The Communist Party-run Xinhua News Agency is bombarding readers with reasons why China’s two-child population policy is beneficial for the country and the world, while completely ignoring the core complaints of human rights activists who say that the policy changes little or nothing.
In a tweet sent Tuesday morning, Xinhua optimistically announced that the family planning policy would add 30 million to the Chinese workforce by 2050, accompanied by a photos of the fresh faces of Chinese children.
#China‘s “two-child” policy to add 30 mln workforce by 2050: official #onechildpolicy pic.twitter.com/LypwneoXMR
— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) November 10, 2015
Three hours earlier, the state-run agency claimed that the policy would “raise potential GDP growth rate by 0.5 percentage point.”
China’s two-child policy to raise potential GDP growth rate by 0.5 percentage point: spokesperson #onechildpolicy pic.twitter.com/2KhUiEmdR9
— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) November 10, 2015
The tweets reflect remarks of Wang Pei’an, vice minister of the National Health and Family Planning Commission, who made the assertions early Tuesday. “In the long-term, the positive effect on economic growth will be significant,” Wang said, attributing the growth to increased consumer demand for housing, education and health and daily necessities.
Wang was quick to assert that China would continue to exert its absolute control over family planning. “A large population is China’s basic national condition so we must adhere to the basic state policy of family planning,” he said.
This iron control over population is what human rights critics find unacceptable, saying that China continues to govern by terror.
“The Chinese Communist Party will never end coercive population control, because coercive population is keeping it in place,” prominent women’s rights activist Reggie Littlejohn recently told Breitbart News.
Ms. Littlejohn, president and founder of Women’s Rights without Frontiers, has been harshly critical of China’s “misleading” announcement, insisting that in reality nothing has changed, since “terror is the purpose of the Policy.”
On October 30, the Financial Times waxed enthusiastically about China’s “new-found reproductive freedom” and warned of mass layoffs of enforcers of the “now-defunct one-child policy,” something China-watchers scoff at as “ridiculous.”
Littlejohn told Breitbart that the Chinese Communist Party will never forego its coercive population control, because it has become a necessary means to social control, “masquerading as population control.”
“Noticeably absent from the Chinese Communist party’s announcement is any mention of human rights,” she said. “Even though it will now allow all couples to have a second child, China has not promised to end forced abortion, forced sterilization, or forced contraception.”
Bill Donohue of the Catholic League noted that the new policy does not eliminate forced abortions, but simply tweaks the point at which they will be applied. “Which means that the government will have to continue its practice of monitoring a woman’s menstrual cycle and fining those who are pregnant with their third child. If they are unable to pay, they will be dragged to a local clinic and injected with a lethal drug,” he said.
Many have seen a connection between China’s astronomical suicide rate among women—three times higher than for males—and its despotic reproductive regulations.
Writing in The New York Times, Chinese author Ma Jian graphically described the “horror” Chinese women face, noting that countless Chinese women had suffered a forced abortions, something unlikely to change under the new “two-child policy.”
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter @tdwilliamsrome
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