Category: Totalitarianism

ChinaAid reports that human rights attorney Jiang Tianyong was arrested by Communist Chinese authorities on November 19 (Beijing time), just over a week after Mr. Tianyong gave U.S. Congressional testimony on the dehumanizing treatment, torture, and forced abortions by Communist authorities of women in China.  Mr. Tianyong spoke  on Capitol Hill at the U.S. House of Representatives on November 10, 2009 on this issue.  His fellow presenter, Ms. Reggie Littlejohn, described Communist Chinese policies against women as causing “more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on Earth.”  R.E.A.L.’s Jeffrey Imm heard Mr. Tianyong and the other human rights speakers on November 10 and has collected their testimony online.

ChinaAid reports that on November 18, when Jiang Tianyong and a handful of other human rights lawyers attempted to meet with U.S. President Obama, the U.S. Embassy told Mr. Tianyong that President would not meet the group.  The groups was then surrounded by 200 Communist Chinese “police officers,” and interrogated.  The next day, Mr. Tianyong was arrested and his wife beaten in front of their 7 year old daughter.

China Aid Reports:

Chinese Human Rights Attorney Jiang Tianyong Arrested and His Wife Beaten in Front of Their Daughter
Attorney Jiang Tianyong recently returned from a tour in the US exposing the abusive treatment of human rights lawyers in China.

November 19, 2009

“BEIJIN — At  7:40 AM (Beijing time) on Nov. 19, Jiang Tianyong and his wife attempted to leave their home to take their daughter to school, when they were barred from leaving the apartment building by Public Security Bureau officers assembled at the gate. Before Jiang could speak with them, four officers grabbed him violently and forced him into a police car. A police officer named Wang Tao threw his wife to the ground and began striking her. Jiang’s 7-year-old daughter cried helplessly as she watched her father being dragged away to detention by the officers.”

“Jiang Tianyong was arrested and held in detention at the Yangfangdian PSB office of Haidian District, Beijing for over 13 hours, under the guard of Officers Li Aimin and Wang Tao. He was allowed only one meal during his detention. A dozen human rights lawyers rallied in front of the station to demand Jiang’s release and to show support for their colleague. He was released at 9:26 PM (Beijing time) to return home to his family.”

“Immediately after learning of Jiang’s arrest, ChinaAid contacted the US Embassy in Beijing and several U.S. Congressional offices, notifying them of Jiang Tianyong’s brutal treatment and detention. A US Embassy official quickly responded and said that the Embassy had called the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and formally registered the U.S. Government’s concern and opposition to this action. The embassy further reported the incident to the National Security Council and the State Department, all prior to Jiang’s release.”

“Jiang Tianyong had just returned to Beijing on Tuesday, November 17, after touring the United States for 4 weeks and speaking out on the unjust treatment of human rights lawyers in China. On several occasions, he and the other five Chinese human rights defenders on the tour advised U.S. officials to encourage President Obama to meet with human rights lawyers and speak out on religious freedom while visiting China. Read Jiang Tianyong’s Testimony before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. Hear his remarks at the National Press Club and at the hearing in Washington, DC.”

“Fearing the lawyers would become targets upon their return, Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission co-chair Frank Wolf of Virginia warned against ill-treatment upon the lawyers’ return: ‘If any of them are arrested or harrassed when they get back, I will do everything I can to just  create the biggest problem possible for the Obama adminsitration and for the Chinese government.’ ”

“Yesterday, on November 18, Jiang Tianyong and a fellow legal researcher attempted to arrange a meeting with President Obama before he left China, hoping to follow through with the lawyers’ request for US acknowlegement of the current dire situation. After receiving a phone call from the U.S. Embassy, informing him President Obama would not be able to meet with the group of five human rights lawyers who had gathered, 200 police officers immediately pulled up, and interrogated Jiang and one of his colleagues in the hotel for over an hour. They were informed they ‘were not allowed to meet President Obama” and would “be held until he left’ yesterday afternoon.”

“The brutal assault of Jiang Tianyong, his wife, and their daughter is an unjust an inexcusable attack on the rights of peaceful Chinese citizens. Jiang’s family now suffers even more from this abuse, as their well-being was taxed after Jiang’s license to practice law was revoked and his tenure at the Beijing Global Law Firm was terminated in April of this year.”

“ChinaAid denounces the cruel and inhumane treatment of human rights Attorney Jiang Tianyong. We urge the Chinese authorities to stop their harassment of Attorney Jiang and the other human rights lawyers and their families who have been detained during President Obama’s visit.”

“ChinaAid further calls on the international community to pray for healing from this unjust persecution, in the wake of Jiang’s courageous tour in the United States, and to call on American leaders to voice their opposition to human rights abuses in China.Raise your concerns on Jiang’s behalf to the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C.”

Ambassador Zhou Wenzhong
3505 International Place, NW, Washington, D.C. 20008
Tel: (202) 495-2000
Fax: (202) 588-9760

Chinese Embassy Press Secretary Baodong, Tel: 202-495-2218

NOTE: If you are a citizen of another country, please click here to find the contact information of the Chinese embassy in your own nation http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/wjb/zwjg/2490/.

R.E.A.L. attended testimony of human rights activists and of persecuted Chinese women who faced oppression and forced abortion due to the PRC Communist Party of China (CCP) regime’s “One Child Policy.”  R.E.A.L. heard women in tears and pleading for the lives of their babies from the cruel and anti-human rights, anti-human life policy of the Communist China regime. To those who use distance, politics, and silence to keep the voice of these women and their very real suffering and human rights abuses from being heard, today in Washington D.C., on Capitol Hill, their voice was given a public hearing, so that world would hear, remember, and call for end to such a genocide against children, and violence against women.

Activist Reggie Littlejohn of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers described the horrors in China that persecutes those caught pregnant with a second child. “Women being literally dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night, or even in the middle of the day, strapped down to tables, pleading and crying, and then being forced to abort their babies.” According to human rights activist Reggie Littlejohn, the PRC CCP regime has boasted on of preventing 400 million births with its policy that allows a woman only one child. Littlejohn stated, “It doesn’t matter whether you’re pro-choice or pro-life on this issue. No one supports forced abortion because it’s not a choice. ”  According to Littlejohn, the actual number of the millions of forced abortions is a tightly-held state secret.

In addition, chairman of the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) Leonard Leo stated, “Speaking softly to China about human rights is a fool’s errand. History has shown it simply does not work.”

— Women’s Rights Without Frontiers

— R.E.A.L. was at news conference where Reggie Littlejohn described this as it “causes more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on Earth”
–— November 10, 2009 – DC: Experts on China’s One Child Policy to Testify in Congressional Hearing

November 10, 2009 Congressional Testimony on Communist China
— Seriously Raise Forced Abortion With Chinese Leaders in Beijing — The Worst Violation of Women’s Rights in History,  Rep. Chris Smith, Chairing the Hearing of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission

— Reggie Littlejohn – Oral Testimony; President, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers; One Child Policy Expert, ChinaAid: China’s One Child Policy 

— Testimony of Wujian, citizen of the People’s Republic of China
— “My ‘Little Foot,’ My Lifelong Pain”
— Wujian_Testimony (Adobe Acrobat)

— Jiang Tianyong, Beijing Global Law Firm: Testimonies on Violent Implementations of the One Child Policy in Linyi City, Shandong Province, China – Specific cases of Fang Zhongxia, Hu Bingmei, Li Juan, family of Song Huahou, and reports from investigators Jiang Tianyong, Cheng Guangcheng, Yuan Weijing, Li Chunfu, Li Jian, Li Heping, Teng Biao, Guo Yushan, and the imprisonment of blind human rights activist Cheng Guangcheng for seeking to protect women for forced abortion.

— The Case of Liu Dan: Woman Dies of Forced Abortion at Nine Months – Jingang Town, Liuyang City, Hunan Province

— Case of Wang Liping Forcibly Aborted at Seven Months, Then Required to Pay – Diaoyutai Village Guying Town Huiji District Zhenzhou City, Henan Province.

— Infanticide “What if the Infant Is Still Alive after Induced Labor?” – Call by Medical Team Personnel to Puncture Fetus’ Skull and Other Atrocities

— Annie Jing Zhang, President, Women’s Rights in China:The Three Examinations: Enforcing China’s One Child Policy in Rural Villages

— Annie Jing Zhang, President, Women’s Rights in China: Powerpoint of Photos Related to China’s One Child Policy

— Reggie Littlejohn: New Evidence Regarding China’s One Child Policy Forced Abortion, Involuntary Sterilization, Infanticide and Coercive Family Planning

— The Consequences of Coercion: China’s One Child Policy and Violence Against Women and Girls; Reggie Littlejohn President, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers

— Harry Wu, Director, Laogai Research Foundation; Prepared Statement on China’s One Child Policy

— Rebiya Kadeer, President, Uyghur American Association: An Evaluation of 30 Years of the One Child Policy in China

— Associated: NDTV video on this Testimony at U.S. Congress

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Related Article from Washington Post on this Testimony at U.S. Congress

When abortion isn’t a choice

By Kathleen Parker
Washington Post
Wednesday, November 11, 2009

— “One of the few incontrovertible assertions one can reasonably make is that no one supports forced abortion.”
— “Yet, coerced abortions, as well as involuntary sterilizations, are commonplace in China, Beijing’s protestations notwithstanding. While the Chinese Communist Party insists that abortions are voluntary under the nation’s one-child policy, electronic documentation recently smuggled out of the country tells a different story.”
— “Congressional members of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission heard some of that story Tuesday, two days before President Obama was slated to leave for Asia, including China, to discuss economic issues. Among evidence provided by two human rights organizations, ChinaAid and Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, were tales of pregnant women essentially being hunted down and forced to submit to surgery or induced labor.”
— “Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of the Frontiers group, told the commission that China’s one-child policy ’causes more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on Earth.’ ”
— “I met Littlejohn for breakfast the day before the hearing. A petite wife and mother — as well as a Yale-educated lawyer — Littlejohn gave up her intellectual property practice in San Francisco after a life-altering illness to become a full-time activist for Chinese women. She is remarkably buoyant, considering the knowledge she has absorbed. Action, she says, is her way of coping with the unconscionable.”
— “Here’s the question Littlejohn insists we consider: What really happens to a woman who doesn’t have a “birth permit” and has an ‘out of plan’ pregnancy?”
— “The answer is simple and brutal: A woman pregnant without permission has to surrender her unborn child to government enforcers, no matter what the stage of fetal development.”
— “Late-term abortions are problematic, but the Chinese are nothing if not efficient. On one Web site for Chinese obstetricians and gynecologists, doctors recently traded tips in a dispassionate discussion titled: “What if the infant is still alive after induced labor?” ChinaAid provided a translation of a thread regarding an eight-month-old fetus that survived the procedure.”
— ” ‘Xuexia’ wrote: ‘Actually, you should have punctured the fetus’ skull.’ Another poster, ‘Damohuyang,’ wrote that most late-term infants died during induced labor, some lived and ‘would be left in trash cans. Some of them could still live for one to two days.’ ”
— “To be clear, some of the doctors online expressed concern for the rights of the child. Others, however, worried only about potential legal ramifications. Technically, it is illegal in China to kill a baby, one is relieved to learn, but family-planning imperatives sometimes prevail. According to a 2009 State Department report, monetary incentives and penalties are attached to population targets, creating what amounts to bounties on the unborn.”
— “As recently as July, officials of China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission said that the one-child policy ‘will be strictly enforced as a means of controlling births for decades to come,’ according to Xinhua, the state-run news agency.”
— “The violence of these procedures doesn’t only kill the child in some instances. In two of the cases described in a document leaked this past August, the mothers died, too. Those who dissent, meanwhile, are persecuted.”
— “Such has been the fate of activist Chen Guangcheng, who is serving a four-year sentence after exposing 130,000 forced abortions and sterilizations in Linyi County, Shandong province, in 2005. Named by Time magazine as one of 2006’s top 100 people ‘who shape our world,’ Guangcheng, who is blind, was severely beaten and denied medical care the following year, according to an Amnesty International report.”
— “The one-child policy has created other problems that threaten women and girls. The traditional preference for boys has meant sex-selected abortions resulting in a gender imbalance. Today, men in China outnumber women by 37 million, a disparity that has become a driving force behind sex slavery in Asia. Exacerbating the imbalance, about 500 women a day commit suicide in China — the highest rate in the world, which Littlejohn attributes in part to coercive family planning.”
— “Obviously, the United States is in an awkward position with China, our second-largest trading partner and the largest holder of our government debt. But Littlejohn hopes Obama will “truly represent American values, including our strong commitment to human rights.” She is also calling on Planned Parenthood and NARAL to speak up for reproductive choice in China.”
— “On this much, both sides of the abortion issue can agree: Forced abortion is not a choice. Averting our gaze from China’s horrific abuse of women is.”