President Hu Jintao of China was warmly welcomed by President Barack Obama during an official visit to the U.S. and honored with a rare State Dinner while his visit presented an opportunity to expose the horrific human rights violations taking place in China today.
New Speaker of the House Republican John Boehner pressed Hu on forced abortion during a congressional leadership meeting stating: "When it comes to guaranteeing the freedom and dignity of all her citizens, including and especially the unborn, Chinese leaders have a responsibility to do better, and the United States has a responsibility to hold them to account."
U.S. Representatives Chris Smith and Frank Wolf hosted a press conference (Click here to watch the press conference on CSPAN) with prominent Chinese human rights activists who spoke for the millions imprisoned, tortured and killed by the repressive Chinese regime and gave testimony against China's population control policy. According to Smith, "The Chinese government's one-child-per-couple policy, with its attendant horrors of forced abortion campaigns and rampant sex-selective abortion, is, in scope and seriousness, the worst human rights abuse - the worst gender crime - in the world today."
"Few people outside China understand what a massive and cruel system of social control the one-child policy entails. As the U.S. China Commission summarized, the system is 'marked by pervasive propaganda, mandatory monitoring of women's reproductive cycles, mandatory contraception, mandatory birth permits, coercive fines for failure to comply, and... forced sterilization and abortion'."
The Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, presented President Hu with a list of concerns about human rights violations in China during the meeting in the US Capitol. Hu responsed on only one issue--forced abortion. According to Ros-Lehtinen, "Out of all of the issues I raised, the only one which received a response from Mr. Hu was my statement urging the end of China's forced abortion policy. I was astonished when he insisted that such a policy does not exist."
Hu's denial of the practice of coerced abortion in enforcing the one child policy casts serious doubt on his credibility as global media coverage voiced the concerns of Chinese human rights advocates who exposed the brutality of China's population policy.
Reggie Littlejohn of Women's Rights Without Frontiers condemned the violence of coerced abortion in China and former Tiananmen Square student leader Chai Ling made an impassioned plea for the end of the daily 35,000 coerced and forced abortions in China. Ling, founder of All Girls Allowed, was hopeful that more Americans would voice their opposition to the abuse inflicted on women in China and to the killing of baby girls through sex selective abortion and infanticide. These discriminatory practices result in the birth of 1.1 million more boys than girls each year. It is estimated that by 2020, 40 million Chinese men will not be able to find a wife.
Women's Rights Without Frontiers' stark and compelling video filmed inside China reveals women whose children were forcibly aborted because the pregnancies were unauthorized. President Hu should watch it and learn about the brutality inflicted upon Chinese women. In addition, the website of All Girls Allowed provides background and documentation on the one child policy including links to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China Annual Report 2010 which states: "In 2010, the Commission analyzed government reports from nine provinces that used the phrase ''by all means necessary'' (qian fang bai ji) to signify intensified enforcement measures and less restraint on officials who oversee coerced abortions."
Presidents Hu and Obama missed an opportunity for a serious human rights discussion with human rights defenders such as Chai Ling, Harry Wu of the Laogai Research Foundation and Bob Fu of ChinaAid that would have addressed the need to rescue Chinese women from the terror they endure at the hands of China's population police.