Chinese Trolls and Chen's Abusers

By Wendy Wright

As events unfold in the gripping saga of Chen Guangcheng's desperate bid to flee Chinese oppressors, trolls for the Chinese government have posted comments on websites that, unwittingly, remind us why he is persecuted: Chen dared to expose the brutal reality of China's population control program.
This ought to unnerve groups like UNFPA, the U.N. population agency, and International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). Both helped implement China's one-child policy.
Yet they appear unfazed. Their top priority right now is pressuring countries to adopt population policies at Rio+20, a U.N. global summit in Brazil in June. They intend to get world leaders to deal with "population dynamics" and achieve "sustainable development" by agreeing to reduce the number of human beings through reproductive services like abortion.
Chen's case is a timely warning of what this can mean.
China's central government sets national population targets and expects local officials to meet them. Chen revealed that local officials, whose careers hinge on attaining goals, forcibly abort women and terrify their families.
Chen's transgression was insisting that national officials hold local officials accountable. For that, he's been jailed, beaten, and imprisoned in his home. His family members are under house arrest.
The message is clear: population control takes precedence over human rights.
Investigations of population control policies reveal an invisible hand of Western elites. Great Britain recently gave $268 million to India even after being warned that the program commits mass coerced sterilizations. UNFPA, whose grants paid for training and equipment like computers to calculate birth quotas, praised China's one-child policy. Gill Greer, director of IPPF, which includes the China Family Planning Association as a member, said adopting the population "policy is very conducive to China's development."
They absolve themselves by arguing that their agencies don't directly commit coerced abortions and sterilizations. Of course not. The national agencies that they fund and equip do the dirty work.
Why do they continue the partnerships? Here is where the Chinese trolls come in. Check out this striking response to a column by Jonathan Kay:

Here's a comment in support of China's one-child policy, that all you dimwitted weirdos can get excited about. In the first place, China's one-child policy is the law in China. Enforced abortions and sterilizations in very rare extreme cases are legal in China. Yes, naturally, these exceptional events are tragic and ugly, and of course no sane person wants to publicize them. On the other hand, reputable organizations estimate the number of enforced abortions and sterilizations in China over the past 20 years as a few thousand, far below 10,000, not the millions that liars like Kay cite. The overwhelming majority of Chinese couples, far more than 99.9 percent of the population, are much too smart and self-disciplined to selfishly break the law. The number of enforced abortions and sterilizations in Linyi over the 10-year period described was approximately 22. Of course the Chinese government made an example of officials as a PR gesture. Only a sicko would expose such sad and unpleasant events in the first place.
Even so, aiding and abetting common criminals, and accessory to criminal acts, are crimes in virtually every nation, and Chen, probably the most narcissistic, vain, and conceited person ever born on Earth, was fairly tried, convicted, and leniently imprisoned for his crimes. He remains nothing but a common criminal. The one-child policy of China, which almost all Chinese agree is a good and necessary law, merely demonstrates yet again how superior the Chinese are to all other people on the planet, and how superior the Chinese national government is to all other national governments. People who cringe from the facts and the truth merely demonstrate their inferiority.

Fears of overpopulation can drive people, to varying degrees, to justify "necessary" population control.
(Note that publicizing -- not committing -- forced abortions is the greater offense that drives guys like this batty. In light of that: here is Chen Guangcheng's report on victims of China's one-child policy. Jonathan Kay highlights a few cases and elegantly explains the link to decriminalized abortion.)
Not all one-child defenders are Chinese mouthpieces. Believers in overpopulation, or the latest iteration of environmentalism, insist that we must cut down the number of human beings -- chiefly those poor and unborn.
UNFPA, IPPF, and their government allies overlook horrific abuses in the greater quest to legitimize abortion and reduce populations.
UNFPA claims it has persuaded the Chinese government to change its ways and adopt voluntary family planning. Chen's work dramatically proves that UNFPA's presence in China has not translated into a gentler one-child policy.
Justice for Chen will not end with rescuing him, his family, and associates like He Peirong. It carries on his work to combat population control -- both its brutal implementation in places like China and surreptitious policies that legitimize and fund it through the U.N. and international agencies.
Wendy Wright is interim executive director for C-FAM, an institute focused on international social policy.