While anti-abortion advocates in the U.S. have embraced Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng as a “pro-life” activist, Chen is, in fact, a crusader against forced abortion and sterilization. In the U.S., “pro-life” connotes opposition to abortion, per se, so Chen isn’t an anti-abortion activist in the U.S. sense. He is a self-taught lawyer who brought down the wrath of local officials by demanding they follow the law of the land and stop forced abortions and sterilizations.
As a “barefoot lawyer” Chen has fought to expand the rule of law on various issues, including environmental protection and the rights of disabled citizens; though it’s important to point out that his struggle doesn’t map neatly onto the U.S. abortion debate.
No Help From Beijing
Born in a rural village in Shandong Province, Chen, who lost his sight as a child, nevertheless managed to teach himself Chinese law. He acquired a reputation as an advocate who was willing to go to court on behalf of his neighbors. He became aware that many of the women in his village were being forced to abort and undergo sterilization. In 2005 he exposed these coercive tactics.
Forced abortions and sterilizations are illegal in China under a 2002 law that gives individuals the right to an “informed choice” in these matters. However, the central government publishes national population targets and holds local officials accountable for meeting them. Some officials resort to illegal and coercive tactics to meet their quotas. These abuses happen primarily in rural areas where families want more children to work the land. In the cities, most couples voluntarily limit the size of their families.
The central government disavows responsibility for the actions of these officials, but it has never made an example of any official who has been caught coercing women, according to Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute.
Chen is being persecuted by local authorities, but Beijing has been unwilling or unable to help him. In 2006, he was sentenced to over four years in prison for “destroying property” and “assembling a crowd for the purpose of disrupting traffic”—despite being under house arrest at the time.
According to Amnesty International, Chen is a prisoner of conscience who has been jailed solely for peacefully defending human rights.
After serving his full sentence, Chen was placed under house arrest in September 2010. On April 22, with the help of allies, Chen scaled a high wall and escaped. He arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing on April 26 and remained there until May 2 when he left to go to a local hospital.
The U.S. claimed to have brokered a deal with China to allow him to leave his home province and attend law school in safety, but Chen became concerned that China would not honor the deal. He said he wanted to go to the U.S., at least temporarily, but that he was afraid to leave because the regime had threatened his wife.
Chen then appealed directly to Congress by phone during a hearing saying that he and his family are not safe in China. On Friday, the Chinese government announced that Chen could apply to study abroad.
The Pro-Life Spin Cycle
Anti-abortion news and opinion websites have taken to calling Chen a “pro-life dissident,” which is fundamentally misleading. And though he’s been described as an opponent of the One Child policy, he hasn’t campaigned to overturn the law. In fact, unlike most Chinese dissidents, Chen’s target is not the central government; he wants to enlist Beijing’s help to enforce the law of the land and to check the power of local government officials who have terrorized him and the women of his community for years.
“I think it’s important to note that he’s not anti-abortion per se,” wrote Jin Zhao, a freelance journalist who blogs at Things You Don’t Know About China. “He is critical of the local authorities’ forced abortions which he believes to have violated women’s rights.”
LifeSiteNews.com, a nonprofit anti-abortion news service, has championed Chen’s cause, publishing numerous stories and opinion pieces about the case over the years.
“[…] Chen is not the kind of activist that American authorities would have wanted to help,” claimed Julio Severo a blogger for LifeSite, “Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are shamelessly pro-abortion, while Chen is pro-life.”
Matthew Cullinan Hoffman alleged in a LifeSite op-ed that the Obama administration would rather see Chen disappear. Like many anti-abortion activists, Hoffman maintains that the Obama administration is complicit in China’s One Child policy through its support of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).
“Perhaps that is why, according to Chen, his American ‘hosts’ started to sound more like fellow members of the international population-control mafia that is killing his country, than starry-eyed defenders of ‘human rights,’” Hoffman continued. (Hoffman provides no citation and I was unable to find evidence that Chen said anything of the kind.)
In fact, while Chen was facing prison time for his forced abortion exposé, the UNFPA repeatedly raised Chen’s case with the Chinese government, but to no avail. The UNFPA rejects coercive population control tactics—and doesn’t support abortion services of any kind—yet critics still maintain that it indirectly supports China’s coercive population control regime:
“Earlier this year American taxpayers funneled $35 mill to UNFPA, an outfit that supports policies Chen has sacrificed his safety fighting,” tweeted Family Research Council president Tony Perkins on April 30.
Hoffman’s op-ed combines two common narratives about Chen and the Obama administration that have become popular on anti-abortion websites; that the Obama administration has betrayed Chen because it values economic cooperation over human rights; and that the administration is refusing to help Chen because it supports the forced abortions that Chen opposes.
The Perfect Dog Whistle
A bookend to this “stabbed in the back” narrative is the “liberal media conspiracy” narrative. Many anti-choice bloggers allege that the establishment media is deliberately ignoring or downplaying the substance of Chen’s activism because he’s pro-life. The standard rhetorical strategy is to seize upon news stories that describe Chen as a dissident without specifying the substance of his dissent. This omission is then taken as evidence of the liberal media conspiracy.
Jim Hoft of the right-wing blog Gateway Pundit accused the “liberal media” of downplaying Chen’s anti-forced abortion activism and speculated that the U.S. abandoned Chen after they found out he was pro-life.
In fact, Chen’s campaign against forced abortions has been widely and approvingly covered in the mainstream media for years. Some of the stories about the tick-tock of the diplomatic crisis ignore the substance of Chen’s activism, but that’s hardly evidence of a conspiracy. Having been recognized as one of the 100 most influential people by Time magazine for his campaign against coercive population control further undercuts this narrative.
The “stabbed in the back” rhetoric of the anti-abortion sites dovetails with the rhetoric of Republican politicians. It’s not yet clear why Chen left the embassy, or whether his departure means anything about the degree to which the U.S. government supports him.
Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney called the Chen incident “a day of shame” for President Obama, assuming the U.S. faltered in its support for the dissident.
Urging Obama to take a tougher line with China on Chen is an easy point of differentiation for Romney, who is actively seeking to distinguish himself from Obama on foreign policy. Given the resonance of this story for hardcore anti-abortion activists, advocating for Chen could also shore up Romney’s weak credentials as a social conservative. It’s the perfect dog whistle: when Romney talks about Chen, moderates hear “human rights” while hardliners hear “pro-life dissident.”
Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), a well-known anti-abortion crusader with a longstanding interest in China and this case in particular, has been in contact with Chen. Smith claims that U.S. officials refused to let him talk to the dissident while he was at the embassy. Chen made his dramatic appeal to Congress at an emergency hearing of a commission chaired by Smith.
Smith has been trying to cut funding to the UNFPA for decades. Romney also favors defunding the UNFPA.
The anti-abortion movement isn’t alone in its admiration for Chen. In a post on Feministing, one of the most influential feminist blogs on the web, Lori Adelman argued for a more precise label: “More apt than the whitewashed ‘human rights activist’ label he’s been given in the news is ‘reproductive rights activist’ and perhaps even ‘feminist.’”
“The world is watching whether the U.S. government will stand for freedom and human rights that it purports to stand for,” wrote Jin Zhao.
