February 17, 2023

CHINA:  SICHUAN PROVINCE SUSPENDS COERCIVE POPULATION CONTROL

Women's Rights Without Frontiers

CHINA:  SICHUAN PROVINCE SUSPENDS COERCIVE POPULATION CONTROL

One province in China, Sichuan, has announced its intention to suspend coercive population control for five years.

Reggie Littlejohn

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WASHINGTON, D.C. — One province in China, Sichuan, has announced its intention to suspend coercive population control for five years. Under the Three Child Policy – still in force in the rest of China outside Sichuan – it remains illegal for an unmarried woman or a woman pregnant with her fourth child to give birth.

According to an official announcement published on the website of the Health Commission of Sichuan Province, marriage will no longer be a requirement for giving birth, and women can have as many babies as they want.  This new policy will take effect in Sichuan only, on February 15, 2023, and will be valid for five years.

Since the One Child Policy was instituted in 1980, women in China have been subjected to forced abortion, involuntary sterilization and infanticide.  It is momentous that  Sichuan has made this move, even if it is only in one province, and even if it is temporary. Unmarried women and fourth babies will not be forcibly aborted in Sichuan, for five years.

Reggie Littlejohn, Founder and President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, issued the following Statement:

The fact that Sichuan – a province with 80 million people — will soon suspend coercive population control for five years is great news.  

Is it time to celebrate?

Not yet.

First, Sichuan is just one province among many.  The population of China is 1.4 billion.  While the 80 million people in Sichuan are free of coercive population control, what about the myriad others, who are not?  And what will happen after five years – will the CCP re-institute the Three Child Policy?

Second, consistent with its history of eugenics and its current genocidal practices, I believe that the motive behind this change in policy is that the Chinese Communist Party wants to increase the Han population.  I seriously doubt that coercive population control will end in Tibet and Xinjiang, where women likely will continue to face forced abortion, involuntary sterilization and other genocidal atrocities.

The reason the Chinese Communist Party has ended the Three Child Policy in Sichuan is not that they have suddenly repented of their crimes against humanity and evolved a new respect for women and babies.  Rather, it is that the CCP is dreading the demographic nosedive it has created through decades of brutal population control policies.  The consequent decrease in the labor force will stifle China’s ability to support its “severely aging society.”  Indeed, demographers forecast that by 2035, 400 million people – 30 percent of the population — will be 60 and above.  Moreover, the CCP has no ability to support this swiftly aging population.

Beyond this, even if the CCP were to lift all birth restrictions nationwide, this would be too little, too late.  Even if China were to have the baby boom it so desperately desires, babies born now will not enter the workforce for decades – too late to stem the tide of China’s imminent demographic disaster.  Through decades of fierce propaganda backed by savage enforcement of the One-Child Policy, moreover, the CCP has managed to achieve its aim: to convince people that children are not a blessing, but a burden.  Now, many couples are choosing to have no children at all.

Indeed, while it was still in force, the Zero Covid policy drove some young couples to despair.  One such couple in Shanghai was confronted by police dressed in hazmat suits, known as “Big Whites,” who attempted to drag them away to quarantine camp because they had contact with someone who had tested positive.  The police threatened three generations of their family.  The husband responded, “We are the last generation.”    This powerful indictment of life under the cruel tyranny of the CCP has gone viral in China.

I believe that even with this suspension of birth restrictions in Sichuan, the CCP will not see a dramatic rise in births.  The CCP has already quietly loosened restrictions in Shanghai (2021) and Guangdong Province (2022).  It is too early to know whether these changes in policy have resulted in a significant boost in births, but I doubt it.  The CCP’s next step will likely be to relax coercive population control throughout China – except, of course, in Tibet and Xinjiang.

Coercive population control has been a central policy of the CCP since 1980.   Suspending it is an implied admission of defeat, or even wrongdoing, by the CCP.  This may be a reason that it took so long for them to do it.

Nor will the suspension of the Three Child Policy in Sichuan correct the severe gender imbalance that plagues China today.  Because of savage son preference, the majority of babies aborted in China have been female, so that there are an estimated 35 million more males living in China than females.  Not only will these forced bachelors, or “bare branches,” be unable to reproduce, but this extreme gender imbalance is driving human trafficking and sexual slavery within China and from surrounding countries.  The sex-selective abortion of some females leads to the sexual slavery of others.  There is no more violent form of gender discrimination than gendercide, the real war on women.   Female gendercide has contributed substantially to the precipitous decline in the Chinese population.

Given China’s desperation to increase the birth rate, maintaining the Three-Child Policy – or any other coercive population control policy — is preposterous anywhere in China.  We call upon the CCP permanently to end all coercive population control throughout China, to make forced abortion and involuntary sterilization illegal, including in Xinjiang and Tibet, and to institute effective measures to save girl children, immediately.

Women’s Rights Without Frontiers has enabled hundreds of women in the Chinese countryside to keep and feed their infant daughters through our Save a Girl Campaign.  We know this can be done.

China’s message to the world is that the United States is a declining power, and China is a rising power. China’s demographic implosion, however, destroys this narrative.  China is plummeting.  This is a self-inflicted wound.

One fifth of the population of the world lives under the totalitarian boot of the Chinese Communist Party.  The world will not be free until the people of China are free.

TAKE ACTION by signing our petition against forced abortion in China.

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Reggie Littlejohn
About the Author
Reggie Littlejohn
Reggie Littlejohn is the founder and President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, Co-chair of the Stop Vaccine Passports Task Force, and Co-Chair of the Task Force to Stop the Genocide Games. A graduate of Yale Law School, she is an acclaimed international expert on China’s One Child Policy, (now the Three-Child Policy). Her organization has been called the “leading voice” in the battle to expose and oppose forced abortion and gendercide (the sex-selective abortion of baby girls) in China.