Tara: From political depression to awakening and speaking out for freedom and truth

Posted on 2025-10-16 by wrchina

Writer: Jing Zhang， WRIC 10-15-2026

Disappearance and Detention

Zhang Yadi (22, online name Tara / @TaraFreesoul) is a young scholar from Changsha, Hunan, who has long lived and studied in France. She recently received a scholarship to pursue a Master’s degree in Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and was originally scheduled to begin her graduate studies in the UK in September 2025.

free_tara_yadi Follow Group.

Tara returned to Changsha on July 5 to visit her family. According to relatives, friends, and multiple sources, she has been out of contact since July 30 while in Shangri-La, Yunnan. Prior to her disappearance, she maintained regular communication with family and friends; however, her WeChat and other communication channels suddenly ceased.

These reports suggest she was taken back to Changsha by state security authorities on suspicion of “Endangering national security.” She has been missing for nearly tree months, and no credible information has been obtained regarding the circumstances of her detention or removal. Prior to her arrest, she had returned to China several times to visit her family; her last contacted her family members was on July 30.

On September 16, renowned human rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong traveled to Changsha, Hunan Province, to attempt to provide legal counsel to Tara’s mother. Shortly after arriving in Changsha, he was forcibly abducted by three unidentified individuals. He was fortunately released later that day. Zhang Yadi’s situation, and the legal and security pressures her family faces, have sparked sustained concern from overseas communities and human rights organizations.

The pictures are from Tara’s social platform.

Political Awakening and Activism

Years ago, while still in China, Tara gained her first true glimpse of “China beyond the Great Firewall” through VPNs, banned book websites, and other channels. She began to delve into psychology, sociology, political theory, and religious philosophy, gradually realizing that she was in a carefully packaged cocoon. From that time, Tara began to focus on Chinese politics, democratic movements, and the history of social movements, which is also how she first encountered the Tibetan issue.

Having studied abroad for many years, Tara has become a vocal advocate who, in the face of political oppression, continues to explore the world. She has extensively addressed topics banned within China, both online and offline. For example, she posted on social media to commemorate the victims of the June 4th Massacre in 1989. She has also been active at the White Paper protests and in the exile community, finding her voice and introducing Tibetan history, culture, and human rights issues to the Chinese-speaking world.

In November 2022, just three months after Tara arrived in France, the fire in Urumqi, China, sparked “White Paper Protests” across the country. Zhang Yadi immediately purchased white paper, candles, and printed signs to join the rally.

She held signs reading “Say No to the CCP” and “No Dictatorship, Want Elections.” “At that moment, I felt so proud. I felt I had been brave, that I had lived the way I wanted to live, and that my life had not been lived in vain,” Zhang Yadi later recalled in a podcast interview.

She was one of the earliest members of the online media platform “Chinese Youth Support Tibet Association.”

Voice and Vision

Writing under the pen name TaraFreesoul on X, Tara said: “The history of China’s southwest ethnic groups is a bloody story of Han Chinese colonization, brainwashing, enslavement, and intermarriage and assimilation of indigenous peoples.”

She wrote:”Behind the ‘building of a strong Chinese nation’ lies the blood and tears of various ethnic groups. Their own cultures have been suppressed and extinguished, their own mother tongues have been silenced and disappeared, and their own histories are not written by their own people. Everything is lightly glossed over with the phrase ‘Chinese Nation,’ as if nothing had happened, as if this land has been part of the Chinese Empire since ancient times.”

She once stated: “Supporting Tibetans is not just speaking for them, but also fighting for a path to freedom for ourselves.” Tara is a young person who gently criticizes government inaction and social injustice, and who staunchly sympathizes with vulnerable groups. Even so, she remains a dangerous figure in the eyes of the Chinese authorities. Expressing empathy and understanding, and documenting the stories of those suffering, is considered a “sin.”

She once said, “If China could be as free as Taiwan, that would be my greatest ambition in life.” Clearly, she was prepared for the price her vision might entail, but she may not have fully anticipated the CCP’s narrow-mindedness, its fragility, or loss of her freedom too fast.

The picture is from Tara’s social platform.

A Clarion Call Against the Reincarnated Dictator Cantorial Tyranny

Posted on 2023-09-06 by wrchina

By Jing Zhang 08-26-2023

(The source and link：https://www.yibao.net/2023/08/26/a-clarion-call-a…tatorial-tyranny)

Editor’s note: The author is a longtime Chinese human-rights advocate IW living in the US., and founder and executive director in particular of Women’s Rights in China.

Not long ago, there was a call for papers, with substantial prizes available, circulating on the Internet. Many figures in the pro-democracy movement with substantial online followings are serving as judges. The themes in the solicitation of papers are on the one hand “Let Us Discuss Autocracy: A Call to Action,” and on the other a “National Nonviolent Non-Cooperation Action Plan.”

“In disastrous times, the people suffer; in prosperous times, they also suffer.” It is this quote from Zhang Yanghao, an official during the Yuan Dynasty, that led the call for essays, “Let Us Discuss Autocracy.” This sentence reveals the consistent survival mode of the Chinese people under the centralized and authoritarian system that has coursed through the country for more than 2,000 years. Even in 21st-century Chinese society, we can infer the continued existence of this vivid tragedy.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Chinese had tired of the tyranny of the imperial power, and social elites were criticizing it in both speech and writing, and were advocating universal values. But a dark tyranny quietly and freakishly overthrew the brief democracy instead [the Republic of China having been quickly overthrown by the dictator Yuan Shikai almost immediately, followed by years of civil war and KMT dictatorship]. 1949 was the first year of the CCP’s Marxist violence. Since then, it has abused the Chinese people without relent. From 1951 onwards the people have suffered the anti-counterfeiting campaign, the three- and five-antis campaigns, land reform, the people’s communes, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, coercive family planning, the Tiananmen Square massacre, the female workers who were told to “be a good cat” and accept their firing to revitalize the economy, and 500 million farmers leaving their homes and going to the city to toil, along with the associated separation of 80 million village children from their parents, followed by the tragedy of having to return every Spring Festival on a trail of blood and tears. Penned in by the tyrannical fence of “In disastrous times, the people suffer; in prosperous times, they also suffer,” the people’s tragedies repeat themselves again and again. The more than 70 years under CCP rule is basically the epitome of thousands of years of Chinese imperial history.

In aggregate the persecution the Chinese people have suffered from the policies and systems of the CCP regime is shocking. Millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of people have died unexpectedly. Among them are scholars, workers and farmers in the prime of life, as well as young people, even college, high-school and middle-school students. And this does not include the countless pregnant women deprived of their lives in the implementation of family planning, nor the 400 million innocent fetuses who were massacred.

“It’s him!” While a line, a confession, in the Japanese movie “Hunt” [a 1978 film, the first foreign movie released in China after the Cultural Revolution], this is also what family-planning cadres shouted to their accomplices who rounded up pregnant women who illegally gave birth in 2011. Ma Jihong, a peasant woman who was 6 months pregnant in Jiangjiazhuang, Lijin County, Shandong Province, hid in a cotton field to avoid the family-planning arrest team, but was finally dragged out of the cotton field by them and sent to the hospital for a forced abortion, resulting in two deaths. Zhang Ronghua was pregnant with her second child for nearly 10 months. In 2012, because she did not have a “birth permit,” mother and child also died on a delivery bed in the Maternal and Child Health Hospital in Tengzhou…In 1983 alone, China had nearly 50 million women who were subjected to forced family planning, of which 17,755,736 had IUD implantations, 16,398,378 had tubal ligations, and 14,371,843 had induced abortions. This does not include missing statistical data from remote areas, nor does it include public or private medical abortion data. (The above data are from Section 8-8-1 of the “China Health and Family Planning Statistical Yearbook,” published by the National Health and Family Planning Commission Statistical Information Center in 2013.) In addition, there were tens of millions of young and middle-aged men who could be and were arrested and sterilized at any time.

This national family-planning policy has harmed the Chinese people in ways without precedent in Chinese history, and indeed is also unprecedented in world history.

Isn’t childbirth, reproduction, the most normal, natural phenomenon for human beings? For thousands of years in China, regardless of whatever natural or man-made disasters might occur, even the worst emperors never cared whether a family had children or not. But today’s CCP controls the sky and the earth, including of course women’s wombs. In the past, pregnant women who were convicted of “excessive birth” were arrested so as to “pull out” the fetus in their stomachs. Today, women are instead called on to give birth to obtain prizes, and students who marry and attempt to procreate are given priority. And for those women who were previously regarded as “super-birth criminals,” who were tortured, sometimes to the extent of permanent disfigurement or even death via equipment, drugs, medical malpractice, etc., will the government apologize? Have the murderers been tried and the dead and injured compensated?

The national family-planning policy has been just one of a series of planned, organized and large-scale campaigns to persecute people of all ethnic groups in China over the 70 years since the founding of the People’s Republic.

And it is not only crimes committed by the CCP against the Chinese people further in the past that remain unpunished. The most recent ones are unaddressed as well. After 2020, the anti-COVID policy of “dynamic” clearing, and closing and suddenly unblocking certain areas caused countless people to die needlessly, and in vain. The large-scale arrests for coercive nucleic-acid testing, the overcrowding in human warehouses of those who had tested positive, people choosing self-immolation in front of their doors, the wailing from hunger and pain…these things are unbearable to look back on. But the common people accepted their suffering, thinking that everything would be fine once the pandemic was over. As a result, Xi Jinping was able to personally carry out other campaigns during this time, eliminating Internet tycoons, those who promoted sales of celebrity-endorsed merchandise, and killing the education and training industry, and now doing the same to leading figures in the medical industry. But the CCP system that breeds all of this corruption throughout various industries remains intact.

While the CCP took turns imposing its intensive “fines” and other money-grabbing operations in many varied economic arenas, it dragged down the entire national economy, destroying the fruits of the people’s saving and hard work. Farmers who have been working in cities for many years are still the “low-end population,” and are driven back to their hometowns with empty pockets; at present, 40% of young people cannot find a job. The government has now straightforwardly announced that it will not disclose future employment data for young people. Even data on land sales, foreign-exchange reserves, bond transactions, academic information, and the Wuhan virus (Covid-19) death rate are now concealed. And data such as resumes of senior officials’ are now not made public. Collectively it is simply brazen, shameless.

Why do some people continue to place hope in the CCP despite the overwhelming evidence of its endless sea of heinous crimes? Here the recipe is lies + violence. For example, the party thinks that you should not have children, and uses its rhetoric to get you to believe it too. There are a hundred reasons why you must kill your children, and so you think it is your fault. When the party needs you to have more children, it will do everything possible to give you money, albeit in minuscule amounts, and the students who receive it to “give birth to the country” will hold onto it for dear life. Yes, for any human being in CCP China there is only one road to walk in life, and there is no resurrection after death. Given this, are there many people who aren’t afraid to do otherwise?

There are those who say that this is an inevitable stage in the history of Chinese civilization, but I say that this is the savage bullying of the jungle beast, darkness inflicted without remorse.

The Chinese people have been bullied for too long. They have endured more than 70 years and several generations of comprehensive rectification and brainwashing, and most of them choose to blot it out of their memories, or are willing to accept it. As long as things don’t happen to them personally, it is basically “refrain from caring about others.” As a result, Stockholm syndrome now sprouts in China. People who understand clearly nonetheless choose to close their eyes and protect themselves by not telling the truth, or simply to passively follow the prevailing political winds. While there is a small group of people who never give up and who pursue the truth, if they remain in China, they are likely to be frostbitten and die of cold on their way to keeping others warm; I for example cannot return to my hometown.

In fact, if one thinks about it more deeply, what is the difference between humans and animals? In addition to material desires, people also on some level have spiritual goals. Wang Weilin, who blocked that tank in 1989, is remembered by the world today. Peng Lifa on the Sitong Bridge in 2021 is also awe-inspiring. The reason is they spoke the truth, and did what was just and right. They bravely pierced the night sky like shooting stars. Although their deeds were short-lived, they will remain in the world forever. They knew the wisdom of “not for the sake of eternity, but for the sake of one moment’s righteousness.” They were not born on their knees, but were warriors who died standing up.

We all know that the democratic system has its flaws, but in a democratic society there are laws to abide by, and people can live with dignity and hope. In an autocratic system, only the rulers are respected. Even if there are laws, they will not be followed. Dignity and hope are important values in civilized society, and enabling people to have them serves the public interest. Daring to tell the truth is the first step in resisting violence. It is time for China to become a country ruled by law rather than by men. The call for essays on “Discussing Autocracy” sets up a platform for everyone to tell the truth together, to expose the darkness of communist dictatorship, and to reject the rotten debasement of the imperial autocracy. Your voice and views will be heard by the public and others will benefit from it.

In waging the crusade against dictatorship. you can listen, you can speak, you can write, you can do. It is the responsibility of all of us.

August 20, 2023

The CFHK Foundation Illuminates Hong Kong’s Brave Women Political Prisoners

Posted on 2023-03-07 by wrchina

Reprinted from CFHKF 03-07-2023

4 March 2023 – Ahead of International Women’s Day on 8 March, the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong (CFHK) Foundation staged building illuminations in New York City to call attention to Hong Kong’s women political prisoners.

In conjunction with the illuminations, the CFHK Foundation launched its political prisoner database featuring women and girls as young as 14 who have been incarcerated. Hong Kong has the largest percentage of women prisoners in the world.

The projections featured Gwyneth Ho, Alice Wong Yuen-lam, Jessica Chu Wai-ying, Claudia Mo, and Chow Hang-tung, all of whom have been in prison for more than 500 days. These women, who have courageously fought for Hong Kong’s freedom, don’t belong behind bars.

The illuminations on the occasion of International Women’s Day come amid the ongoing trial of the Hong Kong 47, the city’s largest-ever National Security Law trial. The projections took place on the eve of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) National People’s Congress annual session, where Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping is expected to further consolidate his power.

The CFHK Foundation stands in solidarity with all of Hong Kong’s political prisoners, and urges the free world to remember the sacrifices they are making and work for their release.

The CFHK Foundation’s President, Mark Clifford, said: “Too many women and girls are among Hong Kong’s nearly 1400 political prisoners. In a free society, the women we highlighted on our building projections would be celebrated for their achievements, not put behind bars. Chow Hang-tung is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee. Claudia Mo gave up a career in journalism to become an elected legislator. Gwyneth Ho is a journalist who was beaten in an attack by a pro-government mob. Members of the U.S. Congress, British Parliament, and all of us throughout the free world should take the occasion of International Women’s Day to remember the sacrifices these women – and all of Hong Kong’s political prisoners – are making for the cause of freedom.”

Dozens protest outside Chinese police station in NYC over alleged spying

Posted on 2023-02-26 by wrchina

New York Post 02-25-2023

Dozens of demonstrators protested outside a Chinatown building housing a foreign police station accused of harassing and spying on Chinese nationals in the city.

More than 60 protestors gathered Saturday morning outside 107 East Broadway where the ChangLe Association Inc, a non-profit, owns and operates a “service station” above a noodle shop where security experts say operatives conduct surveillance against dissidents in the Chinese community.

Republican Congressman Mike Gallagher attended the demonstration.

William Farrington

“It’s a very serious problem in the Chinese community,” said Toni Cai, one of the protestors. Cai is a pro-democracy activist imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party twice in China for promoting free speech. He immigrated to the US in 2000, he told The Post.

“The CCP has coerced the Chinese community severely and has a large influence on them here in the state, through American and Asian-American politicians,” he said. “I am very worried, but I want to support the community leaders who are honest and openly against what the CCP is doing.”

Jing Zhang, founder and executive director of Women’s Rights in China, echoed the thought as she joined the protesters outside the Lower Manhattan building. “People need to support each other,” she said “We all came here to be free.”

Jing Zhang, founder and executive director of Women’s Rights in China, echoed the thought as she joined the protesters outside the Lower Manhattan building. (WRIC photo)

The Manhattan station is part of a web of more than 100 such law enforcement offices set up around the world by the People’s Republic of China, ostensibly to help Chinese nationals renew their government-issued identification and drivers’ licenses.

But the stations have more “sinister” purposes, such as spying on the Chinese diaspora for the Chinese Communist Party, according to a recent whistle-blower report.

“Openly labeled as overseas police service stations … they contribute to ‘resolutely cracking down on all kinds of illegal and criminal activities involving overseas Chinese,’” according to a September report by Safeguard Defenders, a Madrid-based human rights group that documents Chinese repression around the world.

The stations also participate in “intimidation, harassment, detention or imprisonment” to spy on dissenters and return migrants to China, according to the report.

“We Chinese are very angry at local government for their appeasement policy,” said Quiam Jiu, who was at the protest with his daughter, Zhao Yue Auiam. “They let the CCP repress freedom and human rights activities. We want local government to have high pressure policy on CCP agents.”

“CCP agents are everywhere,” said Ziyun Huang, who was also at the Saturday protest.

Ziyin Huang (right) with Jing Zhang, from the same organization. (WRIC photo)

Mr. Yang, who came to the United States from China, also went to the event site to hold a sign to demonstrate. (WRIC photo)

Last year, New York City Mayor Eric Adams was a guest of honor at a gala dinner sponsored by the charity that operates the Chinatown police station, The Post revealed.

“CCP agents are everywhere,” said Ziyun Huang, who was also at the Saturday protest. “When all the human rights groups have protests and demonstrations, the CCP will come and harass people.

WRIC photo.

Xi’s Yes Men: The Absence of Women at the 20th Party Congress

Posted on 2022-11-24 by wrchina

Author: Harriet Eauthorvans 11-07-2022

For the first time in decades, there will be not one single woman sitting on the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo. But it is no surprise to see the almost total absence of women from the rituals of the 20th Party Congress.

The complete exclusion of women from China’s leading positions stems from a political system in which there has been little active encouragement to women at local levels to become politically active.

Whilst a new generation of feminist and LGBTQI activists in China are contesting these practices, they are hampered by censorship and the re-assertion of a powerful ideology of hierarchical gender relations that celebrate China’s “national” Confucian traditions.

The 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) opened on October 16th 2022, and ended a week later. As anticipated, one of its main achievements was to confirm President Xi Jinping in his third term, breaking with established practice of a two-term rule. Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era is now written into the new constitution, using a term that to date has only been used to refer to Mao Zedong Thought.

Xi Jinping’s three posts as General Secretary of the CCP, Chairperson of the CCP’s Central Military Commission and President of the People’s Republic of China, give him unprecedented controls of the party, military and state. His position is widely hailed as that of China’s paramount leader upholding national unity at a time of international turmoil and increasing domestic difficulties. One dimension of this has been the systematic crackdown on dissidents to prevent any disruption to the Congress proceedings.

While the choreography of the Congress was apparently and predictably seamless, audiences were surprised to watch as former President Hu Jintao was unceremoniously and apparently unwillingly led out of the closing ceremony. Hu’s former political allies, including former Premier Li Keqiang, were all replaced by Xi’s people.

Spectators of the rituals of China’s Party and National Congresses have long been accustomed to the spectacle of serried ranks of identically besuited men clapping in unison to the speeches of their leader. It was therefore no surprise to see the almost total absence of women from the rituals of this political stage. Aged seventy-two, Sun Chunlan, the only remaining woman on the twenty-five member Politburo—the decision-making body of the CCP—resigned from her position. Given her age she was expected to retire. Expectations were that Shen Yiqin, Secretary of Guizhou Provincial Party Committee would be appointed. However, this did not happen, meaning that the 20th Congress is confirmed for the next five years as the first time in decades that there has been not one single woman in the CCP’s Poliburo.

Figures for CCP membership in December 2021 indicate that of 96.71 million members, 28.43 (just over a third) were women. Following the decisions at the recent Party Congress, just eleven out of 205 members on the Central Committee are women.

The main images of women that emerged from the recent Congress were of young women, all dressed in identical tailored red skirt suits, large white hot water flasks in hand, moving in unison along the empty rows of delegates’ seats to fill up the teacups prior to the commencement of proceedings.

We all know that the presence of leading female politicians does not in itself signify advances for women. So, would the presence of a woman in a leading political position in China have any substantive meaning for Chinese women’s lives? The question may be easier to answer if approached from a different angle. In China, the complete exclusion of women from leading positions, now presumably a matter of deliberate choice by Xi Jinping, stems from a political system, particularly in the past four decades, in which there has been little active encouragement to women at local levels to become politically active. On the contrary, evidence widely suggests considerable opposition from local to top levels of the political hierarchy to nominating women for political posts. One result is a dearth of female political participation at local levels. Without such participation at local levels, women are effectively prevented from rising to higher positions.

For his part, Xi Jinping presumably has little incentive to encourage women’s political participation. On the contrary, his revival of Confucian values as the moral standard of the nation has been accompanied by encouragement to women to put their energies into having more babies and upholding “traditional values.” Classes in how to become a “virtuous wife and good mother” are now available to girls and young women in largely private neo-Confucian academies across the country.

Savvy social media celebrities have chosen to put their energies into advising women on how to make the best of their lot. This is nowhere better illuminated than in the figure of Yang Bingyang, whose self-styled status as relationship guru under the name Ayawawa has brought her millions of online followers, interviews and considerable wealth. She taps into a conservative gender agenda that prioritises marriage as the foundation of women’s stable future, advising women that their best option for securing a stable marriage is to buy into money rather than looks. According to Wang Qianning, a Beijing based commentator on gender issues, “Yang symbolizes a retrenchment of traditional male-female power relations according to a strongly consumerist model.”

The absence of women from the Party’s recent Congress alongside the failure to reappoint a woman to the Politburo speaks more powerfully for the current leadership’s view of women than do its official statements about upholding women’s rights. This was inversely highlighted by the presence at the opening ceremony of the Congress of former vice-premier, Zhang Gaoli, the powerful official accused of sexual harassment by the tennis star Peng Shuai. He was never brought to account for Peng Shuai’s allegations.

On the contrary, official statements denounced Peng’s allegations as “malicious rumour.” What more powerful symbolism could there be, then, of the Party’s top-level silencing of women than Zhang’s presence alongside the exclusion of women?

This leads us to recent clampdowns of feminist and LGBTQ+ activism. Arguably the best internationally known event was the arrest of the Feminist Five, a group of feminist activists who after several years of public activity, were arrested in March 2015 for challenging male privilege by staging street performance protests. Following widespread international and domestic protest, including accusations against the Chinese government for failing to provide adequate medical treatment for Wu Rongrong who was suffering from hepatitis B, the five were eventually released after thirty-seven days on April 13, 2015.

Activists have also brought complaints of sexual harassment against employers in a range of operations, including the precision electronics giant, Foxconn.

Migrant workers and undocumented workers also raised their voices, and in 2017, the journalist Huang Xueqin went public with her denunciation of workplace harassment.

After conducting a survey of mainland women journalists on the extent of sexual harassment, she started up an online platform to share relevant information, using the hashtag #WoYeShi (a direct translation of #MeToo). In 2019 her passport was confiscated after a trip abroad. Then, having been awarded a place to study in the UK’s University of Sussex, she and labour activist Wang Jianbing went missing on September 19th, 2021, accused of “inciting subversion of state power.” To date, the appeals of international human rights organisations and academics have gone unheeded and Huang Xueqin’s situation remains unclear.

None of this is to ignore the very real benefits that the marketisation of the economy has brought to millions of women’s lives. Xi’s zero-Covid policy has also achieved undeniable successes in keeping excess deaths low, in comparison with, for example, the US and the UK. However, this policy has also produced unintended consequences, some of which have particular relevance for women. The depressed economy and reduction in personal incomes has led to a significant decrease in the number of marriages. Despite official attempts to encourage women to have more children by relaxing the birth control policy, the numbers of births between November and December 2020 were down by 55% on levels five years earlier. As elsewhere, including here in the UK, lockdowns have added to women’s burdens of childcare and housework.

The CCP’s gender policies have had an uneven but persistent ride in China over the past long half century. While from one perspective, it is reasonable to situate the increasing gender inequalities since the early 1990s within the privatising impulse of the commercialised political economy, the conditions for its resurgence were grounded in understandings and practices of gender difference and gender relations that could not escape the hegemonic pull of earlier policies that prioritised women’s participation in social labour but overlooked their domestic role.

Policies of women’s liberation in the Mao years certainly did constitute a transformative experience for countless women, yet the ideologically and historically mediated constraints on including the domestic realm within the sphere of policy debate left relatively untouched certain basic assumptions.

Backed by a notion of biological essentialism in defining gender difference, policies of gender equality forged a clear line between productive and reproductive issues, reducing the latter to a silenced area of women’s lives and experiences. They just got on with the task of birthing babies, nurturing children and taking on the emotional as well as physical labour of domestic care work.

Now, however, in a social and cultural environment that grants access to online connectivity and travel, a new generation of feminist and LGBTQI activists in China are contesting these practices and relations in ways that signify a qualitative departure from the feminisms of their forebears. Yet, the reach of their views is hampered by censorship and the re-assertion of a powerful ideology of gender relations that celebrate China’s “national” Confucian traditions. It remains for future analysis to assess the impact of their struggle against the deep embeddedness of male privilege as a system of institutionalised patriarchal power and subordination operative in all aspects of public, political and domestic life.

This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the China Foresight Forum, LSE IDEAS, nor The London School of Economics and Political Science. The blog image is “Les dirigeants lors du 20e Congrès du Parti communiste chinois” (CC BY 3.0).

About the author:

Harriet Evans is Professor Emerita of Chinese Cultural Studies (University of Westminster) and Visiting Professor of Anthropology (LSE). She has written extensively on the politics of gender and sexuality in China, and on visual culture of the Mao era. Her third monograph, Beijing from Below: Stories of Marginal Lives in the Capital’s Center was published by Duke University Press in 2020. Grassroots Values and Local Cultural Heritage in China, co-edited with Michael Rowlands, and based on a Leverhulme Trust funded research project was published in 2021 by Lexington Books. She is now working on a new multidisciplinary collective project on the legacies of Chinese migration to Latin America since the mid-nineteenth century.

We Ask the UN to Pay Attention to the Millions of Tortured Sex Slaves in China

Posted on 2022-03-24 by wrchina

To:

UNESCO

UN Women

UNICEF

From:

Women’s Rights in China

Christian Alliance for Righteousness

China Democracy Party

Humanitarian China

China Reborn

Church of Rock

China Federal Party

Chinese Democracy and Human Rights Alliance

Re: Save Millions of Tortured Sex Slaves in China

Date: March 8^th, 2022

Dear Respected UNESCO, UN Women and UNICEF:

We are writing to urge you to pay close attention to the millions of tortured sex slaves in China, intervene and investigate the horrible anti-human crimes that the Chinese government has committed against millions of Chinese women/girls, and demand the Chinese government (the CCP) stop such crimes and protect the disadvantaged women and children, and give them back their basic human rights and the dignity as a human being.

The “Chained woman” in Xuzhou, Jiangsu, exposed two months ago, and the “iron-caged woman” in Yulin, Shaanxi, exposed a few days ago, have detonated the online world due to their extremely inhumane and tragic encounters, and caused widespread concern and anger in China and the whole world. Actually, this is just a tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds of thousands of women (girls) who are abducted/kidnapped and trafficked in the CCP’s mainland China every year. In addition to the general loss of conscience and corruption of people’s hearts under the CCP’s evil ruling, there are also systemically institutional causes for such tragedy: the corruption of the ruling power, law enforcement officers’ involvement in crimes and becoming the umbrella of the criminals, and the general promiscuity of the CCP officials at all levels, which has contributed to the birth of the industry of “supply of extramarital sex demand”. For example, the iron-chained woman was originally a beautiful virgin used by the secretary and mayor of Feng County in Xuzhou to sexually bribe their upper officials. After being used, she was sold to a poor man as a sex slave. These women live a life of being constantly raped and group-raped, turned into reproductive machines, tortured, beaten, abused, chained/caged and even treated as mentally ill…… Many are even tortured to death.

When the iron-chained woman case was first exposed, the local government tried its best to cover up and deny it. Later, amid the news was hit more than 20 billion times on the world network, and the widespread angry roaring for accountability, the county, city and even the provincial government had to conduct a “comprehensive” and “in-depth” investigation, and published five investigation reports, which are all to “call the deer as a horse”, to cover previous lies with a new lie, and to diminish the facts and crimes. This once again fully reflects the CCP’s customary evil tactics: suppressing the media, deleting posts, tracing and suppressing those who expose the truth, and centrally disposing (or even “eliminating”) these “Chained women” to prevent further exposure, and punishing several scapegoats; instead of allowing the exposure of facts, thoroughly investigating the truth, prosecuting all the criminals, examining the institutional root causes, and improving the implementation of the law.

Although we are fortunate enough to flee China and avoid such an inhuman fate, we are very worried that our fellow Chinese there, including our loved ones, such as wives, mothers, daughters or sisters. Since they may be kidnapped and trafficked, forced to marry, raped and gang-raped, chained, locked in a dungeon… Her dreams, happiness and even dignity will be brutally destroyed, and finally she will become the “Chained woman” whose life is inferior to an animal.

Today, March 8^th, is International Women’s Day, and March is also the Women’s History Month in the United States. Supposedly, it should be a day when all women in the world happily celebrate their festival. But we cannot help crying sadly in the lieu of at least 10 million women and children in China suffering from the same inhumane lives as the “Chained woman” in the past several decades. Therefore, on this special day of International Women’s Day on March 8, we, the overseas Chinese, raise the following two requests to the UNESCO, UN Women and UNICEF:

To intervene and demand the Chinese government thoroughly investigate the actual situation of the trafficked women in China, such as the “Iron-Chained Woman” and “Iron-Caged Woman”, who shocked the entire world, and prosecute all the criminals in such a chain of interest for their criminal and civil liabilities; to demand the Chinese government find out the truth, scale and systemically institutional problems associated with the trafficking, abuse, and violence of women and children; to demand the Chinese government establish and improve the law enforcement system to prevent trafficking and abusing of women and children.
In view of the fact that numerous women and children in China have been trafficked and abused, and at least hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asian women have been trafficked to China, and there are at least 80 million left-behind Chinese children in the rural areas who lack care and cannot go to school normally, and Ms. Peng, Liyuan, “the special envoy for women and children’s education”, has done nothing to help the suffered women and children for many years, we strongly urge the UN to remove Peng, Liyuan from the honorary position of “Special Envoy for the Promotion of Women and Children’s Education”! She has failed this title!

We look forward to the UN’s response to our appeal as we are continuing our fight for the justice for our miserable and enslaved sisters in China!

Respectfully submitted,

Zhang, Jing

President, Women’s Rights in China

Email: wrchina2007@gmail.com

Mailing address: PO Box 527917, Flushing, NY 11353

This open letter was mailed on behalf of all petitioners.

A Look at the Chinese Regime’s Fundamental Governing Network through the Family Planning Apparatus

Posted on 2017-03-08 by wrchina

WRIC: Jing Zhang 03/15/2016

Scholars have predicted that the bursting of economic bubble, violent repression of demonstrations, long power struggle within the Communist Party and the large number of corruption cases, as well as natural disasters and territorial disputes, etc., would lead to political and social reforms in China. There are also opinions saying that with the 30% annual increase of mass incidents, it would become a threat to the rule of CCP. However, the past several decades still haven’t witnessed any revolutionary changes. In fact, the dramatics of Communist party political power struggle is purely internal palace intrigue with little effect on the population at large. When the stakes were high, the party apparatus always united to face outwards. I agree with the US expert in Chinese politics, Professor Andrew J. Nathan’s prediction that the possibility of big changes taking place in the short term is unlikely. But his analysis has ignored a very important fact, which is that the CCP has been working half a century to gradually lay down a giant net tightly over Chinese society, and have each knot guarded by CCP’s own servants. Despite all the social problems and mass incidents, people could only poke no more than their fingers through the mesh. How did the CCP lay down this net? Let’s take a look at the mechanism of the so-called “Family Planning Policy” that the CCP has been managing for decades; then it is not hard to find out that the Chinese Family Planning Commission at all levels have become a strong network to consolidate the rule of CCP.

The rule of CCP has a solid social basis besides its national defense and economy foundation. The interest groups closely tied with CCP includes more than 87 million CCP members, 2 million active duty military, 1.5 million armed police, 7 million reserve militia, 2 million regular police, 2.5 internet police, 7million cadres, and of course the large system of Family Planning Commission. There are over 100 million full-time or part-time officers including over 50 million population control committee members, and 94 million population control association members. Basically, these 200 million heads have lost their sense of moral responsibility or independence in carrying out their job of watching over the population, planting informers, kidnapping victims including pregnant women, detecting and destroying any semblance of opposition to the regime.

Since the early 1980s, the Family Planning system and other related medical information and data have been classified as a state secret, and became one of the highest state secrets by the end of 80s. The information on the One-Child Policy fines, such as who violated the policy, how much was the fine, and where the money went, has never been revealed to the public, neither was there any institution entitled to audit or publish financial report on this revenue of the government. During the 2 consecutive years of Xi’s anti-corruption movement, there were never a “tiger” reported or publicly investigated because of corruption or abuse the fines of One-Child Policy. In 2013, 14 female lawyers issued and signed a petition asking provincial Family Planning Commissions to release the revenue of One-Child Policy fines. This petition gained a lot of attention and support on the Internet. 22 out of 30 provincial governments unofficially disclosed some numbers, which suggested that the revenue in 2012 was 16.8 billion yuan. However, any kind of formal financial reports or attentions from the “anti-corruption” department were still absent. Chinese media also had to be silent because any digging of such classified Family Planning data could lead to charges of Leaking State Secrets. More importantly, the people who kept the most confidential information and data are the people who have the right to decide where the fine revenue goes. They are mostly the government officers who make the policies, participate in implementation of the policies, and instruct the whole family planning network to implement the policies. They are also the ones have the most knowledge of the variety of means how the Policy has been cruelly enforced; for instance, testing birth control drugs or equipment on human body and resulting in different degrees of physical and psychological harm to those women. There are more than 20 departments in the central administration responsible for carrying out the policy under the direction of the Family Planning Commission. In 2013, the Ministry of Health (MOH, 1954-2013) was dissolved and integrated into the National Population and Family Planning Commission (NPFPC, 2003-2013), and became the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC). The Director of Family Planning Commission was appointed to the new leader of this combined management ever since, bringing the power of Family Planning system to another lever.

According to Article 10 in the “Measures for Administration of Collection of Social Maintenance Fees” promulgated by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, the social maintenance fees with relevant surcharge fines shall all be handed over to the State Treasury and integrated into the local budget administration in accordance with the rules laid down by the finance department of the State Council. Every year, Family Planning department at province and city levels get adequate funds for office activities and other expenses by collecting fines, and they turn in the surplus to the central government. In other words, the central government is getting money rolling in by running this zero-cost “Cash Cow” of Family Planning. Any CCP leaders would not want to expose this business, let alone cut it down. Xi’s anti-corruption movement in the past 2 year almost reached central and local government at all levels, in all departments, but not Family Planning officers. The petition signed by the 14 female lawyers endorses no legal effect. The provincial governments that didn’t release any report of fines were not subject to any penalty, nor were they subject to any moral condemnation. The huge revenue from One-Child Policy fines will continue to be protected by law of this country and policies of CCP. Chinese people, especially the populous peasants, will continue to pay overload fines for fertility. CCP’s highest authority and Family Planning directors have been collaborating in this corrupted business of regulation making, officers appointing and revenue draining for decades.

Source: National Health and Family Planning Commission, National Administration for the Protection of State Secrets.

In 2013, the Ministry of Health and the National Population and Family Planning Commission merged to form the National Health and Family Planning Commission. It is fund by national level budgetary allocation. It is a paycheck of 94 million full-time and part-time officers of Family Planning organizations at all levels, as well as 50.87 million supporting workers placed in all sectors, companies and villages all over the country (CCP official website People.com.cn March 1, 2010 data). Bijie City of Guizhou Province alone had 4,600 new enrollments of county-level Family Planning staff recruited in 2012. These grass-roots government officials know well about every household on every street in every village of the county. Their work is to watch the community. They would not miss any attempt of demonstrations or rebellions. And they would not miss reporting any of it to the CCP. For example, after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, large-scale protests in province and city levels also died out owe to the work of these grass-roots servants. Mass incidents have no chance to expand. The invisible giant net that CCP has been building for decades.

It is a organization of 94 million full-time and part-time officers of Family Planning. (Download the Data from China Family Planning Association official website: http://www.chinafpa.org.cn/jgsz/)

CCP has won over some of the victims with small favors since the launch of Two-Child Policy. Those victims are susceptible to the Stockholm syndrome under the long-term persecution. They are so grateful to the government and policy makers for the quota of a second child that they have even forgotten it is a basic human right to have babies at free will. Tyranny becomes reasonable and basic human right becomes “infinite royal graciousness”. Nearly 40 years of brainwashing propaganda and bloody suppression has engraved obedience in people’s head, with a deep understanding that disobeying means to suffer corporal punishment, financial loss and social status deprivation. Fear overshadows every corner of people’s lives.

For China’s rulers, who have always put social stability as the top priority, knew that implementing the Two-Child Policy would not result in population booms or changes of social structure, nor would it cause sudden pressure on the political or economic sectors of society. The provincial Family Planning fine revenue would remain, the over 100 million full-time and part-time Family Planning officers would still get paid, and affiliated agencies would not be affected. In simple terms, this modified new policy will not affect the rule of CCP, only abolition of the whole Family Planning policy will. Therefore, CCP is not and will not stop the fines or abolish the policy.

The people in China, in the eyes of the CCP, are not more than childbearing machines. They are not granted any protection or benefits under the Two-Child Policy. The policy makers are merely adjusting the output of these “machines”. It is time for Chinese women to speak up that our uteri are not the government’s property. The government shall not have control over whether we give birth to a second or a third child. Only the complete abolition of Family Planning and fines over “out-of-plan child” can grant Chinese people living in real dignity.

Can the Two-Child Policy Improve the Human Rights Situation in China?

Posted on 2016-12-01 by wrchina

Author: Jing Zhang Translator: Jennifer Yuan 10/02/2016

Women’s Rights in China Director Jing Zhang was invited to give a speech at the conference “The Prospects for Democratization in China” organized by The China Democracy Forum, New York University (NYU) and Beijing Spring magazine. The theme of the conference was “The Match between Righteousness and Evil, The Responsibility and Choice of International Society”

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s earliest population policy began in April, 1950. There was a lack of military personnel after the long war and the workforce in society had shrunk. The Central Government and the Military Committee joined hands in formulating the “Methods of Limiting Abortion Among Female Military Cadres,” imposing strict requirements on women who required abortions: it had to be approved by the husband, doctor, and the Head of their unit. Those who secretly underwent abortion were harshly punished.

A few years later, the CCP leaders, who had no foresight at all, again adjusted the population policy, making opposite regulations. In 1979, they implemented a nation-wide One-Child Policy, and this was the beginning of the tragic fate of women in China. Afterwards, the CCP obtained comprehensive control over the uteruses of China’s women, setting rules about when they needed to get an Intrauterine Device (IUD) and when they needed to be sterilized. The Party gained control over the private lives of couples, regulating when they can get pregnant, when they can give birth…everything is decided by the Party. This is unprecedented in history, the one and only in the world, a true Chinese specialty. The CCP’s propaganda machine always claims that China is about to explode, so it cannot further develop unless it enforces population control. Yet, China’s neighbor India, which is also in Asia, has a huge population, but has not implemented coercive birth planning, and has not exploded. Instead, it seems to be developing steadily, with an economic growth rate even surpassing China in the 2nd quarter of 2015/16 （source: CNBC http://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/30/india-economic-growth-outpaces-china-rbi-seen-holding-rates.html / India economic growth outpaces China, RBI seen holding rates）.

From the following points, we can see that whatever changes are made to the population policy the CCP formulates, it will be irrelevant to human rights, and the policy of planned murders are still being executed. No matter how big of a giant China’s economy becomes, it is still a dwarf in the aspect of universal values.

Permission and Authorization to Give Birth are both Violations of Human Rights

After coercively enforcing a One-Child Policy and continuously harming women and children in China for 36 years, CCP leaders proclaimed a new directive in the 18th Central Committee: a Two-Child Policy would be launched throughout the nation, whereby residents are allowed to have two children.

Of course, if someone dares to go against the policy and have a third child, the consequences are the same as the old policy: forced abortion or fines, because these coercive policies are still being implemented and have not been cancelled. That means, the Party still has control over women’s uterus and still restricts the natural rights of couples to have children. Heavy fines which leave civilians penniless and their families in ruins are still collected. This birth planning policy is like a sword hanging over people’s heads, ready to slash down at anytime. This Party has kept its clutches over the uterus of Chinese women like in the 50s in ring the previous century. When the Party tells you to have babies, you have to produce some; when it tells you not to, you must stop. It gives you the number of children you should have, and you must follow. Having fewer children would have resulted in harsh punishment, and now having too many will lead to forced abortion or fines! The power of determining the life and death of new lives has been held by a few men in the leadership level of the CCP.

During the CCP’s 36-year era of implementing a One-Child Policy, forced abortion and fines were guidelines for the Birth Planning cadres. It was not uncommon for civilians to be subject to economic sanctions, violation of rights through physical force, unlawful detention, assault and even destruction of property and loss of family. Some couples with “over-quota” births were persecuted and were forced to hide in different places, even escaping to other countries to seek political asylum. Women’s Rights in China (WRIC) volunteers Su Changlan, Yao Cheng, Chen Qitang etc. spoke out for farmer Zhang Ronghua, who was killed with her baby in a forced abortion in Lijin County, Shandong Province.

See below: Zhang Ronghua was with her husband, daughter. Photo by WRIC

WRIC volunteers also saved Cao Ruyi and the life of her little baby, who were almost forced to undergo abortion in an obstetric bed in Changsha, Hunan. These volunteers who demonstrated such humanitarian spirit have all been arbitrarily detained by the Chinese government. Among them, Su Changlan and Chen Qitang have already been imprisoned for 2 years without being sentenced, and are prohibited from medical parole.

The Chinese government always claims that the Family Planning Policy led to a great decline in the death rates of pregnant women and infants, but this is just a lie that becomes more pronounced as they try to cover it up. In fact, the government’s statistics only include licensed hospitals. Its lack of truthfulness lies in the fact that a significant number of women with over-quota births have to avoid the fine and don’t have birth permits, so can only deliver in unlicensed hospitals or at home, especially villagers and pregnant girls that are under age. There are a large number of cases in which both mother and infant die due to miscarriage or infection through unhygienic abortion equipment, leading to massive hemorrhage etc., and they are not included in government statistics. Also excluded are pregnant women living in remote mountainous areas or ethnic minorities who die because they couldn’t get hospitalized in time during emergency situations due to underdeveloped transportation and medical systems. Once women and their families have more children than permitted by the government, they have to pay fines consisting of heavy Social Childcare Fees, or they put themselves in jeopardy and deliver under the risk of having no medical facilities, which is a match with the grim reaper. Two years ago in Liupanshui area in Guizhou, a migrant worker secretly returned to her hometown to deliver her second child, but had a massive hemorrhage. The midwife couldn’t stop it and both mother and child died.

On September 27, 2016, the Chinese National Health and Family Planning Commission published a shocking statistic: half a year after the national launch of the Two-Child Policy, the death rate of pregnant women has risen: in the first half of 2016, the death rate of pregnant women in the nation has increased by 30.6% when compared to the same time period last year. The Commission has to admit that “there are serious issues in protecting the safety of mothers and newborn babies.” Yet the Deputy Head of the Commission blames it on other factors: increase in births, higher proportion of older mothers, high costs and risks in Obstetrics & Gynecology and pediatrics, medical personnel consisting of more young women who have their own reproductive needs, and a lack of human resources. They are taking the branch for the root! We must ask: didn’t the government think about these practical problems that must be dealt with and solved before they decided to launch the Two-Child Policy? Did the government allocate funding for vocational training programs? Are relevant units and staff held accountable for cases of death? Why is there a higher proportion of older mothers? What responsibilities should the government take for implementing a coercive One-Child policy for the past decades? One conclusion we can make is that, as long as the government enforces a coercive birth planning policy, no matter one child or two are permitted, Chinese women still have no freedom in guarding their own uterus, death and harm is forever their nightmare, and the government will keep shifting their responsibility.

Coercive Fines are a Cash Cow for Rulers

Since the 1980s, medical information and data related to Birth Planning have been labeled as state secret, and even became one of the top national secrets in the end of the 80s. Birth Planning fines have remained a mystery for the past 40 years.

The government has never publicized where these fines ended up, and no auditing agency has the right to publish this financial report. According to incomplete statistics (consisting only of 22 provinces), the total amount of fines in 2012 was 16.8 billion, but strangely, this huge amount has been kept safe and hasn’t become a concern to the media. Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaigns these few years have not resulted in any “tigers” or “flies” being caught for mishandling or embezzling birth planning fines.

In 2013, the National Health Bureau was combined with the Family Planning Committee and became the National Health and Family Planning Commission. The Head of the National Health and Family Planning Commission directly oversees the new commission, which is a merge of the two major systems in China. The other agency directly headed by the government and funded by it, i.e. the Family Planning Association, with 94 million full-time and part-time workers (statistics from its official website), has taken over a majority of the functions of the original Family Planning Committee. The Family Planning Association’s largest funding from the government in 2015, is used for the 94 million staff from the previous Family Planning Committee to directly manage the birth planning of the 250 million farmers in all large cities in the nation, i.e. monitoring and coercing migrant workers to carry out the CCP’s harsh birth planning policy. The government’s policy for fines has not changed. That means that when the nation needed youths, peasants produced children even during hard times, and raised them up to become society’s strong labor force, but they received no rewards and social welfare from the government, and instead now have to pay fines to the government for over-quota births. If the timing between their first and second pregnancies doesn’t follow the government’s regulations, if they have children out of wedlock, or get pregnant before getting married, they all have to be fined.

The CCP’s policy of fines has never been lenient, and continues to lead to tragedies and deaths, destruction of families, and continues to trample over the freedom and rights of Chinese women and children to live and give life.

Coercive Birth Planning Brings Endless Troubles to China

China’s Coercive Birth Planning Policy has brought obvious disasters. Besides the infamous human rights disaster, there are also a series of social problems like serious gender imbalance and a rapidly aging population.

Serious Imbalance in Population Structure

During the era when birth planning was implemented harshly, some families killed or abandoned female infants to keep the quota of having a boy to meet the nation’s regulations. Chinese scholars state that the current gender ratio of newborn infants is 118:100. In 2000, the ratio in Hainan Province reached 135.64:100. WRIC launched activities in Erlang Town, Susong County, Anhui Province, and an elementary school teacher told us that there were 57 students in her class, but only 16 were girls. We conducted a study on the gender ratio in two villages in 2010 and 2011, and the average ratio was 145:100 and 135:100. Scholars warn that there will be 40 million single men. When 2050 arrives, there will be 100 million men that don’t have wives to marry. The gender ratio has been continuously high for many years. This not only destroys the population structure, it also leads to many social problems such as an increase in crime rate. According to scholars, the Chinese government will greatly increase conscription to solve the problem of single men, but this will be a potential security threat to countries nearby.

Aging problems hinder economic development

In his book Empty Nest of the Great Nation, population studies expert Fuxian Yi criticizes the Chinese government’s birth planning policy. This book was banned in China. Yi determined that “the nature of China’s economic crisis is its population crisis.” Currently, the elderly population over 60 years old in China has surpassed 212 million, comprising 15.5% of the total population. According to forecasts, around 2040, China’s elderly population will reach its peak and will exceed 400 million, that means there 1 out of 3 people will be an elderly. In an aging society, there is a serious inadequacy of robust labor, hindering economic development. The Empty Nest phenomenon and aging population will intensify a series of social problems and become a heavier burden.

After a decade of an extremely low birth rate, it is a proven fact that even if a Two-Child Policy is launched, the situation cannot be saved: unlike experts’ expectations, youths in China lack the intention of having a second child. Eight government departments in Yichang City, Hubei, released a document calling for all Communist Party and Youth League members in government agencies and corporate units to take the lead in producing a second child, proclaiming that “one child poses risks, two children are great.” We don’t know whether to cry or laugh at such type of propaganda. Nevertheless, they highlight three points: (1) the Birth Planning Policy implemented for decades by the CCP has been proven to be a short-sighted wrong decision; (2) the local officials enforcing the policy are extremely ignorant; and (3) rulers without values of human rights, democracy and freedom can forever shift their attitudes like clouds and rain, and civilians are always the ones that suffer from the calamity.

In conclusion, in the eyes of the CCP’s dictatorship, civilians are only a birth machine. The so-called Two-Child Policy is just the Party’s adjustment of the productivity of this machine. The people’s human rights have not been protected under the Birth Planning Policy, so naturally they won’t get any benefits in terms of freedom even if they are allowed one more child. Only when China completely abolishes this forceful birth planning policy and its coercive fines, publicizes all birth planning data and the amount of fines in the past decades, holds corrupt officials accountable, punishes those that illegally take away people’s lives, provides nation-wide compensation to women and families persecuted because of the birth planning policy and became disabled or even died, can China begin its first step towards living with dignity.

Will China’s Two-Child Policy Improve Women’s Rights in China?

Posted on 2015-12-05 by Jing Zhang

Translator: Jennifer Yuan 11-15-2015

A few words from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the 5th plenary session of its 18th Central Committee brought massive suffering to the people of China, infiltrating their psychology and body. In the recent 40 years, the Party implemented a stringent One-child Policy, controlling the wombs of a total of two generations of women, and controlling the reproductive systems of two generations of strong young men. In order to get a second child, couples were almost tortured to the point of death by the various cruel punishments imposed by the Birth Planning officials. Cases in which houses were demolished and actual deaths occurred were not rare. The extent, duration and depth of the turmoil were a “historic creation” of the CCP, found in no other place in the world. Now, hearing the phrase “Allowing Two Children”, women who have endured forced abortions are still crying endlessly, tears dampening their collars and clothes. Their sadness is heartfelt.

Yet, to the farmers who make up the majority of the Chinese population and ethnic minorities, this new policy doesn’t seem too relevant. They are not really beneficiaries, since most villages and ethnic minority regions already have a policy for households with two girls that permit a second child. What peasants fear the most are that their wives with “illegal births” are dragged like a pig to undergo forced abortion, and that harsh fines are imposed. These policies currently remain in place, and have no signs of loosening up. Peasants have to face these situations everyday: pregnant out-of-wedlock, fined! Pregnant after unregistered marriages, fined! Inadequate time between the first and second pregnancy or births, fined for not following
regulations! Unplanned pregnancy or births, fined! Not going for operations for Intra-uterine devices (IUDs) or vasectomies as required, fined! Shielding people with “over-quota” births, arrested and fined! Peasants who cannot afford the “Social Childcare Fees” or cannot pay it in installments have to pay additional overdue fees and high interests. All in all, fines are given numerous labels, and a large number of migrant workers have to send their hard-earned money from work in the cities back home to pay these fines or interests. Living under such an “iron-fist” policy, powerless farmers of course are not happy about any surprises, and feel that they have nothing to be grateful for.

Two years ago, after the launch of the CCP’s “Two-child Policy” for families with an only child, the National Health and Family Planning Commission’s data claimed that there were a total of 11 million eligible couples. However, only less than 10% went to register. One year later, only 241,300 couples that registered were approved by the government i.e. 5% of eligible applicants (Source: http://www.chinanews.com/gn/2014/07-11 /6374093.shtml). This Two-child Policy is not embraced by the city dwellers because even if they can afford to give birth to a second child, they cannot afford the cost of raising the child. Expensive fees for daycare and education etc. make parents who want a second child fear the prospects. The government overemphasized the numbers and has already been proven to be wrong. Chinese scholars basically agree on the same point: the trend of age disparity is inevitable; A serious imbalance in the ratio between men and women. even if a Two-child Policy is launched, will take about 100 years for the demographic to return to a reasonable condition. After studying population issues for many years, Mr. Yi Fuxian pointed out that in the 1960s of the last century, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea advocated only two children. Along with economic development, rapid fertility declined from a high level of 5.0 or more, and later pro- state policies have been, but did not appear compensatory baby boom, the fertility rate hovering at low levels of around 1.1. China from the beginning of the last century, 1980 times uses to pilot the “two-child program” in the rural areas of Yicheng Shanxi, Jiuquan Gansu, Chengde Hebei, Enshi Hubei and affects more than 8 million people, but the fertility rates are all below 1.6. Changyang and Wufeng County in Hubei and The production and construction corps of Xinjiang, the same as before with the national implementation of the onechild policy, then let go after two births, they are not found in compensatory baby boom and fertility rebound. But once completely abolished the family planning policy, a series of serious social problems will be breaking out. It is likely to directly shake the CCP’s rule. Therefore, the CCP’s state policy will not change.
To the politicians who treat social stability as their top priority, fully launching a Twochild Policy won’t lead to a population explosion, and basically won’t change the social structure. It won’t bring sudden pressure on the political and economic level of the society, and won’t drastically reduce the revenue of the provinces from birth planning fines. The more than 100 million full-time and part-time birth planning officials will also not lose their jobs, and the relevant departments will not be affected. A huge amount of fines continue to come from villages, as farmers are the main “contributors” of this source of government revenue. The livelihood of birth planning officials remain as sturdy as iron; they are still the most “important”, largest and strongest civilian force from the grassroots level, stabilizing the rule of the CCP. To put it simple, this new policy will not affect the foundation of the rule of the CCP. Since the early 1980s, medical records and data related to birth planning have been successively classified as top state secret. Birth Planning fines collected within these 40 years have continued to be a huge mystery: the government has never publicized or traced the sources of the large amount of fines, and no auditing agency has the right to publicize the relevant financial reports. President Xi’s harsh anti-corruption campaigns these 2 years have not caught any of the “tigers” that embezzled birth planning fines and exposed them to the public through the news. In 2013, a joint petition from 14 female lawyers demanding provincial birth planning agencies to publicize the total amounts of their birth planning fines sparked off debate and support from the citizens. 22 of the 30 provinces unofficially disclosed the amount: the total
revenue created from the fines was RMB 16.8 billion, but there was no official financial report, and where the money was spent was not mentioned. The secret operations of the birth planning treasury did not lead to concern from the “Anti-corruption Leadership Groups” of any level. The Chinese media has also remained silent since birth planning information has always been classified as state secret. Merely touching upon it could lead to charges of disclosing state secrets and harsh sentences of imprisonment.
More importantly, officials that have the authority to use birth planning fines are also those who most understand the birth planning policy and how its various implementation methods have cruelly impacted civilians. Some atrocities include: secretly conducting large-scale human experiments for numerous birth control pills and tools, and the data of the resulting levels of damage inflicted on the women’s bodies. This group of officials not only participated in carrying out secret orders of birth planning, they also have on their hands a large amount of highly classified information and data. More than 20 ministry and commission representatives of the State Council are responsible for policies and matters relevant to birth planning and take orders from the Family Planning Committee on their work. In 2013, the National Health Bureau was combined with the Family Planning Committee and became the National Health and Family Planning Commission. The Head of the National Health and Family Planning Commission directly oversees the new commission, which is a merge of the two major systems in China. This demonstrates how powerful the Family Planning Committee has become. According to Article 10 of the “Measures for Administration of Collection of Social Maintenance Fees” issued by the State Council, the social maintenance fees with relevant surcharge fines shall all be turned over to the State Treasury and integrated into the local budget administration in accordance with the rules laid down by the finance department of the State Council. Every year, provincial and municipal birth planning departments have to send all the fines reaped from the people to the Central government after deducting adequate administrative and event expenses. The Central government does not have to spend a penny for the cost of obtaining a continuous and endless source of money. Gradually, the local birth planning offices become like geese that lay golden eggs: no leader in the CCP dared touch this income source, not to mention trying to sever ties with it.
Xi’s anti-corruption campaigns the last 2 years infiltrated and punished corrupt officials of various levels and classes from different fields in the Central government and local departments, but the birth planning system remains completely untouched. The petition of numerous female lawyers have no legal impact. Provinces that did not disclose the amount generated by fines not only were not punished, they were not even scolded. This shows that the enormous revenue from birth planning fines will continue to be protected by national policy and party regulations, and the people of China, especially the farmers that constitute the majority population, will continue to be overburdened by fines they cannot afford for. The highest authorities of the CCP and the top birth planning officials of different levels from different eras have followed an “interactive” model for decades: regulations are drafted by Central government and decentralization of power, local government extract money from the people and return the revenue back to the Association of China under the Commission, receive funds from the primary budget of the state. The work expenses of the Family Planning Associations on the provincial, municipal, county, district, township and town levels are counted towards the town’s birth planning budget. The Family Planning Associations have a total of 94 million full-time and parttime workers, plus over 50.87 million workers who are under the birth planning system in various departments, units and village groups (statistics from the CCP’s official website People’s Daily Online, Mar.1, 2010), amounting to a total of 150 million people working for birth planning departments. The county and township level departments in Biji City, Guizhou Province recruited 4,600 workers at a single event in 2012 for “special posts” in birth planning (new titles).

These “grassroots level” workers paid by the government know the details of every street, every village unit and every household like the back of their own hand. They monitor, contact and manage all families and households under the guise of handling birth planning matters, and report conditions to their superiors. These birth planning workers in “special posts” will be of great use if thoughts or plans for protests, demonstrations or even violent riots are uncovered. This, plus the CCP’s tens of millions of members and the traditional household registration system and residential committees formed since it established its rule, captures all activities of the people, making them unable to escape from the watchful eyes of the Central Government.
Since the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, riots broke out in many provinces, cities, counties, districts, townships and towns in China, but the longest one lasted only a few days, and the shortest a few hours before vanishing into thin air. The only movement that sustained longer was that of the overseas Chinese community in Wukan Village, Guangdong, which took place during the late years of the Hu era. It lasted about 20 days, then was silenced. Wukan is still in the same state. No group protests have been able to expand to other places and develop. The enormous web constructed by the CCP over the decades firmly captures the body (including women’s wombs) and the spirit (including individual minds) of the Chinese people. In fact, the birth planning agencies of the various administrative regions have already become the grassroots networks used by the CCP to stabilize their rule. It is not hard to see how enormous the “reservoir” formed by birth planning agencies has become, how deep the water has sunk and how many secrets have been buried inside, creating a reality that no one dares to touch upon.
The Two-Child Policy’s minor benefits will win over some victims, especially those who have long endured the oppression and have developed Stockholm Syndrome. Also mixed into the bag will be the extremely grateful victims who consider the policy an act of almost royal graciousness. They will stand by those who’ve harmed them, and look upon the government’s tyranny as a matter of course. They will have forgotten that reproductive freedom is a basic human right, a basic dignity, in which neither political parties nor family members have the right to interfere. The past 40 years of bloody repression, terror, and propaganda brainwashing have conveyed the message that to defy the will of the government is to suffer physical punishment, monetary penalties, loss of social status, and an ever-increasing fear of the shadows. In the eyes of the PRC, the people are simply reproductive machines. The people do not get any added security from family planning, nor will they receive any benefits from having a second child or refraining from it. The government only wants to limit the output in this system they’ve built.
It is time for Chinese women to shout: our womb belongs to us; the party has no right to control or manage it! The decision to give birth is for the women and their partners to make, not the Party!