[Joint House and Senate Hearing, 107 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
WOMEN'S RIGHTS AND CHINA'S NEW FAMILY PLANNING LAW
=======================================================================
ROUNDTABLE
before the
CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
SEPTEMBER 23, 2002
__________
Printed for the use of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China
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CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
Senate
House
MAX BAUCUS, Montana, Chairman DOUG BEREUTER, Nebraska, Co-
CARL LEVIN, Michigan Chairman
DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California JIM LEACH, Iowa
BYRON DORGAN, North Dakota DAVID DREIER, California
EVAN BAYH, Indiana FRANK WOLF, Virginia
CHUCK HAGEL, Nebraska JOE PITTS, Pennsylvania
BOB SMITH, New Hampshire SANDER LEVIN, Michigan
SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas MARCY KAPTUR, Ohio
TIM HUTCHINSON, Arkansas SHERROD BROWN, Ohio
JIM DAVIS, Florida
EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
PAULA DOBRIANSKY, Department of State
GRANT ALDONAS, Department of Commerce
D. CAMERON FINDLAY, Department of Labor
LORNE CRANER, Department of State
JAMES KELLY, Department of State
Ira Wolf, Staff Director
John Foarde, Deputy Staff Director
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
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Page
STATEMENTS
Aird, John S., former chief, China Branch and senior research
specialist on China, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Silver Spring,
MD............................................................. 1
Glick, Bonnie, former Foreign Service Officer and member, 2002
U.S. Assessment Team to China.................................. 4
Winckler, Edwin A., research associate, East Asian Institute,
Columbia University, New York, NY.............................. 8
Greenhalgh, Susan, professor of anthropology, University of
California at Irvine, Irvine, CA............................... 11
Scruggs, Stirling, director, Information and External Relations
Division, United Nations Fund for Population Activities
[UNFPA], New York, NY.......................................... 14
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements
Aird, John S..................................................... 36
Glick, Bonnie.................................................... 44
Winckler, Edwin A................................................ 46
Greenhalgh, Susan................................................ 53
Scruggs, Stirling................................................ 57
WOMEN'S RIGHTS AND CHINA'S NEW FAMILY PLANNING LAW
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MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2002
Congressional-Executive
Commission on China,
Washington, DC.
The roundtable was convened, pursuant to notice, at 2:30
p.m., Ira Wolf (staff director) presiding.
Also present: John Foarde, deputy staff director; Holly
Vineyard, U.S. Department of Commerce; Anne Tsai, specialist on
ethnic
minorities; Matt Tuchow, Office of Representative Sander Levin;
Susan Weld, general counsel; and Chris Billing, director of
communications.
Mr. Wolf. I would like to welcome everybody here today to
this staff-led roundtable of the Congressional-Executive
Commission on China.
Today, we are looking at Women's Rights and China's New
Population and Family Planning Law. We have got a number of
experts before us today. I will quickly introduce them.
John Aird is former chief of the China Branch and senior
research specialist on China at the U.S. Bureau of the Census;
Bonnie Glick was part of the 2002 U.S. Assessment Team to China
and currently with IBM, but she is here in her private and
personal capacity today; Edward Winckler is research associate
at the East Asian Institute at Columbia University; Susan
Greenhalgh is professor of anthropology at the University of
California at Irvine; and Stirling Scruggs is currently
director of the Information and External Relations Division of
the U.N. Population Fund, with long hands-on experience in
China.
We welcome you all today.
We will start with John Aird, if you would, please.
STATEMENT OF JOHN S. AIRD, FORMER CHIEF, CHINA BRANCH AND
SENIOR RESEARCH SPECIALIST ON CHINA, U.S. BUREAU OF THE CENSUS,
SILVER SPRING, MD
Mr. Aird. Thank you, Mr. Wolf.
How will China's new family planning law affect
reproductive freedom in China, particularly the rights of
women? To answer these questions, we need to know what was the
purpose of the law, why it was adopted at this time, and how it
is likely to affect the implementation of family planning in
China.
To address that first question, what was the purpose of the
law, the best indication of its purpose is the justifications
for it that were given in Chinese domestic sources during the
23 years in which the government struggled to produce it.
On this count there is little doubt. When Vice Premier Chen
Muhua first proposed it in July 1979, she said that it was ``to
quickly and further reduce the population growth rate.'' She
added that ``parents having one child will be encouraged, and
strict measures will be enforced to control the birth of two or
more babies.''
Other references to the law in Chinese sources over the
next 4 years repeated these ideas. The timing was also
significant, because 1979 was the first year of the one-child
policy. This policy was bound to encounter opposition and it
needed all the reinforcement it could get.
When the crash program of compulsory birth control
surgeries in 1983 created such a backlash that the Chinese
authorities felt obliged to relax controls in order to take
care of what they called ``the alienation of the masses from
the Party,'' all mention of the national law disappeared from
the Chinese media. Nothing further was heard about it until
1988. During a period when coercion is not necessary, law is
not needed for reinforcement.
In March 1988, a demographic journal said that persuasion
alone would not work without ``the necessary legal and
administrative measures.''
In 1989, Peng Peiyun, then head of the State Family
Planning Commission [SFPC], said that the problem in family
planning had become crucial. There had been a rebound in the
birth rates in the middle- to late 1980s, and a law would be
enacted in October 1990. But that did not happen.
In 1990, another source said family planners wanted the law
to be passed to make policies more authoritative and forceful.
Still, it did not happen. In September 1999, after another
hiatus, a vice minister of the State Family Planning Commission
said the law would be enacted within 3 years and that it would
``tighten the rule of law in carrying out family planning.''
In December 2000, Zhang Weiqing, then the minister in
charge of the State Family Planning Commission, said the new
law was ``to ensure the status of the national family planning
policy and the realization of birth control targets.'' He made
other statements at that time.
Up to this point, the rationale for the law had not
changed. Its purpose was to strengthen control of fertility and
add legal force to the administrative enforcement of measures
already in use.
But when the law was finally made public December 29, 2001,
Zhang Weiqing announced, in an English-language dispatch aimed
at foreigners, that it neither tightens nor relaxes population
policy.
That statement made very little sense. Why did the
government work 23 years to adopt a policy that made no change
in the implementation of family planning rules? Why had they
gone to all that trouble?
The most likely explanation for the change in the way it
was represented, was several things that happened in the
meantime that made coercion once again an embarrassing issue
for the Chinese Government.
First, a number of instances of extreme coercion had been
reported by the Chinese international media since the late
1990s, including some loss of life by family planning
violators, and at least one instance of the deliberate drowning
of a baby born without a birth permit.
Second, the private investigation by the right-to-life
organization PRI claimed to have discovered coercion in one of
the United Nations Fund for Population Activities's [UNFPA] 32
experimental counties in China where, of course, the measures
were supposed to be absent.
Then there were two other investigations shortly on that
challenged those findings, and then still later in May 2002, a
fourth
investigation, in which Bonnie Glick participated, came out
with a finding that there were still coercive measures in the
Chinese
policy.
Obviously, under these circumstances this is not the time
to draw foreign attention to a hard-fisted family planning law.
The tightening had to be denied. Shortly, there were people
even
arguing--including Jiang Zemin himself--that the purpose of the
law was to put an end to coercive abortion in China. That had
never been mentioned as a purpose for this law in all the 23
years. Besides, no law is needed for that purpose.
If the central authority simply relaxed the demands that
drive the coercion in the system, the coercion will stop very
quickly. It did in 1978, it did again in 1980, and it did in
1984. You do not need a law to stop coercion when it is the
central authority that is the impetus for coercion.
You simply relax the impetus. Family planning operatives at
the lower level have always regarded family planning as the
most
difficult work under heaven, and it is also elsewhere described
as something nobody wants to attend to. The coercion will
immediately disappear.
In any case, that cover story will be somewhat hard to
promote because the text of the law is already in print. It
contains some rather suggestively tight-fisted measures. The
UNFPA itself has objected to three provisions, three different
articles of the law.
It, however, did not object to the one I would have thought
it would object to first of all, and that is a provision in
Article 11 that says ``specific population and family planning
measures shall
provide for detailed population control quotas.''
The UNFPA has been saying that not only are quotas
abolished in the experimental counties, but the tendency is
spreading across China. This does not make that sound very
likely.
Furthermore, the law says nothing at all about the basic
components of reproductive freedom of the ICPD [International
Conference on Population and Development] in the 1994 plan of
action. It does not acknowledge the rights of couples and women
to ``determine the number and spacing of their children.'' That
could gut the one-child policy.
It does not guarantee their right to choose their own form
of contraception, which presumably would include the right to
choose none. That would run afoul of the constitutional
provision, again repeated in the law, about the citizens' duty
to practice family planning.
Taking all the evidence available into account, I think one
must conclude that the purpose of the law is still what it has
always been. That is, to lend more compulsion to an already
compulsory program.
There still remains the question of what effect the law is
likely to have. I think that as long as the coercion issue is a
focus of international attention, efforts to present the law as
curbing coercion will probably continue, largely in
communications addressed to foreign audiences. There are not
many statements of that sort
currently being addressed to domestic audiences.
In fact, it may be used to add reinforcement to the 1995
``Seven Prohibitions'' document, which did not preclude all
forms of coercion in the program, but only those that were most
likely to create popular opposition and thus do damage to the
program itself.
But once world attention--which faces many other
distractions in these years--turns elsewhere, I think efforts
will be made to use the law to shore up citizen compliance with
family planning rules. Whether it will succeed in doing that
may be open to question.
There are many factors operating in China today which are
weakening the administrative system in general and the
implementation of family planning in particular. These run
simultaneously with renewed extreme efforts to enforce family
planning that come into the international press from time to
time, and I can document a number of those.
There will also be a continuation of the problems brought
about by family planning in China, including the sex ratio
imbalance, the excessive aging, adverse effects on marital
relations, and damage to demographic statistics.
I think these are likely to continue. But, in the long run,
I think the attempt will probably fail. The program, which is
still very unpopular in China, will become increasingly
unenforceable, law or no law. However, the time for that is not
yet.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Aird appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Wolf. Thank you very much.
Bonnie Glick.
STATEMENT OF BONNIE GLICK, FORMER FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICER AND
MEMBER, 2002 U.S. ASSESSMENT TEAM TO CHINA, BETHESDA, MD
Ms. Glick. Thank you.
At the beginning of May, I traveled to China as a member of
a three-person team selected by the White House to conduct an
assessment of whether the U.N. Population Fund has supported or
participated in the management of a program of coercive
abortion or involuntary sterilization in the People's Republic
of China [PRC].
These concerns were codified in 1985 in U.S. legislation
known as the Kemp-Kasten amendment. Since 1998, the Chinese
State Birth Planning Commission has conducted a special program
with UNFPA participation in 32 of the PRC's approximately 2,800
counties.
Given the controversy that has existed in the Congress on
the issues of coercive abortion and involuntary sterilization,
great
emphasis was placed on making this a mission of objective fact-
finding and assessment.
After we received an overview of the population situation
in China, we began our travels through 5 of the 32 UNFPA
counties. The five counties were selected by the U.S. Embassy
and they
represented a cross-section of urban and rural, poor and middle
income.
During the next 10 days, we traveled approximately 6,000
miles by air and road through urban and rural China. The five
counties visited were Rongchang County, 100 kilometers outside
of Chongqing Municipality, Pingba County, 2\1/2\ hours from
Guiyang in Guizhou Province, Xuanzhou and Guichi Counties in
Anhui Province, and Sihui City in central Guangdong Province.
We were accompanied on our travels by Mr. Hongtao Hu, a
member of the State Birth Planning Commission. Mr. Hu received
no more than 24 hours advance notice of our daily travel plans.
Our visits were often unannounced and with no notice. We
stopped in at 3 factories, 2 schools, 11 village birth planning
substations, 5 municipal birth planning centers, and 3
hospitals.
I held discussions with women in the streets and
agricultural fields who were going about their daily lives. I
went to China with open eyes and with an objective point of
view, and with a narrow mandate. We went to as many counties
and as many villages as possible.
We also made a variety of unscheduled stops. Although our
sample size was small, I believe the results are
representative, and that we varied our methodology through
random visits and with little to no notice given to Chinese
Government authorities, thereby decreasing biases in the
observed data.
I would like to address the conversations I had with women
throughout our travels. In my years as a Foreign Service
officer, I often found that women around the world,
particularly women in societies that tend to be dominated by
men, are willing to open up to foreign women to discuss
personal issues.
Thus, in speaking with Chinese women, I was able to elicit
direct and thoughtful responses to probing questions. Culture
played an enormous role in these conversations.
Often, I found myself asking indirect questions in order to
obtain genuine responses, such as, how many children do you
plan or hope to have? How do you feel about the policy of the
Chinese Government that ostensibly limits your ability to have
more than one child? Do you know any women who have been
coerced to have abortions or forced involuntarily to become
sterilized? Do you know anyone who has to pay social
compensation fees because she had more than one child?
If I sensed that a woman--especially a professional woman--
in one of the health clinics was suspicious of my line of
questioning, I would change the way in which I asked my
questions. I might ask her, perhaps not in this county, but
have you heard of women in other counties who might have been
coerced to have abortions or sterilizations?
In one pharmaceutical manufacturing and packaging factory,
I had the opportunity to talk to a group of 15 or so women all
working on an assembly line. We talked as they packaged
pharmaceuticals. The conditions in which they were working were
good, clean, and comfortable. They considered themselves lucky
to have these stable jobs.
When I asked them questions about their family planning
practices, nearly all said they had just one child. One woman
had two children, several had none. All commented that it is
expensive to raise children.
I met with two women in a health clinic in Rongchang County
who had just had abortions due to pregnancies arising, they
said, from failed contraception. I asked each of them why they
chose to abort. The first woman said that she already had twins
and neither wanted, nor could afford, a third child. She and
her husband, she said, were happy with their two children and
they had not planned on a third.
The other woman, a 22-year-old, said that she and her
husband were not yet ready to have children. They themselves
were children, she said, and she wanted to wait until she was
ready for a ``perfect birth.''
The Chinese Government, it seems to me, through public
service announcements in all forms of media, has convinced
women of the merits of marrying late, delaying births, and
focusing on a ``perfect birth.''
What is a perfect birth? This is a potentially dangerous
question to ask. Since abortions are legal in China, women take
great care to ensure that fetuses they carry are perfect. If
they fear that a fetus is in any way less than perfect, the
inclination among
Chinese women is to abort.
While the practitioners with whom we met said they do not
promote abortion as a form of birth control, they were well
aware that many women abort rather than waste their one
opportunity to give birth on a less than perfect child.
As many of us are aware, this attitude has no doubt led to
the skewed gender ratios in Chinese births. With 116 male
children born for every 100 female children, the numbers speak
for themselves. This skewed birth ratio, when considered among
a population of 1.3 billion people, demonstrates that the
demographic challenges facing China today and into the future
are staggering.
I was initially surprised by the near uniformity of
responses I received to the questions I asked Chinese women.
However, after several days I realized that the similarity of
responses was due to the tremendous public service campaign the
Chinese Government has undertaken to promote its one-child
policy.
Generally speaking, women in China genuinely and faithfully
adhere to the one-child policy, now codified with the new
population law. Although it is hard for Americans to accept the
concept of limitations on family size, we must all think for a
moment about the particulars of the situation in China.
In a country with a population of at least 1.3 billion
people, and where the current generation of women of child-
bearing age was raised with the philosophy of one child only,
it is easy to see women in China accepting the limitation on
births as part of their civic and patriotic duty.
This public service campaign, if you will, to discourage
multiple births has been so prevalent and so effective, that
few women I met seemed willing to rock the boat.
Indeed, all the women I met talked about how expensive it
is to raise children, the underlying implication being that it
is even more expensive to raise multiple children, given the
coercive social compensation fees levied on families daring
enough to have
multiple births.
Clearly, China is sitting on a demographic time bomb. If
the
population continues to grow at its current rate, it will run
into problems of resource allocation. I went to China to look
into the resources of the U.N. Population Fund, all $3.5
million of its annual budget.
When comparing the budget of the UNFPA with the overall
budget of the Chinese State Birth Planning Commission, $3.6
billion, it quickly becomes apparent that China is not
interested in UNFPA for its money.
Rather, the PRC is interested in the fig leaf UNFPA
provides in its attempt to show the world that it conforms to
the international norms and conventions for family planning.
By having an UNFPA presence in China, the PRC can hold this
fact up to the world as evidence that it follows generally
accepted norms vis-a-vis family planning. In fact, it does not.
The limited presence of UNFPA in China may actually hurt
efforts to bring the country's policies more in line with
international norms.
This leaves UNFPA with only two options, as I see it:
Either
expand into more counties in China, which is unlikely given its
tremendous resource constraints, or scale back and demand real
reform of the Chinese Government before agreeing to share
international expertise and before granting international
acceptance of Chinese practices.
Given the codification on September 1 of China's one-child
policy, UNFPA should act forcefully to demand changes to this
law, to the coercive fines, and so-called social compensation
fees.
The opportunity I had to travel relatively freely
throughout China is one that is afforded to few people. The
Chinese Government was accommodating in that we were allowed to
travel
anywhere we chose in the country. Were we fully free? Doubtful.
Everywhere we went, we were accompanied by an official of the
State Birth Planning Commission.
At the initiation of our trip, I did not think it would be
possible to operate as freely as I would have liked. In truth,
the representatives of the State Birth Planning Commission were
more token than anything else. Mr. Hu facilitated our
encounters in health centers and in factories, nothing more.
In closing, I would like to express my thanks to those who
facilitated the visit, while assiduously avoiding any effort to
color our team's impressions or influence our opinions. These
include individuals in the State Department, the American
Embassy in Beijing, and the Consulates General in Shanghai and
Guangzhou.
I would urge this Administration to continue to monitor
closely this aspect of Chinese life. As I mentioned, China's
continued population explosion is the elephant in the room that
no one wants to discuss and all would rather ignore.
It will place ever-increasing strains on natural resources,
public services, and employment. These strains will be felt up
and down the political spectrum and they must be factored into
our decisionmaking as we deal with China in this new century.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Glick appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Wolf. Thanks very much.
Edwin Winckler, please.
STATEMENT OF EDWIN A. WINCKLER, RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, EAST ASIAN
INSTITUTE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK CITY, NY
Mr. Winckler. I appreciate the Commission inviting me. I
have to leave out all courtesies, because in 10 minutes I
cannot even mention what needs to be covered, so I am just
going to dive right in.
Let me say that Susan Greenhalgh and I wrote a 250-page
report for the Immigration and Naturalization Service a year or
two ago explaining the very profound changes that have been
occurring in the Chinese birth limitation program in the last 5
to 10 years. We are revising that report as a book for Stanford
University Press. Since I had to update that report for the
book, I wrote a 40-page article about the new national law--the
programs first national law--explaining what it is doing. That
article will be posted on your Website and it will be coming
out pretty soon in Population and Development Review. Given
that I cannot explain the law to you in 10 minutes, please
consult that article for what the law is all about. I also made
my own translation of the law, which the Commission will not
only post, but also print with my prepared statement. So while
I talk, I am going to stick to the outline of my prepared
written statement and refer you to that article for details.
However, there is something new I want to get on the table,
which is that at the beginning of this month the birth planning
program in China had a very important work conference where
they summed up 2 years' of experiments about how they are going
to go about implementing the 2001 law, which is the most
concrete indication that we have of where things will be going
in the next couple of years. I hope we can get into that a
little bit in the
question period.
Now, the first part of my prepared statement is about
change. If nobody remembers anything else from my presentation,
I hope you will remember that there have been extraordinary and
extensive changes going on in the birth program, as in
everything else about China. It would be remarkable if the
program were not changing a great deal. I wish somebody would
ask me a question afterward about the political nature of this
process, because it is a very convoluted process and it is very
easy to misread from the outside. I cannot go into that and
still tell you anything concrete about the change, so may I ask
that somebody ask me about that?
Now, the three changes that I want to call to your
attention are, first of all, demographic change. The whole
reason for the reorientation of policy at the turn of the
millennium is that it is not 1983 any more. China is now facing
a low fertility rate, not a high fertility rate. The problem
now, as they phrase it, is to ``maintain'' the low fertility
rate and not to drive it down any further. This is a very
different kind of problem, so it gives them the latitude to
make some changes, and it requires some changes.
The second kind of change noted in my prepared statement is
political change, which my article discusses at greater length.
We all know that there have been great political changes in
China. As Mr. Aird said, the current leadership is much weaker
than the old one was. It is going out of its way not to do
things to the population that will create unnecessary popular
discontent. There is also systemic change, the contraction of
the government out of large areas of the economy and other
sectors. So it is not as though the changes in the program are
being driven by public relations concerns about what foreigners
think. The changes in the program are being driven by very
powerful systemic changes in China itself.
The third kind of change is change in the program itself.
Again, I cannot go into it in any detail. But let me say that
the previous peak of nasty enforcement was around 1991. Coming
out of that, they realized that they had leaned on the populace
too hard and unnecessarily, given how low fertility was. So, on
the one hand, beginning around 1993, they launched a series of
reforms to clean up their own bureaucratic act, to clean up
their state-centric program. They cleaned it up by
professionalizing it and by putting a lot more money into it--
by not having periodic crash campaigns by amateur cadres, but
instead financing a professional core of birth planners and
reproductive health workers. That is the positive side. The
negative side, in terms of cleaning up their act, was removing
all sorts of stupid abuses from the system, coercive
implementation and enforcement abuses, and also corruption and
misallocation of local funds abuses. I would be happy to go
into that.
On the other hand, beginning about 1995, and particularly
later in the decade, they began moving toward a more client-
centered approach, what you might call liberalization or
deregulation. They themselves decided that they had too much
red tape in the program, that it was not necessary for their
purposes. It was creating opportunities for corruption, it was
irritating the public, and they did not need it. They launched
a process, which they are now continuing dramatically, of
getting rid of this unnecessary red tape.
Now, another process of change in the program you could say
embraces all of these kinds of reforms. Let us call it the
process of legalization. The main point I want to make about
that is that passing the law in 2001 had a long preparatory
period. They could not pass the law until they cleaned up their
enforcement act enough to narrow the gap between what the
Chinese Constitution would require in the name of a law and
what they were actually doing. The ``Seven Don'ts'' and the
cleaning up the act were much more than cosmetic. It made clear
to local cadres that they were not supposed to use grossly
coercive implementation measures.
The upshot--you know this because you have heard many
sessions about it--is that the whole country is moving toward
legalization of institutions, lawful implementation in all
areas. So you end up at the end of the 1990s with buzz words
like ``implementation according to the law,'' which means no
beating people over the head and other things that were said in
the ``Seven Don'ts,'' and ``legitimate rights and interests of
citizens,'' which means, among other things, that citizens have
a right not to be abused by family planning workers. That is
the language that is the upshot of the 1990s reforms and that
does appear in the law, and that does address the issue of
coercion, albeit not using that word.
The second part of my prepared statement is about the 2001
law. Here again, I ask that somebody ask me a question about
the principles behind the law, because some people talk as
though China is like Sierra Leone, some kind of group of thugs,
running around acting in some unprincipled way or beating up on
people for no purpose. No, birth limitation is a public policy
in China and there are a lot of complicated considerations that
go into it. I would love to talk about that if somebody would
like to ask.
Now, under the 2001 law, I have three topics. The first
topic is duties. Some people say there are two incompatible
interpretations of Chinese birth policy, voluntary versus
coercive. This is not very helpful, because the policy is both.
Limiting your fertility is mandatory, like paying your taxes or
serving in the draft in a war. So, it is not voluntary. But
compliance with the policy is now, as Bonnie just explained,
largely voluntary, as a result of 20 years of enforcement,
propaganda, and socioeconomic change.
But there is still some non-compliance. People try to get
away with things. There is, therefore, enforcement now in the
form of the quite large ``social compensation fee.'' So arguing
about whether there is total reproductive freedom or whether
the program is completely voluntary or not is a complete waste
of time. The policy is mandatory and it is a duty of Chinese
citizens to comply with the policy. That is a matter of
considered public policy, and that is not going to change.
My second topic about what the 2001 law is trying to do, is
that the national political leadership has a huge interest in
restraining the local state. Local governments in China tend to
be very predatory, they try to extract too many resources from
the public. Some have gone hog-wild in their administrative
behavior. The national leadership is terrified of this. They do
not want a rebellion against them on account of this
maladministration. So one of the basic
purposes of the law is to reign in maladministration.
Accordingly, when you see demands for lawful implementation
and punishments for unlawful implementation in order to
guarantee citizens' rights, this is not boilerplate. The idea
that it is not mentioned domestically is absolutely
preposterous. The law came into effect on September 1, and the
entire birth planning system spent the entire month of August
running one of its huge educational campaigns in order--of all
things, in a post-totalitarian system--to make sure that all
citizens understood their legal rights and interests. That is
not just altruistic. The point is that the government wants the
citizens, from the bottom up, to exercise control over the
sometimes-out-of-control local state. I would love to talk more
about restraining the local state and I would love to cite the
articles in the law that address this, but there is no time.
My third topic about the 2001 law is its positive side.
Restraining the local State addresses the negative rights of
citizens not to be abused. The provision of benefits addresses
positive rights. What is really extraordinary here is that the
Chinese Government is in the process of making up new rights on
behalf of its citizens right and left, rights that are not in
the Constitution, rights to reproductive health care, rights to
free this and that. I am not saying that it is paradise over
there, but my talk is titled, ``Positive Recent Developments''
because if you do not recognize the positive developments when
you see them, you cannot foster them.
The third part of my prepared statement was about
implementation. The main thrust of what I talked about there--
and you can look at it--are the practical problems that the
government will have in carrying out the 2001 law, particularly
the cost of delivering these positive reproductive health
services and we all know how expensive that is. But, here
again, I make a plea that somebody ask me a question about
implementation, because now I have something much more concrete
to talk to you about, which is this recent work conference,
which is the implementation of the 2001 law and which is a
positive development of such positiveness that I would not have
dared hope for it when I made up the title.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Winckler appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Wolf. Susan Greenhalgh, please.
STATEMENT OF SUSAN GREENHALGH, PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY,
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT IRVINE, IRVINE, CA
Ms. Greenhalgh. Thank you.
Since China launched its controversial one child policy in
1980, influential voices in this country have advanced a
powerful critique of the state-sponsored coercion used in the
name of limiting population growth. While the focus on coercion
has been helpful in drawing attention to the human rights
abuses in the Chinese program, it has outlived its usefulness.
Three limitations bear note. First, the existence of
coercion in the Chinese program is by now very stale news. Few
people on earth do not know about this.
Second, and more importantly, the exclusive focus on
coercion has kept us from seeing, to say nothing of
understanding, new developments in China's population policy.
The coercion story divides the world into two opposed systems--
capitalist/socialist, free/coercive, good/bad--and defines the
presence of coercion as the only thing worth noticing about the
Chinese program. Evoking an older bipolar cold war world, the
coercion perspective ignores forces of globalization that are
profoundly transforming China's State and society, fostering
not only change in the State program, but also the emergence of
new and progressive quasi-state and non-state sites of
political activity. While some Americans have been turning over
every stone looking for coercion, since 1993-1994 Chinese
reformers have been quietly dismantling the old target-oriented
system, replacing it piece by piece with one focused on
reproductive health. These gigantic changes remained invisible
when we are only looking for coercion.
Third, the exclusive focus on coercion has limited our
responses to new developments in Chinese population affairs.
The coercion critique has elicited punitive responses from the
American
Government, rather than constructive engagements with Chinese
reformers.
The official American response has been less helpful than
it could have been. China is changing. While continuing to draw
attention to human rights violations in the Chinese program, it
is time to move beyond that single-minded focus on coercion to
see the remarkable transformations that are taking place and
the opportunities they present for constructive American
response.
This brief presentation draws on nearly 20 years of active
scholarly research on China's population dynamics, policy, and
birth planning program. That research has involved numerous
trips to China where I have conducted extensive interviews with
both the makers of China's policy and the peasants who are its
main objects. In those 20 years, I have heard many
heartbreaking stories and seen many deeply appalling things. In
my scholarly articles, many focused on the human costs of the
Chinese policy, I have sought not to criticize China, but to
understand how those troubling practices came about. That has
seemed a more productive approach.
Today I want to make three points. First, despite the heavy
cost China's restrictive population policy has imposed, and
continues to impose, on women and girls, important pro-woman
changes are occurring not only within the Chinese population
establishment, but also outside the state, that is, beyond the
scope of formal law, which often follows as much as leads
social change in China. Given the growing role of non-state
forces in Chinese politics, it is important to attend to and
support these developments.
The second big point. The promising changes that have
occurred in China have stemmed, not from foreign coercion, but
from a combination of internal critique and constructive
engagements with international organizations. This history
contains important
lessons for the formation of American policy toward China in
the future.
The third big point. The prospects for further reform to
advance women's rights and interests will be shaped by a
variety of cultural, political, and demographic factors which
present both challenges and opportunities. In this, as in other
domains, China will continue to follow a Chinese path to reform
that will bear the marks of that nation's distinctive culture
and politics. We must not expect Americanization.
Since the early 1990s, two streams of women-focused
critique and reform of the birth planning program have
developed within China.
Reforms in the State Birth Planning Commission.--In the
early 1990s, facing rising birth rates, the Commission oversaw
the use of harsh administrative measures to reach targets. By
early 1993, those in charge realized that fertility had fallen
to a level far below what they had imagined possible. With
pressure to produce results off, in 1993 and 1994, Commission
leaders began to grow concerned about the social, physical, and
political price that had been paid for pushing the numbers down
so fast.
These domestic concerns were supported by China's growing
involvement with the international movement for women's
reproductive health, associated with the 1994 Cairo conference.
In the wake of that conference, collaborations with foreign
organizations
advancing reproductive health agendas multiplied. From those
organizations, reformers in the Commission received a
vocabulary of reform, financial resources, and organizational
and technical know-how to pursue more woman-centered health-
oriented approaches. As documented in detail elsewhere, since
the mid-1990s the State has introduced a package of
programmatic policy and legal reforms culminating in the new
law designed to improve the delivery of services, while
retaining control over population growth.
New voices outside the state.--Meantime, another dynamic
has been developing outside the population establishment. Since
the mid-1990s, a loosely defined group of women scholar-
activists has begun to speak out about the harmful, as well as
helpful, effects of birth planning on women's health and well-
being.
Crucial to the emergence of these activists has been the
multiplying connections to transnational agencies and feminist
and reproductive health networks forged at the Fourth World
Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. Since the
conference, a number of women's rights activists have begun to
work to raise consciousness about the effects of State birth
planning on women and girls and to promote policy and program
changes to alleviate the negative ones. Women's advocates in
China must exercise great caution in criticizing what remains
``a basic state policy.'' In this restrictive political
climate, transnational links have been critical, for they have
given these women and men new concepts, political support, and
external resources to pursue their agendas.
NGO [non-governmental organizations] projects on behalf of
women and girls.--Recent work has highlighted the significant
innovations in the state program, but initiatives emerging from
NGOs are significant as well. Such projects include women's
income-generating activities, magazines for rural women that
include special sections on reproductive health, telephone
hotlines providing advice on sexual and reproductive health and
rights, and many other things. Many of these projects have been
developed on local initiative and supported, in part, by
foreign organizations.
So far, I have talked only about the projects initiated by
urban elite actors. But China's rural people are also taking
matters into their own hands and working to alleviate some of
the costs strict birth control has imposed on rural women and
girls. In the countryside, for example, a whole informal
culture of adoption has developed that flourishes largely
outside of the official apparatus of the state. The legal
development of women's rights is important, but so, too, are
informal practices that bolster women's status and rights on
the ground.
Challenges and opportunities ahead.--First, the challenge
of
political economy. In the reform area, the advance of global
capitalism, coupled with the retreat of the State from direct
intervention in many areas of life, have left women vulnerable
to many forms of discrimination. New notions of the virtuous
wife and good mother who has left the public sphere to men will
complicate efforts to promote women's status and rights.
Second, the challenge of traditional culture. The notion of
women's independent rights has few precedents in traditional
Chinese culture, a culture in which women's social and legal
place was within the male-defined family. These cultural
constructs will shape the way legal notions of women's rights
develop.
Third, the challenge of an unknowable demographic future.
Today's relaxation has been contingent on the achievement and
maintenance of low birth rates over the last 10 years. Today,
by the way, the TFR [total fertility rate] is estimated at 1.8,
quite astonishing. Should the birth rate, though, somehow rise
or turn out to be higher than current estimates suggest, the
reforms may well slow.
Fourth, the opportunity presented by social change. Twenty
years of reform and economic advance have dramatically lowered
child-bearing preferences. In many parts of the countryside
couples want, at most, two children, and in some areas they
want only one. These changes in Chinese society have made, and
will continue to make, high-pressure tactics in the birth
planning program increasingly unnecessary.
Fifth, the opportunity offered by a new gender
consciousness in the state. Since the mid-1990s, the Chinese
State has made
women's economic, political, and educational development a
newly important part of its ongoing reforms. While
implementation faces obstacles, this new commitment to women is
a promising
development.
Thank you. Thanks very much.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Greenhalgh appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Wolf. Stirling Scruggs.
STATEMENT OF STIRLING SCRUGGS, DIRECTOR, INFORMATION AND
EXTERNAL RELATIONS DIVISION, UNITED
NATIONS FUND FOR POPULATION ACTIVITIES [UNFPA], NEW YORK, NY
Mr. Scruggs. Thank you, sir.
I will spend a few minutes talking about UNFPA's history of
work in China, what it has done in the area of advocacy, and
its current program.
UNFPA first began work in China in 1980. During our first
10 years, we focused mainly on projects that had to do with
self-sufficiency, UNFPA supported China's first modern census,
with assistance by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.N.
Population Division.
We also supported contraceptive research in China with WHO,
believing that a breakthrough in contraceptive technology could
come from China because they had such an extensive research
program.
We began academic training for Ph.D candidates from 23
universities in China and who were sent away to United States,
United Kingdom, and Australian universities for their degrees.
We also worked in the first 10 years on contraceptive
production, assisting China to upgrade, and in some cases
build, contraceptive factories. We did not pay for the
building, but for the equipping and the training.
In about 15 years, China became totally self-sufficient in
high-quality international-standard modern contraceptives,
including pills, condoms, IUDs [intra-uterine devices],
injectables, and foam. We were assisted in this work by the
Program of Appropriate Technology in Health [PATH], a Seattle-
based NGO.
Beginning in the 1990s when I arrived in China, we assisted
with another census. We worked with the returning Ph.Ds so they
could establish academic programs in their own universities in
the subject areas of sociology, demography, and statistics.
This way they could provide research that told Chinese
decisionmakers about the problems inherent in their policy, and
some of what Susan Greenhalgh was talking about.
We continued contraceptive research and we established a
high-quality maternal and child health and family planning
program in 310 counties. The focus of the program was on safe
deliveries, acute respiratory infections, diarrhea, breast
feeding, and the use of high-quality contraceptives
manufactured in Chinese factories. Our partners in this
endeavor were UNICEF and WHO [World Health Organization].
We established a special inter-personal counseling and
informed consent program which was also executed by the Seattle
group PATH.
The creation of China's first women's empowerment projects
in 36 counties in 11 provinces was probably the most gratifying
field projects I have ever been associated with. Of course,
beginning in 1997 we initiated the current program, which
includes the now very well-known 32 counties project.
In the area of advocacy, we began in 1980, as soon as we
arrived in China, advising the Chinese against the use of the
one-child policy. We have maintained a constant dialog since
that time with the Chinese as representatives of the United
Nations and international standards.
In 1983, as John Aird pointed out earlier, it became
apparent that there was a massive coercive campaign of
sterilizations and abortions. We sent our deputy executive
director the day after we learned of this injustice, and I
myself, when I was in China, met with the ministers and vice
ministers frequently to criticize and discuss various aspects
of coercion that would appear in the press or that I would
learn about.
When I arrived in China, my first field trip was based on a
human rights event. That is a law that was passed in several
provinces to sterilize the mentally retarded. The law was put
together without scientific evidence or consideration for human
rights.
I went to villages in the northwestern part of China where
there were a significant number of people who were suffering
from mental retardation, much more than in a normal population.
I went back and worked with WHO to bring in a team of experts.
They came in and discovered that micro nutrients were missing
from the diet and set up a massive iodine program to add iodine
to the diet. That was financed and executed by UNDP [U.N.
Development Programme] and UNICEF.
In 1992, I put together a research project with the Alan
Guttmacher Institute, WHO, and Beijing University to try to
convince the Chinese to stop using the steel ring IUD, which
was ineffective and caused significant difficulties for the
women who used them--some 75 million at that time.
The research convinced the government to switch to copper-
based IUDs 2 weeks after the report was released. Over a 10-
year period, which just ended last year, the researchers
estimated that 41 million pregnancies, 26 million abortions,
and 14 million births were
prevented just by the switch of IUDs, and that a million
miscarriages were prevented, along with 360,000 child deaths
and 84,000 maternal deaths.
In 1994, armed with the Cairo program of action, the Action
Plan of the International Conference on Population and
Development, a needs-based and human rights-based blueprint for
global action, we were able to push the Chinese harder to
accelerate pro-human rights changes in their program. The
fourth country program was put together with that in mind.
The objectives of the program in 1997 were to improve and
provide access to quality reproductive health services for
women and men in a small, limited area, and to demonstrate an
integrated client-centered approach to reproductive health,
information, and services on a voluntary basis, and by doing
so, developing a model in these selected counties from which
lessons could be learned and could be drawn on for application
at the national level.
At the beginning of the project, a so-called ``pink
letter'' was sent to all households in the 32 counties
explaining the project, the human rights implications, and the
rights that the people would have for quality family planning
and to be able to make their own choices. Although targets and
quotas were lifted, they still were not absolutely free to make
their own choice because of an onerous
social compensation fee.
Before this program was initiated, there was no privacy
during counseling and no informed consent. Now there is privacy
and informed consent. During the life of the project, the
number of women who know at least three forms of contraception
has increased from 39 to 80 percent; sterilization has
decreased; IUD use has increased; abortion has decreased;
maternal mortality has decreased; infant mortality has
decreased; and delivery by skilled birth attendants has
increased.
Better medical protocols were developed for choice in
contraceptives, for help during menopause and infertility, for
support to prevent sexually transmitted infections,
reproductive tract infections, and AIDS prevention. Also,
protocols to promote breast feeding were improved.
So far, this model has been adopted in 800 other counties
in China, including 4 entire provinces.
Challenges ahead: The social compensation fee, the one-
child policy itself, improvement of the IEC, or Information,
Education, and Special Communication; projects to change
behavior, and condom availability for the HIV problems that
China is now facing. Our major mission continues to be to prove
that choice is right, it works, and to continue to advocate for
gender equality.
UNFPA, like all U.N. organizations, is guided by
international human rights standards and principles. UNFPA
provides assistance in all phases of reproductive health,
including family
planning, maternal health, sexually transmitted disease, and
HIV prevention, treatment for unsafe abortion, and advocacy for
an
enabling environment.
What that primarily means is women's rights and the
availability of reproductive health services. We assist
countries to become sustainable in development planning and
self-sufficiency through data collection, analysis, and
research.
Governments need to know the size of their population, the
dynamics--the number who live in urban areas, rural areas, the
internal and external migration situation, age--in order to
meet
citizen needs and vital statistics. We have advocacy programs
all over the world focused on human rights, gender equality,
women's education, social participation, health care, and
reproductive health.
I am proud to be associated with UNFPA. I am proud of its
principles, its work, and its staff. But today, due to
discrimination and lack of quality reproductive health
services, and because of a lack of funding, ``every minute'' a
woman dies from pregnancy-related causes, 40 have unsafe
abortions, 190 become pregnant who do not want to be, 48
percent of all women deliver at home without medical help, and
finally, every minute 10 people are infected with HIV, half
under the age of 25.
Specifically, in China, I believe engagement has helped to
move China to improve women's rights and to moderate its
population policies. Much more is needed, but each day more
citizens are getting involved and understanding this agenda.
China is, I believe, moving forward, but they have a long way
to go.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Scruggs appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Wolf. Thank you all very much. This is a wealth of
information, and a diversity of views, which is what we try to
do at these roundtables.
I will start. We had a similar roundtable 2 weeks ago on
HIV/AIDS. One of the issues that came up was the skewed gender
birth ratio and the implications for HIV/AIDS into the future.
It obviously has many other implications. It is something
that
exists not just in China, but that skewing exists in a number
of
societies.
What are some of the longer term implications of this? Are
there concerns within the Chinese Government, among reformers
and non-reformers, about the implications and what one might do
to
reduce it?
Mr. Aird. There have been concerns within Chinese circles,
including even, I understand, within the State Family Planning
Commission itself, but especially in Chinese demographic
circles, about the consequences of the use of coercive
measures.
In the mid-1990s, there were articles in demographic
journals which frankly admitted that the program was based on
coercion and argued that coercion was creating and exacerbating
the
popular backlash.
One article said that the stronger the course of measures
used, the stronger the backlash against them. Another article
pointed out that programs of this sort represent a violation of
women's rights. They did not have the right to choose their own
form of contraceptive. The type of contraception was prescribed
for them and they had to follow that. Now, these are complaints
from the 1990s.
More recently, and I think more significantly, something
which has not been mentioned here, and I do not think I
mentioned it in my written preparation--it should have been
there but I did not really have time, in just 2 days, to put it
in there--is the fact that there have recently been
testimonials from top Chinese leaders going back as far as Peng
Peiyun, the previous minister in charge of the State Family
Planning Commission, and now including Zhang Weiqing, who has
said this several times, and even Jiang Zemin himself, that the
present low birth rates are unstable. Some of the quotations
suggest that the----
Mr. Wolf. Excuse me. I am sorry. Maybe I was not clear. My
question was, the implications of the skewed gender birth
ratio.
Mr. Aird. Skewed gender. Well, all I know about the
attitudes on that, is there has been an outcry that the danger
of this sort of thing is that, within a given period, many
Chinese men will not be able to find wives and that there will
be serious problems of
social unrest as a result.
There have been current reports in China of difficulties
with abduction of women under false pretenses into rural
villages, reports of women being lured away on a social service
basis and then finding themselves used as common property in
villages where there are insufficient women.
The government has expressed concern about this, and of
course it is partly a result of the one-child limitation,
particularly its impact on rural areas where it is important to
have a male because it is the only basis for Social Security in
many villages when the family grows old.
But the other part of it, of course, is the traditional
Chinese
preference for males, which is not confined to China, but is
found elsewhere in Asia.
Mr. Wolf. Right.
Susan, I wonder, could you comment on long-term
implications and the possibility of, I do not know, reversals
from policy means?
Ms. Greenhalgh. The long-term implications are really
worrying. You probably know that the sex ratio at birth now is
116.9. It is really high, and it gets worse with higher-order
births. It is hard to say what the long-term implications are.
I think we cannot be sanguine about the implications for
women. The rise in the abduction and sales of women in rural
areas is directly connected to the disappearance of
marriageable women. On the other hand, the government has been
deeply concerned about this since the early 1990s especially
since around 1993.
The deputy director of the State Birth Planning Commission
issued an order to stop using ultrasound for prenatal sex
determination, because this is the major factor behind the
increase in the sex ratio at birth. Parents are aborting female
fetuses. Those kinds of measures have not been very effective.
All you need to do is bribe the local medical worker and you
can be told the gender of your unborn child.
Increasingly, especially since the mid-1990s, there has
been a concerted effort in many areas of government, including
the State Birth Planning Commission, to change tactics. That
is, to try to improve women's well-being on all fronts:
political participation, economic status, legal status, health
status, and so on. This is where the action is now.
I have a new statement, right off the Web, in Chinese, on
the interpretation of the new law, ``Central Concept: People as
the Core. Major implementation strategy: Improve the status and
legal rights of women.'' So, that is encouraging.
Mr. Wolf. Thank you.
John Foarde is the deputy staff director of the Commission.
Mr. Foarde. Thank you, Ira.
Thank you all for coming and sharing your expertise with us
this afternoon.
Since the late 1980s, and particularly after the Tiananmen
massacre in 1989, a number of Chinese people have come to the
United States and asked for asylum under the Immigration and
Nationality Act. A great many of them have asked for it on the
basis of the family planning policy.
I take it, John, you, and also Ed and Susan, have done
background papers over the years--a recent one in your case, I
think--for the INS to consult when trying to adjudicate these
claims.
Can you give us a sense of whether there has been any
change in the nature of those claims in the last 12 years, and
if more recently there is the same basis on which to grant
asylum on that basis as it was, for example, in 1990, 1991,
1992?
Mr. Aird. It is hard to detect a change because when I see
the cases, sometimes the offenses that they refer to occurred
2, 3, 4, 5 years ago. However, recently, for example, I had two
cases in which the complaint was recent--it was dated from
about 2000, 2001--of children born without a birth permit.
In one case, it was a daughter born to a couple in a
hospital. The child was obviously in good, healthy condition.
It was born under circumstances of a forced late-term abortion.
The child emerged, however, unharmed, but was taken away and
apparently killed by the hospital personnel because it did not
have a birth permit.
In the second case, it was a girl, again, a forced late-
term abortion. The child was born alive. It was taken home by
the parents. One week later, the Family Planning people came to
the home and said the child needed an inoculation.
The parents suspected nothing. The inoculation was given.
Shortly after they left, the child began to experience
difficulty in breathing. They rushed it to the hospital, where
it was declared dead on arrival.
There, a family planning official--or one of the doctors, I
do not remember which--said to the couple, do not think you can
escape the long reach of the family planning policy. That
alerted them to the idea that the inoculation was probably a
lethal dosage intended to kill the child born without a permit.
I cannot trace that these things are getting any more
moderate over time, but I think these are rather deviant
samples. I do not think there would be much basis for
generalizing from them. All they say is, such incidents
continue. They continue because local cadres are still under
pressure to make sure that they do not exceed their birth
quotas.
Mr. Foarde. Thank you. Susan.
Ms. Greenhalgh. I will take that one. I agree that it is
impossible to detect a change in the nature of the stories,
because many of the claims are for events that happened even
10, 20 years ago. My firm view is that these kinds of stories
that these claimants tell are not at all a reliable basis for
our knowing what is going on in China.
I have discussed this matter with a number of INS agents,
people who are on the front line listening to these stories,
trying to decide whether they are credible. The INS agents have
a very difficult time. For one thing, the INS does not require
any kind of documentation, so people can just tell whatever
story they think is going to give them political asylum in this
country.
And while the abuses that have taken place in the program
are really pretty terrible, there are also networks of story
shapers out there that help to shape the stories that people
tell. So, I do not think that these kinds of stories are going
to be a good basis for shaping American policy having to do
with China's birth planning program.
Mr. Aird. May I voice a note of dissent?
Mr. Foarde. Please.
Mr. Aird. Many of the stories that I see, Susan, are highly
detailed. They have a ring of verisimilitude. I do not get a
chance to question the applicants themselves. I never have that
opportunity.
But, where I think the applicants' comments are not very
credible, I do not accept the case. That has happened in a few
cases. In fact, once I testified on the other side, on behalf
of the Service and against an applicant whose story I found not
believable.
Often, too many times, however, the story is simply too
vivid, too particular to be dismissed as a fabricated story.
But, again, you are absolutely right. As I said earlier, it is
hard to generalize from these stories about things. What they
say, is it is still going on in some places.
Mr. Wolf. Susan Weld is the general counsel of the
Commission.
Ms. Weld. As you all know, this is a rule of law
Commission. We are supposed to be focusing on the rule of law
in China. So I am interested in what ways does the expression
of this policy in the form of a national law make a difference?
Does it mean that women will have causes of action to try
to apply some of those penalties against the administrators who
do the abuse? How will this be enforced? Is there additional
legislation necessary before that step can be taken by women
who are the victims of abuse? I guess, Ed, could you respond to
this?
Mr. Winckler. Well, that does go to some of the
implementation questions. I think a set of legal premises--the
language about lawful implementation and legal rights of
people--is the crux. Then there are supplementary implementing
regulations, such as the Technical Services Regulations, that
begin to spell out what that is supposed to mean. And now there
is also this work conference where they are putting together
their package of implementation measures. This is the Chinese
talking to themselves--not the Chinese talking to foreigners--
which is always the best kind of evidence you can get. This is
the model that they are going to prop up to be what the whole
country should do.
If I could just take a slight sidebar. There is the
misapprehension that the 2001 law calls for targets and quotas,
but that is simply a mistranslation. The whole system has begun
the process of dropping targets and quotas, partly under UNFPA
urging, and this city in Heilongjiang, which is going to be the
national model, has gone quite far in that direction.
The real crucial test is that not only is the formulation
of policy implementation measures shifting from making up
target numbers that cadres are supposed to meet, toward making
up programs for raising the quality of reproductive health
service, but also they are doing the same thing in the
``responsibility systems,'' the personnel evaluation systems.
This is supposed to go to your question of, how do we know that
the law is going to make a difference? Well, we know it is
going to make a difference because they are using this tool,
the personnel evaluation system--it is astounding--to do
exactly the opposite of what they used the same tool to do in
1991 when they used that tool to enforce a very coercive
enforcement of the program.
Now, in Mudanjiang, in Heilongjiang, the new model, they
are not going to have any item in the personnel evaluation
system for population quota or for birth rate. They are
dropping the demographic indicators and they are switching all
the indicators over to quality of care, which of course
includes women's rights not to be abused and so forth. But the
emphasis now, because they really feel that they have gotten a
handle on the abusive administration problem, is quality of
care and it is ``democratic participation.''
Now, I utter that in quotation marks because this village
self-government business where the government is trying to get
the community itself to enforce the program does not mean an
absence of coercion. The program is still mandatory. But in
terms of guaranteeing that there will not be abusive
implementation, that everything is fair, that it is
transparent, and so forth, that is exactly what the government
is trying to do, by putting as much of the administration of
the program in the hands of village committees as possible.
That is the emphasis in this new implementation model that is
being put out.
Ms. Weld. I was thinking of something quite specific, which
is when the women's rights and interest law was passed it was
criticized because it says women shall have all these good
things, and certain ways of treating women shall be considered
abusive and illegal. But there was inside that law no cause of
action, so you often had to depend on somebody else, like the
Women's Federation or somebody, to come up and sue on your
behalf.
So I am looking for a way that the people harmed, the women
in particular, can be subjects rather than objects. The
government is trying to reform the abuse from the top and the
United States is trying to reform it from the outside, but the
women are the ones harmed. How can they enforce the law for
themselves?
Mr. Winckler. Well, the quick answer is that national laws
in China are always vague. There is a tissue of laws, other
related laws--administrative redress and administrative
litigation and so forth--that if you want to take a legal
approach is what you would rely on. The procedures are there.
But actually this village self-
government thing is much more to the point, because if you are
a woman in a village and abused, you do not have to go through
some complicated court process. You just bring it up within the
village and the village leadership should complain to higher
authorities.
Ms. Weld. Thank you very much.
Mr. Wolf. Anne Tsai, who is our specialist on ethnic
minorities.
Ms. Tsai. I was just wondering if any of you have a sense
of the Chinese public's reaction to the law, particularly women
in various parts of China. Let us start with Bonnie.
Ms. Glick. When we were there, the law had not yet been
implemented. So when we would address the idea that there was a
new law coming, it was hard to elicit any responses on that
except in discussions with government officials.
When we met with people from the government who were
generally at the deputy Governor level, is the easiest way to
describe it, of each of the five counties that we went to, they
toed the line.
Going to Susan's question about the legal process through
which people could address their claims, we would specifically
ask in each case, have you had examples of families or women
coming through the courts to say we have this child, we do not
want to pay social compensation fees, we cannot pay social
compensation fees, whatever it was. And the constant response
was, rather than going through the courts, we handle these
things off-line.
The sense is certainly that there are formal measures of
redress in place, but they are probably not used. When we asked
if we could cite cases that had been brought to court, no, we
have not had any cases in this county.
In terms of women, it was actually so interesting to see
generational spreads on that. When talking with older women who
were government officials, they were pretty hard-core, is the
best way to describe their impressions.
One woman said to us, well, there is no discussion here. We
are on a boat. We are 50 people on a boat and there are limited
resources on board this boat. If somebody brings an extra
person on board, what are we supposed to do? We cannot have 51
people on this boat.
The younger women we met with, also government officials,
were at least, in tone, more flexible in terms of their
perceptions of where China was going, what the new law would
bring, but nobody was willing at the time to comment on
specifics of the law.
Ms. Greenhalgh. I can address that, but kind of obliquely.
It is way too early to know people's reactions to the new law.
But in answer to your question, and also Susan Weld's, how
women can become subjects, not objects, of these legal and
policy developments, I had an interesting set of interviews in
Beijing in late 1999, mostly with women's rights scholar-
activists. They described to me how the women's activists are
really constantly monitoring what is going on in the state, new
legal and policy developments. They gave me an example of a way
they can use these developments subversively to advance women's
own interests.
For example, they pointed out that new developments in the
State birth planning program at that time had focused mostly on
``quality of care'' and the concept of ``taking people as the
core.'' They were not really sure. That seemed like a top-down
process of reform and they were interested in bottom-up,
individual-initiated reform. So they pointed out that they
could take that concept, quality of care, which had a rather
restrictive definition in terms of the State use of it, and
broaden the meaning. Everybody knows that, after Cairo,
concepts like that have a multiplicity of meanings. So, they
could take that because the State introduced it in formal
legislation and policy developments. They could say, aha! Take
that, grab it, broaden the meaning. Use it to gain more support
for it. In this way, they could broaden the types of changes
that are going on in China. I was really excited about that.
Mr. Winckler. Just one word. There is considerable
literature about the uses that ordinary Chinese citizens make
of some of these administrative litigation procedures. Kevin
O'Brien has a wonderful article about this, called, ``Rightful
Resistance.'' So there is every reason to think that, as a
result of the August campaign educating everybody about these
rights--even though this which probably is not a complete
process--as people learn of these rights they will use them.
They have used similar rights in other policy areas, so there
is no reason to think they will not do it here.
Mr. Aird. I would just add a quick comment. One ironical
result of the law already was, men claimed that under it, since
it guarantees the right to have a child, that they should have
the right of veto over a woman voluntarily seeking abortion.
That caused a
little excitement in China.
Mr. Wolf. Thanks.
Matt Tuchow works for one of our Commissioners, Congressman
Sander Levin.
Mr. Tuchow. My question is for Professor Greenhalgh and Ms.
Glick. Is there any evidence that the UNFPA funds are being
used to directly fund forced abortions or sterilizations? Then
I have a follow-up question for Mr. Scruggs, which is, what
mechanisms are in place at the UNFPA to prevent such direct use
of funds?
Ms. Glick. I went to 5 of 32 UNFPA counties. In those five
counties, I saw no evidence that UNFPA directly funds a program
of
coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.
I cannot say that I saw everything. The question that you
ask of direct funding of forced abortion, what does direct
mean? As I learned on return, this is something that lawyers
figure out after the fact. I would have to say that, based on
the 5 of 32 counties that we went to, we saw no such evidence.
Ms. Greenhalgh. I certainly have no evidence that UNFPA
directly supports such practices. But I do have evidence based
on 20 years of going back and forth to China and working mostly
in the scholarly domain, and observing what UNFPA does from the
outside, of UNFPA's working to support the reformers within
China. Obviously, UNFPA cannot control everything that goes on
within its bailiwick, but my impression is that their work
overall has been moving things in the right direction.
Mr. Scruggs. We monitor, as much as we can, all of our
programs there. We monitor and require exact information on
procurement and program activities. With this particular
program, it seems like half the countries in the world have
helped UNFPA monitor including the United States which monitors
frequently.
But to speak to what we have always tried to do, it is to
engage the Chinese in dialog. For example, the sterilization of
the mentally retarded. We tried to find a solution to that, and
I believe, did.
When you were talking about sex ratios earlier, we
supported the research that began to bring that information out
that came from some of the scholars we trained. We supported
the Ph.Ds who became the people who went to the government and
told the government what their policies were doing, and how
they were harming the social fabric in China.
What we do, is we try to be a voice for change, a voice for
human rights, a voice for reason, and we monitor everything
that we do to the best of our ability, both financially and
programmatically. Everything that we do is plotted in a work
plan that is fairly rigidly adhered to.
Mr. Tuchow. A follow-up for Professor Greenhalgh. You
mentioned in your testimony something to the effect that the
emphasis on coercion was restricting constructive engagement.
I was wondering if you can elaborate on that. What sort of
constructive engagement? Has it been the UNFPA or others that
you think were helpful? You mentioned briefly the NGO contact,
but I am interested particularly with regard to international
organizations.
Ms. Greenhalgh. I think it would be very helpful, if
instead of the United States constantly scolding China for
being coercive--and everybody knows, people in this room,
people around the world, people in China know that coercive
abuses continue to occur in the program. But the question is,
is that what we should be noticing, or should we be noticing
the broad changes, systemic changes and very particular changes
that are leading to a reduction in the incidence of those
terrible abuses? I think it would be wonderful if, instead of
just criticizing China, we would acknowledge that China is not
this massive totalitarian State any more. China is quite
politically divided inside. There are all sorts of factions,
just as there are in this country. There are a lot of reformers
within China.
By the way, we should notice that the Chinese Government is
increasingly filled with people with at least bachelors
degrees, being filled with engineers. These people are not the
old Communist cadres that many of us still think about when we
think about China.
I think it would be really helpful if we could identify
reform factions within China and support the work of those
organizations, both within the state and NGOs who are operating
outside the state. We can work through international
organizations to support the people and China if that is what
works better.
Mr. Wolf. That is actually an interesting issue that our
own bosses are struggling with as members of the Commission.
How do you balance the issue of identifying problems of human
rights abuses and putting a spotlight on them while, at the
same time, recognizing that in various areas there are changes
going on, and the China of today is not the China of 25 years
ago.
Mr. Aird. I keep asking to add a footnote. May I do one
more?
Mr. Wolf. Sure. Go ahead.
Mr. Aird. There are several sources that I have seen over
the years in China which indicate that foreign criticisms of
human rights violations in China have had two effects. One, is
to weaken the use of coercion at the grassroots level, because
apparently the word gets down and it undermines the confidence
of cadres in
applying coercive measures.
The other, is that it tends to strengthen the hand of
people in China who are already objecting to coercion and who
feel that the moral sentiment of the world may be, to some
extent, on their side.
So I think that it is not entirely a negative impact. It
can have a constructive impact on the diminution of coercion
and on
re-thinking coercive measures in China.
Ms. Greenhalgh. Can I add a quick footnote to that?
Mr. Wolf. Sure.
Ms. Greenhalgh. I have done extensive field research at the
local level and at the village level in China, and also read
the
reports of other anthropologists who have done similar work. I
sincerely doubt that foreign criticism has undermined the use
of coercive practices at the local level. I mean, people do not
have any idea what is going on outside China in the remote
areas of rural China. So, just a footnote to that point.
Mr. Wolf. No more footnotes.
Where are the reformers? Are there focal points within the
ministries, within the Party, within other areas?
Mr. Winckler. Basically, I should say that we do not know
the politics of all of this very well. Certainly, some of the
reformers are the people that, as Stirling Scruggs explained,
UNFPA helped train as demographers so that they can give some
professional input to the policy process.
The only reason I grabbed the microphone is that I had the
good fortune to be involved in an effort of constructive
engagement to help reform the birth program at the request of
the State Birth Planning Commission. One hundred of their
people came over to the United States, and many of them are the
reformers, people who, at that point, were deputy directors of
their departments, and so forth. These are now the top 100
people in China who run the program, running all the
departments in the central government, and running the
provinces locally. Most of these people are a joy to talk to,
they are extraordinarily open-minded.
Incidentally, apropos of the 2001 law, one of the reasons
why I think I know what the law is trying to do, is that a
member of the last delegation that I met with in March of this
year helped draft the law and was the human rights specialist
in the process of drafting the law. He sure as heck is a
reformer, to continue on that line. You sit there with him and
go through the law, and he is pointing out all the things that
are not there, coercive provisions, and he is telling you that
he is going to go and meet with the provinces and get them to
remove those kinds of provisions from their local
legislation. I mean, there is a reformer for you, and the other
new people running the State Birth Planning Commission.
Mr. Wolf. Any other thoughts, institutionally, where those
loci are?
Ms. Greenhalgh. Yes, definitely. In the State Birth
Planning Commission, in the CPIRC, China's Population
Information and Research Center, in the universities. I happen
to know the demographers, the academic wing, better. Most of
these people, the younger people in particular, were trained
abroad. These people have learned a lot in this country.
They all want China to be a respected member of the
international community. They still work in politically
difficult
circumstances. They have to be careful how they say what they
say. These are people who are actively interested in reforming
the program.
Even within the State Birth Planning Commission, it is
amazing. In 1999, I interviewed the man, a very high-level
official at the Birth Planning Commission, who was personally
responsible for getting those targets achieved in the early
1990s. That achievement entailed horrendously coercive
measures. This man totally turned around. He was influenced by
a Chinese sociologist, trained in this country, who kept saying
in his ear, ``behind the numbers are tens of thousands of
families. Remember the families.'' This man totally turned
around. Of course, he achieved his targets, and then he had a
complete revelation. He personally feels very terrible about
what happened. So, it is amazing where you can find the
reformers. This is a tough-minded, engineering-type person.
Also, these NGOs that are springing up. All those are very
interested in promoting change, and there are a lot of them.
One can gain access to them. Even on the web, it is out there.
Mr. Wolf. Bonnie.
Ms. Glick. I think, too, that we saw a stark difference in
two different government agencies. One, was the State Birth
Planning Commission, where I truly agree that you have really
enlightened people who have been trained in the United States
and in the United Kingdom in demography, and they also have
souls.
These were people who genuinely want the situation to
change in a way that is focused on reproductive health and
maternal care. I am going to put them in stark contrast with
the folks who are with the Ministry of Health. I do not know
why the distinction exists, but in the Ministry of Health the
focus is on making numbers, it is on staying the same, not
changing.
What came to light very graphically for us, was in one of
our first stops we went to a State Birth Planning Commission
health substation. It was clean, the people were friendly, the
displays were easy to understand. Right next door, was the
hospital and it was the most horrifying scene that I have seen.
I have lived in some extraordinarily poor countries, and
this was worse than anything I had ever seen. The entryway to
the hospital was full of coal and there was a motorcycle parked
there, and there were puddles everywhere filled with syringes
of medical waste that children were playing with in the
streets.
It was just such a horrible juxtaposition of what really
struck me as focused on women's health care, and then the
Ministry of Health and the gross distinction between the two.
Mr. Wolf. John, you want to add a footnote, please?
[Laughter.]
Mr. Aird. No footnote this time.
Mr. Wolf. A comment on reformers?
Mr. Aird. Well, I think I mentioned earlier that I have
seen signs of it, of course, in the demographic journals which
have condemned coercion and said that it does not work, that it
provokes popular resistance. So, it is quite clear.
I also have heard of people attending demographic
conferences in China in which there were violent shout-downs
over the issue of the implementation of the family planning
program between people who defended it and people who felt that
it was inhumane. This does not get into print, but apparently
it is going on.
Mr. Wolf. Sure. Go ahead.
Mr. Scruggs. Ira, I have a footnote. It is a story that I
believe speaks to what Bonnie and Susan both spoke about. As I
said
earlier, we conducted an interpersonal counseling and informed
consent training program for many people in the State Family
Planning Commission when I was in China.
About 6 months later after the training was completed, I
went to one of the areas at the edge of the Gobi desert and met
with some of those people. I said, how is it going? How do the
people like it? They said, well, we tried it for a while and it
was a wonderful thing to do, because the people responded and
we felt more humane. But our supervisor stopped us.
But I can tell you, just as these Ph.D candidates and
others, like those people that were trained and understand the
impact that it has on their interpersonal relationships with
clients and that it has on health care. They will make changes
when they can. They are moving China.
Mr. Wolf. Thanks.
John Foarde.
Mr. Foarde. Bonnie, during your statement you concluded
that the Chinese do not meet international norms for family
planning. Can you give us a summary, for the record, of what
those norms are and where they come from?
Ms. Glick. I think probably everyone here is better
qualified than I to State chapter and verse, but coming from
the ICPD and the focus of UNFPA on informed choice, John
pointed out, informed choice should mean the choice not to have
to use contraception. That is not the case in China.
In America, we have a lot of freedoms. China is a police
state. The idea that women and their personal lives, while
nothing like they were in the 1970s where women's menstrual
cycles were tracked and everyone knew if you were pregnant,
that has changed in China. But these fees that the Chinese
Government refuses to lift are not in conformance, as far as I
can see, with any sort of international norms.
When we would meet with these Chinese Government officials
and say to them, you know, your program is going great in this
county and you have been selected, you have self-selected to
participate in the UNFPA study, what if you lifted the social
compensation fees?
And across the board, the response was always the same, oh,
we could not possibly do that. It all comes from the center. We
are told what to do from the center.
I think that the Chinese still have not reached the point
where Chinese Government officials trust the population. If it
means that 300 million women of child-bearing age in China were
suddenly given the freedom to have two children, that would be
an additional population the size of our country. That is
something that China is really having to struggle with.
Mr. Wolf. Susan Weld.
Ms. Weld. Thanks. I wanted to ask Mr. Scruggs about the
UNFPA and different ways of improving the birth planning
system. Does it result in improved health care for women
throughout their lifetime, or is it focused only on their
reproductive health care? Is this something which is going to
be an effort in those kinds of
programs?
Mr. Scruggs. We focus on reproductive health care from
cradle to grave for all people. That means that it starts with
prenatal care, medical care that women get, and nutrition that
they get
during their pregnancy. And, of course, family planning, which
saves more lives than any other intervention because it helps
prevent high risk births that women have who are very young,
who are old, and who have had multiple births.
So I think that we have a dramatic impact on health,
women's reproductive health, and, of course, training birth
attendants so that all women can have assisted childbirth and
deliveries. That has been a focus of the work. I think that
when you improve the quality of care--for example, one of the
things these 32 counties do, which is routine in the United
States, is that people understand how each method of
contraception works and then they choose what is best for them.
This choice leads to better results, fewer abortions, and fewer
complications. Anyone--and certainly a woman--knows that
certain things work for them and certain things do not. Of
course, there are contraindications, such as smoking and blood
pressure, with various methods of family planning: That is why
one needs counselling and consent.
We have seen in these counties that maternal mortality and
infant mortality are improving. The abortion rate is going
down, which is what will happen when people use contraceptives
of their choice. But this is a long discussion and has many
facets.
Ms. Weld. Let me move the question on to some of the other
people. What I am trying to get at, is whether the idea of
Cairo, which is that if women are given other ways of getting
power and status in society, they will not focus so much on
requiring many children to support them in their old age, or to
support their family in their old age. So I am wondering, are
those principles actually being adopted in any part of the
Chinese policymaking community?
Mr. Winckler. Well, I can make one brief comment on it. I
think the Chinese have totally bought into Cairo. That is not
true with regard to freedom not to contracept--though, now they
are about to start dropping the spacing requirement. In some
specific ways which one might wish to consider extremely
important, they are not in compliance with international norms.
But as far as the broad vision of Cairo and shifting the
emphasis to empowering women and giving them economic
opportunities and raising their status, the Chinese totally
have signed onto that. In fact, they started trying to do it
before Cairo.
One of the reforms that they started making in the early
1990s was an idea that was sort of analogous to ``you cannot
raise a child without the whole village.'' You cannot change
people's reproductive behavior without making many changes
throughout the whole society. So, they are trying women's
empowerment programs, and poverty alleviation programs, and
programs targeted precisely at poor women, and programs
targeted at the poorest areas of the country, and western
China, and so forth.
Now, many of those programs are under the auspices of other
administrative systems than the birth planning system, because
clearly it cannot have a competence in all of those areas. But
the man who supervises birth planning these days on behalf of
the State Council is Wang Zhongyu, who is the Secretary General
of the State Council. By the way, he attended the work
conference I am talking about and, on behalf of the cabinet,
which is clearly intimately involved in shaping this new
policy, endorsed the whole thing. Anyway, if you look back over
the last 5 years or so, Wang Zhongyu has chaired endless inter-
agency coordination committees trying to implement this more
comprehensive approach that I
mentioned. So, I think that the Chinese are doing everything
that they have the resources to do, and everything they know to
do, and everything that the Cairo conference ever thought of.
Ms. Weld. Bonnie, do you have one little sentence to add?
If you do not, that is fine.
Ms. Glick. No. No, I do not.
Ms. Greenhalgh. Can I go back quickly and address that
reproductive health question? I think it is important not to
think of reproductive health as something having only to do
with reproduction and a woman during her childbearing years,
because the Cairo
concept includes women's health throughout their lives.
In China, it is particularly important because some of the
reproductive health problems you can get during your
childbearing years, like upper reproductive tract infections,
can impair your health and well-being throughout your life. By
addressing those early, it is improving women's health
throughout their lives.
I have to tell you, I have been an outspoken critic of
China on this birth planning program, especially because of the
implications of the program for women. I have just been really
amazed at the changes. For example, they did a reproductive
health survey, one in 1997 and a recent one in 2001. About
40,000 people were surveyed. The improvements in reproductive
health care between those two periods are really dramatic.
I will not read you the statistics, but things like
proportion of women taking iron when pregnant doubled, taking
calcium while pregnant went from 7 percent to 40 percent,
prenatal check-ups, from 57 percent to 82 percent. I mean,
dramatic changes are taking place. I actually have turned
around on this issue.
Mr. Wolf. Anne.
Ms. Tsai. This question is for Ed. I was just wondering if
you could elaborate further on the implementation of the new
law and findings of the conference that you discussed.
Mr. Winckler. Well, let me see. I think I already got the
main point across, which is that they are shifting all the
administrative emphasis from the old target-driven approach
toward the new
client-centered approach.
Could I just step back slightly and address the question of
the nature of the change process, which will then come back to
implementation? The analogy I use is of Nixon and Kissinger
deciding to withdraw from Vietnam. There are 300,000 to 400,000
workers in this birth planning system. If you are going to turn
an organization around that has that many people in it, you
have to proceed cautiously and bring them on board before you
hit them with new measures, and so forth. Nixon and Kissinger
could not just say, well, this is all a terrible mistake, the
troops get out instantly. You have to retreat in a systematic
way, particularly since, as Susan has documented for the 1980s,
the minute you give the population the idea that the program is
breaking down or softening its policies, then people start
doing things that are outside of the parameters of what the
program can accept.
So think of it as a strategic retreat, and under fire, if
you like, from conservative legislators like Li Peng. Mr. Aird
pointed out that there are lots of contradictions in the
statements that are coming out. Those are partly the result of
the fact that this is a highly political process. Parts of the
2001 law itself are a sop, if you like, to the old style of
planning everything from the top down: it spells out the formal
framework of planning. As I say in my article, all of the
language is there for either a state-centric approach or a
client-centric approach, and that is why I consider this recent
work conference so important, because it shows that they are
moving ahead with actually implementing the client-centered
provisions that are a part of the 2001 law.
As far as the specifics of the conference are concerned, I
have got the conference summary right here. How can I summarize
it briefly? Let me put it this way: practical details. One of
the recommendations of Bonnie's group was that we need to
monitor this program more, and the Congress needs to
appropriate some money so that the State Department has some
money with which to follow these developments. What needs to be
monitored is no longer what the policy is, because that is
fairly clear, but rather this implementation process. It comes
down to very nuts-and-bolts issues.
Health care funding in China is a little bit like in the
United States, at least in New York State where I live. It is
wonderful to have these women's rights to this and that
service, but it is actually possible only if the locality can
afford it. So, you get into very nitty-gritty questions like,
can the country afford these 300,000 to 400,000 birth planning
workers? Bonnie has described the fine facilities that they
have in some places, but those are expensive and largely have
to be paid for by the local community.
So, both from our point of view and from their point of
view, what is on the table at this point is a lot of nuts-and-
bolts issues. One of the things that you see as you go through
these work conference documents, is that they are very candid
about all of this. For example, down at the level of specific
measures here is Wang Zhongyu, the Secretary General of the
cabinet, summing up the concrete things that have to be done:
Use the responsibility system to enforce these new objectives;
create measures for implementing them; get the local
governments to guarantee financing at levels that will actually
support these new objectives; make sure that the local
governments maintain the personnel slots, because the local
governments, in a sense, effectively hire and pay for these
birth planning workers. So, those are the crucial issues.
There is also something that came out last year called the
Technical Services Regulations, which sounds like it must be
the most boring thing you could ever imagine. But that is where
all the nitty-gritty stuff is. In particular, there is the
question, if you are going to deliver better reproductive
health care to rural areas, what is the division of labor
between the birth planning system and the Ministry of Health?
What the Technical Services Regulations say is that the two of
those institutions together should create a local service
network, but Bonnie has already alerted you to the kinds of
problems that will emerge.
Bonnie's observations, I think, were extremely astute and
very on point. This is precisely the kind of thing, oddly
enough, that we need to understand: Not that there is some
incident of coercion in some place, but how, as a system, is
this Technical Services Network being put into place, and what
does it look like? I am sure in different localities there will
be a different division of labor between the Ministry of Health
and the Birth Planning Commission. So, it is going to be a real
mess, but that is the kind of institutional monitoring question
that we need to follow.
Mr. Aird. I think it is necessary to bear in mind, however,
that coercion is not something that exists in scattered places
at a lower level. Coercion is still essentially the attitude of
Li Peng, who still has strong influence in the government.
It has been reiterated by Jiang Zemin and by Zhang Weiqing,
both of whom have taken a hard line, both of whom still insist
that the birth rates will rise again if the pressure is not
maintained.
The policy document of March 2, 2000, still reaffirmed the
importance of the target management responsibility system, and
the veto with one vote system, and still called for firm hold
on family planning.
There are a lot of hard-liners in very important positions
who do not share the more optimistic view of some of the people
in the State Family Planning Commission and elsewhere.
Mr. Winckler. Can I have a 1-second footnote?
Mr. Wolf. Let me just move on.
Matt.
Mr. Tuchow. Well, I have a follow-up question for Mr.
Winckler, also. When you were giving your remarks, you asked
for a question or some more time to speak about the law as it
applies to restraining local State power, and also the
provision of benefits or the creation of new rights in the law.
So, I was wondering if you could elaborate on that, briefly.
Mr. Winckler. Well, fortunately the local state power thing
feeds right into what we were just discussing. I do not know
exactly what speeches are being referred to, but, it is true
that the policy is that the enforcement must remain firm. Our
government leaders do not normally give speeches in which they
address issues of what you might call regulatory theory, what
kind of mechanism is needed to implement a particular kind of
policy, but in China they do.
The 2000 Decision says that maintaining a low birthrate
requires a variety of measures--legal, educational, economic.
It does include administrative measures, which now are mostly
stiffer penalties for government employees. It also placed them
last, which is exactly where they are in Chinese enforcement
priorities.
However, if you want to talk about what Jiang Zemin's own
main personal contribution to this situation is, look at this
work conference that I keep talking about. It starts right off,
as a post-
Communist system would do, from the national leader's ideology,
in this case, Jiang's doctrine of the ``Three Represents,''
which we do not have time to go into. Basically Jiang is trying
to, just like the 2001 law is trying to, legitimize the
possibility of all sorts of progressive development. What is
most relevant here is that Jiang Zemin's Three Represents is
trying to shift policy toward stuff that will give the public
satisfaction. It is like running for office. They want majority
support in the country. What is really salient about Jiang
Zemin's statements on these things, is that he has endorsed the
slogan that has come out of the State Birth Planning
Commission, that the basic criteria for their work should be
public satisfaction.
Actually, that, oddly enough, does go to your question
about restraining the local State because the whole point is to
deliver truly concrete, positive benefits to the citizens--that
is, reproductive health care, and so forth. Thus another thing
that Jiang Zemin has said, is that they must, in the future,
conduct the birth planning program in such a way that it really
can do that. And to do that, they have to do two things vis-a-
vis the local state.
If I could just have another little sidebar, you realize
that since most of this is paid for by local governments and
the provinces, the central government has a great deal of
difficulty bringing leverage to bear. They can make
recommendations for services and create models for
implementation, but they cannot tell the local governments, you
must do this. It is like an unfunded mandate. They have to
persuade the local governments to make the resources available.
So on the general theme of the relationship between the
central government and the local state, they want to do two
things. They want to rein in local abuses. They are in the
process of reforming the local financial system, not just with
regard to the birth planning system, but in order to prevent
the local governments from over-taxing farmers, in general.
In that context, another concrete thing that is on the
table at the recent work conference is that the birth planning
program is now going to have to be funded more out of the state
budget and less out of miscellaneous local revenues, because
these miscellaneous local revenues are being rolled into the
more formal tax system to prevent those miscellaneous
exactions.
If I could just toss in one more thing about financing,
some things should be remembered, with regard to the social
compensation fee, however obnoxious we may consider it to be.
In the first place, from the Chinese point of view, at this
point to demand that they drop this fee is preposterous because
they just spent the last 20 years responding to the idea that
they should use market-based incentives instead of Maoist
coercion and Red Guards. This is their adaptation of incentives
and disincentives to a ``socialist market economy,'' as they
call it. They have just been able to work this out. I mean,
they have spent a long time working this out and it is not
going to go away very soon.
But it is a system not only of disincentives but also of
incentives. One of the things that the social compensation fee
does is to make resources available to the government to pay
for things that this extra child will cost the society. In
addition, a great deal of that money turns around and goes into
the hands of the people who have restricted their fertility and
had only one child, as a matter of fairness, because they gave
up having another child that would have been an economic and
other benefit to them and out of fairness they deserve some
compensation.
So you have flows of funds that have to be arranged
properly, both for the practical reason to maintain the funding
for the reproductive health services we are all talking about,
but also out of
equity considerations to maintain the public acceptance of the
program that Bonnie was talking about. I may not have covered
all your questions.
Ms. Glick. Can I footnote? The social compensation fee does
not sound bad to us when we hear it in English. I am not a
Chinese speaker, but another term is the ``Society is Bringing
Up Child Fee.''
That said, the social compensation fees that are levied on
Chinese families who have out-of-plan births can be 1 to 2
years'
combined salary of the husband and wife. It is not just a
little fine, it is really a very strong financial disincentive.
So I appreciate the concept of market forces, but it is really
a tremendous disincentive.
Ms. Greenhalgh. May I add a quick footnote to something
that Mr. Aird said a few minutes ago?
Mr. Wolf. Well, I do not want to start another debate
because we have been here for about 2 hours. I think we are
pretty much at the end of this. I did want to ask, John, if you
had any final comment on this last discussion.
Mr. Aird. On the social compensation fee. I think that in
most countries, the idea that the State invests in the
education and welfare of children is seen not as a way of
assuming a burden, but rather as an investment in the future.
Ultimately, the child grows up. If his health is good and he
acquires skills, he repays the state by being productive.
It is not seen as something to the disadvantage of the
State for which parents ought to pay. I do not see any trace of
that concept behind any mention that I have seen of the social
compensation fee. I think its real purpose is as a coercive
measure.
Ms. Greenhalgh. Can I please respond to that?
A quick footnote to that.
Mr. Wolf. All right.
Ms. Greenhalgh. I think it is really inappropriate to read
statements by somebody like Jiang Zemin or Li Peng, to the
effect that we must keep the birth rate down as evidence that
they are supporting coercion in the sense of forceful measures.
Population
control in China, birth planning, has always been about keeping
the population growth rate down. They will always say that
until population control is eliminated from China.
The fact of the matter is, the birth rate is way, way, way
down, and that is because social change has been so massive.
What is going on now is walking on two legs, keeping that rate
stable and improving women's health.
Thank you.
Mr. Wolf. Actually, if we were going to spend more time
here, the issue I would want to discuss is the concept of
coercion as a tool for attitudinal change, and its impact.
What is the impact of 10 to 20 years of coercion on
people's own thought and behavioral processes, and how much
coercion is needed after that. That will be for another future
roundtable.
I want to thank all five of you. This has been a very
useful, very professional, very learned set of presentations.
It is a good way for us to start off the next year.
[Whereupon, at 4:27 p.m. the roundtable was concluded.]
A P P E N D I X
=======================================================================
Prepared Statements
----------
Prepared Statement of John S. Aird
september 23, 2002
What is the purpose of China's new family planning law? Why was it
adopted at this time? What effect is it likely to have on family
planning in China? Misleading claims about the law are being put
forward by Chinese family planning officials and by apologists for the
Chinese program, but its true purpose has been made clear in Chinese
domestic sources from the start. It is intended to increase the
government's control over childbearing in order to reduce the numbers
of births and hold down the rate of population growth. This is quite
clear from the explanations given in Chinese sources during earlier
attempts to draft a national law.
previous attempts
These efforts have been under way in China intermittently for the
past 23 years. In July 1979, as China was tightening the then newly
announced and highly coercive one-child policy, the leading Chinese
family planning official at that time, Vice-Premier Chen Muhua,
disclosed that a national family planning law would soon be adopted
``to check population growth.'' She explained:
To quickly and further reduce the population growth rate, the
central government is working out a planned parenthood law
based on experiences obtained in various localities. A policy
of encouragement and punishment for maternity, with
encouragement as the main feature, will be implemented. Parents
having one child will be encouraged, and strict measures will
be enforced to control the birth of two or more babies.
Everything should be done to insure that the
natural population growth rate in China falls to zero by 2000.
(Beijing radio, Domestic Service, July 7, 1979)
However, the law ran into opposition from some Chinese
academicians, who argued that popular resistance to the one-child
policy was too strong for the law to have a positive outcome. As one
put it,
If we adopt under these circumstances administrative measures
of a forcible command type, such as not registering more than
one child in the census records, not issuing food grain
allocations for such children, and not allowing their parents
to participate in work, the outcome would be contrary to our
wishes, have bad aftereffects, and in fact not be admissible in
a socialist state. (Gui Shixun, ``Population Control and
Economic Policies,'' Shanghai Teachers' University Journal,
April 25, 1980)
A Beijing newspaper noted that
Some people believe that family planning should be carried
out with encouragement and education, not with coercion. They
therefore disapprove the formulation of a family planning law.
The article continued:
Laws have the nature of enforcement, but enforcement is not
the same as
coercion. It is exactly for eliminating coercion which has
arisen in some areas when they carry out concrete work that a
family planning law must be promulgated to for all people,
young and old alike, to abide by. (Guangming Daily,
August 29, 1981)
The writer was clearly suggesting that adoption of a family
planning law would legitimize coercion by reclassifying it as law
enforcement.
In 1983 another writer in a journal for foreign readers argued that
Since different people have different levels of
understanding, education alone . . . cannot fully solve this
very urgent problem. Therefore, China plans to draft a family
planning law. For the time being, the local governments in
various places have introduced economic and administrative
measures. (An Zhiguo,''Family Planning,'' Beijing Review,
August 29, 1983)
The ``administrative measures'' referred to included the massive
campaign of compulsory birth control surgeries carried out in 1983,
which reportedly produced 18 million IUD insertions, 21 million
sterilizations, and 14 million abortions. This campaign was directed by
the then Minister-in-Charge of China's State Family Planning Commission
(SFPC), Qian Xinzhong, who later that year was given one of the United
Nation's first two family planning awards for his achievement. However
the authorization had come from Deng Xiaoping, then the supreme leader
of China, who called upon family planning personnel to ``rely first on
political mobilization, second on law, and third on technical
measures'' (the last phrase a euphemism for the three birth control
surgeries).
After 1983, 5 years passed without any mention of a national family
planning law in the Chinese media. The year 1984 had seen a sudden
change in policy away from coercive measures, caused by a strong
popular backlash against the 1983 surgery drive, which allegedly had
resulted in ``the alienation of the masses from the Party.'' Coercion
had to be put on hold. It was no time to pass a law to augment
compulsion in family planning. Qian was removed from his post as head
of the SFPC in December 1983, and replaced by a new head, Wang Wei, who
immediately announced a change in policy. Early in the next year the
Party Central Committee issued a new ``Decision'' which called for a
``more realistic'' family planning policy which is ``reasonable, is
supported by the masses, and is easy for the cadres to carry out.''
This requires that family planning workers do a great deal of
difficult, in-depth, and meticulous work, improve their work
method and work style, refrain from coercion, strictly forbid
any illegal or disorderly action, and carry out their work
consistent with actual conditions and reasonably. (People's
Daily, March 8, 1984)
The call to refrain from coercion was made official in a national
``circular'' known as Party Central Committee Document No. 7, which was
issued on April 12, 1984, widely circulated, often quoted in the
Chinese media, but never published. But the effect was immediate. A
general relaxation of family planning enforcement spread throughout the
country.
Within 2 years, the central authorities began to be concerned about
evidence of rising birth rates. By the end of 1985, Document No. 7 was
reinterpreted as a call take ``effective measures,'' ``grasp family
planning work firmly,'' be ``resolute in curbing ``unplanned'' births,
and fulfill the population control targets. In May 1986 a new Party
circular, Document No. 13, also unpublished but widely distributed,
apparently reversed the softer components Document No. 7 and reaffirmed
the need to regain control of population growth.
The task proved difficult. Central wavering on the coercion issue
seemed to have weakened control at the grassroots level, and it was not
easy to regain. In 1988 talk of adopting a national family planning law
resumed. An article in a demographic journal noted that local family
planning efforts had become confused and inconsistent, birth reports
were being falsified, and family planning rules were being violated.
The writer proposed that the government
. . . Formulate and promulgate a family planning law as soon
as possible to change the situation of no laws to abide by.
Births outside of plans can only be controlled with persuasion
and education on the one hand and with the adoption of the
necessary administrative and legal measures on the other hand.
(Qu Yibin, ``An Enquiry into the Causes of the Marked Rise of
China's Population Birth Rate and Measures to Deal with It,''
Population Research, March 29, 1988)
In January 1989, a family planning journal article said that a new
law was
``imperative'' to strengthen the resolve of family planning workers.
The provincial family planning regulations were inadequate for this
purpose:
. . . Without having formal laws, the rural cadres at the
grass-roots level are always worried. They are fearful that
things will change. This greatly [inhibits] their activism. . .
(Wang Shengduo and Wu Yiren, ``The Dilemma of the Village
Cadres in Rural Family Planning Work and Measures to Deal With
It,'' China Population, January 20, 1989)
In August a writer with provincial Party connections, though he
objected to some compulsory measures, such as smashing down houses,
confiscating farm implements, and refusing household registration to
unauthorized newborns, insisted that compulsory abortion was both
humane and legal, since it was an expression of the Chinese
Constitution's provision that ``both husband and wife have a duty to
practice family planning.'' A national family planning law, he said,
. . . should use the forceful intimidation of punishment to
reduce the opposition to compulsory abortion. . . . The state
has grounds to adopt legal measures for compulsory enforcement
against those who are unwilling to carry out their duty of
practicing family planning. (Kuang Ke, ``Some Suggestions on
Passing Laws on Childbirth,'' Social Science, August 15, 1989)
Though few published commentaries echoed this writer's idea of
legalizing coercion, most, including prominent demographers and other
influential spokespersons, seemed to think the law would strengthen
family planning enforcement and urged its adoption ``as soon as
possible.''
Madame Peng Peiyun, who had replaced Wang Wei in January 1988, was
quoted by XINHUA in February 1989 as saying that the situation in
family planning work had become ``crucial'' and that a national law was
being drafted which would go before the State Council ``as soon as
possible.'' (XINHUA-English, February 23, 1989)
In April, however, another XINHUA article questioned the wisdom of
this step:
Now, more and more experts are asking the state to accelerate
the introduction of [a] family planning law. But many family
planning officials are not optimistic about the results of such
action. An official of the State Family Planning Commission
says, ``As long as such a great number of people ignore the
law, what can the law do to them? (XINHUA-English, Beijing
April 13, 1989)
Nevertheless, in October 1989 Madame Peng told reporters that the
draft law on family planning ``will be enacted in October next year.''
(ZHONGGUO TONGXUN SHE, Beijing, October 17, 1989)
It wasn't. In November 1990 the China Daily reported that family
planners were still calling for a family planning law ``as soon as
possible'' to make family planning policies ``more authoritative and
forceful.'' (``Planners Urge Firmer Control of Population,'' November
14, 1990, p. 4) In May 1992 a demographic journal commented
For one reason or another, our country still has no family
planning law. According to public opinion in our society, most
people are sympathetic with those having extra children. They
are not inclined to support the basic national policy. Under
such circumstances, family planning in some localities has
become a task that almost no one wants to attend to and take
care of. (Li Shaoxian, ``Farmers' Desire for More Children and
Measures to Solve This Problem,'' Population Research, May 29,
1992)
A number of articles candidly discussing the issue of coercion in
family planning appeared in Chinese professional journals during the
middle 1990's, some of them opposing coercion and others approving
coercive measures. One of the latter appeared in April 1993 in a
national law journal. Its authors deplored the fact that because of the
lack of an explicit national law legalizing forcible means, ``some
forcible measures which could have become legal have become illegal. .
. . Meanwhile, it is impossible to totally avoid using forcible
measures in practice.'' The article adds:
In addition to ordinary economic and administrative
sanctions, it is also necessary to have legal rules providing
for relevant forcible, restrictive measures to deal with the
situation of being pregnant and preparing to give birth after
having had two births, such as rules which explicitly provide
for forcible termination of pregnancy, forcible induced
abortion, or induced abortion. It is necessary to forcibly
sterilize those couples who have failed to be sterilized or use
contraceptive measures after having each had two births.
Forcible and restrictive measures constitute an issue which
critically affects whether family planning work can be
effectively carried out. If there are no relevant legal rules,
then it would be difficult to eliminate the stubborn problems
in family planning work. Therefore there should be no hesitancy
on this issue. . . .
To get family planning work out of the predicaments, both
cadres and ordinary people urgently hope there will be a
uniform family planning law so as to use the state's policy on
birth; and such a law can then be used to regulate and adjust
the activity of reproduction of human beings. . . . (Yang
Quanming and Yuan Jiliang, ``Thoughts on Family Planning
Legislation,'' Politics and Law Tribune, No. 50, April 1993,
pp. 89-93.)
One of the things that concerned these authors was that foreign and
domestic criticism that the Chinese government had ``violated human
rights'' in family planning had caused people in China to ``worry that
restricting citizens' reproductive rights is incompatible with the
constitution-stipulated protection for human rights,'' and these
worries ``have all along been creating difficulties for conducting
thinking on family planning legislation.'' . . .
When the SFPC's ``Outline'' of family planning work was published
in February 1995, the task still lay in the future. In fact, it sounded
more remote than ever:
We must conscientiously do a good job of making preliminary
preparations for the drafting of the ``PRC Family Planning
Law,'' make proposals on population and family planning
legislation, and provide legal guarantees for the
implementation of family planning. (People's Daily, February
25, 1995, p. 11)
Still, nothing happened. Four years later a Hong Kong newspaper
speculated that ``a draft law specifying a citizen's rights to have
children now looks unlikely to be ever passed by the National People's
Congress (NPC).'' The writer seemed to think passing such a law would
undermine the pretense of the Chinese leadership that their family
planning program was voluntary. (Jasper Becker, South China Morning
Post, April 19, 1999, p. 17)
the law's adoption
That surmise was also mistaken. In September 1999 a vice-minister
of the SFPC predicted that the long-awaited law would be enacted within
the next three years and that it would ``tighten the rule of law in
carrying out family planning and strengthen mass supervision over law
enforcement in the next decade.'' By 2015, he predicted, the rule of
law in China would be greatly improved and ``by then, people of
reproductive age would follow the state family planning policy
voluntarily,'' an implicit admission that their compliance now was not
entirely voluntary! (China Daily, internet version, September 13, 1999)
In December 2000 XINHUA quoted Zhang Weiqing, who had replaced Peng
Peiyun in March 1998 as head of the SFPC, to the effect that the long-
promised national law would be drafted in 2001:
China will draft up a law on population and family planning .
. . next year to ensure the status of the national policy of
family planning and the realization of birth control targets,
said an official. At a conference on family planning, Zhang
Weiqing . . . said that lawmaking in the field of population
and family planning in China is still backward and the force of
existent laws and regulations is limited. (XINHUA, Beijing,
December 24, 2000)
Zhang's prediction did come true. In April 2001 the People's Daily
revealed that the draft law had been tabled before the Standing
Committee of the NPC. In introducing the measure to the Committee,
Zhang explained that the law was ``indispensable'' for ``upholding
existing birth control policies'' because the issue is ``very
sensitive'' and ``the traditional concept of having more children
remains influential.'' (People's Daily internet version, April 24,
2001)
Throughout the 23 years of its gestation, the essential rationale
for the national family planning law was unmistakable and remained
unchanged. It was to strengthen enforcement of the existing family
planning policies and reinforce government control over childbearing in
order to overcome stubborn popular resistance. The law was seen as an
additional means of compulsion. Not until 2002 did anyone try to
represent it as an effort to curb coercion, and that representation was
largely
confined to statements for foreign audiences.
However, when the new law was made public at the end of December,
the official propaganda line explaining its purpose had already begun
to change. On December 30, 2001, the day after its adoption by the NPC
Standing Committee, Zhang Weiqing said that ``the law neither relaxes
nor tightens population policy.'' (XINHUA-English, Beijing, December 30
2001) In January 2002 another SFPC spokesperson quoted by a Hong Kong
newspaper said that the new law ``solidly sets forth China's current
family planning policy, and there will be no tightening up nor
liberalization.'' (Ta Kung Pao, Hong Kong, January 21, 2002) But these
statements made no sense. Why would the Chinese government have
struggled for 23 years to pass a law that made no difference in how the
program was implemented? The only plausible purpose for the law was to
tighten controls. In denying that this was
intended, the Chinese authorities were being disingenuous.
They may have been reacting to widespread reports of spectacular
instances of coercion in the program since the late 1990's, some of
them involving the death of family planning violators under torture
and, in two cases, attempts by local family planning officials to kill
live-born infants who had been conceived without birth permits. One of
these involved the deliberate drowning of a newborn baby boy in a paddy
field. In the other case, several attempts by a hospital director to
kill a newborn baby girl failed, and the child survived. More recently
the efforts to ``sanitize'' the law retroactively may have been
stimulated by the disclosure in October 2001 that a private
investigative team sent to China by a Washington organization with
anti-abortion connections had found coercive measures still in force in
one of the UNFPA's project counties, where such measures were supposed
to have been abolished. This report embarrassed both the Chinese
government and the UNFPA, and the UNFPA hastily put together an
``independent'' team with close U.N. connections to go to the same
county obviously with the intent of finding no coercion, which, hosted
and escorted by both the government and the UNFPA, it naturally did not
find. After the report of the U. S. State Department investigative
team's visit to China in May 2002, released in July, confirmed the
persistence of coercive measures in China, it was obvious that China's
new law needed to be given a softer image. Hence the subsequent
official statements from Chinese sources disavowing the only reasonable
raison d'etre for such a law!
Giving the law a ``kinder, gentler'' image was not easy to
accomplish, mainly because the text of the law, which conveys a rather
hard-fisted impression, as will be pointed out in detail below, was
already finalized and was published in December 2001. Some foreign
observers immediately rejected the official assurances that the law
would not affect the intensity of family planning implementation. In
January 2002 a Hong Kong newspaper said flatly that:
The legislation basically incorporates current policy and
practice. . . . Analysts say China is unlikely to see a major
departure [from] or relaxation of the coercive one-child
policy. . . . The legislation has failed to prescribe detailed
prohibitions against the well-documented abuses that have been
perpetrated in the name of the policy, analysts said. (Clara
Li, South China Morning Post, January 5, 2002)
Two months later, perhaps partly in response to such skepticism,
the Chinese
authorities seem to have decided to try to represent the law as a human
rights document. In an English language dispatch, clearly targeted at a
foreign audience, XINHUA asserted that NPC delegates were saying that
The law emphasizes the principle of human care and prohibits
coercion, abuse of powers, and infringement on people's
legitimate rights and interests. . . . ``The law requires that
officials in charge of family planning change their work
style,'' said [a Sichuan family planning commission director].
(XINHUA-English, Beijing, March 13, 2002)
The law itself gives little encouragement for any such notions.
Moreover, only 5 days after that, former Premier Li Peng, always a
hard-liner on birth control, presented the annual work report of the
NPC Standing Committee in which he said nothing about avoiding
coercion. Referring to the new law, he said:
. . . The NPC Standing Committee enacted the Law on
Population and
Family Planning, thereby upgrading this basic national policy
into a law. This is set to have a profound and far-reaching
impact on effectively controlling the size of the population
and improving the quality of births. (XINHUA, Domestic Service,
Beijing, March 18, 2002)
The propaganda effort continued , however. In April, Wang Zhongyu,
secretary general of the State Council, warned that family planning
personnel must
. . . improve their working style and method, and ensure that
laws are understood, observed, and followed in regulating
administrative actions in family planning. (XINHUA, Nanchang,
April 8, 2002)
Wang also called for the amendment of local family planning
regulations to bring them into conformity with the national law and to
``ensure the continuity and stability of family planning policy.'' This
news item was NOT directed at a foreign audience. The Chinese
authorities now seemed to be speaking with two voices even to domestic
audiences, a sign of confusion in official circles.
More mixed signals emerged as the new law was about to go into
effect on September 1. 2002. The day before, a XINHUA-English dispatch
quoted a Beijing professor saying the law would represent a milestone
in China's transformation from ``the administrative-guided period into
a new era that puts public satisfaction as top priority.'' (XINHUA-
English, Beijing, August 31, 2002) But the XINHUA domestic dispatch on
the same subject said nothing of the sort! Instead, it quoted Zhang
Weiqing in a statement that the new law must be publicized so that
everyone would
. . . understand the importance of stabilizing the
childbearing policy currently in force, gain a better
understanding of citizens' rights and obligations to practice
family planning, understand the legal provisions concerned, and
enhance their consciousness in practicing family planning.
(XINHUA, Domestic Service, Beijing, August 31, 2002)
The next day, a XINHUA-English dispatch quoted Zhang as saying that
the new law ``focuses on the all-around development of human beings.''
The article went on to say that ``it also strictly prohibits the abuse
of authority, illegal administration, coercive imperatives, and other
practices infringing on the interests of citizens during family
planning.'' (XINHUA-English, Beijing, September 1, 2002)
The Hong Kong English language newspaper South China Morning Post
quoted Zhang Weiqing as having said that the new law would ``help end
abuses such as late abortions and arbitrary fines,'' but statements
attributed to Zhang in domestic sources said nothing about curbing
abuses. (``New family planning law might end abuses,'' South China
Morning Post, September 2, 2002) In fact, late-term abortions have long
been not only approved but required for unauthorized pregnancies that
had not been detected earlier in the pregnancy. In domestic regulations
such abortions are not called ``abuses''--instead, they are called
``remedial measures.''
A September 1 XINHUA domestic dispatch quoted the Deputy Director
of Legislative Affairs Office of the State Council as saying:
. . . It is a misconception to think that China will relax
its family planning policy, a change that would permits its
citizens to have as many children as they would like as long as
they are able to pay the fine imposed for an extra-policy
birth.
The article continued:
Zhao Bingli, Vice-Minister in Charge of the SFPC, said the
law was made to ensure the control of the country's population
and thus to guarantee the harmonious co-development of
population, economy, society, and environment.
``The mentality of 'money for children' goes against the core
principle of the family planning legislation,'' Zhao said.
``From the date that the law took effect, those who have an
extra-policy birth must face the music.'' (XINHUA, General News
Service, Beijing, September 1, 2002)
From these strange contradictions, one might have supposed the
references were to two different laws! Actually discrepancies between
Chinese pronouncements in domestic channels and those addressed to
foreigners are often highly revealing. China scholars have long been
aware that English language publications can present a very different
picture of a controversial issue from that found in the
Chinese version. Usually, the Chinese language version is the more
reliable and the more informative. What that version omits is
misleading propaganda devised for foreign consumption that could not
possibly deceive a domestic audience.
All that aside, why did the Chinese authorities decide to adopt a
national family planning law at this time despite all their former
misgivings? One possibility is that they felt that their grip on family
planning enforcement was slipping and they needed all the legal force
they could muster. In fact, there are signs that at least since the
late 1990s, the Chinese political system has been gradually losing its
effectiveness in all spheres of domestic administration, not just in
family planning. This is apparent in the leaders' increasingly paranoid
reaction to any spontaneous citizen action, especially any collective
action, that takes place without official prompting or control. That
reaction may explain the Chinese government's violent persecution of
the Falun Gong cult and other religious groups not under state
supervision and control. The leaders seem to fear any form of
dissidence or civil disobedience, and they are ruthless in their
attempts to crush all such manifestations.
They have also expressed concern recently that losing control of
population growth could lead to social ``instability.'' Exactly how is
not spelled out, but Chinese demographers, SFPC leaders, Peng Peiyun,
Zhang Zemin, and Jiang Zemin himself have been saying since at least
1994 that the birth control policy was in conflict with the
childbearing desires of the Chinese people, especially those in rural
areas, hence the current low birth rates in China are ``unstable.'' On
March 11, 2001, Jiang Zemin himself affirmed that population control
was a ``major affair for strengthening the country, enriching the
people, and maintaining tranquility.'' Jiang called for ``really
effective measures'' and demanded that the country ``grasp ever more
tightly and do still better this major item of economic and social
work, without the slightest slackness or relaxation.'' (XINHUA,
Domestic Service, Beijing, March 11, 2001) Presumably the new
population law was seen as helping the government tighten its
``grasp.'' The language of the law in many places, even where it sounds
intentionally vague, seems to point in that direction.
specific provisions
When the text of the law was made public, it immediately began to
receive close scrutiny both in China and abroad. Some of its provisions
apparently caused problems for the UNFPA. In February 2002 the UNFPA
Executive-Director, Thoraya Obaid, sent a letter to Zhang Weiqing
expressing ``reservations'' about provisions in three articles that she
alleged were inconsistent with ``ICPD principles and recommendations.''
She said the UNFPA would seek ``further clarifications,'' surely a very
mild remonstrance! The three articles are: Article 18, which proposes
to ``stabilize the current childbirth policies,'' speaks of ``upholding
a single-child policy for married couples,'' and reaffirms that couples
must have government permission before they can have a second child;
Article 41, which provides for the imposition of a ``premium'' on
unauthorized childbirths; and Article 42, which says that in addition
to the ``premium'' a state functionary ``may also be punished
administratively.''
Curiously, the UNFPA raised no objections to a number of other
articles which seem to contain hints of coercion or at least seem to be
contrary to the principles of reproductive freedom. For example:
Article 2 says ``The state shall employ a series of
varied measures to place the population growth under control,''
but it does not set any limits on the kinds of measure alluded
to, an ominously vague and wide-open provision;
Article 10 authorizes the formulation of population
plans at various levels and calls for supervision over the
``implementation'' of these plans, but population plans in
China have always been the foundation of population quotas and
targets and an essential part of the coercion mechanism;
Article 17 couples a citizen's right to give birth to
a child with the idea that citizens are also ``duty-bound to
undergo family planning, as provided for in the law,'' thus
implying that citizens have a right to have only as many
children as the government family planning policy permits them
to have;
Article 20 says that ``husbands and wives of
childbearing age shall consciously employ family planning,
contraceptive, or birth control measures, accepting family
planning technical services and teachings, in order to prevent
an unintentional pregnancy or reduce its chances,'' which
precludes the option of NOT practicing family planning hence
constitutes a direct infringement on
reproductive freedom (``unintentional'' by whose standards?);
Article 12 says that village and neighborhood
committees ``shall press ahead with family planning, with
unreserved efforts, and in accordance with the law,'' which has
a somewhat relentless sound that is undoubtedly intentional;
Article 34 talks about ``urging husbands and wives
who already have a child or children to adopt permanent birth
control measures, a reference to IUDs and sterilization.
Moreover, in the past ``urging,'' ``advocating,''
``promoting,'' and ``persuading'' have often culminated in
brute force when noncompliance
continued;
Article 11 says ``Specific population and family
planning measures shall
provide for detailed population control quotas. . .'' Here the
language undisguised and quite unambiguous. One might have
supposed this provision would have caught the UNFPA's
attention, inasmuch as the agency has been saying that it is
encouraging an abandonment of targets and quotas not only in
the 32 counties where it has current projects but all across
the country.
One wonders why the UNFPA expressed no concern about these
articles? Why don't they also need ``clarification''?
The lack of specificity of many of the law's provisions is in
itself a reason for suspicion. Some articles, in contrast, are highly
explicit, notably those which condemn actions that disrupt or weaken
program implementation. For example:
Article 36 is quite specific about penalties for
those who gain ``illegal'' income by helping people evade
family planning rules, including performing ``illegal'' birth
control surgical operations, using ultrasound to detect and
abort female fetuses, and performing phony birth control
operations, conducting false pregnancy checks, or issuing false
birth control certificates;
Article 37 specifies penalties for those who falsify
birth control certificates or issue them ``illegally,''
presumably to people who do not qualify for them--not much
ambiguity there;
Article 39 provides for the punishment of state
functionaries who engage in several kinds of activities,
including ``doing wrong to serve friends or relatives,''
``seeking or accepting a bribe,'' diverting family planning
funds for other purposes, and falsifying population and family
planning statistical reports--nothing very vague there either;
Article 40 which provides for administrative
punishment of the leadership of local units which ``refuse . .
. to assist in a family planning process as required . . .,''
apparently a reference to the long-term policy of holding local
leaders responsible for the success of family planning in their
units. This is not fully explicit but it does not need to be.
Local leaders in China would have no trouble knowing what it
means;
Article 43 which provides for the punishment of those
who oppose or obstruct an administrative department. This is
not specific, but given its purpose it needs to be broadly
construed, since popular opposition to birth control takes so
many different forms.
Article 22 should also be cited as one of the more
specific. It prohibits
``discrimination against and maltreatment of women'' who give
birth to girls, which the government has long recognized as a
form of opposition to the family planning rules.
The seven articles of Chapter Four of the law (Articles 23 through
29) which
provide for rewards and incentives for those who comply with family
planning requirements are also in most cases relatively specific, and
they resound with serious intent.
On the other hand, the articles which purport to offer some sort of
protection for the rights of citizens are particularly vague. For
example:
Article 4 says that family planning is to be
conducted ``in strict accordance with the law, in a civilized
manner, and without infringing upon citizens' legitimate rights
and interests,'' but does not indicate what constitutes an
``uncivilized'' manner or what rights of citizens are
``legitimate;''
Article 21 says that couples of childbearing age
``shall enjoy free of charge basic family planning technical
services,'' which of course include the three basic birth
control surgeries that have not always been so enjoyable for
recipients in the past because these were mandatory. To present
the surgeries as a service to be enjoyed is more than a little
bit cynical;
There is also one provision under Article 39 that
condemns ``infringing upon a citizen's personal rights,
property rights, or other legitimate rights and interests.''
This may be an attempt to discourage certain kinds of coercion,
such as knocking down houses and confiscating farm implements,
which have in the past been recognized by the central
authorities as counter-productive because they arouse the
collective anger of citizens and lead to setbacks in family
planning work. But this provision could have been made more
explicit, unless perhaps its vagueness was meant to allow
wiggle room in case the government later decided that it did
not wish to come down too hard on cadres who used such tactics.
Finally, Article 44 provides that citizens and
organizations may ``apply for reconsideration of an
administrative decision or file a lawsuit against an
administrative decision, after considering that an
administrative organ [has] infringed upon their legitimate
rights and interests during a family planning process.'' Again,
the meaning of this provision depends upon a precise definition
of the ``rights and interests'' of citizens, which the law does
not provide. Even with such a definition, a plaintiff appealing
under this provision may get nowhere if the local courts, on
prompting of administrators at some higher level, simply refuse
to hear him, as has often happened in the past. A more explicit
law might have made it harder for them to dismiss such appeals,
but the vagueness here allows them considerable latitude in
ruling specific citizen complaints out of order.
If the new law was meant to curb coercion in family planning, it
could have done so almost instantly without the necessity of any
judicial process, simply by explicitly demanding coercive tactics
widely used in the past that must cease at once and imposing penalties
on those who continue to use them. The law does not do that.
It does not prohibit forced IUD insertions, forced
subcutaneous implants, forced abortions, or forced
sterilizations.
It does not prescribe penalties for cadres or
officials who authorize, condone, or carry out such measures.
It does not prohibit exorbitant fines for family
planning violators.
It does not condemn the use of administrative
harassment of violators which is often applied to them in
addition to other penalties.
It does not prohibit the widespread practice of
detaining pregnant women, their spouses, or their other
relatives to force them to submit to abortion, sterilization,
or other unwanted procedures.
It does not prohibit the killing of unauthorized
infants by medical personnel at the time of delivery or within
the next few days, a practice that has been reported in the
international media several times in the past 3 years.
It does not prohibit the use of torture to extract
confessions or information from family planning violators,
which has sometimes resulted in their death while in detention,
as has also been documented in foreign press reports.
It does not repeat or even allude to the particularly
offensive coercive tactics discouraged by the so-called ``Seven
Prohibitions'' circular issued by the SFPC in July 1995, which
ruled out punitive measures that provoked popular unrest and
damaged family planning work.
It does not even mention the word ``coercion'' or
advise cadres to ``improve their work style,'' expressions
which in appeared in the brief anti-coercion campaigns of 1978,
1980, and 1984, and which, as noted above, again reappeared
briefly in several domestic news items in March and April of
this year.
Nor does the law affirm any of the basic principles of reproductive
freedom supposedly endorsed by China along with other nations at the
1994 Cairo World Population Conference, although this would be the
place for such an affirmation if the Chinese government were serious
about implementing them. It does not acknowledge ``the rights of
citizens to determine the number and spacing of their children'' or
their right to choose their own form of contraception, presumably
because these rights go beyond what the Chinese authorities wish to
recognize as ``legitimate.'' To have included such language in the law
would have caught the imagination of the people throughout the country
and led to a virtual rebellion against the family
planning program as presently implemented. Reproductive freedom might
have suddenly become a reality for most Chinese couples of childbearing
age. The Chinese government clearly has no intention of taking that
risk, and the UNFPA and other apologists for the program seem
disinclined to make an issue of the matter.
How the new law will play out in the next few years remains to be
seen. It is possible that a show of suppressing the more flagrant forms
of coercion will take place in the near term, at least until world
attention becomes preoccupied elsewhere. But then the emphasis will
probably shift back to requiring citizen compliance with family size
limits, targets, quotas, and plans, and the argument will be advanced
that family planning is now not just a policy but a law which citizens
must obey. Whether the law's domestic advocates, who expect this will
make for more compliance, or its domestic critics who think it will
inspire more defiance, will be proven correct may not be clear for some
time. For the moment, however, the advocates have prevailed.
Taking all the evidence so far into account, one conclusion is
inescapable. The basic purpose of the new law is to reinforce
population control in China. Ultimately that control will probably be
lost despite government efforts to hold onto it, but the new law is
clearly meant to delay the attainment of true reproductive freedom in
China as long as possible.
______
Prepared Statement of Bonnie Glick
september 23, 2002
Commission members, esteemed colleagues:
At the beginning of May, I traveled to China as a member of a
three-person team selected by the White House to conduct an assessment
of whether the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) has supported or
participated in the management of a program of coercive abortion or
involuntary sterilization in the People's Republic of China. These
concerns were codified in 1985 in U.S. legislation known as the Kemp
Kasten Amendment. Since 1998, the Chinese State Birth Planning
Commission has conducted a special program with UNFPA participation in
32 of the PRC's approximately 2800 counties under an agreement signed
by the State Birth Planning
Commission and the UNFPA on September 11, 1998.
Given the controversy which has existed in the Congress on the
issues of coercive abortion and involuntary sterilization, great
emphasis was placed on making this a mission of objective fact-finding
and assessment.
Prior to our departure for China, we met in the State Department
with a variety of U.S. Government officials. We also met with the
Executive Director of the UNFPA, U.N. Undersecretary General Madame
Thoraya Ahmed Obaid and with Mr. Scruggs as well as with Steven Mosher,
President of the Population Research Institute and with Mr. Aird.
Finally, we met with several Members of Congress and/or their staff
members.
On May 12, we departed for Beijing for a 2-week assessment visit.
In Beijing, we paid a courtesy call on U.S. Ambassador Randt then had
extensive discussions with Minister Zhang Weiqing, Chairman of the
State Birth Planning Commission as well as with Ms. Siri Tellier, the
Director of the UNFPA Country Office in Beijing. We met with Chinese
academics specializing in population and demographics as well as with
students and NGO representatives involved in Chinese population
matters.
Following this overview of the population situation in China, we
began our travels through 5 of the 32 UNFPA counties. The five counties
were selected by the U.S. Embassy, and they represented a cross-section
of urban and rural, poor and middle income. During the next 10 days, we
traveled approximately 6000 miles, by air and road, through urban and
rural China. The five counties visited were Rongchang County (100 km
outside Chongqing Municipality), Pingba County (2.5 hours from Guiyang
in Guizhou Province), Xuanzhou County (in Anhui Province), Guichi
County (in Anhui Province), and Sihui City (in central Guangdong
Province). We were accompanied on our travels by a fluent Chinese-
speaking member of the U.S. Embassy, by an interpreter, Ms. Ying Yu, a
naturalized American citizen of Chinese origin, and by Mr. Hongtao Hu,
a member of the State Birth Planning Commission. Mr. Hu received no
more than 24 hours advance notice of our daily travel plans. Our visits
were often unannounced and with no notice. We stopped in at three
factories, two schools, 11 village Birth Planning substations, five
municipal Birth Planning centers and three hospitals. I held
discussions with women in the streets and agricultural fields who were
going about their daily lives.
I went to China with open eyes, with an objective point of view,
and with a narrow mandate. We went to as many counties and as many
villages as possible. We also made a variety of unscheduled stops.
Although our sample size was small (5 out of 32 possibilities), I
believe the results are representative in that we varied our
methodology through random visits, and with little to no notice given
to Chinese government authorities, thereby decreasing biases in the
observed data.
I would like to address the conversations I had with women
throughout our travels. In my years as a Foreign Service Officer, I
often found that women around the world, particularly women in
societies that tend to be dominated by men, are willing to open up to
foreign women to discuss personal issues. There is a commonality of
interests and experiences. This was as true for me in rural Ethiopia
and Nicaragua as it was in rural and urban China.
Thus, in speaking with Chinese women, I was able to elicit direct
and thoughtful responses to probing questions. Culture played an
enormous role in these conversations. Often I found myself asking
indirect questions in order to obtain genuine responses such as, ``How
many children do you plan or hope to have?'' ``How do you feel about
the policy of the Chinese government that ostensibly limits your
ability to have more than one child?'' ``Do you know any women who have
been coerced to have abortions or forced, involuntarily, to become
sterilized?'' ``Do you know anyone who has to pay Social Compensation
Fees because she had more than one child?''
If I sensed that a woman, particularly a professional woman in one
of the health clinics, was suspicious of my line of questioning, I
would change the way in which I asked my questions. I might ask her,
``Perhaps not in this county, but have you heard of women in other
counties who might have been coerced to have abortions or
sterilizations?''
In one pharmaceutical manufacturing and packaging factory, I had
the opportunity to talk to a group of 15 or so women all working on an
assembly line. We talked as they packaged pharmaceuticals. The
conditions in which they were working were good, clean, and
comfortable. They considered themselves lucky to have these stable
jobs. When I asked them questions about their family planning
practices, nearly all said that they had just one child. One woman had
two children,
several had none. All commented that it is expensive to raise children.
I met with two women in a health clinic in Rongchang County who had
just had abortions due to pregnancies arising, they said, from failed
contraception. I asked each of them why they chose to abort. The first
woman said that she already had twins and neither wanted nor could
afford a third child. She and her husband, she said, were happy with
their two children and they had not planned on a third. The other
woman, a 22 year old, said that she and her husband were not yet ready
to have children. They themselves were children, she said, and she
wanted to wait until she was ready for a ``perfect'' birth.
The Chinese government, it seems to me, through public service
announcements in all forms of media, has convinced women of the merits
of marrying late, delaying births, and focusing on a ``perfect'' birth.
What is a ``perfect'' birth? This is a potentially dangerous question
to ask. Since abortions are legal in China, women take great care to
ensure that the fetuses they carry are perfect. If they fear that a
fetus is in any way less than perfect, the inclination among Chinese
women is to abort. While the practitioners with whom we met said that
they do not promote abortion as a form of birth control, they were well
aware that many women abort rather than ``waste'' their one opportunity
to give birth on a less than perfect child.
As many of us are aware, this has, no doubt, led to the skewed
gender ratios in Chinese births. With 116 male children born for every
100 female children, the numbers speak for themselves. This skewed
birth ratio, when considered among a population of 1.3 billion people,
demonstrates that the demographic challenges
facing China today and into the future are staggering.
I was initially surprised by the near uniformity of responses I
received to the questions I asked Chinese women. However, after several
days, I realized that the similarity of responses was due to the
tremendous public service campaign the Chinese government has
undertaken to promote its one-child policy. Generally speaking, women
in China genuinely and faithfully adhere to the one-child policy (now
codified with the new population law as of September 1, 2002). While it
is hard for Americans to accept that women elsewhere in the world might
not want a house full of children, we must all think for a moment about
the particulars of the situation in China. In a country with a
population of at least 1.3 billion people, and where the current
generation of women of childbearing age was raised with the philosophy
of one-child only, it easy to see women in China accepting the
limitation on births as part of their civic and patriotic duty. The
public service campaign, if you will, to discourage multiple births,
has been so prevalent and so ``effective'' that few women I met seemed
willing to rock the boat. Indeed, all the women I met talked about how
expensive it is to raise children, the underlying implication could be
that it is even more expensive to raise multiple children given the
coercive Social Compensation Fees levied on families daring enough to
have multiple children.
Clearly, China is sitting on a demographic time bomb. If the
population continues to grow at its current rate, it will run into
problems of resource allocation. I went to China to look into the
resources of the U.N. Population Fund--all $3.5 million of its annual
budget. When comparing the budget of the UNFPA with the overall budget
of the Chinese State Birth Planning Commission--$3.6 billion--it
quickly becomes apparent that China is not interested in UNFPA for its
money. Rather, the PRC is interested in the fig leaf UNFPA provides in
its attempt to show the world that it conforms to international norms
and conventions for family planning. By having a UNFPA presence in
China, the PRC can hold this up to the world as ``evidence'' that it
follows generally accepted norms vis-a-vis family planning. In fact, it
does not, and the limited presence of UNFPA in China may actually hurt
efforts to bring the country's policies more in line with international
norms. This leaves UNFPA with only two options, as I see it: expand
into more counties in China--unlikely given its tremendous resource
constraints; or scale back and demand real reforms of the Chinese
government before agreeing to share international expertise and before
granting international acceptance of Chinese practices. Given the
codification on September 1 of China's one-child policy, UNFPA should
act forcefully to demand changes to this law, to the coercive fines and
so-called Social Compensation Fees.
Before our departure for China, we were cautioned by certain
Members of Congress that it would be impossible to get Chinese citizens
to speak openly to our group. China is, after all, a police state. With
all due respect, I believe that many of the women I met were able to
speak openly and honestly. While the answers they gave were not the
ones that some in the U.S. would choose to believe, I would like to
think I was able to sift through the half-truths and obfuscation to
come out with a relatively clear picture of the birth planning
decisions made by dozens of women in rural and urban China.
The opportunity I had to travel relatively freely throughout China
is one that is afforded to very few people. The Chinese government was
accommodating in that we were allowed to travel anywhere we chose in
the country. Were we fully free? That is doubtful. Everywhere we went,
we were accompanied by an official of the State Birth Planning
Commission. At the initiation of our trip, I did not think it would be
possible to operate as freely as I would have liked. In truth, the
representative of the State Birth Planning Commission was more of a
token than anything else. He facilitated our encounters in health
centers and in factories, nothing more.
In closing, I would like to express my thanks to those who
facilitated the visit while assiduously avoiding any effort to color
our team's impressions or influence our opinions. These include
individuals in the State Department, the American Embassy in Beijing
and the American Consulates General in Shanghai and Guangzhou. I urge
the Administration to continue to monitor closely this aspect of
Chinese life. As I mentioned, China's continued population explosion is
the elephant in the room that no one wants to discuss and all would
rather ignore. It will place ever-increasing strains on natural
resources, public services, and employment. These strains will be felt
up and down the political spectrum, and they must be factored into our
decisionmaking as we deal with China in this new century.
Thank You.
______
Prepared Statement of Edwin A. Winckler
september 23, 2002
Positive Recent Developments in Chinese Reproductive Policy
introduction
As part of China's gradual transition from communism, Chinese
social policy is gradually shifting, from limiting population through
planning of births by the state, toward delivering a broader range of
reproductive health services needed by citizens. A December 2001 Law
has legalized both the birth limitation program and many reforms in it;
associated regulations have helped curb abuses and expand citizens'
rights. Due to the complexity of this subject and the shortness of
time, I will package my remarks in the kind of numerical slogan in
which Chinese public administration often packages complex policy
matters--here ``one theme, two purposes and three threes.'' (For a
longer briefing with references, please see my September 2002 paper in
Population and Development Review, appended to this testimony and
posted on the Commission website. My translation of the 2001 Law also
appears in both places. As regards numerical slogans, in the late 1990s
the birth planning program's summary of its key policies was ``33321,''
referring to the ``three unchangeables,'' the ``three basics,'' the
``three links,'' the ``two transitions'' and the ``one purpose,''
explained below.)
By way of introduction, the one theme over-arching my remarks is
that this subject involves tradeoffs between competing rights and
objectives, both for Chinese social policy and for American foreign
policy. On both sides, public policymakers are making difficult
practical and ethical choices. Each side has legitimate criticisms of
the other, but these criticisms are most persuasive when they recognize
that both sides have reasons for doing what they are doing that many on
both sides consider legitimate. Each side should understand the values
that are being privileged by the other and the values that are being
sacrificed by its own choices. The PRC is deliberately limiting the
reproductive freedom of current generations in order to preserve the
sustainability of development and the quality of life of future
generations. In the name of reproductive freedom, the United States is
protesting this restriction, but at the cost of the UNFPA's capacity to
deliver reproductive health services desperately needed by millions of
women in countries less developed than China.
``Limiting reproductive freedom'' may sound horrendous to some, but no
freedom is absolute, including ``reproductive freedom,'' even in the
United States, and even according to international conventions.
Besides, any society may limit some freedoms during emergencies. For
several decades the PRC leadership has regarded China's burgeoning
population as a national crisis. Evidently by now much of China's
populace largely agrees. Ongoing program reforms are deliberately
intended to restore as much reproductive freedom as possible,
consistent with continuing to limit population growth.
Overall, my remarks have two purposes. One is to provide reliable
information about recent policy developments in China, which I believe
are mostly good news. My statement is called ``positive recent
developments'' not only because some
positive developments have occurred, but also because, in order to
promote positive developments, it is essential to be able to recognize
them when they occur. Such recognition becomes unnecessarily difficult
when today's PRC is viewed through yesterday's ideology: as a
timelessly totalitarian monstrosity mindlessly inflicting pointless
suffering on its population. My other purpose is to identify forms of
effective intervention from outside, which I believe should include not
only criticizing the bad but also supporting the good. At the very
least, as recommended by the State Department's May 2002 Independent
Assessment Team, the Congress should give the State Department and
other executive agencies the resources necessary to monitor
developments in Chinese reproductive policy. Moreover, the executive
branch should give some priority to doing so.
In the body of my remarks, the first set of points emphasizes the
extent of change in China over the past decade. These include
demographic change to low fertility, political change toward a smaller
State and weaker national leadership and, consequently, program change
from state-centric birth limits toward client-centered health services.
The second set concerns principles of law. The 2001 Law
institutionalized the duty of citizens to comply with birth limits.
However, it also institutionalized restraints on how those limits can
be administered and it authorized a transition toward provision of more
benefits. The third set of points notes the difficulties of practice
that China will face in attempting to implement these principles over
the next decade. Both politics and prudence dictate the need for some
stability of policy. The central government's leverage over local
practice is limited by decentralization of authority and resources.
What any particular locality can achieve is relative to its level of
economic development.
extent of change
The main point of this section is that China is changing rapidly
and greatly and that PRC reproductive policy is changing along with
everything else. Birth policy change has been mostly for the better,
particularly since around 1993. A 2000 Decision and 2001 Law codified
reforms over the past decade and prescribed additional reforms over the
next decade. These reforms in the Chinese birth program have not been
superficial or cosmetic, but rather have been grounded in fundamental
changes in population and politics.
Demographic change. Around 1970 when the PRC began seriously trying
to limit its population growth, the average woman bore a lifetime total
of just under six children. Around 1980 when the PRC declared a ``one
child'' goal, China faced a new generation-long baby boom. To China's
leaders these facts constituted a crisis that required party-state
intervention and justified some temporary sacrifice of citizens'
rights. It took several years for national political and program
leaders to arrive at a policy that seemed reasonable enough to the
populace that implementation was feasible. In particular, the ``one
child'' goal had to be modified to allow much of the rural population
to have two children. Nevertheless, by around 2000, through some
combination of program effort and socioeconomic change, total fertility
had fallen to around two. Most couples no longer want many more
children than that, though many still want at least one son. To China's
leaders the crisis was not entirely over, because substantial
population growth continues and the pressure on environmental resources
continues to intensify. Therefore, they concluded, it is necessary to
retain the program for limiting fertility, particularly in less
developed areas where natural fertility remains high. Nevertheless, the
fact that average national fertility is now below replacement has
broadened policy options, to maintaining low fertility while expanding
services. Therefore, China's national political and program leaders
concluded, it is necessary to actively reform the program in many
respects, particularly in more developed areas where citizens'
childbearing aspirations barely exceed what the government recommends.
Political change. Changes in reproductive policy reflect broader
political changes. The most basic changes have been systemic. Since
around 1980 PRC leaders have been deliberately shrinking the State and
substituting indirect State regulation for direct State operation of
economy, society and culture. PRC leaders have been systematically
``legalizing'' the State by passing laws that both authorize and
constrain administration of each area of public policy. PRC leaders
have been further decentralizing the State by transferring many
economic and social matters to provincial and local governments for
funding and administration. There have also been significant changes in
the leadership itself. The first and second generation of revolutionary
founders such as Mao and Deng were confident of their control over
Chinese society and imagined that they could plan reproduction in
society just as they planned production in the economy. The third and
fourth generations of revolutionary successors such as Jiang and Hu
have become increasingly preoccupied with avoiding political collapse.
They prefer policies that do not antagonize the public by making undue
demands on citizens or by permitting maladministration by cadres.
China's national political leaders are attempting to make policies more
truly ``public'' in the sense that policies are adopted through
representative bodies that then help monitor implementation, to prevent
incompetence and corruption and to ensure transparency and fairness.
Where bureaucratic ``red tape'' creates unnecessary costs of
administration or opportunities for corruption, the PRC has begun to
``deregulate''--including in the birth limitation program.
Program change. Around 1970 China's national political leaders
launched an ambitious attempt to control the quantity and improve the
quality of China's population. Three decades of experience have
provided China's birth program with many local examples of ``best
practice'' in attempting to reach these twin goals, examples that the
program has propagated nationwide. For example, a major early lesson
was to stress propaganda-and-education over administrative or economic
incentives, to stress pre-pregnancy contraception over post-pregnancy
birth control, and to stress routine work over crash programs (the
``three basics''). Accordingly, by the 1990s a major program objective
was to replace crash campaigns by amateur cadres with continuous work
by trained professionals. At the beginning of the 1990s, conservative
national political and program leaders announced that some things about
the birth program would not change: the basic policy of limiting
births, overall national targets for controlling population, and the
personal responsibility of local party and government leaders for
meeting these objectives (the ``three unchangeables''). On this basis,
since around 1993 the program has unleashed a series of progressively
more fundamental reforms.
Reforms in the early 1990s addressed flaws in China's state-centric
approach itself (the ``two transitions''). First, birth limitation was
linked to other government programs such as alleviating poverty and
advancing women. Second, the program began adapting to China's new
``socialist market economy'' by supplementing administrative and social
``constraints'' with financial ``guidance'' through incentives and
disincentives. Throughout the 1990s a major preoccupation was
correcting abuses within the administration of the program itself.
Clumsy coercion was attacked by the 1995 ``seven don'ts;'' local
financial corruption was addressed first through anti-corruption
campaigns and later through local financial reform. Reforms in the
later 1990s initiated movement toward a more client-centered approach.
With international assistance, China's more advanced localities began
improving ``quality of care:'' some choice between methods of
contraception in particular and better maternal-and-child health care
in general. By around 2000, the emphasis was shifting from limiting the
quantity of the population toward improving its quality--``quality''
both in the narrow sense of better maternal-and-child health care and
in the broad sense of better lifelong health and education. The program
also began reducing unnecessary regulation, for example allowing
newlyweds to have their first child whenever they choose instead of
waiting for local government permission.
At the turn of the millennium, two major policy documents both
further institutionalized and further reformed Chinese reproductive
policy: a once-in-a-decade joint party-and-government Decision in March
2000 and a long delayed national Law, finally passed in December 2001.
As regards institutionalization, the Decision and Law reaffirmed the
PRC's intention to continue trying to control national population
growth and to limit individual couples' fertility. As regard reform,
the Decision and Law formalized 1990s reforms and authorized further
progressive reforms. As I say in my current article in Population and
development review: ``Clearly the program is no longer just
administratively enforced birth limitation, but equally clearly it is
not yet entirely client-centered reproductive health care. Language is
now in place authorizing much of both. How much of which prevails will
depend on the power of rival policymakers and the vagaries of local
implementation.'' Fortunately, since I wrote that, an important program
conference has given further concrete indication that the program will
continue moving in a progressive direction.
Thus in early September 2002--just as the 2001 Law came into
effect--the program convened a national work conference to summarize 2
years of experiments in how to proceed with the additional reforms that
the new Law now permits. The conference site, the city of Mudanjiang in
the province of Heilongjiang, will serve as a national model for many
features of the next round of reforms. One of the most important of
these involves the PRC's rigorous system for evaluating the performance
of local political leaders and administrative personnel (a form of
western ``management by objectives'' that the Chinese call a
``responsibility system''). This system is one of the national
leadership's most important tools for controlling local politics and
steering local policy. In the early 1990s the national leadership used
this system to ensure draconian enforcement of birth limits. Now, in
the early 2000s, the national political leadership is using this same
system to ensure reform of the
program toward less State regulation and more service delivery. In
evaluating
personnel performance, Mudanjiang is dropping indicators for population
growth and birth quotas and replacing them with indicators for quality
care and citizen satisfaction. This is the most direct evidence one can
have of the likely future direction of the program: further reform in a
progressive direction is now institutionalized not only as national law
but also as the criteria by which local performance will be
evaluated.
principles of law
The main point of this section is that current PRC reproductive
policy is principled not unprincipled. The 2001 Law embodies definite
constitutional principles concerning citizen rights and duties,
definite public policy principles of optimality and justice, and
definite implementational principles of reasonableness and fairness.
What so long delayed the adoption of a national law governing
reproductive policy were difficulties in squaring the ideal
requirements for what a law should contain under the PRC State
constitution and the actual practice of birth limitation in China. It
was only after the program was already substantially reformed that the
2001 Law could be passed authorizing further reforms. Westerners may
justifiably disagree with some of the principles involved or with how
some of them are applied. Nevertheless, the underlying principles are
analogous to principles upheld by the West--in fact many of them derive
from the West or from current international
conventions. Preoccupations common to the PRC and the West include
defining an appropriate relationship between the rights and duties of
citizens, establishing restraints on what the State can do to citizens,
and achieving a feasible relationship between citizen entitlements and
local resources.
Duties of citizens. The 2001 Law reaffirms the duty of Chinese
couples to practice contraception and to limit their childbearing. The
PRC regards this duty as comparable to military service or tax payment.
Ideally citizens should comply with such duties voluntarily.
Noncompliance is not criminal and should not be punished by criminal
penalties. Nevertheless, such duties are mandatory and therefore should
be enforced by some sanctions. Accordingly, noncompliers must pay a
steep ``social compensation fee'' (several times annual income), so
called because the PRC regards it as a way to reimburse society for the
extra costs imposed by extra children. This fee also provides local
revenues from which to reward couples who do restrict themselves to
only one child. Of course, such a fee also serves as a coercive
deterrent, but in the form of a financial disincentive that the PRC
considers appropriate to a ``socialist market economy.'' Sanctions
become more severe only for citizens who do not pay this fee (either
immediately or by yearly installments). Citizens who
actively refuse to pay, or who otherwise actively obstruct birth
planning, can be
referred to the courts for trial and punishment.
Thus, as a policy, PRC birth limitation is ``coercive'' in the
sense that it is a mandatory restriction on absolute reproductive
freedom. Nevertheless, by now--as a result of thirty years of
propaganda and enforcement on the one hand and of economic and social
change on the other--compliance is largely voluntary. Evidently by now,
in principle, most Chinese citizens agree with their government that
population should be limited and that citizens have a duty to limit
their childbearing. Most citizens are willing to do so, provided that
policy is reasonable and consistent and that enforcement is firm and
fair--just as most Americans are willing to pay their taxes
voluntarily, but only so long as everyone does so. In practice, of
course, some couples attempt to break the rules, particularly couples
who have a daughter or two but still do not have the son they desire.
But then enforcement is definitely not supposed to be ``coercive'' in
the sense of community-level implementors taking physical action
against the noncompliers.
Restraints on the state. Thus the 2001 Law also reaffirms the right
of Chinese
citizens not to suffer from abuses of maladministration or from over-
harsh implementation measures. This is part of an ongoing effort by
national political leaders to rein in sometimes predatory local
governments, in order to protect the regime's legitimacy in the eyes of
the public. As noted above, during the 1990s the national political and
program leadership made strenuous efforts to combat abuses in the birth
program such as clumsy enforcement (physical coercion of persons,
physical damage to property) and financial corruption (local
governments levying undue fines to increase their revenues). These
efforts included removing egregiously coercive or
extractive provisions from local regulations. The 2001 Law
institutionalizes these efforts by stipulating severe penalties for
such abuses. Thus most of the punishments specified in the 2001 Law are
not on citizens for non-compliance but on local officials for
maladministration. Associated regulations will turn all money from fees
over to county finance bureaus, reducing opportunities for financial
corruption.
The 2001 law also omits many harsh measures that still remain in
existing provincial regulations, which will require removing them from
provincial regulations as well. These include such unpopular
requirements as that, after a couple has had its permitted number of
children, one partner in the couple should accept sterilization. The
2001 Law also continues efforts to combat demographic distortions that
birth policy has aggravated, such as skewed sex ratios at birth. Thus
the 2001 Law confirms that it is illegal to use ultrasound machines to
determine the sex of a fetus as a prelude to sex-selective abortion.
(This is intended as a restraint on both State and private medical
providers, and on private citizens. Unfortunately the popular demand
for sex-selection is so great that this attempt at restraint has little
effect.)
Provision of benefits. At the same time that the PRC is limiting
some rights (mostly civil-political) it is extending others (in the
case of reproductive health, rights to social services that go beyond
those guaranteed by the Chinese State constitution). The 2001 Law
affirms the right of citizens to a variety of benefits related to
reproduction. Couples who forego extra children deserve direct rewards
to compensate for the economic benefits the children would have
provided. Poor households who
practice birth planning deserve extra help in developing their
livelihoods through priority access to poverty-relief resources and
programs. Women deserve access to basic reproductive health services
and to more opportunities for education and employment. An adequate
social security system would lessen the need of parents for children
who can care for them in old age. Of these benefits, the main specific
one currently being actively expanded is reproductive health care. A
main goal here is to raise the ``quality'' of the children actually
born, through premarital and prenatal screening, checkups and nutrition
during pregnancy, and better care during childbirth and early infancy.
In 2001, concurrent with the process of passing the Law, the State
Birth Planning Commission issued Technical Services Regulations to
govern the provision of these benefits. Among other things, these
regulations
instructed the SBPC and Ministry of health to cooperate in establishing
a ``local service provision network.''
difficulties of practice
The main point of this section is that the principles endorsed by
the 2001 Law face difficulties of implementation in practice. In the
long run progressive reformists at the center probably will largely
prevail. However the process will be gradual, piecemeal, and
incomplete.
Need for stability. Program change will be gradual because national
political and program leaders regard some stability as a precondition
for much reform. As in any country, policy change is easier to achieve
if it can be represented as a continuation of existing policies. In the
March 2000 Decision ``stability'' is a mantra: the goal is to
``stabilize'' a low fertility rate that the leadership regards as
potentially ``unstable,'' because in some areas economic and cultural
development is not yet sufficiently advanced to reduce fertility on its
own. According to the Decision, the key to maintaining low fertility is
to ``stabilize'' and ``strengthen'' existing policies. This does mean
maintaining strict limits on the number of children that couples are
permitted, particularly in less developed areas where fertility remains
high. However it does not mean ``strengthening'' enforcement against
citizens--instead, what is to be ``strengthened'' is program capacity
to deliver services--competently, honestly and efficiently.
In practice, the process of reforming China's birth program will
involve a great deal of stability. First, to placate conservative
elites, large parts of central policy itself will not change. Perhaps
as a concession to conservatives, the 2001 Law
contains much language authorizing features of the old ``state
planning'' approach. Second, to avoid erratic mass behavior, policy
change must proceed in an orderly fashion. At each stage it must remain
clear what rules cadres must enforce and citizens must obey. Program
leaders believe that experience has taught them that for the program to
remain stable--neither grass-roots implementors nor the mass public
either rebelling or defecting--the program must steer a centrist course
between too great severity and too great leniency. That is why, when
the 2001 Law was passed, national program leaders immediately
underlined that it represented ``neither a tightening nor a loosening''
of policy. Third, existing policies have been arrived at through a long
process of trial-and-error. The reform strategy is to ``fade in'' new
methods and to make sure they work before a ``fade out'' of old
methods. Obviously change in China's birth program is a politically
sensitive and technically complex process that requires careful
attention to understand correctly.
Limits from decentralization. Program change will be not only
gradual but also piecemeal because the central government's leverage
over provincial and local governments has some limits, for both
constitutional and practical reasons. According to the Chinese State
Constitution, provinces have some latitude for adapting national
policies to provincial circumstances. In social policy, central
ministries do not exert direct authority over their provincial
branches, which report instead to the provincial government and its
party leadership. The same is true of the relationship between
provincial and local governments (county and city), and between local
governments and community governments (township and village). As a
practical matter, lower levels provide much of the funding and staffing
for social programs and therefore inevitably have some latitude for
influencing what occurs within their
jurisdictions. For very high priority objectives, higher levels can use
personnel policy and party discipline to overcome these obstacles. This
has worked well for
combating maladministration of birth limitation but is less likely to
work well for delivering reproductive health services.
Level of development. Program change will be not only gradual and
piecemeal but also incomplete, because it will be relative to
development. As Marxists, national leaders view many matters as
relative to the overall level of national economic development,
including what constitutional rights it is feasible to implement at
each stage. In practice it will be harder to rein in abuses in less
developed localities, where fertility is still high, compliance is less
voluntary, and the quality of personnel is lower. In these poorer
localities, positive benefits will be harder to fund and many benefits
may never be feasible at all.
conclusion: policy implications
By way of conclusion I return first to my two purposes (providing
reliable information about recent policy developments and identifying
effective forms of outside intervention) and then finally return to my
one main theme (the inevitability of tradeoffs between different
rights). All of these are complicated by the multiplicity of discourses
in both China and the West. China includes both many modern discourses
(e.g. variants of both communist and non-communist modernity) and many
traditional discourses (e.g. variants of Confucianism and other
philosophies). Each of these discourses has its own interpretation of,
or adds its own nuance to, Chinese understanding of Western rights
concepts. These Western concepts are themselves contested within the
United States, within the international community, and between the two.
In particular, the dominant discourse through which Americans have
perceived PRC birth limitation is what Professor Susan Greenhalgh calls
``the
coercion narrative,'' whose relevance to the program has been steadily
decreasing (please see her testimony). Accordingly, dialog between
China and the West over the PRC's implementation of specific rights
might best proceed by looking for common ground, particularly between
the Chinese and Western discourses that are closest to each other.
These are Western social democracy and its Eastern offshoot, post-Mao
Chinese market socialism. However, philosophical agreement is no longer
the main problem: China has already adopted most of the aspirations
compiled in international agreements.
The first of my two purposes has been to provide reliable
information about recent policy developments in China, in particular to
underline that there is much that is positive in recent developments,
the 2001 Law in particular. Evidently that positiveness is difficult to
detect through the lens of the coercion narrative, as Dr. John Aird's
statement to this Roundtable illustrates, making that statement
distinctly unreliable as a source of information. Dr. Aird's main
conclusion is correct: Chinese couples still do not have complete
reproductive freedom and the 2001 Law is intended to further
institutionalize public policies limiting the number of children that
PRC citizens are permitted to have. Nevertheless, his conclusion
presents a number of problems. A first is that, contrary to the
impression he conveys, few informed persons maintain otherwise, least
of all the PRC government or the 2001 Law, which he correctly cites as
plainly requiring that Chinese citizens limit their fertility. A second
problem is that much of the rest of his strategy for substantiating his
conclusion is irrelevant or misleading. It is irrelevant to report that
enforcement of the policy has been clumsily coercive in the distant
past. It is misleading not to report that, precisely for that reason,
the PRC is doing its best to prevent enforcement from being clumsily
coercive in the present and future.
A third problem is that some of the rest of Dr. Aird's strategy for
proving his conclusion is misinformed or misguided. As for
misinformation, it is simply not the case that, for example, the 2001
Law calls for population targets or birth quotas (that was a FBIS
mistranslation). It is not true that the Law does not proscribe abusive
coercion as a method of implementation (that is the meaning of the
Law's demand for ``lawful implementation'' and for respecting citizens'
``legal rights and interests''). It is not correct that the government
makes no domestic mention of its opposition to abusively coercive
implementation (in the late 1990s it advertised the ``seven don'ts''
and in the early 2000s it is trying to inform citizens of the 2001
Law's ameliorative provisions). As for misguidedness, Dr. Aird asks why
the PRC would pass such a law at this time if it were not for the
sinister purpose of increasing ``coercion,'' when the answer plainly is
that the PRC is belatedly bringing birth planning into a longstanding
process of reconstructing the foundations of the regime on the basis of
``socialist legality.'' In doing so the PRC has reaffirmed that birth
limitation is mandatory, but it has also chosen the least coercive
method for enforcing such limits that it could devise. Equally
misguided as a form of argument, Dr. Aird finds ``contradictions''
between various Chinese policy statements, which again to him proves a
sinister intent to ``coverup'' increased coercion, but which really
just demonstrates that he simply does not understand the complex
process of reform that is occurring.
As regards effective intervention, over the past decade Chinese
reproductive policy has been remarkably responsive to outside
influences. Negative criticism of questionable practices has
contributed. However, constructive assistance and persuasive ideals
have contributed more. For example, the United Nations Population Fund
(UNFPA) made the largest single contribution to reducing abortions in
China, by improving contraceptive technology to avoid unauthorized
pregnancies. International standards for reproductive health and
women's rights (Cairo 1994 and Beijing 1995) quickly and strongly
influenced Chinese reproductive policy. The Ford Foundation, Population
Council and other international organizations helped launch the 1990s
reforms in China's birth limitation program. The problem now is not so
much persuading the PRC to adopt Western ideals as it is the PRC's
ability to implement jointly held ideals. According to the
``developmental'' approach to rights taken by China's leaders, the main
question is one of feasibility. Demographic feasibility dictates that
implementation measures not allow a rebounding of fertility. Economic
feasibility requires that local resources be available to fund better
administration and more benefits. Political feasibility demands that
particular measures win credit for individual leaders within the elite
and win legitimacy for the regime within society. Effective
intervention would analyze and help alleviate these feasibility
constraints, through both bilateral and multilateral assistance to the
Chinese birth program in such matters as employing voluntary methods,
raising technical standards, and combating HIV/AIDS.
Finally, I return to my one main theme of tradeoffs. Most
contemporary ethical theories concede that rights are never absolute.
In particular some tradeoff is likely between libertarian rights of
freedom from State interference and social-democratic rights to social
services that require some State intervention. In China's reproductive
policy the main tradeoff has been between the right of the current
generation to bear more children and the right of future generations to
resources and environment. In relevant American policy there has been
some tradeoff between security and economic relations with China and
the ethical values of some Americans related to reproduction. There has
also been some tradeoff between the right of Americans to promote such
values and the right of Third World women to receive international
assistance for reproductive health. No doubt such tradeoffs will
continue, but positive recent developments in Chinese reproductive
policy should make them less acute.
______
Prepared Statement of Susan Greenhalgh
september 23, 2002
Women's Rights and Birth Planning in China: New Spaces of Political
Action, New Opportunities for American Engagement
introduction
Since China launched its controversial one-child-per-couple policy
in 1980, influential American politicians and the media have advanced a
powerful critique of the state-sponsored coercion used in the name of
limiting population growth. While the focus on coercion has been
helpful in drawing attention to the human rights abuses in the Chinese
program, it has outlived its usefulness. That exclusive focus on
coercion has limited both our understandings of, and our responses to,
new developments in Chinese population affairs. Three of those
limitations bear note.
First, the coercion critique has paid scant attention to the
violations of women's interests and rights, when it is women and girls
who have borne the heaviest costs of China's birth planning program.
Second, the coercion story divides the world into two opposed systems--
capitalist/socialist, free/coercive, good/bad--and defines the presence
of coercion as the only thing worth noticing about the Chinese program.
Evoking an older, bipolar cold-war world, the coercion perspective
ignores forces of globalization that are profoundly transforming
Chinese society, fostering not only change in the State program but
also the emergence of new and progressive quasi-state and non-state
sites of political activity. Finally, the coercion critique has
encouraged punitive responses from the American government, rather than
constructive engagements with Chinese reformers. The official American
response has been less helpful than it could have been. China is
changing. While continuing to draw attention to the human rights
violations in the Chinese program, it is time to move beyond the
single-minded focus on coercion to see the remarkable transformations
that are taking place in the global and local Chinese politics of
population and the opportunities they present for constructive American
response.
This brief presentation draws on nearly 20 years of active
scholarly research on China's population dynamics, policy, and birth
planning program. That research has involved numerous trips to China,
where I have conducted extensive interviews with both the makers of
China's policy and the peasants who are its main objects. In those 20
years, I have heard many heartbreaking stories and seen many appalling
things. In my scholarly work, much of it focused on the human costs of
the Chinese policy, I have sought not to criticize China, but to
understand how those troubling practices came about. That has seemed a
more productive approach. This presentation draws heavily on interviews
with leading Chinese women's rights scholars and activists.
I want to make three points. First, despite the heavy costs China's
restrictive population policy has imposed and continues to impose on
women and girls, important pro-woman changes are occurring not only
within the Chinese population establishment, but also outside the
state--that is, beyond the scope of formal law, which often follows as
much as leads social change in China. Given the growing role of non-
state forces in Chinese politics, it is important to attend to and
support these developments. Second, the promising changes that have
occurred in China have stemmed not from foreign criticism, but from a
combination of internal critique and constructive engagements with
international organizations. This history contains important lessons
for the formation of American policy toward China in the future. Third,
the prospects for further reforms to advance women's rights and
interests will be shaped by a variety of cultural, political, and
demographic factors, which present both challenges and opportunities.
In this as in other domains, however, China will continue to follow a
Chinese path to reform that will bear the marks of that nation's
distinctive culture and politics. We must not expect Americanization.
i. dynamics of reform
Since the early 1990s, two streams of women-focused critique and
reform of the birth planning program have developed within China. One
has been located within the State Birth Planning Commission, while the
other has been emerging from a loose grouping of women's advocates
located outside the population establishment. Before we can assess the
prospects for future change, we need to understand the dynamics behind
the reform movements that are already developing.
Reforms in the State Birth Planning Commission
Since its creation in 1981, the State Birth Planning Commission's
central mandate has been the fulfillment of stringent population
control targets. In early 1990s, facing rising birth rates, the
Commission oversaw the use of harsh administrative measures to reach
targets. By early 1993, those in charge realized that fertility had
fallen to a level far below what they had imagined possible. With the
pressure to produce results off, in 1993-94 Commission leaders began to
grow concerned about the social, physical, and political price that had
been paid for pushing the numbers down so fast. Larger reform-era
changes in Chinese society--in particular, the spread of an
increasingly globalized market economy, the development of ``socialist
legality,'' and limited political reform in the form of local
elections--also stimulated growing concern at the Commission with the
human costs of population control.
These concerns, which grew out of China's own experience of
population control, were supported by China's growing involvement with
the international movement for women's reproductive health associated
with the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development
held in Cairo. The Cairo process gave supporters of change a vocabulary
of reform that dovetailed with concerns that were developing
domestically. In the wake of the conference, collaborations with
foreign organizations advancing reproductive health agendas multiplied.
From international
organizations, reformers in the Commission received crucial financial
resources and organizational and technical know-how to pursue more
woman-centered, health-
oriented approaches to the State planning of births. As documented
elsewhere, since the mid-1990s the State has introduced a package of
programmatic, policy, and legal reforms--culminating in the new
Population and Birth Planning Law--designed to improve the delivery of
services while retaining control over population growth.
New voices from outside the State
Meantime, another dynamic of change has been developing outside the
population establishment. Since the mid-1990s, a loosely defined group
of women scholar-activists has begun to speak out about the harmful as
well as helpful effects of birth planning on women's health and well-
being. Crucial to the emergence of these women's rights activists have
been the multiplying connections to transnational agencies and feminist
and reproductive health networks, forged in particular at the Fourth
World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. The international
women's conference gave the women's movement in China, which had been
moribund during the 1960s and 1970s, fresh energy and life. Since the
conference, a number of women's rights activists have begun to work to
raise consciousness about the effects of State birth planning on women
and girls, and to promote policy and program changes to alleviate them.
These individuals come from a variety of backgrounds--from population
studies to bioethics, women's studies, women's activism, and even
journalism. They are located in such diverse institutions as
universities, the social science academies, the All-China Women's
Federation, and a variety of newly emerging NGOs. Women's advocates
must exercise great caution in criticizing what remains a ``basic State
policy'' of the party and government. In this restrictive political
climate, transnational links have been critical, for they have given
these women (and some men) new concepts, political support, and
external resources to pursue their agendas.
ii. a gender critique from outside the state
Although they remain few in number, unorganized, and dependent on a
fragile tolerance by the state, these women's rights advocates
represent a new voice on
population, with the potential to question the policies that have
guided population work for the last 20 years. What have they been
saying about the impact of birth planning on women's lives?
Contradictory effects on adult women
The women's advocates I talked to all maintained that the birth
control program has had huge and largely unexamined effects on women's
lives. They also agreed that those effects have been not exclusively
good, as the state has claimed, but contradictory, with harmful
consequences mixed in with the good. On the positive side, birth
planning has facilitated women's personal development, enabling them to
acquire skills and education and to devote themselves to work and
income acquisition as never before. While such benefits might be
enjoyed by the majority of urban Chinese women, for rural women, they
emphasized, the harm has outweighed the benefits. In the birth planning
program, they felt, rural women have been treated less as subjects than
as objects to be managed and used in the achievement of State plans and
goals. The effects of this objectification extend from women's health
to their psychological well-being and socioeconomic security.
Threats to infant girls
A strict one- or two-child policy enforced in a culture with a
strong son preference has also proved dangerous for rural infant girls.
Statistics show that the sex ratio at birth has been rising steadily,
reaching about 117 today. That means that for every 100 girls born, 117
boys are born, much higher than the biologically normal level of 106.
In the past infant girls were sent away, hidden, abandoned, or even
killed; today female fetuses are increasingly being aborted. Death
rates among female infants have also been rising, producing what
demographers call an ``excess female mortality''--higher than
biologically expected level--that is high and rising in some places.
Despite the political risks of criticizing the state program, some of
my interviewees acknowledged that the birth program was a contributor
to these problems faced by the infant girls.
The emergence of this women's health and rights critique is highly
significant, for it suggests the evolution of a discourse on population
that departs from the official line. Although the commentators I spoke
with followed rather than led the State in interrogating the benefits
of birth planning to women, they have moved much further than the State
has in dismantling the official view that birth planning has been an
unmitigated good for women. These activists also have visions of new
paths to political change that might allow women themselves to begin
articulating their own reproductive needs and interests.
iii. ngo projects on behalf of women and girls
While this gender critique is developing at the level of discourse,
other promising developments are occurring at the level of practice.
NGO activities to promote women's interests
Recent work has highlighted the significant innovations in the
state program, but initiatives emerging from NGOs are significant as
well. Let me give just a few illustrations of the many activities that
are developing. One major project has supported rural income-generation
activities that have worked to boost women's income and thus power in
the family. Another important project is a magazine for rural women
that carries special sections on reproductive health. Yet another is a
telephone
hotline set up for women to call in and get advice on a wide range of
problems, including sexual and reproductive health and rights. Many of
these projects have been developed on local initiative and been
supported in part by resources from foreign organizations.
Peasant initiative in solving the problem of abandoned baby girls
So far I have talked only about projects initiated by urban elite
actors. But China's rural people are also taking matters into their own
hands and working to alleviate some of the costs strict birth control
has imposed on rural women and girls. One of the most important arenas
of such peasant initiative is that of the adoption of infant girls. As
is well known, strict limits on births have led many couples to abandon
infant daughters. Even as the State has tried to regulate the adoption
of these abandoned girls, in the countryside, research in a few
localities suggests that a whole informal culture of adoption has
developed that flourishes largely outside the official apparatus of the
state. In the localities studied, this research indicates, the babies
are adopted not from State orphanages, but directly from their birth
parents or through intermediaries. Few of these adoptions involve local
cadres, and when cadres are involved, they do not try to prevent the
adoptions, but only to collect fines for unregistered adoptions. These
studies also suggest that it is women who are taking the initiative in
finding daughters to adopt, especially when they had only sons. In the
rural areas, at least, adoption seems to be an arena in which women are
gaining informal power to shape family size and composition and to give
abandoned girls good homes. The legal development of women's rights is
important, but so too are informal practices that bolster women's
status and rights on the ground.
iv. challenges and opportunities ahead
These efforts to promote women's reproductive rights and health are
being nurtured into existence in a larger political, cultural, and
demographic environment that presents both challenges and
opportunities.
Political economy
First, the challenge of political economy. Although it failed to
fulfill its promises to women, Maoism at least championed the goal of
gender equality. In the post-Mao era, the advance of global capitalism
coupled with the retreat of the State from direct intervention in many
areas of life have left women vulnerable to many forms of
discrimination. Although the economic and political reforms have had
contradictory effects on the lives of urban women, it is the losses--of
job security, formal
political position, and much more--that have received the most
attention. A new consumer culture has commodified the bodies,
sexualities, and identities of women and promoted the image of the
``virtuous wife and good mother'' who has left the public sphere of
production and politics to men. Moreover, the reforms have supported a
biological notion of gender that sees women as by nature physically and
psychologically different from men. This notion that women are
essentially different from men can be expected to shape the women's
rights that will develop in Chinese legal thought and practice.
Traditional culture
Second, the challenge of traditional culture. The notion of women's
independent rights has few precedents in traditional Chinese culture, a
culture in which women's social and legal place was within the male-
defined family. In the countryside, where the majority of the
population lives, the basic social and gender organization of the
family has been quite resistant to change. These cultural constructs
will color the way legal notions of women's rights develop.
A stable but unpredictable demography
Third, the challenge of an unknowable demographic future. Despite
the important reorientation that has occurred in the birth program,
over the last 20 years the state's fundamental rationale for the
drastic limitation of births has been the notion that China faces a
real or potential population crisis--a crisis of people proliferating
out of control, sabotaging the nation's economic growth and global
ascent. Keeping the numbers down has been the number-one concern.
Today's relaxation has been contingent on the achievement and
maintenance of low birth rates over the last 10 years. Should the birth
rate somehow rise again, or turn out to be higher than the current
estimates suggest, the reforms may well slow.
Falling desires for children
Fourth, the opportunity presented by social change. Twenty years of
reform and economic advance have dramatically lowered childbearing
preferences, even in the rural areas. In many parts of the country
couples want at most two children, and in some of the more developed
rural areas they want only one. These changes in Chinese society have
made, and will continue to make, high-pressure tactics in the birth
planning program increasingly unnecessary.
A new gender consciousness among State officials
Fifth, the opportunity offered by a new gender consciousness in the
state. Since the mid-1990s, the Chinese State has made women's
economic, political, and
educational development a newly important part of its ongoing reforms.
While implementation faces obstacles, this new commitment to women is a
promising
development.
conclusion
These challenges are real and will continue to shape the way the
issue of women's rights is handled in China's birth planning program.
Yet China is changing--and fast. Globalization is producing fundamental
transformations in China's society and polity whose implications for
women and birth planning no one can predict. The
history of the 1990s and early 2000s reveals the critical role of
international organizations in supporting both the positive reforms in
the state, and the emergence of new, quasi- and non-state spaces of
political critique and action. These promising developments open up
opportunities for new forms of constructive engagement by Americans
that support the reform tendencies already in place.
______
Prepared Statement of Stirling Scruggs
september 23, 2002
UNFPA has worked in China since 1980. During our first 10 years, we
focused on building self-sufficiency. In particular, we supported:
China's first modern census, which was executed by
the U.S. Census Bureau.
Contraceptive research, which was executed by WHO.
Academic training for Ph.D candidates from 23
universities, which was executed by the U.N. Population
Division. Their studies took place in U.S., U.K. and Australian
universities.
Contraceptive production, which eventually helped
China become self-sufficient in the production of high-quality,
international standard contraceptives, including birth control
pills, condoms, IUDs, injectables and foam. This activity was
executed by PATH, a Seattle-based NGO.
Beginning in 1990, when I was the UNFPA Representative in China,
UNFPA assisted with:
Another census.
Working with the returning Ph.Ds, whom we had sent
away for training. We assisted the 23 universities that
sponsored their studies to establish Population Science
curricula, which included Sociology, Demographics and
Statistics.
Continued contraceptive research.
The establishment of a high-quality Maternal and
Child Health Programme in 310 counties. The programme focused
on safe deliveries, ARI, diarrhea, breastfeeding, and the use
of high-quality contraceptives manufactured in Chinese
factories. Our partner agency in this endeavour was UNICEF.
The establishment of a special interpersonal
counseling and informed consent project, which was executed by
PATH.
The creation of China's first women's empowerment
projects in 36 counties. These were the most gratifying field
projects I have ever been associated with. And I will be glad
to discuss them later with anyone who is interested. They were
executed by FAO and ILO.
Beginning in 1997, UNFPA initiated its current programme, which
includes the now well-known 32 counties quality reproductive health
care project. And we continued women empowerment projects.
unfpa advocacy in china
UNFPA has always engaged in a serious dialog with the Chinese
Government on human rights, including reproductive and women's rights.
In:
1980: UNFPA advised against the one-child policy.
1983: UNFPA strongly condemned the first reports of massive
coercion in China's population programme. The Executive Director sent
the Deputy Executive Director the day after it was reported in the
Washington Post. That coercion was occurring on a large scale. We have
been in constant dialog since then.
1990: My first field trip after assuming my post in China was to
visit remote villages in northwestern China to investigate China's new
campaign to sterilize the mentally retarded. While this sterilization
campaign was initiated for humanitarian reasons, that is, because
authorities had become aware that mentally deficient parents had in
many cases neglected their children even to the point of death, the
Chinese approached this situation without scientific evidence or
consideration for human rights. I consulted with WHO and brought a team
of experts to China,
including a scientist from Columbia University and another from CDC in
Atlanta. After a month, they developed a micro-nutrient programme that
effectively decreased the incidence of mental retardation in these
remote areas. The primary reason for the large numbers of mentally
deficient citizens in these remote areas was a lack of iodine in their
diets. The micro-nutrient programme was financed and executed by UNDP
and UNICEF.
1992: UNFPA, working with the Alan Guttmacher Institute, WHO, and
Beijing University conducted a large-scale IUD study. This study was
prompted by the large number of contraceptive failures of the Chinese
steel ring IUD. The study resulted in a policy change in China. Two
weeks after the study was released, China made it mandatory that all
IUDs being used in its programme should be copper-T IUDs, which were
being manufactured in China in the factories that UNFPA was
assisting.
Over a 10-year period, it is estimated that the use of the copper-T
IUD prevented:
41 million pregnancies
26 million abortions
14 million births
1 million spontaneous abortions/miscarriages
360,000 child deaths
84,000 maternal deaths
1993: I tried to initiate the first model county programme, which
was, in fact, the precursor to the 32 counties programme that began in
1997. When the day came for the Governor of the Province to suspend
targets and quotas in the county in question, he was told that he could
not suspend targets and quotas. Thus I canceled this programme.
1994: The Cairo International Population and Development Conference
specifically addressed coercion and advocated a needs-based, human
rights-based approach to all population programming. This gave UNFPA
the international standard and leverage to be insistent in mandating
this approach.
1995: Negotiations began on the current 32 county programme. These
negotiations took 2 years and during those 2 years UNFPA did not have a
programme in China.
1997: The current 32 county programme was approved by UNFPA's 36-
member Executive Board, of which the United States was a member. This
programme ends this year.
objectives
The objectives of the 1997 programme were improved access
of women and men to quality, integrated client-centered RH/FP
information and services on a voluntary basis, and developing a model
in selected counties from which lessons could be drawn for application
at the national level.
These efforts were reinforced and complemented by
programmmatic activities aimed at creating an enabling environment in
terms of women's empowerment and advocacy.
achievements
The 32 counties were chosen according to geographic criteria and
their stated willingness to drop targets and quotas, and whether they
were willing to invest counterpart matching funds (3-9 times of the
UNFPA budget).
At the beginning of the project, a so-called ``pink letter'' was
sent to all households in the 32 counties explaining the project (ICPD,
client rights, etc.).
Before: No privacy during counseling, no informal counsel.
Now: Privacy and informed consent.
Women who knew about at least three methods of
contraception has increased from 39 to 80 percent
Sterilization decreased: 44 to 30 percent
IUD's increased: 51 to 61 percent
Other methods increased: 5 to 9 percent (mainly
condoms to prevent AIDS)
Abortion decreased: From 18/100 to 11
Maternal mortality: 66/100,000 to 62
Infant mortality: 27.7 percent to 21 percent
Delivery by skilled attendant: 90 to 96 percent
Better medical protocols to include choice in
contraceptives, help during menopause, infertility, STI/RTI,
HIV/AIDS, breastfeeding promoted.
So far this model has been adopted in 800 other
counties in China including four entire provinces.
challenges ahead
Stop social compensation fee.
Improve IEC and condom availability for AIDS.
Continue to prove that choice is right and it works.
Continue to advocate for Gender Equality.
unfpa role and structure
UNFPA's role is to advocate and support governments
in their efforts to implement ICPD principles and its Programme
of Action.
UNFPA reports to an Executive Board composed of 36
U.N. member countries. The Board meets 3 times yearly.
UNFPA works in those countries which request
assistance, and which, according to the Executive Board, fall
within the criteria for assistance, both for the country and
the type of assistance requested. The four UNFPA country
programmes for China have each been adopted by UNFPA's
Executive Board.
UNFPA's core budget is funded entirely by voluntary
contributions from 126 U.N. member countries.
UNFPA assists 142 developing and transition
countries.
UNFPA is a development fund. It relies on standards
and data from other U.N. entities (e.g. WHO, U.N. Population
Division, etc.). UNFPA generally works through U.N. agencies
and international NGO's and governments for project execution.
conclusion
UNFPA, like all U.N. organizations, is guided by
international human rights standards and principles.
UNFPA provides assistance in all phases of
reproductive health: FP, MH, STD/HIV prevention, treatment for
unsafe abortion, and advocacy for an enabling environment.
UNFPA assists countries to become sustainable in
development planning and self-sufficiency through:
--Data collection, analysis and research.
--Governments must know population numbers, dynamics
(urban, migration, age etc.), in order to meet
population needs.
--Advocacy for human rights, gender equality, women's
education, social participation, health care and RH
care.
I am very proud of UNFPA, its principles, its work and its staff.
The malicious lies and misinformation of the past few years have
hurt UNFPA, most importantly they have hurt women, youth and men around
the world. Today, due to discrimination and a lack of quality
reproductive health services:
One woman dies every minute.
40 have unsafe abortions.
190 become pregnant who do not want to be.
48 percent deliver at home without medical help.
10 people are infected with AIDS: half are under 25,
our future.
They could be our mother, wife, sister, daughter--but they aren't.
But they are a mother, wife, sister, or daughter to someone. They
deserve our assistance.
Thank you.
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