China’s Minister Of Forced Sterilizations Honored Guest At The UNCSW

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Ms. Song Xiuyan executive member of China’s communist party, Minister and Vice-Chairperson of National Committee on Women and Children under the State Council China, and vice Chairman (sic) of the All China Women’s Federation (ACWF), a national organization that enforces China’s notorious population control policies upon women in China, and occupied Tibet and East Turkestan.

She knows about Tibet having (until January 2010) been a so-called Governor in Amdo, one of occupied Tibet’s three regions (re-named by communist China’s regime as Qinghai Province). During her time there Ms Song displayed a callous intolerance towards Tibetan culture, she was deeply resented by Tibetans, particularly given her reportedly close political relationship with China’s President Hu Jintao, whose hands are covered in Tibetan blood. According to one well-informed Tibetan source Ms. Song was publicly dismissive of Tibetan culture, an attitude that was reflected in her draconian term of office in the region. It was reported that on occasion she demanded that newly constructed government buildings, including schools, be rebuilt, if they included traditional Tibetan features!

It is not just Ms Song Xiuyan’s barely concealed racism that is troubling, but the organization of which she is joint head, the All China Women’s Federation, whose automaton-like members infest every village, town and city, and are responsible at a local level for the enforcement of the population program. Through a spiral of intimidation and coercion they trample over women’s human and reproductive rights to meet Government population targets, imposing fines, organizing education campaigns, withdrawing employment and housing rights, and if such bullying fails, forcibly sterilizing women.

Such harrowing violations are all committed in loyal obedience to China’s communist party ideology. Anyone wishing to learn more about the ACWF’s complicity and implementation of these atrocities is advised to read Susan Greenhalgh’s   Chinese State Birth Planning in the 1990s And Beyond

On Thursday February 24 2011 Ms Song Xiuyan addressed the 55th Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) which was examining a range of rights based issues, with a number of parallel programs including subjects as violence against women. Once again the UNCSW had chosen not to include any discussion of forced sterilizations as constituting a gross violation of women’s human and reproductive rights, preferring to invite as an honored speaker Ms Song, whose very organization is responsible for inflicting the most appalling medical atrocities upon Chinese, Tibetan, Uyghur Mongolian and Manchu women. It appears to have forgotten that the 1995 UN Beijing Declaration is supposedly committed China to eradicate coercive practices relating to reproductive health. Yet the Commission On The Status Of Women and Women’s NGO’s are cold-heartedly indifferent to the fact that document was agreed the abuses have continued, engineered and authorized by organizations in China such as the All China Women’s Federation!

Given the continuing censorship and evasion shown towards this major human rights issue, the political agendas of member states, we cannot expect any critique and certainly no examination of China’s continuing violation of women’s human rights or its mass campaigns of forced sterilizations suffered by countless women.