Nightline Transcript 6-9-98 from
www.abcnews.com/onair/nightline/transcripts/ntl_980609_trans.html
Executing Orders China's One Child Per Family Policy Tuesday, June 9, 1998 (This is an unedited, uncorrected transcript.)
TED KOPPEL, ABC NEWS (VO) The policy in China, one child per family, a policy with devastating consequences.
FIRST LADY HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.
TED KOPPEL (VO) That was Hillary Clinton in 1995. Listen to a Chinese defector describe that country in 1998.
KIAO DUAN GAO I saw some women that were nine months pregnant put on the operating table and forced to have abortions.
REP CHRISTOPHER SMITH, (R), NEW JERSEY It's Orwellian, it's a brave new world and it's absolutely outrageous.
KIAO DUAN GAO, CHINESE BIRTH CONTROL OFFICIAL If the doctor does it correctly, the injection will be done through the mother's stomach right into the child's brain and the child will die at that time.
TED KOPPEL (VO) And she would know. Tonight, executing orders, a crisis of conscience.
ANNOUNCER From ABC News, this is Nightline. Reporting from Washington, Ted Koppel.
TED KOPPEL It remains one of the most controversial issues here in America. It is about to become one of the most controversial aspects of this country's relationship with China. Even as President Clinton prepares to visit China at the end of this month, a Congressional committee will hold hearings tomorrow on Chinese birth control policies. Even as abortion remains one of the most volatile hot button issues on our own domestic political landscape, that bears little or no relationship to the birth control policies that are still being implemented throughout significant parts of China. In our own country, the debate often boils down to the question of whether you are pro-life, that is opposed to all or all but a very few cases of abortion, or whether you consider yourself pro-choice. That phrase implies the belief that every woman should be entitled to make her own decision about what is happening within her own body. In this country at least, there is no responsible or significant group recommending forced abortions. Tonight, we'll bring you eyewitness testimony that this is not true in at least one part of China. Overpopulation and an insufficiency of resources have led that country's government for more than a generation now to generate huge pressure on couples to have no more than one child. Violators of that policy have been subjected to fines and other civil penalties. But, as ABC's chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross now reports, even more draconian measures have also been employed.
BRIAN ROSS, ABC NEWS (VO) By her own admission, this woman has been one of the most feared and hated people in the small town in China where she lives.
KIAO DUAN GAO Sometimes they'd see me when they were captured and they would curse me or they'd try to hit me with sticks.
BRIAN ROSS (VO) Her name is Kiao Duan Gao and for the last 14 years, Mrs Gao has been the local official in the Yonghe township on the South China coast in charge of enforcing China's one child birth policy.
KIAO DUAN GAO We use this card to arrest people.
BRIAN ROSS (VO) With only a few exceptions, one child per family, she says, or else.
KIAO DUAN GAO I saw some women that were nine months pregnant put on the operating table and forced to have abortions.
BRIAN ROSS (VO) Mrs Gao is perhaps the first official at any level in China's long, controversial planned birth program to reveal in startling detail what she says has become a well organized system of force sterilizations and abortions, including those at nine months.
KIAO DUAN GAO If the doctor does it correctly, the injection will be done through the mother's stomach right into the child's brain and the child will die at that time. Or if the doctor misses a little bit, then the child can still be alive when he comes out of his mother's womb and as soon as the child cries, the doctor will give it another injection and the child will die.
BRIAN ROSS In front of the mother?
KIAO DUAN GAO Usually. Sometimes mothers ask them please let me have the child and the doctors will say oh no, can't do anything about it. And they'll just let it die.
BRIAN ROSS Have you been present for such a procedure?
KIAO DUAN GAO Yes. Sometimes I've been there. Sometimes when I've sent them up there I've been in the room with them. I feel so sorry for them and it feels so cruel and if I could help them, I would.
BRIAN ROSS But you're the person who signed the order, right?
KIAO DUAN GAO Yes, I'm ordered from above.
BRIAN ROSS But you signed the document.
KIAO DUAN GAO Yes, I'm the one that executed the order. The order comes from above. I've got to carry it out.
BRIAN ROSS (VO) Last month, Mrs Gao says she finally had had enough of her job and its brutal duties. Arranging for permission to take a vacation in the Philippines, she instead defected, arriving in San Francisco three weeks ago. Now, with the help of one of China's most active critics, Harry Wu, a former political prisoner in China, Mrs Gao is seeking asylum in the United States, preparing to testify tomorrow before a Congressional committee chaired by Congressman Christopher Smith.
REP CHRISTOPHER SMITH Mrs Gao is one of the most important whistle-blowers in recent years to tell the truth about what's going on in the coercive population control program in China and that's a first, where we have somebody who finally says I've had enough. I don't want to be part of this atrocity anymore.
BRIAN ROSS (VO) In the weeks before Mrs Gao fled China, she arranged for a member of the Chinese dissident underground to come to her township to make this videotape to provide some evidence of what she says has been going on at the planned birth center she ran out of this building. At the entrance, an informant's box for paid informers to slip information on who has become pregnant in the township. Inside, a huge records room where Mrs Gao says there is a detailed file on every woman under the age of 49 and her reproductive status. Mrs Gao says no one in the township of 60,000 was authorized to become pregnant unless she said so.
KIAO DUAN GAO This is the permit to have children. After people are married, they apply to have permission to have the children and if they get pregnant without permission then we have to force them to have an abortion and if they're not willing to, if they run away or, we capture their parents or something else. We force them to do it.
BRIAN ROSS (VO) On the first floor, jail cells, a birth control jail for women who, Mrs Gao says, refuse to be sterilized or who become pregnant without her approval. Relatives who help to hide such women also end up here, she says.
KIAO DUAN GAO The people that are captured are locked up in there. There's one for locking up men and one for locking up women.
BRIAN ROSS And how long would people be locked up?
KIAO DUAN GAO Oh, sometimes they're locked up for five or six months. Some have even been locked up for eight months.
BRIAN ROSS (VO) Mrs Gao secretly took these pictures on another day when, she says, several women were actually in custody, including some who were to be sterilized for failing to have their birth control IUDs checked on schedule.
KIAO DUAN GAO Every three months they have to come in for a checkup and if they didn't come in for the second checkup, then we take them and we sterilize them.
BRIAN ROSS And you keep them in jail until they finally agree to go through with being sterilized?
KIAO DUAN GAO Right.
BRIAN ROSS (VO) The tape shows what Mrs Gao calls the sterilization doctor and the abortion room for abortions in the first trimester. Abortions for women in the final months of their pregnancy, up to and including nine months, are done at a hospital because of the serious nature of that procedure.
KIAO DUAN GAO It doesn't matter how old the child is, if it is outside the family planning then it has to be aborted.
BRIAN ROSS And how many times did this happen over the course of the 14 years you ran the planned birth center?
KIAO DUAN GAO Hundreds of times.
BRIAN ROSS There are people, many people who would call an abortion at nine months, they would use the term murder, not abortion.
KIAO DUAN GAO But there's nothing we could do.
TED KOPPEL Mrs Gao is not only willing to blow the whistle on China's policies, but also to share her own family secret. Part two of Brian Ross' report, in a moment.
(Commercial Break)
BRIAN ROSS (VO) Ever since a high profile speech in Beijing three years ago by Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Chinese government has been put on notice about forced sterilization and abortions.
FIRST LADY HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.
BRIAN ROSS (VO) But the hundreds of pages of documents smuggled out of China by Mrs Gao from her planned birth center indicate that at least in her province the warnings by Mrs Clinton and others have been widely ignored. The documents, according to an expert who has seen them, provide a first detailed picture of just how extreme the Chinese government can be in enforcing its one child policy.
JOHN AIRD I don't think we have ever seen a collection of documents at that level specifying the exact tactics to be used in enforcement of the family planning program.
BRIAN ROSS (VO) John Aird is the former chief of the China branch at the US Census Bureau and a critic of Chinese birth control tactics.
JOHN AIRD It is a very grim picture and this at a time when the United States and other countries are easing up in their demands on inspection of human rights in China.
BRIAN ROSS (VO) Of course not all abortions and sterilizations are forced. But the documents show specific instructions on how to use sterilization as punishment for uncooperative women and men, guidelines for setting up a network of paid informers and much more.
JOHN AIRD This represents coercion on a scale beyond anything that the world has ever seen and it also represents a massive assault on women in China because women bear the brunt of all of these measures.
BRIAN ROSS (VO) Mrs Gao says in the last few years she has secretly been trying to help some of the young women she has put through hell, including this young woman, who was unmarried, 19 years old and nine months pregnant with an unauthorized child when an informer turned her in and a squad of men was sent to the family home.
KIAO DUAN GAO The work group went over there and told her to come out and she was not willing to. She was hiding inside of her mother's house. They were threatening to demolish the house.
BRIAN ROSS (VO) According to Mrs Gao, her men then smashed and nearly destroyed the house, seen in this photo, what Mrs Gao says is a common practice when someone refuses to cooperate with the birth control forces.
KIAO DUAN GAO She was about to have the baby. She wasn't willing to come out.
BRIAN ROSS She was screaming?
KIAO DUAN GAO Oh yeah. She was crying. She was crying.
BRIAN ROSS And then she was forcibly taken to have an abortion?
KIAO DUAN GAO Yes. They took her over to have the abortion and she gave birth to a baby boy and the mother just cried and cried.
BRIAN ROSS What happened to the boy, the little baby?
KIAO DUAN GAO There's nothing they could do. It just, he came out and he died.
BRIAN ROSS (VO) According to Mrs Gao, the woman's child had been injected in the head with some kind of solution and died shortly after being born. (interviewing) Do you regret what you did?
KIAO DUAN GAO Of course. Many times when I went back home I couldn't sleep, I couldn't sleep well.
BRIAN ROSS Did you feel guilty?
KIAO DUAN GAO I guess that's why I came here.
BRIAN ROSS (VO) Through all of this, Mrs Gao has had her own family secret, a young boy she adopted after he was abandoned. As Mrs Gao knew better than anyone, it was illegal for her to do so because she and her husband already had one child, a daughter. Such adoptions are considered the same as actually giving birth to a second child.
KIAO DUAN GAO When coworkers come to my house I have to hide that child and sometimes I tell the child in the open you can't call me mommy.
BRIAN ROSS So you were breaking the very law that you were in charge of enforcing by having this second child?
KIAO DUAN GAO Yes, so you could consider me as illegal. I hid the child at my mother's house but then someone reported that there was a child at my mother's house and so there was an order for an investigation that came down from me. And so I hid the child at my friend's house.
BRIAN ROSS Even though you were in charge of the so-called planned birth center?
KIAO DUAN GAO It's the same thing. We have a one child policy for everybody and if they found I had two then I'd be fired and I'd be fined.
BRIAN ROSS (VO) In fact, Mrs Gao says if she had been caught, she, too, would have been sent to the same sterilization room to which she had sent so many others. Brian Ross, ABC News, New York.
TED KOPPEL The Chinese embassy here in Washington declined our invitation to respond to the charges that will be amplified before Congress tomorrow. Is it possible to get a handle on China's population growth without forced birth control? Two views, when we come back.
(Commercial Break)
TED KOPPEL Former congressman Peter Kostmayer is executive director of the grassroots group Zero Population Growth. He is with us here in our Washington bureau. And joining us from Irvine, California, Professor Susan Greenhalgh, a China population specialist who also teaches anthropology and women's studies at the University of California. Let's see if we can get some kind of a baseline. Professor, any reason to disbelieve what you have just heard?
SUSAN GREENHALGH, ANTHROPOLOGIST (Irvine, California) I think it's quite possible that these sorts of practices are evident in Fujian Province, which is where Ms Gao came from. Fujian has been known for being a place where the policy has been enforced with special vigor.
TED KOPPEL Are you saying that to the best of your knowledge policies such as these are not carried out in other parts of China?
SUSAN GREENHALGH No, there's tremendous amount of variation from province to province, between urban and rural areas, even from township to township and village to village. It's truly impossible to say how representative the situation that she describes is of the country as a whole.
TED KOPPEL Mr Kostmayer, as committed as you are to the notion of zero population growth, I'm sure you don't approve of any of the methodologies that we've heard described here, but let me ask you to put it in your own words.
PETER KOSTMAYER, ZERO POPULATION GROWTH (Washington) No. These are reprehensible violations of the most basic and fundamental human rights. I think we probably should believe the worst about what we hear about China. It's a repressive regime. It's a very closed society. I think we have to believe that these things are happening and probably take a very pessimistic view of what's happening in China.
TED KOPPEL And as best you can determine, how widespread is it?
PETER KOSTMAYER I don't know how widespread, but if it happens once, that's a fundamental violation of human rights. It only has to happen to one woman in one province one time for this country to be outraged.
TED KOPPEL Professor Greenhalgh, I'd like you to give a little bit of context, at least, for why, and obviously these policies, as I've said before, are so draconian, I don't think there is any kind of approval that can be given of those, but why is it necessary, in the view of the Chinese government, to have any sort of a policy that dictates to families how many children they may or may not have?
SUSAN GREENHALGH Well, you have to look at what was happening in China in the late 1970s. The one child policy was introduced in 1979. That was round about the time that Mao Tse-Tung died, Zhou Enlai died in 1976 and a new regime came to power. This regime wanted to set aside the old communist ideology and to base its legitimacy on rapid economic development.
TED KOPPEL Congressman Kostmayer, when we observed policies like this during the nazi regime in Germany and following the Second World War, the United States helped prosecute these kinds of things as war crimes. This is really no different, is it?
PETER KOSTMAYER I don't think it's fundamentally different. I don't know that we can engage in prosecution in a sovereign country, but I think the President needs to take a strong position when he visits China, as he will be very shortly, and speak out against this. I think what's happening here is something different, though, and that is that Congressman Smith and others in China, others in Congress are using what's happening in China as a way of stopping all family planning, which we contribute to around the world. And the US doesn't contribute anything to the Chinese program, either directly or indirectly through the UN But Congressman Smith and others want to stop all family planning around the world. He's been a consistent foe of international family planning. He also wants to stop it in the United States and he's using China as an excuse. So there's no question that what's happening in China is reprehensible, but we mustn't lose sight of the good work that voluntary family planning has done all over the world and in our own country.
TED KOPPEL I'll tell you what, we're ...
SUSAN GREENHALGH Yeah, I'd like to jump in here. May I?
TED KOPPEL Well go ahead and jump in, please.
SUSAN GREENHALGH Yes, I think that this whole discussion is very troubling, especially when you talk about Nazism. I personally am very troubled with the representations of China's birth control program that we get here in the US media. I think the situation in China is much more complex than this kind of discussion indicates. What's happening is that China is a socialist country. The state is supposed to plan both economic development, the production of economic goods as well as the production of people, in other words, reproduction. And from the early 1970s, there have been specific numerical targets that the population policy has been driven by and in my view this is the problem, because there are no scientific basis for the specific targets that have guided the policy.
TED KOPPEL Let's just take a short break and we'll be back with time for one more question and answer to each of you in just a moment.
(Commercial Break)
TED KOPPEL And we're back once again with Peter Kostmayer and Susan Greenhalgh. How at one and the same time can China be encouraged to engage in keeping its population growth under control and at the same time discouraged from participating in the kinds of procedures that we've heard enunciated on this program today, Professor Greenhalgh?
SUSAN GREENHALGH I think it's important to recognize that a lot of things are happening in China today in the policy. On the one hand, people want fewer children, so there's less need for pressure. On the other hand, the state birth planning commission is trying to Cairoize the policy, that is to push it in the direction of women's empowerment. Now I personally am very skeptical that they're going to get very far because the one child policy is still formulated in written regulations, written laws of the provinces of the PRC and I think that we have to change the laws before the program can really be modified. But I think it's important ...
TED KOPPEL Well, obviously-forgive me, but we're running out of time ...
SUSAN GREENHALGH Yeah. Oh ...
TED KOPPEL-and obviously we are not in any position to change Chinese laws so Mr Kostmayer, what do you think can be done to ...
SUSAN GREENHALGH Right.
PETER KOSTMAYER Well, I think you're right. We're not going to change what's happening in China. But we need to influence policy. Two things have to happen worldwide. One is the US has to devote more of its resources to international family planning. It's working. Fertility rates are dropping all over the world. And secondly, as educational and economic opportunities for women move up, fertility drops. So if we empower women with more education, with more economic opportunity, fertility rates come down, you join that with voluntary family planning. We can solve the population problem. The world's population is growing by about 168 a minute. The world's population, which is 5.9 billion, could double in 50 years. It's the number one problem on the planet. We need to solve it but we need to solve it voluntarily and through the empowerment of women.
TED KOPPEL And on that note, let me thank you both, Mr Kostmayer, Professor Greenhalgh, good of you to join us. And that's our report for tonight. I'm Ted Koppel in Washington. For all of us here at ABC News, good night.