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POPULATION CONTROL IN CHINA: 

STATE-SPONSORED VIOLENCE 

AGAINST WOMEN AND CHILDREN 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE 

COMMISSION ON CHINA 

ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS 

FIRST SESSION 

APRIL 30, 2015 

Printed for the use of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China 

( 

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.cecc.gov 

CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA 

LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS 

House Senate 

CHRIS SMITH, New Jersey, Chairman 

ROBERT PITTENGER, North Carolina 

TRENT FRANKS, Arizona 

RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois 

TIM WALZ, Minnesota 

MARCY KAPTUR, Ohio 

MICHAEL HONDA, California 

TED LIEU, California 

MARCO RUBIO, Florida, Cochairman 

SHERROD BROWN, Ohio 

DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California 

JEFF MERKLEY, Oregon 

GARY PETERS, Michigan 

EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS 

CHRISTOPHER P. LU, Department of Labor 

SARAH SEWALL, Department of State 

STEFAN M. SELIG, Department of Commerce 

DANIEL R. RUSSEL, Department of State 

TOM MALINOWSKI, Department of State 

PAUL B. PROTIC, Staff Director 

ELYSE ANDERSON, Deputy Staff Director 

(II) 

(III) 

CO N T E N T S 

STATEMENTS

Page 

Opening Statement of Hon. Christopher Smith, a U.S. Representative from 

New Jersey; Chairman, Congressional-Executive Commission on China ....... 1 

Franks, Hon. Trent, a U.S. Representative from Arizona .................................... 3 

Hultgren, Hon. Randy, a U.S. Representative from Illinois ................................ 5 

Eberstadt, Nicholas, Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy, American 

Enterprise Institute ............................................................................................. 6 

Hudson, Valerie M., Professor and George H.W. Bush Chair, Bush School 

of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University (via Skype) ......... 9 

Littlejohn, Reggie, Founder and President, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers ....................................................................................................................... 14

Pittenger, Hon. Robert, a U.S. Representative from North Carolina .................. 19 

Chai, Ling, Founder, All Girls Allowed ................................................................. 19 

Chen, Guangcheng, Distinguished Fellow in Human Rights, Simon Center 

on Religion and the Constitution, Witherspoon Institute; Distinguished Visiting Felllow, Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies, Catholic 

University (via Interpreter James Cheng) ......................................................... 23 

APPENDIX 

PREPARED STATEMENTS

Eberstadt, Nicholas ................................................................................................. 36 

Hudson, Valerie M. .................................................................................................. 58 

Littlejohn, Reggie ..................................................................................................... 101 

Chai, Ling ................................................................................................................. 105

Chen, Guangcheng ................................................................................................... 117 

Smith, Hon. Christopher, a U.S. Representative from New Jersey; Chairman, 

Congressional-Executive Commission on China ................................................ 118 

Rubio, Hon. Marco, a U.S. Senator From Florida; Cochairman, CongressionalExecutive Commission on China ........................................................................ 120 

SUBMISSION FOR THE RECORD

Witness Biographies ................................................................................................ 122 

(1) 

POPULATION CONTROL IN CHINA: STATE– 

SPONSORED VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN 

AND CHILDREN 

THURSDAY, APRIL 30, 2015 

CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE

COMMISSION ON CHINA, 

Washington, DC. 

The hearing was convened, pursuant to notice, at 2:04 p.m., in 

room 2175, Rayburn House Office Building, Representative Christopher Smith, Chairman, presiding. 

Also present: Representatives Trent Franks, Randy Hultgren, 

and Robert Pittenger. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. CHRISTOPHER SMITH, A U.S. 

REPRESENTATIVE FROM NEW JERSEY; CHAIRMAN, CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA 

Chairman SMITH. The Commission will come to order. I want to 

wish you all a good afternoon. 

Today’s hearing will examine the looming demographic, economic, and social problems associated with China’s one-child policy 

and seek recommendations on how the international community 

can assist China to address that. 

China’s one-child policy is state-sponsored violence against 

women and children, including and especially the girl child, and 

constitutes massive crimes against humanity. 

With us today is a distinguished panel, all of whom have made 

major contributions to combating these crimes against women and 

in defense of those who have been victimized, whether it be men, 

women, or children, as a result of this policy. 

With us today is Chen Guangcheng, the Chinese legal advocate 

who was jailed for five years for trying to protect women facing 

forced abortions and sterilizations. In his testimony, Chen absolutely gets it right. He calls China’s course of population planning 

policies ‘‘genocide.’’ He calls for an international tribunal to investigate these crimes against humanity and calls on the administration to enforce existing U.S. law and bar Chinese officials from 

coming to the United States. 

In 2000, I wrote the law. It’s called the Admiral Nance-Meg 

Donovan Foreign Relations Act for fiscal years 2000 and 2001. The 

bill was signed into law on November 29, 1999. Section 801 of Title 

VII of that Act requires the Secretary of State not to issue any visa 

to, and the Attorney General not to admit to the United States, any 

foreign national whom the Secretary finds, based on credible eviVerDate Mar 15 2010 11:25 Sep 02, 2015 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00005 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 U:\DOCS\94474.TXT DEIDRE
2 

dence, has been directly involved in the establishment of forced 

abortions or forced sterilizations. 

To the best of my knowledge, under President Obama, almost no 

one—we can’t find anyone who has been rendered inadmissible. 

Thus, it has been a gross failure of the Obama administration not 

to enforce existing law, particularly on those in China who so brutally violate women’s rights. 

The one-child policy will soon mark its 35th sad anniversary. 

That’s 35 years of telling couples what their families must look 

like, 35 years of forced and coerced abortions and sterilizations, 35 

years of children viewed by the state as excess baggage from the 

day that they were conceived. 

The human rights violations associated with this policy are massive. We have only recently begun to fully understand the demographic consequences of what that could mean for China, for China’s neighbors, and for the rest of the world. 

Just over a year ago, China announced a slight change to the 

policy, allowing couples in which one parent is the only child to 

have two children. The announcement was followed by a tidal wave 

of international media coverage trumpeting that relaxation of China’s one-child policy and speculating that the policy was on the 

way out. That has not happened. The policy change was only minimal and was grossly inadequate in light of the coercion the Chinese 

Government has employed for three decades against women and 

children. 

Left unchanged is the Chinese Government’s stranglehold on deciding who can have children, when they can have children, and 

how many children a family can have. Left unchanged are the coercive measures and the ruinous fines that can be taken if a women 

is found to be carrying a child without permission. Let’s not forget, 

one needs to get a birth-allowed certificate in order to carry a child, 

otherwise the child is illegal. Brothers and sisters, as we all know, 

are illegal throughout all of China. 

Left unchanged is the large bureaucracy that enforced, and continues to enforce, the policy of population control. In the 1990s, I 

chaired a hearing with a woman who took the name of Mrs. Gao 

to protect her family back in China. She ran a program in the 

Fujian Province and she stood right there at the witness table and 

said by day I was a monster, by night I was a wife and mother of 

one child. She talked about how women, often in the ninth month 

of pregnancy, would be pleading with her in tears to allow them 

to continue and to have that child without injury or death. She said 

that is the reality. 

She said she had the ability to incarcerate family members. Not 

just the woman, not just her husband, but other family members 

to increase the pressure, the coercion so that she would succumb 

to a so-called voluntary abortion. 

The minimal changes also do nothing to address the three-decade 

decimation of the female population. Tens of millions of women and 

girls are missing from the population, a policy that can only be accurately described as gendercide. The extermination of the girl 

child in society simply because she happens to be a girl is outrageous and a crime against humanity. 

3 

I would also point out that Mira Visenstahl writes in her book, 

and very heavily documented, that in Asia there were about 160 

million missing females. She points out that’s roughly the number 

of all the women and girls living in the United States of America 

decimated from the Asia population, and China is leading the way, 

sadly. 

China’s birth limitation policy continues to increase gender imbalance, making China a regional magnet for sex and bride trafficking of women from neighboring countries, such as Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea, and beyond. This is unacceptable. It’s horrific, it’s tragic, and it’s absolutely wrong. We are 

waiting for the course of population planning policies to end, but 

where is the United Nations? Where is the Obama administration? 

AWOL. 

Yet, the Chinese Government continues to deny that there will 

be an end. Of course, ending the brutal policy would be the moral 

thing to do, and everyone is increasingly aware that ending this 

policy would also be in the Chinese Government’s best interests. 

As the economists noted just last week, by 2025 nearly 1 in 4 

Chinese citizens will be over the age of 60. At the same time, China’s working age population has shrunk in each of the past three 

years. These factors are likely to hurt not only the government balance sheets, but also economic growth in China. This should be of 

particular concern to the Chinese Communist Party, as economic 

growth is the primary source of their alleged legitimacy. 

The government should also be concerned about the dramatically 

skewed gender ratio. It may be fashionable for the media to write 

stories about leftover women, but I know, and I’m quite sure the 

Chinese Government knows, that its real problem is the young 

men—one estimate was 40 million, nobody knows the exact number—who will be unable to find wives in the coming years. 

The government should be concerned about this because they 

will have huge, huge dislocation and a lot of turmoil with its society that prides itself on harmoniousness. 

We continue to see an increase in human trafficking. Again, the 

magnet is caused by the lack of women, who have been brutally 

killed pursuant to the one-child-per-couple policy. 

Given its current realities, it’s baffling that China would continue to implement its population control program. Absolutely baffling, and yet they do. This hearing is meant to shine additional 

light on it, get recommendations on what we ought to be doing to 

try to mitigate and hopefully end this egregious abuse of women 

and children. 

I’d like to yield to Mr. Franks, Trent Franks, Chairman of the 

Constitution Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee and also 

the Chairman of the Caucus on Religious Freedom, and a great 

leader on behalf of human rights. 

STATEMENT OF HON. TRENT FRANKS, A U.S. 

REPRESENTATIVE FROM ARIZONA 

Representative FRANKS. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I guess 

the quickest way for me to do this is to express my complete agreement with everything that Chairman Smith has said. I’m so grateful to all of you for being here. I have known every last one of you 

4 

in some context in the past. I admire your courage and your humanity so deeply. I know sometimes it seems like the battle is 

unending, but you know that God sees your efforts and your work. 

And in the final analysis we all spend our time doing many different things, but when we are focused on trying to recognize the 

humanity of those in the shadows of life it is a worthwhile endeavor, almost no matter what our particular thrust really is. 

So I just appreciate you for remembering that we’re all very 

briefly on this planet and life is a miracle of the most profound 

magnitude, and you’re using it to try to help others hold onto that 

miracle as long as possible and in the most joyous way they can. 

I just have every conviction that the counsels of eternity will 

deem your efforts very worthwhile, so I want to just, again, express 

my gratitude to you. You know, as difficult as it all seems, I am 

convinced of two things: That someday the world is going to begin 

to understand the real matrix here, that apart from respect for innocent human life and the recognition of religious freedom and 

other foundational, core essences of who we are as human beings, 

that really life has no other real purpose of consequence. I think 

the world’s beginning—they’re going to understand that. I mean, if 

nothing else, the information age has a way of helping everyone get 

a close-up look. 

I’m convinced that as time goes along we’re going to come to a 

realization within ourselves collectively that this is a big deal, this 

thing called life, and what we do that honors the Maker of life and 

those that are our fellow heirs of life are really all that matters. 

And then the other thing I would say to you that is one of the 

great encouragements to make always—when you see all the suffering and all the tragedy and you know that there are children 

this day for whom help will not come in time, those are hard, hard, 

harsh things: But if there’s anything I am absolutely sure of, it is 

that the Lord of the universe hears the cries of every last one of 

these little children. He knows them by name and if time turns 

every star in heaven to ashes, that eternal moment of his deliverance will come to each of them someday. In the meantime, we do 

the best we can to be the good stewards of the moments we have 

to try to reach out to them. 

So, thank you. I could name every one of you here, but—Reggie, 

I appreciate you. You’re always in the middle of things. And Chai 

Ling, you’re always—you know, we read about you all the time. 

And Chen, you’re kind of a famous hero to all of us. Nicholas, I 

know you’re sort of the brains of the outfit sometimes, and I appreciate what you do. But more than anything else, just realize that 

it’s your heart that goes before you and you are doing a good thing. 

I am honored to be here to see you and I hope that as time goes 

along we’ll have more interaction. We’re working really hard, as 

you know, here in the Congress to do some things. The Chairman 

is always in the middle of everything that we’re doing. I’m glad to 

be able to be with you here. This man has been a hero of mine for 

I don’t know how long, but we’re about doing an important thing. 

Whether we succeed or fail, the effort is worth every moment we 

have. So, thank you, and God bless you. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

5 

Chairman SMITH. Chairman Franks, thank you very much. 

Thank you for your extraordinary leadership. 

We are joined by Randy Hultgren, who is finally out of the Chair. 

He was presiding all day yesterday in the Chair on the floor of the 

U.S. House of Representatives. I yield to the gentleman. 

STATEMENT OF RANDY HULTGREN, A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE 

FROM ILLINOIS 

Representative HULTGREN. It’s so good to be here. It’s something 

that I’m very interested in and very passionate about, and so I’m 

here to learn as much as I can, to hear from you, but also to find 

out what we can do to make a difference. You absolutely are doing 

that already and we just want to come alongside and help and use 

whatever ability we have to be able to help. And even saving one 

life or one child or one young woman is all worth it, so that is my 

commitment. 

It’s such an honor to be with a couple of my heroes as well on 

this Commission, Chairman Smith and Congressman Franks is a 

great friend and someone I look up to and want to emulate in however much time my constituents give me to serve them in this capacity. So thank you for being here, thank you for your work. 

With that, I’ll yield back. 

Chairman SMITH. Randy, thank you very much. 

I’d like to now introduce our distinguished panel. Each and every 

one of you are experts and have done yeoman’s work. We will end 

with Chen Guangcheng batting cleanup because this is a man who 

has suffered immensely for his beliefs, and certainly Ling has suffered as well. But beginning first with Nicholas Eberstadt, who is 

the Henry Wendt Scholar in Policy Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. 

A political economist and demographer by training, he is a senior 

advisor to the National Bureau of Asian Research, and has served 

on the visiting committee at the Harvard School of Public Health, 

the Global Leadership Council at the World Economic Forum, and 

the President’s Council on Bioethics. He has also served as a consultant to the World Bank, Department of State, U.S. Agency for 

International Development, and the Bureau of the Census. 

Without objection, yours, and all of everyone else’s bios, full bios, 

will be made a part of the record. 

Valerie Hudson is a Professor and George H.W. Bush Chair in 

the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M 

University. Her co-authored book, ‘‘Bare Branches, Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population,’’ received two national 

book awards and widespread media coverage for its unique insights 

into the possible consequences of Asia’s gender imbalance. 

Dr. Hudson has developed a nation-by-nation database on 

women, the WomenStats Project, to facilitate empirical research on 

the status of women globally. She is founding editorial board member of Foreign Policy Analysis and serves on the editorial boards 

of Politics and Gender, and International Studies Review. 

Then we’ll hear from Reggie Littlejohn, who is founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, a broad-based international coalition that opposes forced abortion and sexual slavery 

in China. Ms. Littlejohn is an acclaimed expert on China’s oneVerDate Mar 15 2010 11:25 Sep 02, 2015 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00009 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 U:\DOCS\94474.TXT DEIDRE
6 

child policy, having testified six times before the U.S. Congress, 

three times before the European Parliament, and presented at the 

British, Irish, and Canadian Parliaments as well. 

She has briefed officials at the White House, Department of 

State, United Nations, and the Vatican. Ms. Littlejohn also represented Chinese refugees in numerous political asylum cases. 

We will then hear from Chai Ling, who is founder of All Girls 

Allowed, a nonprofit organization which seeks to expose the injustices of China’s one-child policy and rescue girls—actually rescue 

them—and mothers in-country from gendercide. 

A leader in the 1989 Tiananmen Square student movement and 

among the most wanted by the Chinese dictatorship at the time 

and two-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, she is founder of 

Jenzabar, a company that provides higher education software and 

management solutions and a co-founder of the Jenzabar Foundation which supports the humanitarian efforts of student leaders. 

Chai Ling also authored ‘‘A Heart for Freedom,’’ a memoir detailing her journey from a fishing village in rural China to Tiananmen 

Square, where we all remember her and praise her for her courage, 

and then on to America. 

Then finally, and batting cleanup for our witnesses, will be Chen 

Guangcheng, the legal advocate and activist. Blind since childbirth, 

Mr. Chen is from rural China where he advocated on behalf of people with disabilities and exposed and challenged abuses in population planning with officials, including forced abortions and sterilizations. He was imprisoned for his activism for four years, over 

four years, following two years of house arrest. 

Mr. Chen escaped confinement in a daring and almost unbelievable escape, where in 2012 he made his way to the U.S. Embassy 

and then came to the United States. He is currently a distinguished fellow in human rights at the Witherspoon Institute Center on Religion and the Constitution; a distinguished visiting fellow 

at Catholic University Institute for Policy Research and Catholic 

Studies; and a senior distinguished advisor to the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice. 

Mr. Eberstadt, if you could begin. 

[The witnesses’ biographies appear in the appendix.] 

STATEMENT OF NICHOLAS EBERSTADT, PH.D., HENRY WENDT 

SCHOLAR IN POLITICAL ECONOMY, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE 

INSTITUTE 

Mr. EBERSTADT. Chairman Smith, Members of Congress, distinguished co-panelists, and esteemed guests, it is a privilege to be invited to testify on the demographics of China’s one-child-policy era, 

and if I might say it’s a special honor to sit at the same table as 

Chen Guangcheng, who is one of modern China’s towering human 

rights heroes. 

[Showing of slides] 

Mr. EBERSTADT. With the assistance of this Power Point, I’m 

going to try to make four quick points about what we know and 

what we don’t know concerning the demographics of China’s onechild policy. 

First, what we know. The unnatural imbalance between the 

numbers of baby boys and the number of baby girls that has 

7 

emerged in China over the past 30 years is the consequence of a 

terrible collision between three huge social forces, between a ruthless son preference, declining fertility and sub-replacement fertility, 

which adds a new freighting of gender outcome to each additional 

birth, and the advent of relatively reliable and inexpensive gender 

determination technology in the context of unconditional abortion. 

You can see from this graphic here, I believe, the strong correspondence between fertility levels and gender imbalance. The 

lower the fertility level, as estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau 

over the past generation in China, the higher, the more abnormal 

the distortion from what we would expect as a natural human balance between proportions of boys and proportions of girls. 

The missing piece here, of course, is sonography, is ultrasound. 

This graphic shows the estimated proportion of China’s counties 

with access to ultrasonography. We can see that by the late 1980s, 

over 90 percent of China’s counties were reported to have access to 

sonography. By no coincidence, the 1990s Chinese census shows the 

enormous increase in sex ratios at birth. 

Let me show you this one slide as well. It shows the sex ratios, 

the number of boys per 100 girls, by birth parity: first born, second 

born, third born, and so forth. You’ll see that in the earlier Chinese 

censuses, the imbalance between baby boys and baby girls for firstborn babies was relatively small. It was almost a biologically 

human ratio, whereas for second, third, and fourth births the ratio 

was absolutely impossible for any large human population. That’s 

where sex-selective abortion comes in. 

Yet in the most recent Chinese census, in the 2010 census, we 

see a sex ratio of birth for first-born children of about almost 114 

boys reported for every 100 baby girls. In effect, sex-selective feticide in China appears to have been increasingly front-loaded with 

respect to birth parity. Fewer first-time parents than in the past 

are apparently willing nowadays to take their chances with biologically determined gender outcomes for their first-born child. 

Second, most international observers of Chinese demographic 

trends believe that the imbalance between baby boys and baby girls 

has stopped increasing in recent years and may actually be declining. Just the dimensions of this pause and/or decline are still a 

matter of considerable debate and uncertainty: a necessary, inescapable uncertainty given the basic data from China with which we 

have to work. 

The plain fact is that contemporary China does not have a vital 

registration system that provides accurate and comprehensive national data on annual births and deaths, and when one looks at 

contending alternative sources of data from China, the respective 

successive annual censuses or hospital birth records, or for children 

a little bit older, for children who are enrolling in school for the 

first time, we see tremendous discrepancies as this chart by the 

Census Bureau researcher Dr. Daniel M. Goodkind indicates. 

For some given birth years we have discrepancies of 10 percentage points or more. That’s not a trivial difference. This is also true 

when one looks at Chinese official census data for children born in 

particular birth years. Big discrepancies here as well. 

Why these big discrepancies? Because parents are not reporting 

their children. Why are they not reporting their children? There is 

8 

a very strong incentive, under the one-child-policy era, under the 

strictures of the one-child policy, not to report one’s child. This 

tends to be true of girls, of course, but it also tends to be true of 

boys. This is an inescapable uncertainty in estimating the precise 

dimensions of the imbalance today, much less its future trajectory. 

Now, third, we have talked in the past about some of the consequences of the one-child policy, to the extent that it is demographically effective. We have talked about the sub-replacement 

fertility consequences of shrinking labor force and population 

aging. One of the other consequences, to the extent it is effective, 

is the prospective creation of an army of unmarriageable men. 

In this work done by Chinese demographers, the projection is 

that men in their late thirties stand about a 25-percent chance of 

never getting married for those of the year 2030, and men in their 

late forties in 2030 stand about a 20-percent chance, this for a society where, until more or less yesterday, universal marriage was the 

norm and very widely the practice. 

But other changes in Asia, I think, are throwing a wild card into 

this situation, making it even more volatile. Throughout the rest 

of east Asia, we have seen what some demographers have called a 

‘‘flight from marriage’’ by women, a tendency for women to postpone marriage or avoid marriage altogether. 

This typically has started out as an elite phenomenon in societies 

like Hong Kong and Taiwan, and, of course, also Japan and South 

Korea, in the big metropolises and within the most educated strata 

of women. But the elite fashion has ultimately turned out to be a 

mass norm in those societies. 

You’ll see in this chart that China has yet really to enter into 

this flight, even though other countries of China’s same income 

level had already evidenced this flight quite strongly. 

But what seems to be an incipient flight from marriage by 

women in China is now beginning. We can see that in this graphic, 

which shows the most recent Chinese census results. For the nation as a whole, this flight seems to have begun as of 2010 and, 

sure enough, it is most evident in Beijing today. That’s the light 

blue bar there. And it is most evident within Beijing by the highest 

educated group of young women, and that’s the green bar there. 

Just how fast the flight from marriage by women is going to proceed we cannot tell, but to the extent that it does proceed as it has 

in the rest of the east Asian rim, this will intensify the marriage 

squeeze and only further increase China’s coming and pending 

army of unmarriageable men. 

If I could, I’d make one final point. While the human rights implications of China’s one-child policy are well known and widely 

documented, the question of the program’s actual demographic impact is rather less straightforward. We can note here that east 

Asian rim countries today exhibit some of the world’s very lowest 

fertility levels and all of these in places that have never toyed with 

compulsory birth control. 

Japan has reported snapshot TFR, Total Fertility Rates, of under 

1.3 births per woman per lifetime in some years. South Korea’s, at 

times, has dropped below 1.2. In Chinese cultural venues like Taiwan and Hong Kong, it has dropped in some years below 1.0, less 

than one birth per woman per lifetime. 

9 

So we may reasonably ask, has forcible population control accelerated modern China’s fertility decline? Would fertility levels really 

be higher today without the program? Is it possible they’d be even 

lower? The simple truth of the matter is, we don’t know. There are 

a number of methodological approaches we could take to pursuing 

that question. 

In my view, they strongly merit pursuit, not least so that we may 

have some sense in advance of the magnitude of the demographic 

responses that will be elicited when the one-child program is finally 

scrapped once and for all. Thank you. 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you very much, Dr. Eberstadt. 

We’re going now, by way of Skype, to Dr. Hudson, Valerie Hudson, who couldn’t be with us in person but is doing it via Skype. 

Dr. Hudson? 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Eberstadt appears in the appendix.] 

STATEMENT OF VALERIE M. HUDSON, PH.D., PROFESSOR AND 

GEORGE H.W. BUSH CHAIR, BUSH SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT 

AND PUBLIC SERVICE, TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY (VIA SKYPE) 

Ms. HUDSON. Thank you. Are you able to hear me? 

Chairman SMITH. Yes. 

Ms. HUDSON. Great. Thank you to the distinguished members of 

the Commission for their invitation, and also for their attention to 

this extremely important problem. Also thanks to the other experts 

assembled who are outstanding in their respective fields and whose 

work has inspired my own. 

A final thank you to my co-author, who was kind enough to allow 

me to use a paper that we had written as the foundation for my 

remarks. Now, I want to warn you, that’s a 43-page paper and I’ve 

been given approximately eight minutes to summarize that argument. 

I was asked to speak specifically on the topic of this paper, which 

was, what’s going on with China’s neighbors, specifically South 

Korea and Vietnam, the changes in those two countries, and what 

implications that might have for China’s own demographic issues. 

Let me start out by saying that as China struggles to normalize 

its sex ratio, it’s interesting to note that China is book-ended by 

two countries that have had vastly different birth-sex ratio trajectories: South Korea and Vietnam. 

In South Korea, a very abnormal birth-sex ratio was normalized 

over the course of approximately one decade. In the latter, Vietnam, a normal sex ratio of birth became profoundly abnormal over 

the course of less than one decade and threatens to become even 

more abnormal than that of China. Are there lessons for China 

from the experiences of these mismatched bookends? If you will, a 

note about son preference. 

As Nicholas Eberstadt has said, it’s a ruthless type of force. Let 

me suggest that its foundations in the East Asian context are not 

dissimilar from those found in other regions. Its root is the organization of society along patrilineal lines. The vast majority of lineage-based groups traced descent through the patriline, practice 

patrilocal marriage, inherit land and property through the 

patriline. 

10 

Patrilineality permits groups of male relatives bound by blood 

ties to become politically powerful and band together in allegiances 

when conflicts arise. However, in patrilineality, the most vulnerable family members are the women, whose role it is to reproduce 

the patriline. 

As sociologist Mark Weiner notes, ‘‘the anti-individualism of the 

rule of the clan burdens each and every member of a patrilineal society, but most of all it burdens women. The fate of women lays 

bare the basic values of this rule and as outsiders, citizens of liberal states often find their own values clarified when they confront 

the lives these societies offer women.’’ I think that was echoed in 

Representative Smith’s opening remarks. 

So signs of patrilineality still enforced, despite the fact that we’re 

in the 21st century, include prevalence of patrilocal marriage, it includes inequitable family law and customs, discrimination against 

women, and lastly, it denies property rights for women. Property 

rights in law are not the same as property rights in practice, which 

are often a very different kettle of fish. 

And, of course, we would suggest that those three factors may be 

present in societies where the sex ratio is not abnormal. Oftentimes 

what is needed is a catalyst for son preference to adopt its more 

ruthless face. Certainly one prime example of that catalyst in a 

patrilineally organized society is the enforcement of government 

limits on fertility. 

The one-child policy, now law in China, and the two-child policy 

of Vietnam are cases in point. As Nick Eberstadt has pointed out, 

when fertility is forcibly lowered by the state, son preference will 

turn into enactment of son preference, which is a euphemism for 

culling girls from the birth population. 

This is so because the typical family-level solution for not having 

a son is to continue to bear children until a son is forthcoming. If 

that solution is no longer an option for a family, some parents will 

select for a child of the male sex. 

Another catalyst which we will be speaking of in a patrilineally 

organized society is the government’s decision whether to provide 

a meaningful old-age pension for all of its citizens. The old-age pension scheme in traditional patrilineal societies is sons. If the government decides to provide a substitute pension scheme, any perceived need to enact son preference will be profoundly undercut. 

So what I’d like to do now is go to a summary of our more elaborate and articulated case studies of South Korea and Vietnam, 

which I cannot present to you in the time allotted to me. 

Let’s look first at South Korea. What we found in the South Korean case were several critical factors—and let me list those—in 

South Korea’s ability to revert its sex ratio of birth from highly abnormal to normal. 

What we found was: (1) an enforcement of a ban on physicianprovided prenatal sex identification, despite the fact of abortion 

being easily available in South Korea; (2) South Korea undertook 

a unique and profoundly meaningful attack on patrilineality. They 

dismantled its core structures, such as the notion of male household head and hoju, birth registry, family registry, and so forth, 

including those that buttressed patrilocal marriage; (3) the South 

Korean Government provided some form of old-age insurance to the 

11 

bulk of the population, providing a substitute for the need to have 

a son to provide elder support. 

Next, South Korea did not enforce any type of fertility control 

policies and it should be noted, as Nick Eberstadt has pointed out, 

that the fertility rate dropped even despite the fact that there were 

no such limitations on fertility. 

Finally, urbanization and the decline of rural land as an important inheritance also changed the relative value of sons and daughters, as parents were then able to transfer goods and receive goods 

from both their daughters and sons on an equal basis. 

Let’s turn to Vietnam. Vietnam is very puzzling. Given that it 

shares the same foundation of strong son preference with South 

Korea, the first half of the Vietnamese puzzle is why it took so long 

for son preference to turn into son preference enactment. 

After all, Vietnam also has a patriarchal system, staunch son 

preference, trends of economic and demographic modernization, 

strong family planning regulations, and easy access to abortion. Yet 

it was not until about 2002 that the sex ratio of birth of Vietnam 

began to be abnormal, really taking off like a rocket around 2005. 

Another part of the puzzle is that Vietnam was a Communist 

country and gender equality was enshrined in law from virtually 

the very beginning, but of course laws on the books and practice 

on the ground are two different things. 

Let’s hit the highlights then of the Vietnamese case. Before I do, 

I’d like to note that just as in the South Korean case an increasingly abnormal birth sex ratio occurred in the context of steady economic development, and I want to return to that in my concluding 

remarks. All right. 

So the factors involved in Vietnam’s trajectory of increasingly abnormal sex ratio of birth, no real enforcement of a ban on prenatal 

sex identification in a context where abortion is easily available, 

the Vietnamese Government made no effective legal attack on 

patrilineality, no real attempt to dismantle its core structures, and 

there was continued importance of land inheritance by sons in this 

society. 

The Vietnamese Government provided no real form of old-age insurance to the bulk of its population. Furthermore, it imposed a 

two-child policy, enforced by semi-coercive means. When that became law and punishments were affixed in 2005, that’s when you 

see the sex ratio of birth really take off in Vietnam. 

Lastly, unlike South Korea, it’s a predominantly rural country. 

Sixty-eight percent of the population is classified as rural, and so 

land still continues to have importance. All right. 

Concluding remarks. What can we learn from these case studies, 

as cursory as they have been? First, and this is extremely important, increasing wealth and increasing levels of education are irrelevant to the enactment of son preference. 

Eberstadt himself has said, as we have seen sudden steep increases in birth sex ratios, it is by no means inconsistent with continuing improvements in levels of per capita income and female 

education. South Korea’s greatest rise toward abnormality in its 

birth sex ratio coincided with its greatest rise in GNP per capita 

and average level of education in the society. 

12 

In similar fashion, Vietnam has also seen its birth sex ratios 

turn highly abnormal during the same time in which Vietnam became increasingly wealthy and increasingly educated. The same 

can be said of China and India. This finding is noteworthy. 

The assumption that sex ratios will naturally normalize over 

time as a country progresses in its development is completely unwarranted, in my estimation. The case studies of South Korea and 

Vietnam show that specific attention must be paid to the roots of 

son preference in order to deter a rise in the sex ratio at birth. 

I would also like to point out to the Commission that even 

though this is the year 2015, the list of countries with highly abnormal sex ratios is growing. It is not decreasing. In addition to 

Vietnam, we have countries such as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, 

Moldova, Albania, and others not necessarily within Asia, but even 

outside the Asian region, where this is becoming a great problem. 

Thus, this is not just a puzzle of the past or even of the present. 

This is a puzzle of the past, present, and the future and I think 

it’s right that you’re looking at this. 

Now, let me just give you our recommendations, we have a few, 

and then I’ll wrap it up. Our first observation will be echoed by the 

remainder of the panel: catalyzing son preference enactment 

through coercive fertility limitation is catastrophic in terms of effects on the sex ratio. So Vietnam did not learn its lesson from 

China, and this was a great mistake on its part. 

Our second observation is that it is important that physicians be 

the target of punishment for any identification of fetal sex or provision of sex-selective abortion. Even now in the United Kingdom, 

which had not had a son preference enactment problem since the 

Middle Ages, just within the last year felt the need to create legal 

penalties for doctors for these very reasons. 

Our third conclusion is that it is insufficient to try to raise the 

status of daughters within the society by having large billboards 

that talk about how wonderful daughters are. In actuality, you 

have to reduce the value of sons. One of the most important ways 

that you do that is that you provide a system of old-age pensions 

so that sons are not the old-age solution for their parents. 

Last, something that South Korea did that neither Vietnam nor 

China has done is actually enforce gender-equal laws in inheritance, property rights, you name it, on their broader populations, especially in the rural areas. So patrilineality has continued 

unabated in Vietnam and China, freighting, as Nicholas put it, the 

preference for sons. 

In sum then, and I think that one last note is that it’s also true 

that Vietnam is hemorrhaging women, not only at birth but also 

in the young adult cohort due to the massive export of brides to 

China, Taiwan, and South Korea because of those countries abnormal sex ratios. It is not just the sex ratio at birth that should concern policymakers in Ho Chi Min City. 

In sum, I hope this examination of China’s mismatched bookends 

of South Korea and Vietnam has been instructive in helping to 

clarify what is and what is not causally linked to the enactment 

of son preference. As the list of nations enacting son preference 

lamentably grows longer, these insights may be of increasing importance over time. 

13 

Thank you very much. 

Chairman SMITH. Dr. Hudson, thank you so very much. 

There is a vote on the floor so my colleagues and I will have to 

leave. It’s at zero time left, actually. But I do have a question and 

we’ll leave the record open for a moment, if you wouldn’t mind answering it, and then reconvene as soon as we come back from the 

votes. 

My question would be—you have done groundbreaking work in 

the area of what an increasingly male, increasingly gray population 

might have on a place like China in terms of violence and the possibility of war in order to project the chaos that is occurring in 

China. Thank you for your work and your comparison. 

Trent Franks, who just left, is the author of a bill in the House 

that got a majority vote last Congress to ban sex-selection abortion 

in the United States. I met with the president of Azerbaijan in 

Baku and spent about half of my time with him, speaking to this 

disparity and this discrimination against the girl child inherent in 

sex-selection abortion, and urged him—pleaded with him—to defend the littlest girls that are being decimated in his country. 

So thank you. The fact that you point out ominously that this is 

a growing trend and not a contracting phenomenon is a very, very 

tragic, but reversible, policy that we need policies globally. So 

maybe you want to speak a little more on that while the record is 

open, and then we will have a brief recess as soon as you’re done 

because I know you have to get on as well. I do have to vote. But 

if you could talk about the military side as well. 

Ms. HUDSON. Yes. I wanted to note that the work of myself and 

my co-author, Andrea Den Boer, has been focused on trying to 

point out that there were clear security implications of creating a 

vast number of unmarriageable males within a society. 

I’ve often been tempted, in fact, to create a graphic—and maybe, 

Nick, you can lend me your graphic designer—and actually show 

the flow of women from various countries into China, into South 

Korea, Taiwan, other places that these nations are actually sucking 

in women from abroad even from nations such as Vietnam where 

there’s abnormal sex ratios to begin with. 

Yet, despite drawing in these women, as Nick points out, estimates are still that 20 to 25 percent of the young adult population, 

male population in China, will not be able to find brides. It is also 

true, as Nick pointed out, that women at higher levels of education 

are not satisfied with what Chinese marriage looks like. It does not 

look like an equitable companion-type of relationship, but it looks 

like the old patrilineal style of marriage where women are subordinated in marriage. 

So despite the inflow of women, I think the sheer numbers of 

men who are unmarriageable in China, plus the growing rejection 

of patrilineal hierarchical style marriage by highly educated Chinese women means that I think China is in for a very rough ride 

in terms of instability over time. 

I think we already see that. We see, again, as Nick pointed out, 

the data is sketchy, but from what data we do have we have been 

able to show that sex ratios, in fact, are correlating with rises in 

violent crime in areas of China, and we’ve also noted the re-emergence of what we could call male coalitions, smuggling rings, black 

14 

market purveyors of small arms, drugs, and prostitution, and so 

forth, that plagued historical China in the days, again, when there 

were very high sex ratios. 

Will this internal instability spill over and lead to regional effects? Possibly. We think that that is certainly something that happened in the past and it’s something that might be anticipated in 

the future. Surely the Chinese Government is going to have to become even more authoritarian in order to control spiraling levels of 

internal instability caused by this large army, as Nick put it, this 

large number of unmarriageable men. 

For what stake in society have you given an unmarriageable 

man? In a patrilineal-based society, he has very little face, he will 

not have descendants for his family line. In terms of providing for 

his elderly parents, he may do that, but then there’s no future. 

There’s no future, no continuation of the family line over time. So 

this is a deeply distressing problem, I think, for the Chinese authorities. 

We know that they have been spending a lot of money commissioning studies on these men and what their proclivities are, where 

they’re located, where they congregate, and so forth. So we know 

the Chinese authorities are aware of this issue. We know, as Representative Smith said, that there has been a slight tweaking of 

the one-child policy. There’s been rampant talk of going to a twochild policy. 

Yet, demographers will tell you, the horse has left the barn. 

Those cohorts of young men have already been born and so the sex 

ratio of the young adult population of China is going to be abnormal for decades to come, even if the birth sex ratio was normalized 

tomorrow, which it will not be. So this is an abiding problem. I 

can’t see anyone but myself, so I’m hoping that this is an appropriate place to stop speaking. 

Mr. PROTIC. Thank you, Dr. Hudson. As the congressman said, 

we’re in recess for a few minutes. 

[Whereupon, at 2:54 p.m. the hearing was recessed.] 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Hudson appears in the appendix.] 

AFTER RECESS 

[3:16 P.M.]

Chairman SMITH. The Commission will resume its sitting. Again, 

I apologize to our witnesses and all of our guests for that delay. We 

don’t expect any other votes until about 4:45, 5:00, so we should 

be okay. 

I’d like to now introduce Reggie Littlejohn, and the floor is yours. 

STATEMENT OF REGGIE LITTLEJOHN, FOUNDER AND 

PRESIDENT, WOMEN’S RIGHTS WITHOUT FRONTIERS 

Ms. LITTLEJOHN. Honorable members of the Commission and distinguished fellow panelists, ladies and gentlemen, I am grateful for 

this opportunity to testify here today as we commemorate the 25th 

anniversary of China’s one-child policy. I am very honored especially to be able to share a table with blind activist Chen 

Guangcheng because, as you know, I’ve been advocating for him 

15 

since 2008 and you held, Congressman Smith, hearing after hearing after hearing to secure his release, and then to actually be able 

to testify with him is a great honor. 

I would also like to acknowledge the presence today of another 

great Chinese human rights hero, Dr. Teng Biao, who is here with 

us today. Dr. Teng Biao, as you may know, was part of Chen 

Guangcheng’s team in 2005 when he was doing his groundbreaking 

work, together with his wife Yuan Weijing, another human rights 

hero. They are the ones that produced the report that got Chen 

Guangcheng in jail, and Dr. Teng Biao has been heroic in defending him and himself spent jail time on behalf of Chen Guangcheng. 

So I’m greatly honored to be testifying today. 

I have been asked to comment upon China’s insistence on keeping the one-child policy, despite looming demographic concerns. 

China has not eased, has not relaxed, has not abandoned its onechild policy, despite reports to the contrary. China periodically 

tweaks its one-child policy. These minor modifications are routinely 

exaggerated. 

For example, under the misleading headline, ‘‘China To Ease 

One-Child Policy,’’ Xinhua News Agency reported that China would 

lift the ban on a second child if either parent was an only child, 

beginning on January 1, 2014. It was already the case that couples 

could have a second child if both parents were themselves only children. This minor adjustment did not ease the one-child policy, it 

merely tweaked it. 

The minor modification of the policy that took place on January 

1, 2014, number one, did not affect a large percentage of couples 

in China; number two, was not subject to a time table in which implemented; number three, retained the dreaded birth intervals between children. If a woman got pregnant before the interval lapsed, 

she would be subject to forced abortion. Number four, most importantly, makes no promise to end the coercive implementation of the 

one-child policy. 

Noticeably absent from the Chinese Communist Party’s announcement is any mention of human rights. Even though it will 

now allow some couples to have a second child, China has not 

promised to end forced abortion, forced sterilization, or coerced contraception. The coercive enforcement of China’s one-child policy is 

its core. Instituting a two-child policy in certain limited circumstances will not end forced abortion or forced sterilization. 

The problem with the one-child policy is not the number of children allowed, rather, it is the fact that the Chinese Government is 

telling people how many children they can have and enforcing that 

limit coercively through forced abortion and forced sterilization. 

Even if all couples were allowed to have two children, there is 

no guarantee that the Chinese Communist Party will cease their 

appalling methods of enforcement. Regardless of the number of 

children allowed, women who get pregnant without permission will 

be dragged out of their homes, strapped to tables, and forcibly 

aborted. 

Furthermore, instituting a two-child policy will not end gendercide. 

Indeed, areas in which two children are currently allowed are especially vulnerable to gendercide, and we have just heard from Dr. 

16 

Valerie Hudson about the fact that when Vietnam had a two-child 

policy the gender ratios zoomed up. 

So I expect, over the next several years, that the Chinese Government will probably announce that they are instituting a twochild policy and that will be blared out by the media as the end 

of the one-child policy. What I’m saying is, it is not the end of the 

one-child policy. The core of the policy is the coercion, and they’re 

not saying they’re going to end that. 

Furthermore, all the reasons the Chinese Government has given 

for this adjustment are economic or demographic: China’s dwindling labor force, the country’s growing elderly population, the severe gender imbalance. The adjustment is a tacit acknowledgement 

that the continuation of the one-child policy has led, and will continue to lead, to economic disaster. 

The policy was originally instituted for economic reasons. It is 

ironic that through this very policy China has written its own economic death sentence. Even if China were to completely abandon 

the one-child policy and all population control now, demographers 

worry that it might be too little, too late to avert the demographic 

disaster already caused. 

As one researcher stated, ‘‘Even if the family planning policy 

were terminated today it would be too late to solve our rapidly 

aging population, the drastic shrinkage of the labor force, and the 

gaping hole in social security funds that the country has already 

begun struggling with.’’ 

Despite the demographic pressure to end the policy, the Chinese 

Government, just this month, on the 10th of this month, denied 

that it has plans to implement a two-child policy. Continuing the 

one-child policy makes no demographic sense. China’s population 

problem is not that it has too many people, it is that it has too few 

young people and too few women. Limiting births can no longer 

justify the policy. 

In addition, the most recent modification of the one-child policy 

has failed to produce the expected number of births, as couples are 

self-limiting the size of their families. Why then does the Chinese 

Communist Party keep the policy? I will attempt to explain the 

unexplainable. In my opinion, the Chinese Communist Party will 

never abolish the one-child policy because the government is exploiting the one-child policy as social control masquerading as population control. 

The one-child policy was formally instituted on September 25, 

1980, in response to a population explosion under the Mao era 

where fertility rates rose to 5.9 children per woman. The one-child 

policy began as a means to control this population, however brutal 

and misguided. 

The terror that forced abortion and involuntary sterilization had 

was a by-product of a population control policy. Now that keeping 

the policy makes no demographic sense, I believe that terror has 

become the purpose of the policy. 

Forced abortion continues in China, terrifying both women and 

men. Some of these forced abortions have been so violent that the 

women themselves have died along with their full-term babies. 

Forced abortion is so terrifying that victims become shattered emoVerDate Mar 15 2010 11:25 Sep 02, 2015 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00020 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 U:\DOCS\94474.TXT DEIDRE
17 

tionally, and sometimes succumb to mental illness. China has the 

highest female suicide rate of any country in the world. 

Men also are terrorized. Some men have been killed or maimed 

for life. Others have lost control and murdered family planning officials. Some men have resorted to suicide in protest over the excessive fines imposed by the government. The spirit of the Cultural 

Revolution lives on in the family planning police, who have been 

able to steal, intimidate, torture, and kill with relative impunity. 

The Chinese Communist government is a brutal totalitarian regime. It has many human rights abuses. The detention and torture 

of human rights lawyers, activists, and journalists, religious persecution, the execution of prisoners to harvest their organs for transplant, just to name a few. However egregious, each of these human 

rights violations touches only one sliver of society. The one-child 

policy is unique in that it touches everyone. 

So the one-child policy is uniquely the way that the government 

in Beijing can take its arm and extend it and touch the womb of 

every single woman in China and declare life or death over that 

child, and that is a way of extending its reign of terror over the 

entire nation. That’s the first reason I think that they’re not going 

to abandon the policy. 

The second reason is that the one-child policy is enormously profitable for the Chinese Communist Party. The one-child policy system of fees and fines is an important source of revenue for the 

Party. These fines are arbitrary and inconsistently applied 

throughout China and can be as much as ten times a person’s annual salary. 

Very few can afford to pay these terror fines, and in high-profile 

cases the fines may run into the millions of dollars. It has been estimated that the Chinese Communist Party has received as much 

as $314 billion since 1980 in family planning fines. 

The use of these fines is not subject to accountability so they can 

be used simply to line the pockets of the family planning officials 

or fund other government projects under the table. This system or 

lack thereof is a strong incentive for them to keep the policy. 

The third reason I think that the Chinese Communist Party will 

never abandon the policy is that the one-child policy’s infrastructure of coercion can be turned to crush dissent of any kind. There 

is growing dissent inside of China—now I quote from previous congressional testimony—‘‘Internal Chinese law enforcement data on 

so-called mass incidents, a wide variety of protests ranging from 

sit-ins, to strikes, to marches and rallies, and even genuine riots, 

indicated that China has seen a sustained, rapid increase in those 

incidents, from 8,700 in 1993 to nearly 60,000 in 2003, to more 

than 120,000 in 2008.’’ Meanwhile, there are as many as 1 million 

family planning officials. 

This army of family planning officials can be turned in any direction to crush dissent of any kind. By the way, if China’s family 

planning officials were an army they would tie with North Korea 

as the sixth largest army in the world. 

The last reason that I think that the Chinese Communist Party 

will not abandon the one-child policy is that they use the one-child 

policy to break relationships of trust. In addition to the family 

planning police, there are employed a system of paid informants so 

18 

that a woman who is pregnant can be informed on by her neighbors, her friends, her co-workers, people in the village who are simply hired to watch women’s abdomens to see if someone might be 

pregnant and then see if she’s carrying a birth permit. 

Then in addition, if a woman flees because she’s illegally pregnant, there are instances where the Chinese Communist Party will 

detain and torture her family. What this does, is it ruptures every 

kind of relationship of trust in society, which is very useful to the 

Chinese Communist Party because if you can’t trust anyone you 

can’t organize for democracy. 

In conclusion, I believe that the Chinese Communist Party is 

maintaining its grip on power through the one-child policy by shedding the blood of innocent women and babies of China. China’s onechild policy is the largest and most disastrous social experiment in 

the history of the world. 

Through it, the Chinese Communist Party boasts that they have 

prevented 400 million lives, which is greater than the entire population of the United States and Canada combined. This is the hallmark of Communist regimes, the peacetime killing of their own 

citizens. 

So in terms of policy recommendations, we respectfully request 

that the U.S. Government urge the Chinese Government to abolish 

the one-child policy and end all forms of coercive population control, and offer incentives for couples to have girls. 

Women’s Rights Without Frontiers has a ‘‘Save a Girl’’ program 

where we go and basically encourage women to keep their daughters and offer them a monthly stipend to keep their daughters, and 

empower them to keep their daughters. We have found that it 

takes very little to actually save the lives of baby girls in China. 

Number three, offer pensions to couples who do not have a son, 

ensuring that parents of girls will not become impoverished in old 

age. Number four, abolish the hukou system so that all children 

will have access to healthcare and education. 

In addition, we respectfully request that the U.S. Government establish principles of corporate responsibility to ensure that U.S. 

corporations do not allow coercive family planning in their factories 

in China and also de-fund the UNFPA [United Nations Population 

Fund] unless and until the UNFPA stops supporting and participating in the management of a program, a coercive abortion or involuntarily sterilization in China, in violation of the 1985 KempCasten amendment. Thank you. 

Chairman SMITH. Ms. Littlejohn, thank you very much for your 

testimony, your work, and for your recommendations, all of which 

will be taken very seriously by this Commission. So, thank you. 

We are joined by Robert Pittenger, a gentleman from North 

Carolina, who has been an outspoken advocate of human rights 

and has spoken on Chinese human rights in particular in a very 

effective way. I’d like to yield to him, if he has any opening comments. 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Littlejohn appears in the appendix.] 

19 

STATEMENT OF ROBERT PITTENGER, A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE 

FROM NORTH CAROLINA 

Representative PITTENGER. Thank you so much, Chairman 

Smith, and for your dedication and leadership in the 30 years that 

I have been with you and known you. Thank you to each of you 

who have come today to give testimony to the realities that are so 

grievous to all of us in China. 

I’d like to just understand that China’s rapid rise on the global 

stage does not come without cost, including China’s strong disregard for human rights and well-being of its people. This issue is 

close to my heart, as I have been deeply involved in efforts to protect the rights of the Chinese people, support their religious expression for over 30 years. 

While population control policies are not unique to China, China’s policies are particularly egregious and are some of the most 

heavily enforced in the world. These population control policies 

have fractured communities, exacerbated gender-based biases and 

violence, and caused irreversible damage to the stability of the population. 

Enforcement of population control policies at the local level has 

led to reports of traumatic violations of individual rights, forced 

abortions and sterilizations, and increased human trafficking to 

counter over-population of males. China must repeal these horrific 

policies not only for the well-being of their people, but in order to 

protect the sustainability of their already aging population. 

The United States must remain committed to human rights of all 

peoples and hold our counterparts around the world accountable for 

their violations. We must promote the repeal of population control 

in China and across the world. 

I look forward to hearing more of your testimony, and I yield 

back. 

Chairman SMITH. Mr. Pittenger, thank you very much for your 

leadership for these many years. 

I’d like to now yield to Chai Ling. 

STATEMENT OF CHAI LING, FOUNDER, ALL GIRLS ALLOWED 

Ms. CHAI. Thank you, Chairman Smith, and thank you for your 

tireless effort to end the one-child policy for the past 35 years, for 

upholding human rights for all people in China and in the world. 

Thank you, Ranking Congressman, for your support and care for 

our country and our people. 

The title of my testimony today is, ‘‘In Jesus’ Name, I Declare 

the One-Child Policy Will End, and Will End Soon.’’ I am honored 

to be invited to be a part of this distinguished panel, and I will 

focus on the following three subjects: The brutal nature of the onechild policy; how the one-child policy is being dismantled by the 

Lord one-by-one and step-by-step by His faithful workers; and how 

gendercide can also be ended in such a way. 

I know the brutal nature of the one-child policy. When I was first 

asked about that, it was June 1990, when Congressman Chris 

Smith asked me during my first U.S. congressional hearing, after 

I came out from Tiananmen Square I spent 10 months in hiding. 

Congressman Chris Smith asked me, ‘‘Does anybody know about 

20 

the one-child policy? ’’ I thought, does not everybody—all know 

about one-child policy? 

Congressman Smith said, ‘‘No, not everybody knew.’’ The truth 

was one child per family. Those three words sound so benign and 

perfect. Only decades later I realized even I did not know the true 

meaning of it either and the true nature of this policy was, indeed, 

all the other children must die. How they must die can be explained by the following story. 

This woman on the screen, her name is Zhang Wen Fang. She 

was nine months’ pregnant with her second child. She was dragged 

into a forced abortion clinic. She fought so hard to save her baby’s 

life, she was injected with deep anesthesia. 

By the time she woke up not only had she lost her baby, she also 

lost her uterus and her entire health, her relationship—with the 

baby’s father—and her job. So from a vibrant, healthy mother and 

young entrepreneur, she was turned into this homeless, jobless, 

and disabled petitioner for justice. 

The next picture is a picture of a forcefully aborted baby who was 

dumped in a water bucket. Cases like Zhang Wen Fang and a baby 

like this were numerous because, even according to the Chinese 

Government’s own admission, they have eliminated 400 million babies. That’s 400 million of forced and coerced murders like this 

story. So it is, indeed, the largest crime against humanity on Earth 

and a pure evil. 

It was at Congressman Chris Smith’s hearing in November 2009 

that my eyes were opened up to the nature of the one-child policy 

and I realized how, like many others, I had also been fooled all 

these years. But after I led the Tiananmen movement and paid a 

severe price for it, including continually living in exile as of today, 

I know from personal experience to try to end China’s one-child 

policy not only needs commitment, endurance, experience, perseverance, courage, all these human attributes we can name, but it 

also needs something bigger, much bigger, to overcome this massive evil. 

My finding was revolutionary to me, and I ask for forgiveness up 

front if you find my testimony uncomfortable in any way. I don’t 

mean to offend anybody, but as for me, I could no longer live the 

life that I lived before by trying to pursue justice and freedom, 

seeking to do good only on my own back. 

I did find the big thing, and that is God. So shortly after the 

hearing, Ms. Reggie Littlejohn led me to the Lord through Christ 

Jesus and I was able to be restored to life and to carry on the fight 

for freedom and justice. 

In June 2010, I founded All Girls Allowed. In the past few years, 

we have fought against and tried to end the one-child policy in a 

very different way than what I did in 1989 at Tiananmen Square. 

It was an Abraham, Moses, David vs. Goliath kind of walk with the 

Lord. 

We experienced these verses taught in Sunday School in our 

walk, in our daily walk with the Lord, verses like ‘‘With people, 

this is not possible. But with God, all things are possible.’’ And ‘‘Do 

not overcome evil with evil, but overcome evil with good.’’ ‘‘If you 

abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish 

21 

and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you 

bear much fruit and still prove to be my disciple.’’ 

Our experience has shown that these verses are not only true, 

but possible in our fight to end the one-child policy. I understand 

other witnesses may say that the Chinese Government may never 

end the one-child policy, but you know what? They’re not in control. God is! And His faithful are! Under God’s mighty plan, that 

one-child policy will come to an end. 

God is not a deity up there in the air with no interest in the suffering in China, so our work in the past has shown the good news 

that God has overcome all suffering. That is the true meaning for 

me, the cross: God has conquered all evil through the power of 

Jesus Christ’s death on the cross. 

So with that, it means that not only can we confront the onechild policy, with God we can also overcome it and end it. The 

truth is, the one-child policy is ending step by step. 

So this is what happened. In November 2011 in Rome, I had a 

powerful personal experience with the Lord. As I was crying out for 

the policy to come to an end I felt the words of Jesus in the Beatitudes, ‘‘Blessed are those who are hungry and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.’’ I felt Jesus come down, wept and 

said, ‘‘If nobody else on Earth would do it, I will—that is, end it.’’ 

So in December 2011, I went to a conference, a mission conference in Los Angeles, and there a lady who had the gift of listening from God and declared God is starting the work of ending the 

one-child policy beginning in 2012. 

So in June 2012, a disciple of an American missionary couple 

learned about the Choose Life message and called 500 Chinese pastor leaders to repent to God, to forgive others and ourselves for actions of forced and coerced abortions, just as the Lord promised, ‘‘If 

My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves 

and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then 

I will hear from Heaven and I will forgive their sins and will heal 

their land.’’ 

So the next day, the very next day, June 13, 2012, the story of 

the young mother and the forcibly aborted baby picture—it’s going 

to be graphic, so I apologize for that—was released on the Internet 

and it caused 90 million people to bombard the Internet to protest 

against this brutal policy. 

Within a month, on July 22, 2012, the outcry against the policy 

had caused China’s Family Planning Committee to declare absolutely stopping the late-stage forced abortions. They were silent on 

early-stage forced abortions. Within months, 23 provinces adopted 

that policy on their Web sites. Ever since then we have found very 

few cases, much fewer cases—we only found one case who had a 

forced abortion. When our workers called them, they immediately 

compensated the family. 

By June 1, 2014, 800,000 Chinese believers had received the 

teaching of the ‘‘Choose Life’’ message. That means they learned 

that life starts from conception. In China in general, people 

thought abortion is just taking a piece of tissue out of the body. So 

when that message was taught to them, repentance and crying out 

went throughout the land. 

22 

So November 14, 2013, the Chinese announced they would ease 

the one-child policy to even further relax the condition of the twochildren policy. 

So in 2015, China already had 1 million babies registered for 

birth certificates—as second children registered birth certificate for 

a second child, and by January 13, 2015, more than 600,000 babies 

had been born as second children, and that’s just as big as the entire city population of Boston. 

As you can see, the pictures they promote in the stories are no 

longer a couple with a boy picture, the boy has been replaced by 

a baby girl now in this picture. They’re all wearing pink. It’s the 

same color here with our logo. We have seen this movement continuing to take place, this is the timeline of how the policy has 

been adopted province by province. 

But April 5, 2015, Xinhua Net announced that China would promote a full two-children policy with no conditions. Recently, some 

Family Planning Committee leaders tried to refute the chatters, 

but we know the end is coming near. 

So our recommendation is we urge the Chinese leader to make 

the decision to end the one-child policy once and for all and make 

it an all-children-allowed policy. We invite American leaders to join 

us to embrace this message and support this message on June 1 

and to declare it on China’s Children’s Day. 

Regarding gendercide, as we all know, the one-child policy is a 

massive evil, but they also have a lot of side consequences. It produced massive gendercide. One of every six baby girls are aborted 

or killed. A gender imbalance: 37 million extra men that will not 

find wives. 

Sex trafficking. Sixty percent of worldwide trafficking, sex trafficking, is taking place in China. Children without hukou—13 million. Aging populations show that in 15 years China is going to 

have a population with 400 million people over 60 years old. A 

large percentage of women suffer forced or coerced abortions; this 

shows 86 percent of the women had at least one abortion. 

Domestic violence. Thirty percent of families reported domestic 

violence. Sexual assaults against women and children are very 

high. The UN number is 74 percent. A high percentage of young 

couples under 35 are getting divorced, and 500 women commit suicide daily. 

With these social issues, our work to expose, rescue, and heal in 

the name of Jesus by Simply Love Her has also proven fruitful in 

the past five years. Two thousand mothers and babies have been 

helped by our ministry. Many babies that would not have been 

born otherwise, especially baby girls, have been able to be saved. 

More encouragingly, we also saw the Chinese Government recently, at least from the reports, saying that they are also giving 

financial incentives to families and couples to try to incentivize 

them to have baby girls. 

But our experience is ‘‘just money alone is not enough.’’ The family needs to change the concept to know that men, women, girls 

and boys are all made in the image of God, and because of that, 

we shall cherish them equally, treat them equally. So our recommendation is to end the gendercide by adopting an all-girls-allowed policy. 

23 

So, thank you very much. 

Chairman SMITH. Ling, thank you very much. Thank you for 

your witness. Very often people forget what drives so many of us 

in human rights work, and for me as well. It is my faith in Jesus 

Christ. So I want to thank you for that very strong witness as to 

the why of it, and we are people who believe that faith and works— 

faith without works is dead, but faith with works can accomplish 

a great deal. Even if we have a mustard-seed-like faith, it does 

take a great God to bring it to fruition. So, thank you for that. 

I would like to now introduce a great human rights defender, a 

man who suffered four years—over four years—in prison for defending women, particularly in Linyi, who had been forcibly aborted, by taking up their cause. His epic escape, I think, is without 

parallel. 

The whole country, the world, was riveted as you made your way, 

Mr. Chen, to the U.S. Embassy and when you were, sadly, given 

over to the Chinese Government, and then finally, after a great 

deal of attention brought to your case, released so you can live in 

freedom, you, your wife Weijing, and your children. 

You have mentioned over and over again, and this Commission 

remains steadfast in speaking out on behalf of your nephew and 

your other family members who remain in China, and so know that 

there’s a good, strong bipartisan commitment forever, however long 

it takes, to your family as well. Thank you for speaking out so boldly on behalf of human rights, and especially for those who are suffering the utter cruelty of the one-child-per-couple policy. 

Chen Guangcheng. 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Chai appears in the appendix.] 

STATEMENT OF CHEN GUANGCHENG, DISTINGUISHED FELLOW IN HUMAN RIGHTS, SIMON CENTER ON RELIGION AND 

THE CONSTITUTION, WITHERSPOON INSTITUTE; DISTINGUISHED VISITING FELLOW, INSTITUTE FOR POLICY RESEARCH AND CATHOLIC STUDIES, CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY, 

VIA INTERPRETER JAMES CHENG 

Mr. CHEN. Dear Mr. Chairman, dear Senators, Representatives, 

and Commission members, I am honored to be here today to testify 

before the Commission about the conditions and suffering of women 

in China. 

Let me start with listing the birth control slogan from some of 

the following provinces to address the issue of violent birth control 

in China, which is a matter of life and death. But China’s birth 

control policy is breaking down the traditional morality of the Chinese society. 

In Hunan province, for example, they have a slogan that says, 

‘‘All Villagers Must Be Sterilized Once a Single Villager Violates 

the Birth Quota.’’ In Anhui province they say, ‘‘We’d Rather See 10 

More Tombs Than a Single Baby Born Alive.’’ In Jiangsu, they say, 

‘‘We’d Rather See a River of Blood Than a Single Baby Born Alive.’’ 

In my home province, Shandong, they said, ‘‘We’d Rather See a 

Broken Home Rather Than a Collapsed Country.’’ 

From these slogans you can definitely see a clear picture of the 

bloody and brutal violence resulting from China’s birth control polVerDate Mar 15 2010 11:25 Sep 02, 2015 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00027 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 U:\DOCS\94474.TXT DEIDRE
24 

icy and practices. I remember back in the summer of 1982 that a 

village Party chief said, while at rest, 

‘‘During the birth control movement I went to see a friend who 

had just had an abortion in the hospital. 

‘‘After wandering to the backyard of the hospital, I saw an old 

man trying to remove a pile of dead babies in his two drums, 

and spades pressing down the bodies when it was almost full. 

I saw some of the babies with hair, noses, ears, and some just 

taking the shape of a person, and all sorts of them being carried away to somewhere for burial.’’ 

As you know, birth control in China is almost like taboo, and nobody dares to touch the nerve. To achieve its goal of population 

control, the Chinese Government and the Communist Party has established a vast control and planning policy system to carry out 

this project. The Party has also signaled to those on the ground the 

jailing, beating, and eviction, and demolishing and other policies 

are not beyond the red line, even at the cost of life. 

In my own village and the neighboring villages we often heard 

and saw groups of people, from a dozen to several dozens, and 

headed by the local Communist Party chief, acting like bandits and 

beating villagers and holding them without any legal procedures 

day and night. We could hear screaming and crying during those 

operations. 

I volunteered to help the villagers with my legal knowledge in 

the hope of stopping and preventing such brutal actions from the 

government, and yet I found the law was useless in trying to stop 

these illegal and inhuman practices. The Party committee had ordered local law enforcement authorities like the police department, 

and prosecutors, and the judiciary department not to get involved 

in any of these cases involving violent birth control situations. 

The propaganda officials ordered the media not to report any of 

these violations. So whenever these kinds of human rights violations occurred, the villagers could want to help, want to get help 

from the police, but they were told that this is a government action 

and beyond the scope of their work. The police refused to intervene. 

When a complaint was made to the local prosecutor, it was 

turned down. Even when such a suit was filed in local court, it 

would be rejected with no further consideration. Therefore, the 

media was also not allowed to report so local folks could really not 

find a place to obtain justice. Once such a layman was driven to 

such desperation by lack of hope, he would resort to violence. Only 

when such violence happened, you would see the law enforcement 

flooding in as a tool of the human rights violation at the will of the 

Communist Party. 

As you probably know, in China a married couple must seek a 

permit from the government before pregnancy. With such an official document in hand, the couple can then think of having a baby. 

If pregnant without such a permit, the woman would be summoned 

and forced to report to a local birth control service station. 

If these Communist bandits failed to get the pregnant woman to 

submit to the abortion operation, then they would take away the 

family members, like their uncles and aunts, and siblings, and 

even their neighbors with force, and also in cruelty. They were coerced into fighting between and among each other and they were 

25 

forced to tell the whereabouts of the pregnant women. That kind 

of coerced fighting between them caused great strife among these 

relatives, even hatred. 

What is worse, when they were detained illegally for a period of 

time they had to pay, like 50 to 100 yuan a day, which is what, 

about $10 to $20, in the name of the so-called legal training fee. 

But this is, as a matter of fact, ironically that they pay for what 

they suffered during time at the illegal detention center of the Chinese Government, local government. 

Whenever a pregnant woman without a birth permit was forced 

into the birth control service station, she would be handed over a 

form, the so-called acknowledgement, purporting that such a kind 

of procedure like sterilization or forced abortion was done with her 

consent. If the pregnant woman refused to sign the form, against 

her own will, there would be several strong men to threaten her 

and say, ‘‘Whatever you do, we just put you down in the operation 

room and have the operation done.’’ 

I’m sorry, I must describe a kind of abortion procedure in China 

which is a little bit graphic. During the first three months of pregnancy, a device would be inserted into the vagina and the fetus 

would be cut into pieces inside the womb and then pumped out. 

After six months of pregnancy, a poison is injected into the womb 

to kill the baby and then birth is induced to withdraw the baby 

from the body. Later in pregnancy, at six months or beyond, the 

birth is to be induced and the baby drowned in a water bucket, and 

sometimes it’s brutal, as the doctor would break the neck of a baby 

and throw it into a trash bin. 

During the six-month period of 2005, there were more than 

130,000 forced abortions and sterilizations that took place in Linyi 

city alone, which is my hometown. More than 600,000 family members suffered during this period. This brutality and these crimes 

against women and their families has brought irrevocable physical, 

spiritual, and psychological harm. There were 130,000 forced abortions in a six-month period in 2005, which is the correct number. 

Over the past 35 years, China has killed a total of 360 to 400 

million young lives as a result of its inhuman and violent birth control policy and practices. This brutality still goes on today. Despite 

Chinese Government propaganda of loosening control on the second 

child bearing for some couples in certain conditions, but with no 

significant change. 

Just a few days ago I got a case involving a man who was disabled due to the severe beating by the local government personnel 

just because his wife’s sister had an extra or additional baby without a permit. This inhuman brutality of the birth control policy has 

resulted in society becoming indifferent to life and has diminished 

the dignity of human beings and has broken down the traditional 

morality of Chinese society on life-and-death matters, leading to social decay. 

The birth sex ratio is distorted as a result of the planning birth 

control policy of the Chinese Government. As an old Chinese saying 

goes, a single piece of wood burns long enough, so it’s hard to raise 

a single child in a family. 

These so-called little emperors and little princesses have exhibited selfish character and weak and fragile psyches. Along with 

26 

these issues, China is becoming an old and aging society, which is 

almost like a hidden bomb, with more than a million families who 

have lost their only child. 

A contemporary genocide is taking place in Communist China 

now. It is a horrific crime against humanity. I would make the following proposal. First, the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Government, 

and the administration, along with the international community, 

should take all steps necessary to stop this inhuman cruelty of the 

Communist Party of China. 

It should call for an international tribunal to investigate the 

crimes committed by the Communist regime in China and make 

Communist government officials accountable for their crimes 

against humanity, particularly this kind of family planning leading 

to genocide. To be more specific, those tombs for burying those babies, because of the population and abortion, coerced abortions, can 

be found in today’s China. 

Second, the United States should ban these criminal Communist 

officials from China from entry into the United States, and their 

property in this country should be forfeited. These officials, including the former Security Chief of the Communist Party Zhou 

Yongkang, who has been arrested, actually, on charges of various 

crimes, and the second is Zhang Gaoli, who is the former governor 

of Shandong province and now is the first Vice Premier and Politburo member of the Communist Party. 

Also, Party Chief Li Qun, who is not only a practitioner of violent 

birth control bureaucracy, but is also a leading evil-doer, persecuting my family there. These human rights violators who act 

against humanity must be made accountable. 

I want to thank you very much for all your support, for your tireless work all these years. Thank you so much for your care. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Chen appears in the appendix.] 

Chairman SMITH. Guangcheng, thank you very much for your 

leadership, for your very strong and powerful testimony. 

In 1984, I offered the first amendment to de-fund any organization, including the UN Population Fund [UNFPA], because of their 

complicity in these crimes against women, these crimes against humanity. It passed. Right after that, that became Kemp-Kasten, 

which is current law. Yet, the administration refuses to de-fund the 

UNFPA, despite their complicity in these crimes against women. 

You have made such a powerful call that this is genocide, and 

I do hope that people in this city and in capitals all over the world, 

and at the United Nations recognize this for what it is: it is genocide, the systematic destruction. 

The way the Genocide Convention reads, it is in whole or in part, 

this is a very large part and gendercide, the killing of young girls, 

baby girls simply because they’re female—and I know that Nicholas Eberstadt had done much work on that, as you all have in the 

past. Yet, there is very little being done today to combat this, especially at our government level. 

Let me just say a couple of things and then I’ll yield to my colleagues. I do believe there is breathtaking indifference and outright 

enabling. Has our Nobel Peace Prize-winning President, President 

Obama, defended women and children from China’s one-child-percouple policy? I haven’t heard it. It was several of us who asked, 

27 

when he met with President Hu and then Xi Jinping, to raise this 

issue. There’s been nothing, deafening silence. This testimony of all 

of you hopefully will be a pivot. It’s about time our government engaged this human rights atrocity that’s occurring. 

Guangcheng, your call for an international tribunal. Where is the 

United Nations, their treaty bodies, whether it be the International 

Covenant for Civil and Political Rights or the Human Rights Council, why have they been so silent? Occasionally there’s been a mere 

mention of this somewhere buried on page 54 of a universal periodic review, but nothing that is commensurate with the gravity of 

this genocidal act that is being committed. So I thank you for that 

call for the tribunal, for labeling this, the genocide, for what it is. 

On the visa ban, we have a visa ban, and President Obama is 

not enforcing the law. It couldn’t be more clear. I have the language of the law right here in front of me. It couldn’t be more clear. 

Any complicity—denial of entry into the United States for foreign 

nationals engaged in establishment or enforcement of forced abortion or sterilization policy. It’s been the law of the United States 

since the year 2000. It has not been enforced. It has to be enforced. 

Yesterday, I chaired on the Global Magnitsky Act, which I am 

the prime sponsor of, so that we’ll take the lessons learned from 

the Magnitsky Act and the good work it has done toward Putin’s 

government and those who killed Sergei Magnitsky. 

Well, we already have this law. Why is this not being implemented? We’ve got to ask that question. I hope our friends over at 

the press aisle will ask that question: Mr. President, why are you 

not enforcing this important law? 

One question about the bribes. Reggie, you brought up that huge 

amount of money. Not bribes, the fines. I would suspect on top of 

that would be the bribes paid under the table at times to try to 

plead for the life of the child. Then there’s the confiscation of property and valuables when they expand their efforts to go after the 

family members. As you pointed out, Guangcheng, the man that 

you just heard about that was beaten and is now disabled because 

of his sister-in-law who had a child that was not allowed by the 

government of China. Punishment, punishment, punishment. 

That’s all we hear. And yet when the Chinese Government sends 

their representatives here to the United States, we treat them with 

kid gloves and do not raise these issues in any meaningful way. 

That, too, has to change. 

Finally, your point, Guangcheng, about the slogans, and perhaps 

others might want to speak to this. Even if tomorrow there was no 

one-child-per-couple policy, they have so propagandized and done a 

political coercion, if you will, starting from the youngest levels of 

a child’s life. Better 10 More Tombs Than a Single Baby Born, one 

of the signs you mentioned, Guangcheng. We’d Rather See a River 

of Blood Than a Single Baby Born. What prejudice against the life 

of a child who is so defenseless and so at risk that the government, 

the strong arm of a dictatorship, could come down so hard. 

I remember Harry Wu wrote a book and the title was, ‘‘Better 

Ten Graves Than One Birth,’’ very similar to what you just mentioned a moment ago. This is madness. The fact that the elites, especially, have refused—it’s politically correct not to raise this issue. 

28 

I raise all the human rights issues, as do my colleagues here. We 

care about all the human rights issues: torture, the Internet censorship, and all the other issues. But here we’re talking about an 

assault on women, children, the family, and even the relatives. 

I’d like to yield to my colleagues for any comments they might 

have, and then if you could respond to any of these comments or 

points that you would like. 

Mr. Franks? 

Representative FRANKS. I don’t think there’s anything I can add 

to what Chris has already said. It reflects my perspective completely. We have a bill here in the Congress right now that we 

should be hopefully passing in the next month: Pain Capable, 

which will protect children late in gestation in utero. 

Then we’re going to be hopefully taking up another bill that will 

deal with sex-selection abortions in America. I can’t express to you 

how important I believe your perspective and the information that 

we will have from China and the people at this table will be to that 

debate because it is one that the American people overwhelmingly 

are with us on. 

It’s just a matter of being able to overcome the pro-abortion perspective of saying, ‘‘Oh, no, this isn’t really happening, this isn’t 

really true.’’ You know how it is, this is the way they do it. So I 

just can’t tell you how important I think all of you are to that effort. That’s really how I became acquainted with some of you when 

we were trying to do this before, but persistence will prevail, by the 

grace of God. 

And again, I thank every one of you for what you’re doing. I hope 

you don’t grow weary in well-doing. You are doing a good thing. 

Sometimes those of us at this podium like this are three-fourths exhausted because we had an all-night mark-up, but we believe so 

strongly in what you’re saying and that’s why we’re here. 

I hope you know that somehow the truth has a way of getting 

through. Always throughout history when people were able to finally see the humanity of the victims and the inhumanity of what 

was being done to them, even the hardest heart was changed. So, 

be encouraged. It’s going to happen. God bless you. 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Chairman Franks. 

Before yielding to Randy, as the author of both of those two bills, 

one deals with pain capable babies. We know beyond any reasonable doubt that at 20 weeks the child feels excruciating pain, and 

that applies to American babies who are killed, that applies to the 

Chinese babies who are suffering those later-term abortions, in 

that case under coercion. 

On the sex-selection abortion, Chairman Franks was able to 

muster a majority of House Members to vote for his bill and that 

debate—you know, it’s a little bit on the side here, but it’s not because of sex-selection being a terrible consequence of the one-childper-couple policy, one of the consequences. To hear people who 

claim to be in favor of women’s rights defend the selection of a 

child in utero for extermination simply because she is a girl is the 

height of hypocrisy. 

Randy? 

Representative HULTGREN. Thank you again, Chairman. Thank 

you all for being here. Very, very powerful and so much for us to 

29 

think about, to pray about, to figure out how we can best impact 

and again work together to save lives, to turn this horrible, horrible tragedy around, unthinkable tragedy. 

I do have a couple of questions, if I could open it up to any of 

you for response on this. Just from the title of Guangcheng’s statement of how violent birth control in China is breaking down the 

traditional morality of Chinese society, I want to just hear your 

thoughts of a domino impact of gendercide, of forced abortion, and 

how something or somewhere someone must have thought this was 

a good idea, and yet how destructive it has been for morality, but 

also for the family, for the future, and now it almost feels like this 

desperation to try and react. 

But it almost feels too late without, Chai Ling, as you said, a 

heart change. We had a group that had the opportunity to remember George Washington, and even some of the prayer that has happened by leaders of our nation in the past. We had a group of us 

that had an opportunity to pray last night. But just for me the 

thought that we do have strong arguments and changing minds 

needs to happen, but also changing hearts and how we do that. 

So I’m rambling, but would love to hear from you, or want to 

hear from you, of some of the domino impacts, I guess, of breaking 

down of morality and how that has impacted, I guess, other parts 

of Chinese society and what we can do to turn that back around 

again. Is there hope to turn that back around again? 

Ms. CHAI. Yes. I absolutely believe there’s a hope. That hope is 

really to understand and to know God through Jesus Christ and 

also to understand what life is, when it begins. So what we found 

most exciting about this whole battle, is my life was changed when 

I saw a baby fetus model and an ultrasound picture. I never knew 

that. I myself had four abortions, three were coerced and one I did 

not know better. 

So when we shared this little fetus model in China, in the church 

community, it had a profound impact and caused powerful change. 

People just crawled on the floor just weeping because they did not 

know the fetus is a life and is a growing baby. In their own hand, 

we have allowed this—forced and coerced abortions—to happen to 

the most precious thing and—the baby—is meant to be an inheritance from God. 

People called it tissue, called it a burden, called it something 

that would harm us. So when that teaching of Choose Life was 

happening, first the 500 pastors and leaders repented and God 

blessed with ending forced—late-stage forced abortion. 

When 800,000 people were educated, I believe God allowed it to 

come to a conditional two-children policy. This year, this summer, 

there’s going to be 7 to 8 million people more that will be educated 

by the Choose Life message. There’s a manufacturer working with 

us day and night trying to produce those baby fetus models. Even 

more powerful changes are coming. 

Another key concept is, I think as Chen Guangcheng mentioned, 

the slogans saying we would rather to have broken down families 

but save the nation. When I came to America, one thing very key 

for me was families and nations are not exclusive of each other but 

in the Chinese culture it has been a thousand years of this kind 

30 

of demonic stronghold to say I can either have the family or I can 

have a nation, but I can’t have both. 

I recently, in prayer to process these things, realized, wow, this 

stronghold was so deep in my own life as well. So what dawned on 

me is when Jesus Christ went on the cross He said ‘‘I am doing 

my Father’s will.’’ He went up there to love his Father, but what 

he was also able to accomplish was the biggest thing to bring the 

Kingdom into the world. 

So in the biblical sense, the family is the nation and the nation 

cannot survive with broken families. So that is a concept I am hoping, through these kind of hearings and testimony, I believe the 

leaders of China are watching and I hope they will understand, too. 

Representative HULTGREN. Let me ask a question, Reggie, if I 

could to you. To me, gendercide is so concerning. I’m just wondering, is there any movement of other groups, especially women’s 

groups, of recognizing the threat of gendercide and the damage 

that’s being done there? Is there something that you’re seeing 

there, things again that we can do to see how damaging this is to 

our world, but also specifically to women, and to men as well, just 

the inequality that’s there of 35 million, or I forget the exact number, of men who will not be able to have a spouse. So I just wondered if you’re seeing anything there on gendercide of what we can 

be doing, again, to get more people involved. 

Ms. LITTLEJOHN. [Inaudible.] 

Representative HULTGREN. I guess, both. I would say both, or 

anywhere, I guess, where you would see hope or see opportunity. 

Ms. LITTLEJOHN. Yes. But the thing is that—— 

Representative HULTGREN. Can you turn on your microphone? 

Ms. LITTLEJOHN. You might be aware—— 

Representative HULTGREN. Can you turn on your microphone? 

I’m sorry. 

Ms. LITTLEJOHN. Oh, I’m sorry. You might be aware of the five 

women who have recently been detained in China for doing something as really simple as just objecting to sexual harassment on 

public transportation. The women of China, they can’t even take up 

the most uncontroversial cause, a cause that is something that 

even the Chinese Communist Party wants. I mean, the Chinese 

Communist Party isn’t in favor of sexual harassment on public 

transportation, and yet they jail these women. 

The message, as I interpret it, is you cannot organize to do anything, we are the ones who are controlling everything. Even if 

you’re trying to help us, we’re going to slam you in jail because we 

don’t want you to taking any initiative. 

So I am not aware of groups within China on Chinese soil that 

are attempting to combat gendercide. The Chinese Government is 

cracking down ever more strongly on anyone who wants to assemble for any reason, including reasons that the Chinese Government 

might even agree with. 

In India, there are some efforts to combat gendercide but they 

are really struggling. Actually, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers 

wants to come to India. Congressman Chris Smith has hosted a 

showing of the ‘‘It’s A Girl’’ film on Capitol Hill, a 63-minute documentary. The first half hour is on India, the second half-hour is on 

China. 

31 

So we have a successful campaign to save baby girls in China. 

We’d love to go to India, we’d love to show the film, we’d love to 

get on the news about that to combat the culture of gendercide 

there, because as it is right now, even in India, even though they 

don’t have a totalitarian regime that is crushing any kind of women’s movement, they have this intense shame. 

People do not talk about this. Really, somebody is going to need 

to go over there and show the film, get on television, get on radio, 

speak to people and get a movement to help people in India who 

are really struggling right now to combat gendercide. 

Representative HULTGREN. Well, thanks. Again, we want to help 

with that. 

One last thing with the shame. I’ve got to think the medical community, hearing stories of doctors breaking necks of late-term babies, throwing them away, buckets of water to drown babies, 

there’s got to be a shame level there with the medical community 

as well, who have been trained to save life and protect life, and yet 

clearly are destroying life so much here. 

But I’m going on too long, so I’ll yield back. Thank you so much 

for all of your work. Please keep it up. 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you very much. 

Mr. Pittenger? 

Representative PITTENGER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Ms. Chai Ling, I certainly agree with you that changed lives, 

changed hearts is the ultimate need, that when Jesus Christ 

changed my life, that made everything else different. My work in 

the East has been related toward seeing people know Christ, so I 

do understand that. 

I would say that in our country we have seen at least an awareness, an openness, or recognition that the majority of the American 

people understand the brutality of late-term abortion and they 

gravitate to that. What I heard today from your testimonies—and 

please forgive me that I had to be in two hearings today and I had 

to come in and out. 

Sorry for that—but from what I heard when I’ve read, these are 

the most egregious, horrific crimes against humanity that you can 

hear. I think it is incumbent upon us as Members to share your 

story with our colleagues, to share it with our friends in the media, 

to build a better understanding of how horrific the entire one-child 

policy is and the brutal effect it has had on your entire society. 

So that’s our work. Your ability to help us in that mission to continue, you’ve touched each of us today, all of you have. I am deeply 

grateful for the work that you do to bring us to this point. We have 

much more work to do, but I know each of these individuals on this 

panel very well and you have our heart and commitment to continue in this fight. God bless you. 

Ms. CHAI. Thank you. 

Mr. CHENG. Mr. Chen would like to add. 

Mr. CHEN. Let me add something. Before we knew that the Chinese women and other people have been fighting all the time 

against such kinds of brutal, violent birth control policies and practices, but with little effect. But in the past recent 10 years or so, 

with the Internet available to the ordinary people, we see a different picture now. 

32 

When I reported this kind of thing to the outside world and when 

they knew that I could offer some legal knowledge, they would 

come to me, even from 100 miles away. We find the Internet is a 

very, very powerful tool that the U.S. Government and the people 

around the world can take advantage of and to stand along with 

the Chinese people in fighting for this justice, to end this genocide. 

We want to see freedom of the Internet and the information flow 

into China and outside of China. So that will help everybody involved in the cause understand better how we could do a better job. 

Ms. CHAI. I would like to add my recommendation to the American side. I know there are three additional bills that could really 

help to show a model to China on how they ought to change their 

culture of gendercide as well. One is the sex trafficking bill. I believe—I’m not sure if it’s passed or in the process of being passed. 

Another one is the Girls Count Act. That bill would give children 

without hukou the opportunity to buy or purchase hukou. I highly 

encourage that bill to be passed. 

The third one is a campus safety and accountability bill. We 

learned that U.S. campuses that have 20 percent of the women 

being date raped or raped, and in a recent documentary called ‘‘The 

Hunting Ground,’’ it showed that colleges and universities have become a hunting ground for women to be sexually violated. In 

China, as Reggie just mentioned, those five ladies, just for advocating for no more sexual harassment in a public area, were being 

detained. So to pass the campus safety bill would set a better campus culture and would definitely give an example for Chinese universities and colleges on how they ought to act. I believe once we 

change the culture, we can save lives and we can save women and 

children. 

Chairman SMITH. Thank you. 

Before we conclude I just would like to ask Dr. Eberstadt, you 

know, Dr. Hudson spoke about, and you did as well, a ruthless son 

preference. I think there is an under-appreciation of how, when 

juxtaposed with—even though you say the empirical data is not 

fully there, if you’re only allowed one and you have a son preference and it turns out the woman is carrying a daughter, the pressures will be very, very intense to ensure that she is not born and 

she is killed. 

Would you want to speak to that ruthless son preference issue? 

Because again, our hope is that many of the recommendations you 

make, if there’s anybody listening in China—and there certainly 

are people, I think, who care. You interface with demographers 

who get it. They’re heading toward an implosion economically, and 

societally, in terms of the break-up of the family. 

They cannot long sustain, even at the point of a barrel of a gun, 

the coherence of a nation when you have so decimated its foundation. It will implode. I don’t think the leadership gets that yet, but 

if you could speak to that ruthless son preference issue. 

Mr. EBERSTADT. Thank you, Congressman Smith. I have written 

elsewhere about what I’ve called the ‘‘global flight from the family,’’ 

which is a truly worldwide phenomenon. It may also be regarded 

as a flight by the strong from the weak. It has, I think, grave implications for the future. 

33 

The global war against baby girls is something quite specific. I 

would observe that we know now, and Professor Hudson alluded to 

this, there’s a way back from it. We’ve seen the existence proof that 

there’s a way back from it from South Korea. 

What we saw in South Korea, I think, is the importance of civil 

society and the importance of faith-based groups, and the importance of engaging in a struggle for conscience. It worked in South 

Korea, I think it can work elsewhere. 

Chairman SMITH. Would anybody else like to add something, colleagues or witnesses, before we close? 

Ms. CHAI. Can we suggest to end the hearing with a prayer? 

Chairman SMITH. Before we do that, I do want to ask unanimous 

consent that Marco Rubio, who is the Cochair of our Commission, 

that his full opening statement be made a part of the record. 

Without objection, that is so ordered. 

Please, if you could close with a prayer. 

[The prepared statement of Senator Rubio appears in the appendix.] 

Ms. CHAI. Would that be okay? Yes. Dear Father, Lord Jesus, 

Holy Savior, we thank you for this wonderful opportunity to be together, to testify about the evil of the one-child policy and 

gendercide, and testify also about the triumph of Your victories. We 

thank you for Congressman Chris Smith’s faithfulness and his 

team’s hard work. We thank you for the other ranking congressmen’s support on this issue, and all the distinguished witnesses, for 

their powerful testimonies. 

So God, we know things that are not possible with man but are 

possible with you, and all things are possible. You gave us power 

to bind and loose things. We are here in unity to declare that we 

bind the one-child policy and we loose the All Children Allowed policy in China, we bind up gendercide, we loose the All Girls Allowed 

Policy in China, in India, and in the entire world. In Jesus’ name 

we pray, Amen. 

Chairman SMITH. Amen. The hearing is adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 4:29 p.m. the hearing was adjourned.] 

(35) 

A P P E N D I X 

36 

1 Nicholas Eberstadt, ‘‘The Global War Against Baby Girls’’, The New Atlantis, Fall 2011, 

available electronically at http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-global-war-againstbaby-girls . 

PREPARED STATEMENTS

PREPARED STATEMENT OF NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

APRIL 30, 2015

Members of Congress, Distinguished Co-Panelists, Esteemed Guests: 

It is a pleasure and a privilege to be invited here today to testify on China’s demographic evolution in the era of the One Child Policy. 

The general dimensions of what I have called ‘‘the global war against baby girls1’’ 

will, I am afraid, already be all too familiar to most of you, as will the general nature of that war as it has unfolded in China over the past three and a half decades. 

My testimony this afternoon will therefore simply attempt to provide a few updates on contemporary China’s biologically un-natural sex ratio at birth, and some 

of the prospective questions arising from this artificially induced gender imbalance. 

My testimony will rely upon the graphs and tables that accompany this written 

statement. 

I wish to make four basic points in this statement: 

First: modern China’s un-naturally high sex ratio at birth (SRB) can be understood as a social collision between three powerful forces—ruthless and enduring sonpreference; sub-replacement fertility, which perforce freights the gender of each 

birth with additional import for parents; and inexpensive, universally available prenatal gender determination technology in the context of an unconditional abortion 

policy. 

Ms. Anne Morse of the Population Research Institute has used US Census Bureau 

estimates of China’s fertility levels and gender imbalances to illustrate vividly the 

strong correspondence between lower fertility levels and higher SRBs in China over 

the past generation. [SEE FIGURE 1] Of course this gender imbalance is effectuated 

through mass sex-selective abortion, which presupposes widely available and reliable information on the gender of every fetus. When the One Child Policy commenced in the early 1980s, sonography or ultrasound machines were only found in 

a tiny minority of China’s nearly 3000 counties—mostly of course in urban areas. 

But by 1988, over 90 percent of China’s counties possessed ultrasound machines. 

[SEE FIGURE 2] Thus by the time of China’s 1990 census, all-China second births, 

third births, and all higher order births were reporting sex ratios of 120 or more 

[SEE FIGURE 3]—in contrast to the ‘‘normal’’ ratio of 103–105 typical of large established human populations, so far as we can tell, all around the world today and 

all throughout history. 

Its name notwithstanding, China’s One Child Policy has never actually managed 

to enforce a one-child-only regimen over China as a whole: in recent years, by the 

estimates and projections of the US Census Bureau’s International Data Base, China’s total fertility rate has ranged between 1.5 and 1.6 births per woman per lifetime. In the 1990s and early 2000s, to judge by officially reported census figures, 

sex-selective abortion was not common for first pregnancies in China: instead, parents intervened massively across the country with female infanticide at higher-order 

parities. According to the 2010 census, however, the SRB for first births had risen 

sharply: to almost 114 boys for every 100 girls. This, even as SRBs for some higherbirths appear to have been significantly declining. In effect, sex-selective feticide in 

China appears to have been increasingly ‘‘front-loaded’’ with respect to birth parity 

in recent years: fewer first-time parents than in the past are apparently willing 

nowadays (2010) to take their chances with biologically-determined gender outcomes 

for their firstborn child. 

Please note that China’s involuntary population control policy is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for biologically abnormal distortions of a modern 

society’s sex ratio at birth. Un-naturally high SRBs today are witnessed in culturally Chinese settings like Hong Kong and Taiwan; in parts of India and Pakistan; and in West Asian countries such as Georgia and Armenia. None of those societies maintains a forcible birth control policy. To the extent that China’s One Child 

Policy successfully coerces parents into having fewer children than they would otherwise desire, however, we would expect such pressures to result in higher SRBs 

than would otherwise occur. In 2007 Professor Zeng Yi, one of China’s leading demographers, offered his judgment that approximately half of China’s surfeit of baby 

37 

2Zeng Yi, ‘‘Options for Fertility Policy Transition in China’’, Population and Development Review, Volume 33, Issue 2 (June 2007), pp. 215–246. 3These UNPD estimates and projections are from the ‘‘2012’’ revision (released June 2013) 

for the ‘‘World Population Prospects series; the ‘‘2014’’ revisions are expected later this year. 

boys at that time was due to the One Child Policy.2 He did not, however, explain 

how he derived that approximation. Exactly how much the One Child Policy contributes to China’s SRB imbalance is a complex question to answer—and one that requires further scholarly investigation. 

Second: there is broad agreement among researchers of China’s population trends 

that China’s overall sex ratio at birth is no longer rising, and may indeed have 

begun to decline in recent years—but there remains some disagreement in expert 

circles about the actual levels and trends here, and these differences are for the moment essentially irresolvable given the non-trivial uncertainties and discrepancies 

contained in China’s official demographic data. 

The two leading institutions that produce worldwide demographic estimates and 

projections at a national level are quite arguably the US Census Bureau, with its 

aforementioned continuously updated International Data Base, and the UN Population Division, with its biennially-revised ‘‘World Population Prospects’’ series. One 

can compare their estimates for China’s sex ratio at birth for the One Child Policy 

Era. [SEE FIGURE 4] The Census Bureau and the UNPD present their data slightly differently: UNPD offers five year averages whereas Census gives year-by-year 

estimates or projections, and Census Bureau estimates only start with the year 1990 

while UNPD series trace all the way back to 1950. (UNPD also includes Taiwan in 

its calculations for China, unlike Census Bureau IDB.) Nevertheless, it is apparent 

from Figure 4 that while UNPD and Census Bureau evaluations of levels in trends 

in SRB for China over the past generation are generally quite close, they are not 

identical. Their differences are most pronounced for the most recent years (2010– 

2015): by UNPD’s projections, China’s SRB for those years would have averaged 

116, but Census’ projections for that same period averaged about 112. 

Some of this difference may be explained by the fact that the Census Bureau’s 

projections are more recent than UNPD’s and therefore utilize more up-to-date information.3 But it is also true that the official Chinese demographic data that independent analysts must contend with can afford no certainty concerning sex ratios 

for those born throughout the One Child Policy Era—least so for small children. 

The plain fact is that contemporary China does not yet have a vital registration 

system that provides accurate and comprehensive national data on annual births 

and deaths. Further, as Dr. Daniel M. Goodkind of the US Census Bureau has 

pointed out, there are discrepancies in demographic data from different official Chinese sources: census counts versus hospital records versus primary school enrollment records (primary schooling in theory being universal these days for children 

7 years of age). [SEE FIGURE 5] For example: where school enrollment data would 

have suggested a sex ratio at age 7 of about 110 for boys and girls born in 1993, 

China’s 1995 ‘‘mini-census’’ placed their sex ratio at about 120. These are big differences. 

But even if we limit our gaze to official censuses and ‘‘mini-censuses’’ (1% intercensal sample surveys of the Chinese population) we see major discrepancies. [SEE 

FIGURE 6] The 2005 ‘‘mini-census’’ tells us that the sex ratio for two-year-old children was 125, but the 2010 census says it was 119 for seven-year-old kids in 2010— 

even though the two year olds and seven year olds in question were all born in 

1993. By the same token, the 2000 census places the sex ratio for children born in 

1999 at nearly 123, while the 2010 census puts it at about 117. Cleary all these 

ratios are abnormally high—but such differences raise considerable questions about 

what the true underlying levels and trends in gender imbalance for China may be. 

Differential childhood mortality cannot account for such discrepancies. 

Part of the trouble here seems to be a varying undercount from one census to the 

next for China’s children and youth. [SEE FIGURES 7 THROUGH 9] For males and 

females born from the mid-1980s onward, China’s successive censuses provide significantly different headcounts for any given birth year. The 2010 census, for example, offers a substantially higher headcount for population born in every year of the 

1990s than does the 2000 census. Notably, it is not only girls who seem to have been 

undercounted in the 2000 census—at least in light of the 2010 census: boys also appear to have been undercounted. Such undercounts speak, among other things, to 

the incentives for parents to ‘‘conceal’’ non-quota births when reporting those births 

might risk strictures or other penalties, including financial penalties. We may suspect that such strategic under-reporting of births has continued in recent years, insofar as the One Child Policy itself has continued. But trends and differentials in 

sex-specific under-reporting today remain a major unknown—and how experts treat 

38 

4 UN Population Division, ‘‘World Marriage Data 2012’’, available electronically at http:// 

www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/dataset/marriage/wmd2012/MainFrame.html. 5 Cf. for example Richard Leete, ‘‘The Continuing Flight from Marriage and Parenthood 

Among the Overseas Chinese in East and Southeast Asia: Dimensions and Implications’’, Population and Development Review, Volume 20, Issue 4 (December 1994), pp. 811–829; and Gavin 

W. Jones, ‘‘The ‘‘Flight from Marriage’’ in South-East and East Asia,’’ Asian Metacentre Research 

Paper Series, No. 11 (National University Of Singapore, 2003) available electronically at http:// 

www.populationasia.org/Publications/ResearchPaper/AMCRP11.pdf. 

this unknown necessarily have implications for calculated estimates and projections 

regarding current and future trends in gender imbalance in China. 

Third: China’s imbalanced sex ratios at birth over the past generation already 

portend a virtually unavoidable ‘‘marriage squeeze’’ for the generation to come; but 

that ‘‘squeeze’’ may be even more severe than previously anticipated owing to a new 

trend just now beginning to emerge on the Mainland: a ‘‘flight from marriage’’ by 

young women. 

Today as in the past, China has embraced what might be called a ‘‘universal marriage norm’’—and in recent decades, it has actually also achieved something close 

to universal marriage in practice. According to the 2000 China census, for example, 

just 3.8 % of men and a mere 0.2% of women in their early forties had never been 

married.4 But these were children of the pre-population control era. With rising 

SRBs and continuing sub-replacement fertility, any society with a ‘‘universal marriage norm’’ must perforce be consigned to the prospect of substantial numbers of 

‘‘surplus grooms’’ or effectively unmarriageable young men. 

Professor Zeng Yi and his colleagues are among the demographers who have projected the prospective dimensions of this marriage squeeze for China in the decades 

immediately ahead. [SEE FIGURE 10] In a study from 2008, their work suggested 

that about 25% of Chinese men in their late thirties, and over 20% of those in their 

early forties, would be never-married by the year 2030. The growing army of 

unmarriageable males envisioned in their projections, it is important to note, was 

still predicated on the assumption of near-universal marriage for Chinese women. 

But that assumption is now being challenged by facts on the ground. 

Throughout the rest of East Asia, what has been dubbed a ‘‘flight from marriage’’ 

by women (and also men) has been underway for more than two decades.5 In both 

Japan and South Korea—but also in such quintessentially Chinese settings as Hong 

Kong, Macau, and Taiwan—demographic data have been recording a pronounced 

and still-continuing tendency for women to postpone marriage to ever later ages— 

and, increasingly, to forgo marriage altogether. In all the societies so affected, the 

‘‘flight from marriage’’ begins as an elite phenomenon, starting in large urban areas 

and in the strata with the highest educational attainment—then, gradually or notso-gradually, that elite fashion becomes a mass norm. In Japan and Hong Kong, for 

example, about 23% of women in their late 30s were still single according to recent 

census counts (2010 and 2006 respectively), and about 17% of those in their early 

forties were likewise reportedly never-married. [SEE FIGURES 11 and 12] 

As may be seen in Figures 11 and 12, Mainland China is a latecomer the East 

Asia’s ‘‘female flight from marriage’’ party. Contemporary China’s ‘‘female flight 

from marriage’’ has thus far been more hesitant than those of other postwar East 

Asian locales even after controlling for income: as may be seen, the proportions of 

still single women in their late thirties and early forties for China in 2010 were notably lower than for Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong when those societies had 

levels of GDP per capita comparable to China 2010. [SEE FIGURES 12 AND 13] 

But incipient signs of a ‘‘flight from marriage’’ by women are now evident in China, 

the country’s impending ‘‘marriage squeeze’’ notwithstanding. 

Figures 15 through 17 document the first hints of such trends. [SEE FIGURES 

15 THROUGH 17] The tendency for Chinese women to postpone, or forgo, marriage 

is only just becoming visible at a national level: less than 2% of women in their late 

thirties were never married as of the 2010 census. But that fraction is decidedly 

higher than in previous decades. And just as in the rest of East Asia, the tendency 

for women to postpone marriage, or avoid it altogether, is emerging first in the China’s major metropolitan center and in the most educated segments of Mainland society. Although the national average share of never married women ages 35–39 in 

China in the 2010 census was reported at 1.8%, it was 5.1% in Beijing—still low 

by current East Asian standards, but nevertheless roughly three times the national 

average. Within Beijing, furthermore, nearly 9% of women in their late thirties with 

some college or post-secondary education were never married as of 2010—as were 

roughly 18% of those women in their early thirties. This is precisely what an East 

Asian ‘‘flight from marriage’’ by women would look like in its early stages. 

39 

At this juncture we cannot tell how fast, or how far, the tendency to postpone 

marriage, or forgo it altogether, will progress in Mainland China. But such a trend 

is already definitely evident. And to the extent that this trend unfolds further, the 

magnitude of the ‘‘unmarriageable male’’ problem can be expected correspondingly 

to intensify over the coming generation. 

Fourth: while the human rights implications of China’s One Child Policy are well 

known and widely documented, the question of the program’s actual demographic 

impact is rather less straightforward. Exactly how much has involuntary population 

control shaped (or warped) contemporary China’s population structure? There is no 

immediate, easy answer here because history does not allow re-runs: we do not 

know what China would look like today if Beijing had never enacted that terrible 

social experiment. 

It may suffice here to note, however, that the East Asian rim today exhibits some 

of the world’s very lowest fertility levels—all in places that have never toyed with 

compulsory birth control. In recent years, Japan has reported ‘‘snapshot’’ (i.e., period) total fertility rates below 1.3 births per woman; South Korea’s at times has 

dropped below 1.2; and in some years Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan have all reported TFRs of less than one birth per woman. In this context, fertility levels for 

contemporary China—or even just for contemporary urban China—do not look extraordinarily low. 

So we may reasonably ask: Has forcible population control accelerated modern 

China’s fertility decline? Would fertility levels really be higher today without the 

program? Is it possible they would have been even lower? The simple truth of the 

matter is: we cannot really address these immense issues with any great confidence 

as of yet. From a methodological perspective, estimating the net demographic impact of China’s police state population policy presents an exceedingly difficult analytical challenge. There are of course a number of approaches that could be pursued—but none is without its limitations. Such a project, however, in my view 

strongly merits active pursuit—not least so we may have some sense in advance of 

the magnitude of demographic responses that will be elicited when the One Child 

Policy is finally scrapped. 

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1 ‘‘Birth policy changes are no big deal.’’ http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/indepth/2013–11/16/ cl132893477.htm. 11/16/13. 

2 ‘‘China’s One-Child Policy ‘Reform’ Won’t End Abuses: US Group.’’ http://www.rfa.org/english/ 

news/china/policy07232014161119.html. 7/23/14; ‘‘China Hasn’t ‘Eased’ Its One-Child Policy.’’ 

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/364200/chinahasnt-eased-its-one-child-policy-reggielittlejohn. 11/18/13; ‘‘China Not Easing One Child Policy, Says Campaigner.’’ http:// 

www.zenit.org/en/articles/china-not-easing-one-child-policy-says-campaigner. 11/22/13; ‘‘Little 

Change in Practice for China’s One Child Family Policy.’’ http://www.washingtontimes.com/ 

news/2013/nov/24/little-change-in-practice-for-chinas-one-childfam/?page=all. 11/24/13. 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF REGGIE LITTLEJOHN

APRIL 30, 2015

Honorable members of the Commission, Representative Chris Smith, Senator 

Marco Rubio, distinguished fellow panelists, ladies and gentlemen, I am grateful for 

this opportunity to testify here today, as we commemorate the 35th anniversary of 

China’s brutal One Child Policy. 

I have been asked to comment upon ‘‘China’s insistence on keeping the One-Child 

Policy, despite looming demographic concerns.’’ 

China has not ‘‘eased,’’ ‘‘relaxed’’ or ‘‘abandoned’’ the One-Child Policy, Despite Reports 

China periodically tweaks its One Child Policy. These minor modifications are 

routinely exaggerated. For example, under the misleading headline, ‘‘China to Ease 

One-Child Policy,’’ Xinhua News Agency reported that China would lift the ban on 

a second child, if either parent is an only child, beginning on January 1, 2014. It 

was already the case that couples could have a second child if both parents were 

themselves only children. This minor adjustment did not ‘‘ease’’ the One Child Policy. It merely tweaked it. 

Indeed, in apparent response to quell overly optimistic speculation that this small 

change represents a major reform, Xinhua ran another report soon after the original 

announcement: ‘‘Birth Policy Changes Are No Big Deal.’’ In this second article 

Xinhua states that Wang Pei’an, deputy director of the National Health and Family 

Planning Commission (NHFPC), told Xinhua that ‘‘the number of couples covered 

by the new policy is not very large across the country.’’ 1

The minor modification of the policy that took place on January 1, 2014: 1) did 

not affect a large percentage of couples in China; 2) was not subject to a timetable 

in which to implement it; 3) retained the dreaded ‘‘birth intervals’’ between children 

(if a woman gets pregnant before the interval has lapsed, she risks forced abortion); 

and 4) makes no promise to end the coercive enforcement of the Policy. 

Noticeably absent from the Chinese Communist party’s announcement is any 

mention of human rights. Even though it will now allow some couples to have a second child, China has not promised to end forced abortion, forced sterilization, or 

forced contraception. The coercive enforcement of China’s one-child policy is its core. 

Instituting a two-child policy in certain, limited circumstances will not end forced 

abortion or forced sterilization. 

The problem with the one-child policy is not the number of children ‘‘allowed.’’ 

Rather, it is the fact that the CCP is telling women how many children they can 

have and then enforcing that limit through forced abortion and forced sterilization. 

Even if all couples were allowed two children, there is no guarantee that the CCP 

will cease their appalling methods of enforcement. Regardless of the number of children allowed, women who get pregnant without permission will still be dragged out 

of their homes, strapped down to tables, and forced to abort babies that they want. 

Further, instituting a two-child policy will not end gendercide. Indeed, areas in 

which two children currently are allowed are especially vulnerable to gendercide. 

According to the 2009 British Medical Journal study of data from the 2005 national 

census, in nine provinces, for ‘‘second order births’’ where the first child is a girl, 

160 boys were born for every 100 girls. In two provinces, Jiangsu and Anhui, for 

the second child, there were 190 boys for every hundred girls born. This study stated, ‘‘sex selective abortion accounts for almost all the excess males.’’ 

To say that China has ‘‘relaxed’’ or ‘‘eased’’ its One Child Policy under these circumstances is entirely unwarranted.2 Because of this gendercide, there are an estimated 37 million Chinese men who will never marry because their future wives 

were terminated before they were born. This gender imbalance is a powerful, driving force behind trafficking in women and sexual slavery, not only in China, but in 

neighboring nations as well. 

Furthermore, all the reasons the Chinese government has given for this adjustment are economic or demographic: China’s dwindling labor force, the country’s 

102 

3 ‘‘Critic of One Child Policy in from Cold.’’ http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1224885/ 

critic-one-child-policy-cold 4/28/13; ‘‘Easing One Child Policy May Be Too Late.’’ http:// 

yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/easing-one-child-policy-may-be-too-late. 1/7/14. 4 ‘‘China denies full implementation of ‘two-child policy.’’ http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/ 

2015–04/10/contentl20407560.htm. 4/10/15. 5 ‘‘Why China’s New Family Planning Policy Hasn’t Worked.’’ http://thediplomat.com/2015/04/ 

why-chinas-new-family-planningpolicy-hasnt-worked/. 4/20/15. 6 ‘‘China Couple Speak of ‘Forced Abortion.’’’ http://news.sky.com/story/1150016/china-couplespeak-of-forced-abortion 10/4/13; ‘‘Four Uyghur Women Forced to Abort Their Babies in 

Zinjiang.’’ http://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/abortion12302013050902.html; ‘‘Xinjiang authorities try to force six women to abort for violating one-child policy.’’ http://www.asianews.it/ 

news-en/Xinjiang-authorities-try-to-force-six-women-to-abort-for-violating-one-child-policy29925.html. 12/30/13 7 ‘‘China Couple Speak of ‘Forced Abortion.’’’ http://news.sky.com/story/1150016/china-couplespeak-of-forced-abortion 10/4/13; ‘‘Four Uyghur Women Forced to Abort Their Babies in 

Zinjiang.’’ http://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/abortion12302013050902.html; ‘‘Xinjiang authorities try to force six women to abort for violating one-child policy.’’ http://www.asianews.it/ 

news-en/Xinjiang-authorities-try-to-force-six-women-to-abort-for-violating-one-child-policy29925.html. 12/30/13. 8 ‘‘Forced abortion at 7 Months – The Horror of China’s One Child Policy Sparks Further Outrage.’’http://www.christianpost.com/news/forced-abortion-at-7-months-the-horror-of-chinas-onechild-policy-sparks-further-outrage101764/ 8/7/13; ‘‘Chinese couple seeks damages for forced 

abortion.’’ http://www.worldmag.com/2014/01/chineselcouplelseeksldamageslforlforcedl abortion 1/10/14. 9 ‘‘China: Family Planning Official Stabs Man to Death,’’ http:// 

www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/blog/?p=147. 4/5/11. 10 ‘‘Crazed Chinese father-of-four stabs two government officials to death over one child policy.’’ .’’ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2376771/Chinese-father-kills-1-child-policy-officials-registering-4th-child.html 7/24/13. 11 ‘‘Chinese father of four commits suicide over one-child policy fines so his children can go 

to school.’’ http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/chinese-father-of-four-commits-suicide-over-onegrowing elderly population, and the severe gender imbalance. The adjustment is a 

tacit acknowledgement that continuation of the one-child policy will lead to economic and demographic disaster. The policy was originally instituted for economic 

reasons. It is ironic that through this very policy, China has written its own economic, demographic death sentence. 

Even if China were to completely abandon the One Child Policy and all population 

control now, demographers worry that it might be too little, too late to avert the 

demographic disaster it has caused. As one researcher stated, ‘‘Even if the familyplanning policy were terminated today, it would be too late to solve our rapidly ageing population, the drastic shrinkage of the labour force and the gaping hole in social-security funds that the country has already begun struggling with.’’ 3

Despite the demographic pressure to end the policy, the Chinese government recently denied that it has plans to implement a two-child policy in the near future.4

Continuing the One Child Policy makes no demographic sense. China’s population 

problem is not that it has too many people, but too few young people and too few 

women. Limiting births can no longer justify the policy. 

The One Child Policy will turn 35 on September 25, 2015. The fertility rate has 

fallen to approximately 1.5 children per woman, far below the replacement level of 

2.1. These birth rates are dangerously low. 

In addition, the most recent modification of the One Child Policy has failed to 

produce the expected number of births, as couples are self-limiting the size of their 

families.5 Why, then, does the Chinese Communist Party keep the One Child Policy? 

1) In my opinion, the Chinese Communist Party will never abolish the OneChild Policy, because the government is exploiting the One Child 

Policy as social control, masquerading as population control. 

The One Child Policy was formally instituted on September 25, 1980 in response 

to the population explosion under the Mao era, when the average fertility was 5.9 

children per woman. The One Child Policy began as a means to control the population, however brutal and misguided. The terror of forced abortion and involuntary 

sterilization was a by-product of the Policy. 

Now that keeping the Policy makes no demographic sense, I believe that terror 

is the purpose of the Policy. Forced abortion continues in China, terrifying both 

women and men.6 Some of these forced abortions have been so violent that the 

women themselves sometimes die along with their full term babies.7 Forced abortion 

is so terrifying that victims at times succumb to mental illness and China has the 

highest female suicide rate in the world.8

Men also are terrorized. Some have been killed or maimed for life.9 Others have 

lost control and murdered family planning officials.10 Some men have resorted to 

suicide in protest over the excessive fines imposed by the government.11 The spirit 

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child-policy-fines-so-his-c. 5/26/14; ‘‘Farmer drinks poison after being fined for violations of family planning policy.’’ http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/830847.shtml 12/8/13 12 ‘‘Zhang Yimou’s children spark one-child policy debate.’’ http://en.people.cn/90782/ 

8236414.html. 8/8/13. 13 ‘‘The Brutal Truth: A shocking case of forced abortion fuels resentment against China’s onechild policy.’’ http://www.economist.com/node/21557369. 6/23/12. 14 ‘‘Huge Fines for Violators of One-Child Policy, but Little Accounting.’’ http:// 

sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/12/hugefines-for-violators-of-one-child-policy-but-little-accounting/. 12/12/13; ‘‘Population Control Is Called Big Revenue Source in China.’’ http:// 

www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/world/asia/chinese-provinces-collected-billions-in-family-planningfines-lawyer-says.html. 6/26/13; ‘‘China has collected $3.1 billion from one-child policy violators 

so far this year.’’ http://qz.com/154079/china-has-collected3–1-billion-from-one-child-policy-violators-so-far-this-year/. 12/5/13; ‘‘Chinese Family Planning Officials Misappropriated $260 Million 

in Fines.’’ http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/293660-chinese-family-planning-officials-misappropriated-260-million-infines/. 9/20/13. 15 ‘‘China’s Social Unrest Problem—Testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security 

Review Commission.’’ Murray Scott Tanner, Ph.D. http://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Tanner—Written%20Testimony.pdf. 5/15/14; see also, ‘‘Rising Protests in China.’’ http:// 

www.theatlantic.com/photo/2012/02/rising-protests-in-china/100247/. 2/17/12. 16 ‘‘Family Planning: Enforcing with a smile.’’ http://www.economist.com/news/china/21638131- 

enforcers-chinas-one-child-policyare-trying-new-gentler-approach-enforcing-smile. 1/10/15. If China’s Family Planning Officials were an army, they would tie with North Korea as the sixth 

largest army in the world. ‘‘World’s Largest Armies.’’ http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ 

world/armies.htm. 17 ‘‘Testimony of Mei Shunping, Victim of Five Forced Abortions in China.’’ 

http://archives.republicans.foreignaffairs.house.gov/112/HHRG–112–FA16–WState-ShunpingM– 

20120515.pdf. 5/15/12. 

of the Cultural Revolution lives on in the family planning police, who have been 

able to steal, intimidate, torture and kill with relative impunity. 

The Chinese Communist Party is a brutal, totalitarian regime. It has many 

human rights abuses: the detention and torture of human rights lawyers, activists 

and journalists; religious persecution, the execution of prisoners to harvest their organs for transplant. However egregious, each of these abuses touches only a sliver 

of Chinese society. The One Child Policy is unique in that it touches everyone. 

2) The One Child Policy Is Enormously Profitable for the Chinese Communist Party. 

The One Child Policy’s system of fees and fines is an important source of revenue 

for the Chinese Communist Party. These fines are arbitrary and inconsistently applied throughout China, but may be as much as ten times a person’s annual salary. 

Very few can afford to pay these ‘‘terror fines.’’ In high profile cases, the fines may 

run in the millions of dollars.12

It has been estimated that the Chinese Communist Party has received as much 

as $314 billion in family planning fines since 1980.13 The use of these fines is not 

subject to accountability, so they may be used simply to line the pockets of the family planning officials or to fund other government projects under the table. This system (or lack thereof) provides a strong incentive to keep the Policy in place.14

3) The One Child Policy’s Infrastructure of Coercion Can Be Turned to 

Crush Dissent of Any Kind 

There is growing unrest inside China. ‘‘[I]nternal Chinese law enforcement data 

on so-called ‘‘mass incidents’’—a wide variety of protests ranging from sit-ins to 

strikes, marches and rallies, and even genuine riots—indicated that China has seen 

a sustained, rapid increase in those incidents from 8,700 in 1993 to nearly 60,000 

in 2003, to more than 120,000 in 2008.15 Meanwhile, there are as many as 1 million 

Family Planning Officials.16 This army of Family Planning Officials can be turned 

in any direction to crush dissent of any sort. Does the Chinese Communist Party 

regard this army as necessary to maintain control in a tinder-box situation? 

4) The One Child Policy Breaks Bonds of Trust, Discouraging Dissent 

In addition to official Family Planning Police, the One Child Policy employs a system of paid informants—‘‘womb police.’’ Anyone can inform on an illegally pregnant 

women—her neighbors, friends, co-workers, people in the village who watch women’s abdomens to see who might be pregnant. On May 15, 2012, I testified before 

the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health and 

Human Rights, together with Mei Shunping, a victim of five forced abortions. She 

described the way her factory enforced the One Child Policy. ‘‘If one worker violated 

the rules, all would be punished. Workers monitored each other.’’ The women became informed on one another. Predictably, friendships were destroyed.17

104 

18Testimony of ‘‘Wujian,’’ Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, 11/10/09.http:// 

www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/index.php?nav=cases&nav2=wujian#anchor 19We have found in our ‘‘Save a Girl’’ campaign that the encouragement of modest monetary 

support is enough to make the difference between life and death to a baby girl. ‘‘Twin Girls 

Saved from Abortion in China, Husband’s Family Only Wanted Boys.’’http://www.lifenews.com/ 

2014/05/30/twin-girls-saved-from-abortion-in-china-husband-family-told-wife-they-only-wantedboys/ 5/30/14. 

In addition, if an illegally pregnant women runs away to escape a forced abortion, 

members of her extended family may be detained and tortured.18 This puts enormous pressure on the woman to give herself up for an abortion. The system of paid 

informants and the persecution of family members and neighbors rupture the natural bonds of love and trust in Chinese society. People feel that there is no one they 

can trust. 

Could the Chinese Communist Party be exploiting this rupture in relationship to 

divide and conquer? If people cannot trust anyone, they cannot organize for democracy. 

Conclusion 

In my opinion, the Chinese Communist Party will not relinquish coercive population control because 1) it enables them to exert social control through terror; 2) 

it is a lucrative profit center; 3) it provides and infrastructure of coercion that can 

be used to crush dissent of any sort; and 4) it ruptures relationships of trust, so 

that people cannot organize for change. I believe that the Chinese Communist Party 

is maintaining its grip on power by shedding the blood of the innocent women and 

babies of China. 

China’s One Child Policy is the largest and most disastrous social experiment in 

the history of the world. Through it, the Chinese Communist Party boasts that it 

has ‘‘prevented’’ 400 million births. This is the hallmark of Communist regimes— 

the peacetime killing of their own citizens. Now China faces demographic disaster. 

Ironically, the Chinese Communist Party instituted the One Child Policy for economic reasons, but through it, it has written its own economic death sentence. 

Policy Recommendations: 

We respectfully request that the U.S. government urge the Chinese government 

to: 

• Abolish the One Child Policy and all forms of coercive population control; 

• Offer incentives for couples to have girls; 19

• Offer pensions to couples who do not have a son, ensuring that parents of 

girls will not become impoverished in their old age; and 

• Abolish the hukou system, so that all children will have access to healthcare 

and education. 

In addition, we respectfully request that the U.S. government: 

• Establish principles of Corporate Social Responsibility, to ensure that U.S. 

corporations do not allow coercive population control measures to be taken 

against their employees; and 

• Defund UNFPA, unless and until UNFPA stops supporting or participating 

in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization in China, in violation of the 1985 Kemp-Kasten Amendment. 

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PREPARED STATEMENT OF CHEN GUANGCHENG

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH: HOW VIOLENT BIRTH CONTROL IN CHINA IS

BREAKING DOWN THE TRADITIONAL MORALITY OF CHINESE SOCIETY

APRIL 30, 2015

To address the issue of violent birth control in China, let me start by listing birth 

control slogans from some of the following provinces: 

In Yunnan: All villagers will be sterilized once a single villager violates the birth 

quota. 

In Sichuan: Anyone avoiding sterilization must be put in custody; anyone avoiding 

sterilization must be punished by bulldozing their house; anyone avoiding abortion 

shall surrender their cattle and house. 

In Anhui: We’d rather see ten more tombs than a single baby born alive. 

In Jiangsu: We’d rather see a river of blood than a single baby born alive. 

In Guangxi: An IUD must be secured after the first birth; sterilization must follow 

the second; the third and fourth must be killed. 

In Shandong: We’d rather see a broken home than a collapsed country. First birth 

is OK, the second must be followed by sterilization, or law enforcement steps in. 

From the above slogans, you can definitely get a clear picture of the bloody and 

brutal violence resulting from China’s birth control policies and practices. 

Back in the summer of 1982, a village Party chief said while at rest, ‘‘During the 

birth control movement, I went to see a friend who had just had an abortion in a 

hospital. After wandering to the backyard, I saw an old man trying to remove dead 

babies in his two buckets, and spades pressing down bodies. I saw some of the babies with hair, or a nose, or ears, some just taking the shape of a person . . . all 

sorts of them being carried away to somewhere for burial.’’ 

Birth control in China is taboo, as nobody dares to touch a nerve. To achieve its 

goal of population control, the Communist Party has established a vast system to 

carry out its policy. The Party has also signaled to those on the front line that 

jailing, beating, eviction, demolition and other such policies are not beyond the red 

line, even at the cost of life. In my village and neighboring villages, we could often 

hear and see groups of people, from a dozen to several dozen and headed by their 

local party chiefs, acting like bandits, beating villagers, and holding them in defiance of legal procedures, day and night. We could hear screaming and crying during 

these operations. 

I volunteered to help the villagers with my legal knowledge in the hope of stopping and preventing such brutal actions. Yet, I found out the law was useless in 

trying to stop these violent birth control practices. The Party committee had ordered 

local law enforcement authorities such as the police, the prosecutors, and the judiciary NOT to get involved in such cases. 

Whenever this kind of human rights violation occurred, villagers would call the 

police for help, but they were told that this was a governmental action, and beyond 

their scope of work, and so the police refused to intervene. When a complaint was 

made to a local prosecutor, it would be turned down; even when such a suit was 

filed in a local court, it would be rejected with no further consideration. Therefore, 

the local folks could not find a place to obtain justice. Once a layman was driven 

to such desperation by lack of hope, he would resort to violence. And only when such 

violence happened would you see law enforcement flooding in, tools of human rights 

violation at the will of the Party. 

In China, a married couple must first seek a permit from the local birth control 

committee before pregnancy. With such an official document in hand, the couple can 

then think of having a baby. If pregnant without such a permit, the woman would 

be summoned and forced to report to a local birth control service station, where a 

Communist party official would force her to sign a form of acknowledgement prior 

to a forced abortion, purporting that such a procedure (including sterilization) was 

done with her consent. Of course, NONE of these women are willing to lose their 

own babies, but rather are coerced to place their fingerprint on the form against 

their will. 

If these Communist bandits failed to get the pregnant woman to submit to a 

nighttime operation, then they would take away family members, relatives such as 

uncles and aunts, siblings, and even other neighbors within a diameter of 50 meter 

of the target, usually including 10–20 households, by force, often with cruelty. These 

relatives would be coerced into fighting before being taken away for illegal detention. Those who suffered would have to pay 50–100 yuan per day, which is about 

$10–$20, in the name of legal training fee. As a matter of fact, they have to pay 

118 

for their suffering. This illegal detention and torture has caused great strife, even 

hatred, among relatives. 

Regarding forced abortion in China, during the first three months of pregnancy, 

a device shall be inserted into the vagina and the fetus cut into pieces inside womb, 

then pumped outside. Up to the sixth month of pregnancy, a poison shall be injected 

into womb to kill the baby and birth induced to withdraw the baby from out of the 

body. Late in pregnancy, at six months or beyond, birth is to be induced and the 

baby drowned in a water bucket. Sometimes, a doctor would break the neck of a 

baby and throw it into a trash bin. 

During a six-month period of 2005, more than 130,000 forced abortions and/or 

sterilizations took place in Linyi city ALONE; more than 600,000 family members 

suffered during this period. This brutality and these crimes against women and 

their families have wrought irrevocable physical, spiritual and psychological harm. 

Many families have lost hope and ended up broken. 

Over the past 35 years, China has killed a total of 360 to 400 million young lives 

as a result of its inhumane and violent birth control policies. This brutality still goes 

on despite China’s propaganda of loosening control on the second child bearing for 

some couples on certain conditions. Just a few days ago, I got a case involving a 

man who was disabled due to a severe beating by local government personnel just 

because his sister-in-law had had an additional baby without a permit. 

This inhumane brutality has resulted in society becoming indifferent to life and 

has diminished the dignity of the human being, thus breaking down the traditional 

morality of Chinese society on life-and-death matters and leading to social decay. 

The ratio of the sexes to one another is distorted - as an old Chinese saying goes, 

a single piece of wood burns hardly long, so is hard to raise a single child 

in a family. These so-called little emperors and little princesses exhibit a selfish 

character and a weak and fragile psyche. Along with these social issues, China has 

becoming an aging society, with more than a million families who have lost their 

ONLY child. . . 

A contemporary genocide is taking place in Communist China now; it is a horrific 

crime against humanity. I would make the follow proposal: 

(1) The United States Congress, along with the international community, 

should take all steps necessary to stop the inhumane cruelty of the Communist 

Party; it should call for an international tribune to investigate crimes committed by the Communist regime in China, and make Communist officials accountable for their crimes against humanity, particularly this kind of genocide. 

(2) The United States should ban those criminal Communist officials from 

entry into the U.S., and their property in this country should be forfeit. These 

officials include former security chief Zhou Yongkang (who has been arrested 

on charges of various crimes); Zhang Gaoli (former governor of Shandong Province, now first Vice Premier and Politburo member); and Linyi City Party Chief 

Li Qun, who is not only a practitioner of violent birth control, but also the leading evildoer persecuting my family. These human rights violators who act 

against humanity must be made accountable. 

Thank you very much for your attention to the worsening human rights situation 

in China. 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF HON. CHRISTOPHER SMITH, A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE FROM

NEW JERSEY; CHAIRMAN, CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA

APRIL 30, 2015

Today’s hearing will examine the looming demographic, economic, and social problems associated with China’s ‘One-Child Policy’ and seek recommendations on how 

the international community can assist China to address them. 

China’s one child policy is state sponsored violence against women and children, 

including and especially the girl child, and constitutes massive crimes against humanity. 

With us today is Chen Guangcheng, the Chinese legal advocate who was jailed 

for five years for trying to protect women facing forced abortions and sterilizations. 

In his testimony, Chen gets it right. He calls China’s coercive population planning 

policies ‘‘genocide.’’ He calls for an international tribunal to investigate these crimes 

against humanity and calls on the Administration to enforce existing US law and 

bar Chinese officials from the U.S. 

In 1999, I wrote a law—The Admiral James W. Nance and Meg Donovan Foreign 

Relations Act for fiscal years 2000–2001. That bill was signed into law on November 

29, 1999. 

119 

Section 801 of Title VII of that Act requires the Secretary of State not to issue 

any visa to, and the Attorney General not to admit to the U.S. any foreign national 

whom the Secretary finds, based on credible evidence, to have been directly involved 

in the establishment of forced abortions or forced sterilizations. 

To the best of my knowledge under President Obama, almost one has been rendered inadmissible. It has been a gross failure of the Obama Administration not to 

enforce existing law, particularly on those in China who so brutally violate women’s 

rights. 

The ‘‘One Child Policy’’ will soon mark its 35th anniversary. That’s 35 years of 

telling couples what their families must look like; 35 years of forced and coerced 

abortions and sterilizations, 35sx years of children viewed by the state as ‘‘excess 

baggage’’ from the day they were conceived. 

The human rights violations associated with this policy are massive. We have only 

recently begun to fully understand the demographic consequences and what that 

could mean for China, for China’s neighbors, and for the world. 

Just over a year ago China announced a slight change to the policy—allowing couples in which one parents is an only child to have two children. 

The announcement was followed by a tidal wave of international media coverage 

trumpeting this ‘‘relaxation of China’s one-child policy’’ and speculating that the policy was on its way out. 

The policy change was really only minimal and was grossly inadequate in light 

of the coercion the Chinese government has employed for three decades against 

women and children. Left unchanged was the Chinese government’s strangle-hold 

on deciding who can have children, when they can have children and how many 

children a family can have. 

Left unchanged are the coercive measures and fines that can be taken if a woman 

is found to be carrying a child without permission. Left unchanged is the large bureaucracy that enforced and continues to enforce the policy of population control. 

The minimal change also does nothing to address the three decade decimation of 

female population. Approximately 40 million women and girls are missing from the 

population—a policy that can only be accurately described as gendercide. The extermination of the girl child in society simply because she happens to be a girl. 

China’s birth limitation policy continues to increase the gender imbalance—making China a regional magnet for sex and bride trafficking of women from neighboring countries such as Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and North Korea. 

This is unacceptable, it is horrific, it is tragic, and it is wrong. We are waiting 

for the coercive population planning polices to end. Yet, the Chinese government 

continues to deny there will be an end. 

Of course, ending this brutal policy would be the moral thing to do. And everyone 

is increasingly aware that ending this policy would also be in the Chinese government’s interest. 

As the Economist noted just last week, by 2025, nearly 1 in 4 Chinese citizens 

will be over the age of 60. At the same time, China’s working-age population has 

shrunk in each of the past three years. These factors are likely to hurt not only government balance sheets but also economic growth in China. This should be of particular concern to the Chinese Communist Party, as economic growth is the primary 

source of their legitimacy. 

The government should also be concerned about the dramatically skewed gender 

ratio. It may be fashionable for the media the write stories about ‘‘leftover women,’’ 

but I know—and I’m quite sure the Chinese government knows—that its real problem is the 30 million young men who will be unable to find wives in the coming 

years. 

The government should be concerned—as should China’s neighbors and the international community—of the consequences of 30 million men, unable to find companionship, unable to start families, coming of age precisely at the time that China’s 

economy is creating fewer jobs to employ them. 

We continue to see increased human trafficking for forced marriages. NGOs working in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Burma have all reported an increase in trafficking 

of women and girls into China in recent years. Even if China ends the one-child 

policy tomorrow, given the current demographics, this problem of a shortage of 

women in China will only get worse in the coming decade. 

Given this current realities, it is frankly baffling that China would continue to 

implement its brutal policy of population control. This is a policy that is hated by 

the Chinese people, recognized as a drain on China’s social and economic development, destructive of traditional family relationships, and criticized globally. 

China’s women and girls have borne the brunt of the one-child policy over the 

past three and a half decades. All of China’s society will feel the effects of this misguided and inhuman policy for decades to come. 

120 

I urge the government to do what is right, not only of its people, but what is clearly in its own interest, and end this policy now. 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF HON. MARCO RUBIO, A U.S. SENATOR FROM FLORIDA; 

COCHAIRMAN, CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA

APRIL 30, 2015

I’d like to begin by thanking Chairman Smith for his unwavering leadership on 

this issue. 

Nearly 35 years ago, the communist regime in China enacted its ‘‘One-Child Policy,’’ one of the most disastrous and immoral social policies in human history. It was 

the communist regime’s ill-conceived ‘‘solution’’ to help curb population growth and 

boost economic development. 

The One-Child Policy banned most Chinese couples from having more than one 

child. When couples conceived a second child, the Chinese government forced them 

to eliminate him or her, by any means necessary—including forced abortions. However, because of cultural norms that place a premium on boys, the policy’s victims 

also included first-conceived children simply because they happened to be girls. In 

addition, Chinese women who gave birth to baby girls were indirectly victims of this 

policy because many ended up being shunned by their husbands, families, and society. 

For over three decades, China’s One-Child Policy, combined with the preference 

for sons, has condemned an unknown number of Chinese girls—who the policy 

helped deem unwanted or ‘‘surplus’’—to abortion, infanticide, and abandonment. 

The result is a radically skewed sex ratio, and—by the Chinese government’s own 

estimates—30 million more men than women by 2020. No one knows for sure what 

such a large surplus of males will mean for Chinese society, but many experts have 

predicted, among other consequences, an increase in human trafficking for the purposes of prostitution and forced marriages. Many of China’s neighbors can attest to 

this reality. 

China’s One-Child Policy demands the attention of American policymakers not 

only because it is a grotesque violation of basic human rights, but also because there 

will be a growing number of involuntary bachelors and the likely impact this group 

may have on internal social unrest and broader regional stability. 

The One-Child Policy has also contributed to a large number of unregistered children in China. The Economist has done an excellent job of documenting in several 

reports in recent years, noting that today there are about 13 million Chinese who 

lack household registration certificates, many of them because they were born in 

violation of the One-Child Policy. While it is technically illegal to withhold registration from ‘‘out-of-plan’’ children, in practice, many local family planning officials 

refuse to register these children as a way to force parents to pay large fines. In 

other cases, parents who know they will be unable to pay family planning fines do 

not even try to have their so-called ‘‘illegal’’ children registered. Not having this certificate means they can’t go to school, get a job, get married or receive state benefits. 

They have no access to China’s already flawed legal system. They can’t even escape 

this misery by buying plane or train tickets so they can relocate. Over time, failing 

to register children at birth leaves them vulnerable to human trafficking and exploitation. 

Just over a year ago, the Chinese government relaxed this disastrous policy. However, innocent Chinese parents are still forced to endure abortions and sterilizations 

in the parts of the country that are still subject to it. The shift in policy was not 

an admission that the government had perpetrated a horrific human rights abuse 

against its own people. Rather, it was based on the recognition that China now faces 

serious demographic decline in the coming decades if the status quo remains intact. 

I am actively trying to address both the problem of unregistered children and China’s sex-ratio imbalance through legislation I’ve introduced called the Girls Count 

Act. 

The Girls Count Act would direct current U.S. foreign assistance to support the 

rights of women and girls in developing countries by working to establish birth registries in their countries. While China already has a birth registration system, the 

Girls Count Act includes provisions to coordinate with the private sector and civil 

society organizations to advocate for the registration of all children. Of course, the 

best way to ensure that all Chinese children are registered is to remove the fines 

and other punishments for ‘‘out-of-plan’’ children; however, until this happens, encouraging local NGOs to work with parents to register their children and, if necVerDate Mar 15 2010 11:25 Sep 02, 2015 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00124 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6621 U:\DOCS\94474.TXT DEIDRE
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essary, to take legal action against local governments who refuse to register children, would be a positive step. 

In addition to the focus on registration, the Girls Count Act would support programs to help increase property rights, social security, home ownership, land tenure 

security, and inheritance rights for all citizens, and women in particular. Women 

in China often face difficulty protecting their property rights. In urban settings 

women may face pressure to keep their names off the deed of their home in order 

to allow their husbands to save face, while in rural areas women lose their land 

rights when they marry outside of their home villages. Yet as one of our witnesses 

today, Professor Hudson, will discuss, supporting property rights for women is crucial for raising the status of women and girls within the family and society as a 

whole. By working to raise the status of women, we can get at one root cause of 

the gender imbalances in China and elsewhere—the preference for sons. This Act 

is but one way we can address the societal consequences of China’s disastrous OneChild Policy. 

Perhaps most regrettably, time and again this Administration has failed to 

prioritize human rights in its dealings with the Chinese government—at times going 

so far as to convey both indirectly, and directly, that these issues can be pushed 

to the sidelines in our bilateral relations. The Obama Administration has contributed millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to the United Nations Population Fund, an 

agency which has been complicit in China’s One-Child policy. It is time for American foreign policy to reflect American values. The U.S. must continue to advocate 

for the complete elimination of the One-Child policy and the rights of all Chinese 

citizens, including the unborn, to live up to their God-given potential. 

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SUBMISSION FOR THE RECORD

POPULATION CONTROL IN CHINA: 

STATE-SPONSORED VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND CHILDREN

APRIL 30, 2015

Witness Biographies 

Nicholas Eberstadt, Ph.D., Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy, 

American Enterprise Institute 

Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. A political economist and demographer by training, he is 

a senior advisor to the National Bureau of Asian Research, and has served on the 

visiting committee at the Harvard School of Public Health, the Global Leadership 

Council at the World Economic Forum and the President’s Council on Bioethics. He 

has also served as a consultant to the World Bank, Department of State, U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Bureau of the Census. With numerous 

publications on demographics in East Asia, Dr. Eberstadt received his Ph.D., 

M.P.A., and A.B. from Harvard University, and his M.Sc. from the London School 

of Economics. 

Valerie M. Hudson, Ph.D., Professor and George H.W. Bush Chair, Bush 

School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University 

Valerie Hudson is Professor and George H.W. Bush Chair in the Bush School of 

Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. Her co-authored book, 

Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population, received 

two national book awards and widespread media coverage for its unique insights 

into the possible consequences of Asia’s gender imbalance. Dr. Hudson has developed a nation-by-nation database on women, The WomenStats Project, to facilitate 

empirical research on the status of women globally. She is founding editorial board 

member of Foreign Policy Analysis, and serves on the editorial boards of Politics and 

Gender, and International Studies Review. Dr. Hudson received her Ph.D. in political science at the Ohio State University. 

Reggie Littlejohn, Founder and President, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers 

Reggie Littlejohn is Founder and President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, 

a broad-based international coalition that opposes forced abortion and sexual slavery in China. Ms. Littlejohn is an acclaimed expert on China’s One-Child Policy, 

having testified six times before the U.S. Congress, three times before the European 

Parliament, and presented at the British, Irish, and Canadian Parliaments. She has 

briefed officials at the White House, Department of State, United Nations, and the 

Vatican. Her ‘‘Save a Girl’’ campaign has saved more than 150 baby girls from sexselective abortion or grinding poverty in China. A graduate of Yale Law School, Ms. 

Littlejohn was named one of the ‘‘Top Ten’’ people of 2013 by Inside the Vatican 

magazine. She and her husband are raising as their own the two daughters of jailed 

pro-democracy dissident Zhang Lin. 

Chai Ling, Founder, All Girls Allowed 

Chai Ling is Founder of All Girls Allowed (‘‘In Jesus’ Name, Simply Love Her’’), 

a nonprofit organization which seeks to expose the injustices of China’s one-child 

policy and rescue girls and mothers from gendercide. A leader in the 1989 

Tiananmen Square student movement and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Ms. Chai escaped from China and received her MPA from Princeton and MBA from Harvard. 

She is the founder of Jenzabar, a company that provides higher education software 

management solutions, and co-founder of the Jenzabar Foundation, which supports 

the humanitarian efforts of student leaders. Ms. Chai is also author of A Heart for 

Freedom, a memoir detailing her journey from a fishing village in rural China to 

Tiananmen Square and then America. 

Chen Guangcheng, Distinguished Fellow in Human Rights, Simon Center 

on Religion and the Constitution, Witherspoon Institute; Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies, Catholic 

University 

Chen Guangcheng is a Chinese legal advocate and activist. Mr. Chen is from rural 

China, where he advocated on behalf of people with disabilities, and exposed and 

123 

challenged abuses of population planning officials, including forced abortions and 

sterilizations. Mr. Chen was imprisoned for his activism for four years. Following 

two years of house arrest, Mr. Chen escaped confinement in 2012 and came to the 

U.S. with his family. His now famous escape from China is detailed in a recently 

published memoir, The Barefoot Lawyer: A Blind Man’s Fight for Justice and Freedom in China. In addition to his positions at the Witherspoon Institute and Catholic 

University, Mr. Chen is also a Senior Distinguished Advisor to the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice. 

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