china

"Chinese officials say they will begin studying how to move away from the country’s one-child restriction, but caution that any changes would come gradually and would not mean an elimination of family-planning policies. Though enforcement of the policy has softened in many places, there are still reports of forced sterilizations and abortions."

"The situation in China is different from that overseas. Other countries also have families who have lost an only child, but not as many. Such parents comprise just a small segment in other countries, but since family-planning is a national policy in China, this demographic group has ballooned. Among the Chinese up to 25 years old, four out of every 10,000 die for various reasons every year. This translates into 76,000 deaths each year. Over the past few decades, some 10 million families have been affected by these deaths."

"After the signing of China's One-Child Policy in 1979, all married urban couples were allowed to only have one child. This creates a typical family of four grandparents and two parents to one singleton child (also referred to as an only child). This singleton child would therefore not be replacing the prior generations, dramatically reducing the expected population growth within the country. Enforcement of this policy is held at the provincial level. For any additional child, the couple must pay a fine based upon the province of residence, family income, etc."

"The purpose of the family-planning policy was not to make hundreds of families lose their only child, but this situation did occur. If the government does not address this, the situation will only get worse."

"The one-child policy was designed in 1980 as a temporary measure to put a brake on China’s population growth and to facilitate economic growth under a planned economy that faced severe shortages of capital, natural resources, and consumer goods. However, the answer to China’s underdevelopment did not come from its extreme birth control measures, but from reform policies that loosened state control over the economy. China’s economic boom over the last few decades has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, sent almost 100 million young men and women to college, and inspired generations of Chinese, both young and old, to purse their economic goals. As observed in many other countries and societies, socioeconomic and cultural transformations accelerated the pace of fertility decline. By the turn of the new century, China’s fertility was well below the replacement level, and China began to face the mounting pressures associated with continued low fertility. To continue the one-child policy within such a demographic context was clearly no longer defensible."

"Finally, the jury is still out on how Chinese people will respond to this loosening of the rules. One of the side-effects of the old policy is that there is now an expectation that parents will spend so much money and resources on a child, that even many middle class couples say they cannot comprehend being able to afford two children.5 China therefore may continue to have a generation of children who feel either lucky or lonely, or both."

"China’s one-child policy will be remembered as one of the costliest lessons of misguided public policymaking. Contrary to the claims of some Chinese officials, much of China’s fertility decline to date was realized prior to the launch of the one-child policy, under a much less strict policy in the 1970s calling for later marriage, longer birth intervals, and fewer births. In countries that had similar levels of fertility in the early 1970s without extreme measures such as the one-child policy, fertility also declined, and some achieved a level similar to China’s today. While playing a limited role in reducing China’s population growth, the one-child policy in the 35 years of its existence has created tens of millions, perhaps as many as 100 million, of China’s 150 million one-child families today. For these families, the harm caused by the policy is long-term and irreparable."

"Though often labeled one of China's most draconian laws, China's one-child policy, introduced at the end of the 1970s and abandoned at the beginning of 2016, achieved what it set out to do -- rein in growth of the country's already vast population. More than three decades on, as economic prosperity and nature have taken their course, the country faces a new demographic issue: it looks set to become old before it becomes rich."

"In China, parents have historically preferred sons to daughters and in some circumstances discarded daughters upon birth. In the 1960s, when fertility was high and infant mortality was low, this pattern was temporarily muted by the fact that most mothers were likely to have at least one surviving son without resorting to sex selection. However, while the female deficit was reduced, high fertility and low infant mortality were contributing to unsustainable population growth."

"When you create a system where you would shrink the size of a family and people would have to choose, then people would ... choose sons."

"The fertility policy in China is enforced by a complex system of financial disincentives for excess fertility, including reduction of land allotments, denial of public services, and fines for unauthorized births."

"While the sex ratio distortion in China is a long-standing demo-graphic pattern, fertility policies instituted to slow population growth have exacerbated the female deficit. Under the One Child Policy, parents in China who exceed their fertility limit are forced to pay a fine and are subject to a variety of other monetary punishments, including the seizure of property and forced dismissal from government employment."

"As a result of the one-child policy and the tradition of male heirs, there is currently a national gender imbalance. In China, there are 30 million more men than women."

"The policy led to sex-selective abortions or infanticide targeting girls, because of a centuries-old social preference for boys."

"Female infanticide and sex-selective abortions are one of the many unintended consequences of the one-child policy. For every 118 boys in China, there are now only 100 girls."

"For more than 35 years, China enforced a controversial one-child policy initially imposed to halt a population explosion. Its replacement, a two-child limit, failed to result in a sustained surge in the number of births as the high cost of raising children in Chinese cities deterred many couples from starting families."

"The one-child policy, however, extends beyond the borders of mainland China. Throughout the globe, many children adopted from China have been trafficked into orphanages. Women are currently being trafficked from Myanmar, due to the gender imbalance, to marry Chinese men. The lesson from the impact of the one-child policy is that when a government regulates a woman’s reproductive rights, it is detrimental for the world."

"A boom in second children was exactly what the central government was hoping for when it announced the lifting of the world’s most controversial family planning scheme, commonly known as the “one-child policy” in October 2015. As of 2015, after 35 years of severe restrictions, the demographic implications for the 150 million families in China of having only one child were becoming increasingly apparent and the government was forced to act in an attempt to, at least in part, correct an upcoming demographic disaster for the rapidly ageing country."

"For China’s leaders, the controls were a triumphant demonstration of the party’s capacity to reshape even the most intimate dimensions of citizens’ lives. But they bred intense resentment over the brutal intrusions involved, including forced abortions and crippling fines, especially in the countryside."

"In Guangxi Province, where family-planning regulations are strictly enforced, parents trying for sons sell their baby girls on the black market. At the time, 80 percent of trafficked babies were girls, according to a Chinese academic."

"That longstanding policy, enforced with harsh consequences, fostered an anti-natalist mindset that Party slogans cannot easily change. The Party has never openly acknowledged that the policy was wrong—only that it was “adjusted”—meaning there is no moral reset, no cultural accountability, and no space for genuine persuasion. You cannot ask people to have more children while refusing to admit that you [had] previously unjustly punished them for doing just that."

"For thousands of years, sons have been highly revered in Chinese culture. Sons were expected to carry on the honor of the family name, wealth, and the expectation to provide for his parents. Males dominated all aspects of Chinese life. In 1979, China introduced one of the world's most extreme state mandated policies for population control, one in which all married couples were to be restricted to having only one child. Even immediately after its implementation, the Chinese continued to believe in this cultural value in males."

"While some couples have complied with the government's family planning policy, others choose to avoid it. Some couples have found this population control policy to contradict their own beliefs; rather than adapting to the country's mandated policy, they move from Mainland China so that the policy does not apply to them anymore. Some immigrate to other nations where they are allowed more freedom in their reproductive choices. Others move to Chinese territories such as Hong Kong or Macau, who have been granted a 50-year grace period after the transfer of colonial rule to Chinese rule. While these territories will eventually come under Chinese rules and regulations, at this moment they have their own government and policies in place. The One-Child policy does not apply there; therefore, families are moving from Mainland China in order to have more children."

"Why did we follow such a wrong policy for so long? The Chinese government doesn’t want to admit it’s wrong. It says the policy was right but now is the time to change. If it just says the policy was wrong, the public will become angry."

"It’s not just a problem of whether you permit ordinary people to have one or two kids. It’s about returning their reproductive rights to them. In over 200 countries and regions around the world, which of them nowadays controls people’s reproduction like this?"

"As an old Chinese saying goes, none but the wearer knows where the shoe pinches. As a member of a generation that experienced and, in fact, sacrificed to make the family planning policy a success, we know only too well that it is a sacrifice that had to be made for the betterment of the country and the Chinese people."

"The problem for China of not having children must be very painful, because the pyramid is then inverted and a child has to bear the burden of his father, mother, grandfather and grandmother. And this is exhausting, demanding, disorientating. It is not the natural way. I understand that China has opened up possibilities on this front."

"The irony is rich. In a country that officially espouses atheism, the Party has become the most zealous proselytizer of all. Its gospel is nationalism, its saints are revolutionaries, and its miracles are economic statistics. The faithful are expected to genuflect not to gods, but to growth charts and five-year plans. Xi [Jinping] is not just the architect, he is the icon. His personal involvement in religious affairs is no longer symbolic; it’s structural. The message is clear: religion must serve socialism, not the other way around. The Party is the new clergy, and Xi its infallible pontiff."

"Westerners are never far away from [CCP ideologist Qiu Jini’s] argument [about national security, which Qiu defines as the protection of the absolute control on the country by the CCP, its Central Committee, and its General Secretary], but they are seen like a threat, a continuous conspiracy to impose on the Chinese something different from Marxism and from the control of everything by the Party, the Central Committee, and Xi Jinping. They should read more texts like Qiu’s, which would help them understand that more economic development does not mean for China less Marxism and less totalitarian control by the Party."

"Communism was to be China’s weapon for modernization, according to the party’s propaganda. It would make the country rich and strong. But Mao’s agenda went further than the creation of a modern, wealthy country. He wanted to transform Chinese society and people’s ways of thinking. It was “old China” that was to blame for the country’s weakness, Mao thought, more than even British, Japanese, or American imperialists. He liked to compare traditional, Confucian forms of thinking to women with bound feet, hobbling along while being disdained by others. His “new China,” on the other hand, should be youthful, progressive, and militant. Those who stood in the way were “pests” to be exterminated; landlords, priests, and capitalists were holding China back on purpose, in order to serve their own interests. They had to go, as did all those forces that blocked the new society the Communists would create. For Mao this was a millennial struggle. It was China’s last chance to redeem itself and retake its rightful position in the world."

"The Chinese Communist Party turns every walk of life into a battlefield."

"A century after the Party was founded by a young Mao Zedong and other students of Marxism-Leninism, it aspires to achieve the ultimate dream of authoritarian politics: an encompassing awareness of everything in its realm; the ability to prevent threats even before they are fully realized, a force of anticipation and control powered by new technology; and economic influence that allows it to rewrite international rules to its liking."

"But our approach can’t just be about getting tough. That’s unlikely to achieve the outcome that we desire. We must also engage and empower the Chinese people – a dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist Party."

"Xi Jinping has done his best to dismantle Deng Xiaoping’s achievements. He brought the private companies established under Deng under the control of the CCP and undermined the dynamism that used to characterize them. Rather than letting private enterprise blossom, Xi Jinping introduced his own “China Dream” that can be summed up in two words: total control. That has had disastrous consequences. / In contrast to Deng, Xi Jinping is a true believer in Communism. Mao Zedong and Vladimir Lenin are his idols. At the celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the CCP he was dressed like Mao while the rest of the audience was wearing business suits."

"Awareness of the reprehensible and ongoing actions carried out by the CCP under Xi Jinping is crucial at a time when the regime is exporting its malign activities outside mainland China. The free world must do all it can to stop the CCP from using its economic muscle to hoodwink gullible leaders into supporting its self-interested aims, which run counter to freedom and democracy. The CCP and its rogue leaders must be held accountable for their crimes against humanity over the past 100 years."

"The CPC’s longevity is due in large measure to its ability to sum up the lessons of history and change course quite drastically, if required."

"It is more important than ever to understand the nature and power of this organisation; its strengths and weaknesses; its ability to capture the imagination of the people — and interestingly, the youth. It has refuted prognostications of its demise with its capacity for reinventing, regenerating and renewing its compact with the people, strengthened, among other things, by its ability to continue learning from history. The world is dealing not merely with a nation state but with an authoritarian party-state that foregrounds its civilisational culture — and at its helm is an organisation that is steering the country towards its own tryst with destiny. It remains to be seen whether the CPC is still on the right side of history, but the party is by no means over."

"As China grew richer and stronger, we believed, the Chinese Communist Party would liberalize to meet the rising democratic aspirations of its people. This was a bold, quintessentially American idea, born of our innate optimism and by the experience of our triumph over Soviet Communism. Unfortunately, it turned out to be very naïve."

"The United States and other democratic nations do so much business with China that there is a tendency to turn a blind eye towards the Communist Party’s abysmal human rights record. The Chinese Communist Party’s strategy of liberalizing its national economy while harshly rejecting democracy has become the model for modern dictatorships. Hu Jintao and his party control all media in China, between 250,000 and 300,000 Chinese citizens, including political dissidents, are incarcerated in “reeducation-through-labor” camps and the conviction rate in normal criminal trials is 99.7 percent. Less than 5 percent of trials include witnesses. China executes more people than all other nations combined most of those executions are for nonviolent crimes. Amnesty International has reported that school children have been bused to public executions as field trips."

"Rural discontent was spreading. Peasants had benefited from the dissolution of the land communes under Deng Xiaoping and traded their growing harvests for profit. But they were taxed ever more heavily. Regional and local administrators illegally dispossessed them of their fields on the edges of cities. The cranes and bulldozers were kept working twenty-four hours a day in the great cities as the massive economic boom continued. Where was it going to end? There was no equivalent in the history of world communism. Ideas of ‘market socialism’ – for example, in the USSR in the 1920s, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Hungary in the 1970s – had never proposed a system with the capitalist sector outgrowing the parts of the economy owned by the state. Chinese leaders from Deng Xiaoping onwards asserted that they were developing a ‘communism with Chinese characteristics’. The red-dyed gauze no longer occluded reality. The communist order was retained only as a means of rigorous political and ideological control; its economic and social components were blown to the winds. Concepts of Mao Zedong Thought were abandoned except insofar as they promoted the goals of national identity, centralised administration and superpower status. An extraordinary hybrid was created."

"Yet China remained a one-party dictatorship and its labour camps – the infamous laogai – continued to hold between four and six million inmates in shocking conditions. Mao’s gigantic image was still displayed in Tiananmen Square. There was no true pluralism of intellectual and political discourse at the highest official levels. Interest groups of employers were not allowed to function. Trade unions were emasculated. The importance of military power went on being promoted. Tibet languished under China’s despotism and its levels of literacy and material provision remained low; and the construction of a railway across its territory, much vaunted in Beijing as showing its wish to share the benefits of modernisation, was seen by Tibetans as a means of reinforcing central control. Great regions such as Xinjiang in the north-west of the People’s Republic were held in a suffocating grip. There the Chinese authorities feared that Islam and Uigur nationalism might breed a separatist movement. Freedom of religious expression was only patchily respected across China. Falun Gong, an indigenous faith of massive popularity, was systematically persecuted. Communist doctrines remained an obligatory ingredient in the school curriculum and a qualification for a serious public career. Marxism-Leninism was otherwise honoured only in the breach."

"China had become the only communist state which developed a vibrant economy by giving it over to capitalism. By the beginning of the third millennium the country was already pointed in the direction of becoming the world’s largest manufacturing nation. It was its social cohesion and political durability that remained questionable. Deng was the last supreme ruler to have taken part in the Long March; his successors lacked the aureole of legitimacy as revolutionary veterans. Measures to deal with popular discontent were either crudely punitive or merely palliative. Party officials, faced with a choice between Maoist ideology and self-enrichment, invested in apartment blocks, coal-mines and computer technology. No one was able to tell how long this situation could last. No one today can tell any better."

"Driven by Marxist-Leninist ideology and imperialist nostalgia, the CCP silences dissent and restricts the rights and freedoms of Chinese citizens, to include forced population control, arbitrary detention, censorship, forced labor, violations of religious freedom, and pervasive media and internet censorship. The CCP continues to commit abuses against Uyghurs, Christians, and other religious and ethnic minorities. It maintains an iron grip on Tibet while continuing to assert control and silence foreign critics in Hong Kong. The CCP manipulates international organizations, democratically elected governments, and companies to mask its human rights abuses at home and abroad."

"The CCP’s presence on overseas campuses subverts academic freedom, while undermining the integrity and security of the international research enterprise by enticing foreign researchers to engage in deceptive and illegal activities for the PRC’s economic, scientific, and military gains."

"The Party is always there, but you can’t always see it. And yet, citizens always know that there is a limit to what they can do that is bound by whatever the Party is deciding at a particular time. It is obviously the core institution in China at a political level. Even though there are a number of other political parties, they’re irrelevant in any genuine sense. So if you want to understand China, you need to understand the Party and its relationships with different aspects of society and the system."

"The CCP remains alert at all times to its historic mission and responsibility; it is always acutely sensitive to the political tasks that lie before it in the present transitional phase. History and politics delineate its mission. Neither permits it to relax its initiative or to share its responsibility fully with others. Both require it to devise practical working methods that ensure to it the substance of absolute control. For the present, it mouths democratic slogans and operates behind a formal fade o interparty government, considering these to correspond to the political necessities of a Marxist-Leninist revolution now in a pre-socialist stage."

"The CCP is aware of the myriad challenges Beijing faces, but it believes its top-down system is capable of handling today’s complex environment. The party trusts that it can marshal the resources necessary to eradicate poverty, redress inequality, and drive innovation, as well as respond to major global trends: deglobalization, climate change, technological disruption, and shifts in the international balance of power."

"China is not a monarchy or a declared dictatorship. But it is ruled with dictatorial zeal by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)."

"Americans must know how the Chinese Communist Party is poisoning the well of our higher education institutions for its own ends, and how those actions degrade our freedoms and American national security. If we don’t educate ourselves, if we’re not honest about what’s taking place, we’ll get schooled by Beijing."

"Since the 1990s, the CCP has shown a technocratic capacity to respond to the developmental stresses brought on by China’s dizzying economic rise. Today, the party has harnessed the rewards of globalization and economic development, lifting tens of millions of people out of poverty. The CCP has reimagined itself as a driver of change, guiding the country’s path to wealth and fueling a sentiment of national pride."