In such a program, everyone involved in the work can be fully aware that the program is coercive, but spokesmen at the national level can deny it with a straight face, or dismiss documented reports of coercion as occasional abuses at the local level.

Sometimes population planners make a distinction between incentives and disincentives. An incentive is a reward for cooperating, a "carrot." In some nations, poor women are paid cash or given gifts if they get sterilized; such payments (or bribes) are incentives. A disincentive is some kind of punishment for failing to cooperate, a "stick." Fines, loss of work or promotion, and loss of farmland are examples of coercion. In the debate over population policy, some funders argue for an approach based on voluntarism, and insist that they will not support a program that has any coercion, quotas or disincentives, but will tolerate incentives.

It is possible to blur the difference between incentives and disincentives, though. In one Chinese village, the government installed water heaters at the town well. People who cooperated with the family planning program were rewarded with access to hot water for washing. That sounds like an incentive. But suppose most of the town cooperates? Then it might be more accurate to say that the few holdouts are being punished, losing access to hot water. That would be a disincentive.

A substantial amount of population control work is accomplished through simple manipulation. Recall the words of Alva Myrdal, the Swedish population expert, who said that her government planned to address the problem of defectives reproducing themselves by encouraging "severe family limitation," reaching them "through direct propaganda and instruction in contraceptive methods."

In 1999, the UNFPA announced its support for a family planning program in 32 counties in China (out of about 2,000). In those counties, the one-child-only population policy will be suspended. Or will it be?

Nafis Sadik, as Executive Director of the UNFPA, said, "In the project counties, couples will be allowed to have as many children as they want, whenever they want, without requiring birth permits or being subject to quotas." However, the Chinese government may still use economic pressure to encourage compliance. In Sadik's words, couples in these counties "may still be subject to a 'social compensation fee' if they decide to have more children that recommended by the policy."

The Golden Venture incident

In June, 1993, the ship Golden Venture ran aground near New York harbor. It was carrying 300 passengers who had paid high prices to smugglers to help them flee the one-child-only family policy in China. Several passengers died trying to swim to shore; the others made it, but were arrested as illegal immigrants.

They applied for political asylum. The United States will grant asylum to refugees who can show that they have a well-grounded fear of persecution if they are sent home. Immigration judges had to decide whether a well-grounded fear of forced sterilization or abortion was sufficient reason for granting asylum. The government held the Chinese refugees in federal prisons during the hearings and appeals.

The matter dragged on for four years. The Clinton administration was determined not to offend the Chinese government, and tried to send most of the refugees back to China. Some of the refugees were sent back, and went to re-education camps. Some did finally receive asylum in the U.S. Others sought and received asylum in other nations.

In the end, the message to Chinese refugees was clear. If you flee to the United States, you will suffer for it.

In 1997, a young Chinese woman named Li Xuemei became pregnant without authorization. She had already given birth to one child, and had been fined for that. She had become pregnant a second time, and been forced to undergo an abortion. This was her third pregnancy, and she knew that she faced severe punishment. In early 1998, she fled from China. She went to a gang of "Snakeheads," and paid them to smuggle her out. The Snakeheads got her out of China, and landed her in Japan with a large group of other refugees. Japanese authorities learned about the illegal entry, and arrested them almost immediately.

Li Xuemei was the only one in the group who managed to stay in Japan; the rest were deported quickly. But Li asked for asylum, saying that if the Japanese sent her back, she would be forced to abort her child. The Japanese courts debated her case for months, and her child was born while she was in jail.

Eventually she was released from jail, but not granted asylum. The Japanese, like the Americans, were not eager to offend the Chinese. Nor did they want to encourage a mass exodus. The Japanese do not have anything like America's tradition of welcoming refugees. Further, Chinese refugees who intend to reach the United States have to cross the largest ocean in the world, but the distance to Japan is much shorter. Still, at least one judge admitted his admiration for Li Xuemei, who suffered so much to keep her child alive.

The case may have been resolved quietly when she dropped out of sight.

Ambivalence in the United States

Since 1985, the American public has been aware that forced abortion occurs in China. During those years, there has been a fierce national fight about abortion. The people in the abortion battle describe themselves as "pro-life" and "pro-choice," so the Chinese policy should be extremely offensive to the activists on both sides of the abortion issue. Forced abortion is an assault on life and is also an assault on freedom. It would seem obvious for all Americans to denounce the practice.

In fact, few of the people who identify themselves as "pro-choice" have spoken out. And when the Chinese government decided that they wanted to host the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, women's rights groups cooperated. Twenty percent of the women in the world (that is, Chinese women) live under a government that considers pregnancy to be the government's business, that is prepared to monitor menstrual periods, that brutalizes women regularly, that has no respect at all for privacy or choice or women's rights. The Chinese population campaign is bloody and oppressive. To permit Beijing to host an international conference on women is like permitting Germany to host a summit meeting on antisemitism in 1939. And yet, women's groups went along with it.

Hillary Clinton went to the Beijing meeting, and in her speech she did refer obliquely to forced abortion. But her words were muted, and did not mention China explicitly. Still, the U.S. State Department was quick to say that even her muted words were her own, and should not be understood as an official criticism of the Chinese from the American government. When Jimmy Carter was President of the United States, he made human rights a part of American foreign policy. In our dealings with other nations, we would look at their record on human rights. In official meetings with diplomats or heads of state from other nations where there were serious abuses, Americans would make sure that one of the topics they discussed was human rights.

American relations with the Communist government of China were not smooth. For years, American diplomats met with the Chinese to talk about trade and similar issues, and raised a list of complaints, including concern about genocide in Tibet, abuse of prison labor, the export of nuclear technology, the export of weapons — and forced abortion. But under Clinton, Americans stopped raising the forced abortion issue, except for occasional pro forma complaints.

Since the early 1980s, there has been a great deal of support and praise for the Chinese population policy at the United Nations. Under Clinton, the American government has not made any serious effort to signal to the Chinese that our view of the one-child-only policy is different from the UNFPA view.

Support for the Chinese population policy may be widespread. Good polling data is not available, but there were some informal surveys of several hundred people in Wisconsin and Maryland in the early 1990s. The surveys asked a random cross-section of people, "Do you SUPPORT or OPPOSE China's population policy, which includes forced abortion?" Over 20 percent of respondents said they supported the Chinese policy.

NSSM 200: Fear of Non-White Babies

In 1975, the United States decided that protecting the nation required that we decrease population growth around the world. The government defined population growth in developing nations as a threat to our national security. The official policy was not put in the terms used by Lothrop Stoddard, who had written at the beginning of the century about the "rising tide of color against white world supremacy." But the new policy was designed to protect the power of the people in land Stoddard had called "White Man's Land" against encroachments from Black Man's Land, Brown Man's Land and Yellow Man's Land.

UN conferences on population Few topics, if any, have received as much attention at the United Nations as population. Since its founding, the UN has shown remarkable tenacity, organizing one conference per decade on population. The extraordinary series began in Rome (1954), the continued through Belgrade (1965), Bucharest (1974), Mexico (1984), and Cairo (1994). The Cairo conference was about "population and development," continuing a long debate. The Catholic Church had forced population control advocates to weigh development issues. Pope Paul VI insisted that "development is the new name for peace," and that international development would address the problems that worried the depopulationists. Shortly after Pope Paul VI issued a formal letter (or encyclical) entitled On the Development of Peoples laying out his approach, the Population Council started a scholarly journal called Population and Development. The fight was on: does population growth help or hinder development, or is it neutral? In the 1990s, the UN also sponsored international conferences on population and the environment (Rio de Janeiro), population and women (Beijing), and population and housing (Copenhagen). Population controllers were determined to establish themselves as the leaders in the environmental movement and the feminist movement, and were also ready to start a new battle over housing policies.

The recycled racism appears in a collection of official documents, including National Security Study Memorandum 200, or NSSM 200. The "study" memo led in 1975 to a "decision" memo, National Security Decision Memorandum 314, or NSDM 314. The purpose of national security studies like this was to make clear for everyone involved, including American diplomats overseas, what the national government thought about issues and more specifically about possible threats. In 1975, the government saw various threats to American safety, or national security. Some threats were obvious; the government was concerned about maintaining military power in the Pacific, countering the threat of Communism in Europe, containing Communist rebels in Latin America. While it did not say so explicitly, NSSM 200 put non-white babies on the list of threats.

The Memorandum called for increased funds for international population control programs, and also noted that funds from other programs could be used to study ways to reduce fertility.

After the document was declassified in 1989, the Information Project for Africa distributed it to journalists all over the world. Many people found the document extremely offensive, and used NSSM 200 to challenge the United States at the UN population conferences.

Review of Chapter 15:

Population Control Today

1. Describe the one-child-only family policy in China.

2. Explain the following terms: coercion, quota, manipulation, disincentives, incentives.

3. Is the United States government clearly opposed to China's population policy? Are the American people unanimously opposed to the policy?

4. What is NSSM 200, and what does it say about population?

5. Summarize the Golden Venture incident briefly. Identify Li Xuemei, and explain the significance of her flight from China.

Discuss: What is the link between population policy in China and immigration policy elsewhere?

www.eugenics-watch.com/roots/chap15.html