Hu Xijin, a top Chinese communist propagandist and former editor of the state-run Global Times, slammed the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday for overturning Roe v. Wade. Hu saluted abortion and sneered at the supposed hypocrisy of a “U.S. that advocates human rights vigorously.”
“The constitutional right of American women to have their own decision on abortion ends today. This change is painful for those women who have unintended pregnancy, many will face a hard life. And this change happens in the U.S. that advocates human rights vigorously. Pathetic,” Hu tweeted.
Chinese propagandists have a habit of picking up left-wing American media themes and repeating them in a lazy effort to cause discord, so there is nothing surprising about Hu basically cut-and-pasting a couple of angry tweets, tossing in a link to the New York Times, and calling it a day.
More interesting is that China’s authoritarian government has been shuttering abortion clinics and rather strongly hinting to its captive population that it wants to reduce its high abortion rate.
China is suffering a major demographic crisis after decades of its barbaric “One Child Policy,” which was only recently amended to allow couples to have first two, and later three, children. The One-Child years left China with a serious deficit of young women since couples forced to have only one child generally wanted a boy.
When the regime belatedly realized that the next generation of Chinese workers would not be showing up at the factories because they were killed before they were born, it commenced frantic efforts to encourage young citizens to get married early and have kids. This initiative ran into the above-mentioned shortage of young women and the same problem affecting much of the industrialized world: China’s increasingly affluent young urban professionals wanted to put off child-rearing so they could develop their careers.
Abortion (and, often, infanticide) was mandatory during the One-Child era and remained broadly legal in China afterward. When the Communist regime decided to begin restricting abortion in late 2021, as part of its bid to reverse population decline, it was surprised by the intensity of the backlash from women who did not want to become baby factories for the state.
One would never know it from reading Hu Xijin’s tweet, but China criminalized sex-selection abortions years ago and some provinces have imposed significant restrictions on abortions after the first trimester. In other words, Chinese provinces have different rules for abortion – just as different American states can after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday.
In February, China’s Family Planning Association launched a program to “intervene” in abortions, invoking traditional Chinese values and “positive” family culture to convince young women to have children. Human rights groups are nervous that China could make these “interventions” more intense if the rate of abortions does not come down fast enough.
On the other hand, China has used forced abortion and sterilization as part of its genocidal campaign to reduce the population of Uyghur Muslims. Uyghur women who resist these population control measures are sent to the brutal concentration camps of Xinjiang province, a prospect so frightening that Uyghur women have performed improvised abortions on themselves. These population control tactics were reportedly effective enough to reduce the Uyghur birth rate by 60 percent over three years.