Joe Biden Told China in 2012: ‘I Totally Understand’ One-Child Policy
Former Vice President's speech to CCP
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In 2012, former Vice President Joe Biden gave a speech in China saying he “fully understands” and was not “second-guessing” the Chinese Communist Party's one-child policy, which resulted in the deaths of millions of children.
According to the Obama White House digital archives and reports from Fox News, Biden made the comments while speaking at Sichuan University.
“But as I was talking to some of your leaders, you share a similar concern here in China,” Biden said.
“You have no safety net. Your policy has been one which I fully understand – I’m not second-guessing – of one child per family," he added.
"The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people. Not sustainable.”
“So hopefully we can act in a way on a problem that’s much less severe than yours, and maybe we can learn together from how we can do that,” Biden said.
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China made it illegal for couples to bear more than one child in 1979.
The move was an attempt to curb population growth while striving for industrialization.
Women were forced to abort their second child.
The Chinese government would still kill their child if they caught women pregnant late in their term.
Around 400 million births were “prevented” between 1979 and 2015.
NPR wrote in 2016:
Last October, China ended its 35-year-old policy of restricting most urban families to one child. Commonly referred to as the "one-child" policy, the restrictions were actually a collection of rules that governed how many children married couples could have.
"The basic idea was to encourage everybody, by coercion if necessary, to keep to ... one child," journalist Mei Fong tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.
Fong explores the wide-ranging impact of what she calls the world's "most radical experiment" in her new book, One Child. She says that among the policy's unintended consequences is an acute gender imbalance.
"When you create a system where you would shrink the size of a family and people would have to choose, then people would ... choose sons," Fong says. "Now China has 30 million more men than women, 30 million bachelors who cannot find brides. ... They call them guang guan, 'broken branches,' that's the name in Chinese. They are the biological dead ends of their family."
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A feature in the Atlantic explored the One Child Nation documentary, interviewing an 84-year-old Chinese mid-wife who said she has performed “50,000 to 60,000 sterilizations and abortions.”
Some of the gruesome details from the film were rpeorted by the news outlet:
As One Child Nation continues, the trail of horrors it depicts becomes long and winding. When China opened its doors to international adoption in 1992, many state-run orphanages became sites for human trafficking. Through her interviews, Wang learns about how newborns from families who violated the policy were kidnapped by family-planning officials and sold to orphanages, a detail that was repressed by the government (in the film, Wang speaks with a journalist who was eventually forced to flee to Hong Kong because of his reporting). To this day, many adoptees—and their families—find learning the truth about their origins nearly impossible.
A significant number of the babies sold were abandoned by their families or given to “matchmakers” for adoption. Many of the infants were girls given up by parents who hoped instead for a male child to carry on the family name. In one scene, Wang’s uncle recalls the loss of his newborn daughter, who was left on a meat counter in a market and died two days later when no one took her. Another of Wang’s relatives talks about how she gave away her own daughter to a human trafficker, fearing the child would die if abandoned.
It was not surprising that the pro-abortion stance of the democrats was not a talking point during the Democratic National Convention.
Abortion is still a part of the party platform.
