China’s One-Child Policy Reached Its Peak of Cruelty During Late CCP Leader’s Tenure: Rights Advocate

This photo taken on January 19, 2019 shows a medical staff taking care of a new born baby at a hospital in Fuyang in China's eastern Anhui province. - China's population shrank last year for the first time in 70 years, experts said, warning of a "demographic crisis" that puts pressure on the country's slowing economy. STR/AFP via Getty Images

The Chinese regime’s family planning policy, better known as the “one-child policy,” led to more than 330 million abortions over four decades. This population control plan saw women subjected to forced sterilizations, forced abortions, and seeing their infants killed and led to China’s demographic crisis that threatens the country today.

While there has been some reporting on the horrors committed under this draconian policy, the role of recently deceased Chinese top leader Jiang Zemin in directing its harsh implementation is less well known.

In one city in northeast China’s Shandong province, more than 130,000 people were forcibly sterilized or forced to have an abortion in only half a year in 2005, according to a Chinese human rights activist. An overseas Chinese expert believes that this is a direct result of Jiang’s orders to upgrade the importance of family planning work to the same level as the economic and political work of the Chinese regime.

While Jiang was the CCP’s top leader for more than a decade beginning in 1989, even after his formal retirement, he controlled much from behind the scenes because of the influence of his faction within the Party. He died in Shanghai on Nov. 30.

Jiang “triggered the collapse of China’s population,” causing its fertility rate to drop to 1.22 per woman in 2000 from 2.3 in 1990, Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Big Country with an Empty Nest,” a book on China’s one-child policy, wrote in a Dec. 2 tweet.

A nurse massages babies at the Xining Children Hospital in Xining City, Qinghai Province, China. Hospitals in Henan province have been advertising the selling of unwanted babies, according to a report by China National Radio. Getty Images

In 1979, the Chinese regime began the one-child policy, which allowed married couples to have only one child, in a campaign ostensibly aimed at boosting the country’s standard of living by curbing population growth. The policy caused widespread forced abortions, forced sterilizations, and infanticide.

After Jiang took power, he ordered the establishment of a responsibility system in 1991, in which top Party and local government officials were held personally accountable for the family planning policy. Those who failed to control birth numbers in their jurisdiction would face disciplinary punishments and the loss of promotion opportunities.

According to Chen Kuide, executive director of the nonprofit Princeton China Initiative, China’s one-child policy entered its harshest period while Jiang was the top leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its military from 1989 to 2004.

“The inhumane practices [of forced abortions, sterilizations, and infanticide] occurred most frequently in this period, which resulted in a sharp drop of birth rates [in China],” Chen told the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times on Dec. 1.

According to data from the country’s Ministry of Health cited by Chinese state media, 336 million abortions were performed from 1971 to 2013, and Chinese doctors also inserted 403 million intrauterine devices (IUDs) in Chinese women for birth control.

Veterans Used to Enforce Policy: Chinese Rights Advocate

The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the most heinous human rights situation in rural regions in China, according to Chen Guangcheng, a prominent Chinese lawyer and rights advocate now living in the United States. While in China, Chen campaigned on behalf of women who were forcefully sterilized and had their children aborted by force, which led to his jailing for four years and then house arrest. He made a dramatic escape to the United States in 2012.

Chen told the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times that in 1992, during Jiang’s administration, the CCP’s propaganda department issued an order that CCP mouthpiece media shouldn’t report on human rights violations related to family planning. This ban remained in effect until 2005. The police, courts, and public prosecutor’s offices also were prohibited from accepting family planning cases.

Chen is from China’s eastern Shandong province. He said that in his hometown during those two decades, local authorities organized veterans and sent them to villages to implement the policy.

“These veterans lived in the villages, which provided them accommodation and food. When they saw a woman pregnant with a second child, they immediately dragged her to the local clinic and forced abortion on her,” Chen said.

Other punishments for families with a second child or pregnant with a second baby included fines, torture, the demolishing of houses, and confiscating private property, including livestock.

Feng Jianmei lies on a hospital bed after a forced abortion during her seventh month of pregnancy, in Northwest China's Shaanxi province on June 4, 2012. Photos of her with her aborted baby next to her on the bed went viral in China and provoked fury at the regime's one-child system and the forced abortions that accompany it. bbs.hsw.cn

When Chen and his friends probed into how the policy was being run in his home city of Linyi, their findings were shocking, he said.

According to Chen, in just six months in 2005, more than 130,000 people in the city were forcibly sterilized or forced to undergo abortions, and more than 600,000 family members or neighbors were harassed or tortured. Chen and his friends exposed their findings to the media and reported them to the relevant authorities, only to find themselves targeted by the regime for seeking to publicize the abuses.

Killing Infants

The year 1991 saw the cruel killing of infants in Shandong province. As the year was the year of sheep, according to the Chinese lunar calendar, the killing of infants is also called the “killing of lambs” by Chinese people, according to Yang Jianli.  

In 2016, Yang, a Chinese scholar and human rights activist who now lives in the United States, wrote about the horrendous killing of babies in China in 1991 and published his article on the website of Human Rights in China, a U.S.-based rights group established by Chinese students and scientists. 

Yang wrote that the CCP county secretaries of Guan county and Shen county in Shandong province launched the “Childless Hundred Days” campaign in 1991, in which the massive slaying of babies and the abortion of fetuses occurred. Zeng Zhaoqi and Bai Zhigang, CCP secretaries of the two counties, ordered a forcible abortion of every pregnancy in the 100 days from May 1 to Aug, 10 that year.

There were literally no newborns during this period, and even newlyweds having their first child weren’t spared. Any babies born alive during an induced abortion were strangled.

Yang noted that similar brutal infant killings happened across the country in 1991.

Zeng and Bai were both promoted because of their “excellent performance” in implementing the regime’s family planning policy, and neither of them ever expressed remorse for killing babies that year, as Yang condemned in his article.

Most shockingly, according to Yang, Zeng later served as a deputy director of the office of the Shandong Provincial Working Committee for the Care of Children. 

“I am not a judge, but if I were to charge them with a crime, I could only judge them for their actions back then as ‘crimes against humanity,’” Yang wrote.

In a city in China’s Yunnan province, the local family planning director forced a 37-year-old pregnant woman, whose baby was due in 10 days, to a local hospital. The woman was kept in the hospital for three days and an obstetrician fed her medicine every day to kill her fetus. On the third day, the doctor used an eight-inch-long syringe to inject a poisonous shot into her womb directly into the head of the fetus. She gave birth to a dead baby on the night after the shot. The hospital charged her 40 yuan (about $6) for the funeral expenses of the killed baby.

This case, from 2005, is recounted in the book “The Fetus Who Was Executed by the National Policy of China,” and the woman is named Tang Leqiong. Hers is one of the 84 forced abortions detailed in the book.

After four decades of diving birth rates, the communist regime discontinued the one-child policy in 2013, allowing two children. In May, it announced that families could have three children.

China’s fertility rate was 1.16 in 2021, far below the 2.1 OECD standard for a stable population and among the lowest in the world.

Chen said the cold-blooded nature of forced abortion subverts the traditional Chinese concept that human life is the top priority and makes the whole society no longer value human life.

“More seriously, people’s morality has deteriorated.”

Fang Xiao and Luo Ya contributed to this report.