I learned something fascinating about China’s one-child policy while recently researching other things, including the definition of genocide.
UBC professor emeritus Setty Pendakur, who has been to China 87 times to advise officials, told me a while ago Mainland China’s one-child policy was never as extensive as most Westerners think.
It strictly applied to only 36 per cent of Mainland Chinese. It was Draconian. But it didn’t include rural people in quite the same severe way it did urban dwellers.
And, most interestingly to me (who writes about ethnic diversity), it excluded the roughly 120 million residents of China who are considered “ethnic.”
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Genocide? Pogrom? Crime Against Humanity? Words matter
Those are Chinese people who are not members of the dominant Han ethnic group.
Part of the reason ethnic Chinese were excluded from the one-child policy was because of fear of an uprising.
Last week, while researching a piece on the disputed definition of genocide, I realized another key reason China never imposed its one-child policy on non-ethnic Chinese.
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UBC professor emeritus Setty Pendakur, who has been to China 87 times, told me Mainland China’s one-child policy was never as extensive as most Westerners think.
Mainland China could have been accused of “genocide,” of trying to slowly exterminate a specific group of people, if it tried to restrict the births of ethnic groups.
The UN’s 1948 definition of “genocide” includes any measures to limit births within a targeted group. It also forbids the transfer of children of one group to another.
China’s one-child policy does not count as genocide because it applies only to Han Chinese.
If it were brutally enforced on, say, Tibetans, the international community would have been able to justifiably raise an outcry, with teeth.
Here is the United Nation’s 1948 definition of genocide:
Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
killing members of the group;
causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
[and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Image may be NSFW.
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