Biden on China's One Child Policy: A Shameful Way to Ingratiate Yourself to Dictators and Murderers

In 2008 I wrote on this blob that if left-wingers like Jim Wallis and Brian McLaren got their way and Barack Obama was elected, the outcome would be that the wars they supposedly opposed would continue in the same way as if a Republican and, in addition, we would get the most pro-abortion administration in American history. Well, three years later Obama is involved in three wars, which is one more than George W. Bush was involved in. But the anti-war rhetoric from the anti-war Left has been moderated considerably, actually pretty much abandoned.

Still, the Evangelical Left (which purports to care about women, children and the poor so much) can take pride in one accomplishment: they got a Vice President who went to China and assured the Communist dictators that their coercive one-child policy is just fine by him. This is an improvement on George W. Bush? No, it is a moral embarrassment to all who care about oppressed women and unborn children.

Here are some excerpts from Joe Biden's speech on Aug. 21: [Warning: contains extreme moral relativism instead of the usual Biden profanity]

China has followed a very different economic and political path to prosperity, enhancing some aspects of a free-market system, while resisting political openness and maintaining the state’s deep involvement in economic affairs. That's a decision for you to make.

What is a little thing like human dignity and liberty between trading partners?

Maybe the biggest difference in our respective approaches are our approaches to what we refer to as human rights. I recognize that many of you in this auditorium see our advocacy of human rights as at best an intrusion, and at worst an assault on your sovereignty. I want to tell you directly that this is not our intention. Yes, for Americans there is a significant moral component to our advocacy. And we observed where we have failed, as well. But it is who our people are.

"What we refer to as human rights"? What the heck is he trying to say? "It is who our people are"? Sounds like a concern for human rights is an American quirk that other nations cannot be expected to care about. Well, that sets up the context pretty well for the big bombshell:

In answer to a student's question about the US debt, Biden said:

What we ended up doing is setting up a system whereby we did cut by $1.2 trillion upfront, the deficit over the next 10 years. And we set up a group of senators that have to come up with another $1.2 to $1.7 trillion in savings or automatically there will be cuts that go into effect in January to get those savings. So the savings will be accomplished. But as I was talking to some of your leaders, you share a similar concern here in China. You have no safety net. Your policy has been one which I fully understand -- I’m not second-guessing -- of one child per family. 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. [my bolding]

Maybe we can learn from China and its one-child policy? This guy is a disgrace to his religion (he is Roman Catholic), to his country and to his office.

Rep. Chris Smith, a stalwart pro-life leader in the House of Representatives was interviewed by Laura Ingrham on this issue. Here is a clip of the interview.

Here are some of Smith's remarks from the show transcript:

This is just exposing what this administration has been doing from day one. Just like the eight years of the Clinton administration, and that is to enable dictatorship, to enable forced abortion and forced sterilization. Let's not forget that at the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal​, forced abortion was properly construed to be a crime against humanity. It is no less a crime against humanity today and there is our Vice President saying that he fully understands the one child per couple policy that has made brothers and sisters illegal in China.

...

Hillary Clinton​, en route to Beijing, after being selected as secretary of state, said, I'm not going to allow human rights to interfere -- her words -- with selling or peddling our debt, as well as global warming. Obama -- when he had Hu Jintao​ in town, who ought to be held for genocide and crimes against humanity at the world court, he said nothing, had a state dinner for this man who ought to be behind bars, be held to account for these atrocities, including those focused on women.

Obama, Biden, Clinton - none of them care about the rights of women and children. They ought to be ashamed of themselves and no Christian ought to have anything whatsoever to do with supporting politicians like them.

Marxism is More Moral, But Capitalism Produces More Moral Effects. Huh?

For a guy who supposedly has been reborn in order to enlighten others, the Dhali Lama seems a bit confused.

TIBETAN spiritual leader the Dalai Lama says he's a Marxist, yet credits capitalism for bringing new freedoms to China, the communist country that exiled him.

"Still I am a Marxist," the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader said in New York, where he arrived today with an entourage of robed monks and a heavy security detail to give a series of paid public lectures.

"(Marxism has) moral ethics, whereas capitalism is only how to make profits," the Dalai Lama, 74, said.

However, he credited China's embrace of market economics for breaking communism's grip over the world's most populous country and forcing the ruling Communist Party to "represent all sorts of classes".

"(Capitalism) brought a lot of positive to China. Millions of people's living standards improved," he said.

The Dalai Lama, giving a series of lectures at the Radio City Music Hall in central Manhattan until Sunday, struck a strikingly optimistic note in general, saying that he believed the world is becoming a kinder, more unified place.

Anti-war movements, huge international aid efforts after Haiti's earthquake this year, and the election of Barack Obama as the first black president in a once deeply racist US are "clear signs of human beings being more mature", he said.

The Dalai Lama said he felt a "sense of the oneness of human beings," jokingly adding: "If those thoughts are wrong, please let me know!"

Although China, which forced him to escape for his life in 1959, is loosening up, he had harsh words for a Communist leadership that he said still seeks to rule by fear.

As Chinese become richer, "they want more freedoms, they want an independent judiciary, they want to have a free sort of press", he said.

The Chinese Government, he said, seeks harmony, "but harmony must come out of the heart, not out of fear. So far, methods to bring harmony mostly rely on use of force."

Marxism has more moral ethics, but Capitalism brings freedom.

Marxism has more moral ethics, yet Capitalism has liberated the people of China from a Marxist government.

Marxism has more moral ethics, but Capitalism is responsible for raising the living standards of millions.

Marxism has more moral ethics, but "China's embrace of market economics for breaking communism's grip over the world's most populous country and forcing the ruling Communist Party to "represent all sorts of classes"."

Is it just me, or is this all just a bunch of contradictory gobbly-gook?

What an incredible hold Marxism exercises on the mind of those who embrace its superstitions.

A Chinese Perspective on the Influence of Christianity on Western Culture

Zhao Xiao is a Chinese economist and the author of a famous article entitled: "Market Economies With Churches and Market Economies Without Churches," which first appeared online in 2002 shortly after his return to China from a period in the United States. It has been reprinted in various magazines and is available online in a number of places. Xiao argues in this article that a market based economy does not work well without a foundation of morality and that morality is best fostered in a society by religion. He argues that much of the success of Western capitalism is actually due to the widespread influence of Christianity in society. In answer to the question of what is the biggest difference between America and China, he writes:

What makes the deepest impression on our countrymen about the US is the forests of skyscrapers that this country puts up, representing the high development of America's material culture. But skyscrapers are no longer scarce in China! It is evident that skyscrapers are not the greatest difference between China and the US.

Then, what about wealth? Without a doubt, the US is the world's richest country. In 2000, China's per-capita GDP was US$840, while America's was US$34,100; there is great disparity between the two. But considering that China's personal income levels are swiftly increasing, the wealth gap, though large, does not amount to the greatest difference between China and America.

Perhaps someone may suggest the gap in science and technology. However, China also possesses a great deal of high technology: for some time it has had the hydrogen bomb and the atom bomb, it sends rockets to the heavens, and it is developing a spaceship. So while a gap remains between the science and technology levels of China and the US, it is not an astronomical one.

Perhaps someone will suggest the financial gap. The pinnacle of the market economy is finance, and this is a weakness of China's market economy. In comparison, the US has the world's strongest financial system, and was the earliest to implement relaxations of financial controls to invite financial innovation. To date it has attracted 75% of the world's financial resources, making finance one of America's three superlatives (the others being sci-tech and political power). However, while China's financial system lags behind, looking across the country one finds banks as common as rice shops, securities firms promoting themselves everywhere, and ads for funds airing one after another during prime time on CCTV. So the financial gap between China and the US, while large, still does not amount to the greatest difference.

Then it must be a difference in the political and legal system. To be sure, there is a noticeable difference between China and the US in this area. However, the particular national conditions of the US and China are not very similar, and China is currently involved in a rapid transition and transformation. It is possible to imagine that a modernized China will inevitably move in the direction of an improved political and legal culture, and the prodigious experience and techniques of the US, as the the world's most developed country, have been taken as a model by the Chinese, who absorb everything. From this perspective, though reference can in fact be made to many areas in politics and law in China and the US, this still cannot be called the greatest difference.

Then where does the greatest difference between the US and China ultimately lie? My personal opinion: churches. Only in this area is the difference between China and the US not a question of numbers, but rather an essential difference between presence and absence. In the US, the spires of churches are more numerous than China's banks and rice shops. On a street near Harvard Square, I once stood and looked around to find that in three different directions there were three churches. Truth be told, from the east coast of the US to the west coast, from towns to cities, in any place you look you will find that this country's most numerous structure is none other than the church. Churches, and only churches, are Americans' center; they are the very core that binds Americans together.

The problem with markets without churches is that the lack of morality hobbles the economy:

Hobbled market ethics have already lead to two chronic ailments in Chinese society. First, becoming rich without relying on labor or on the creation of wealth for society, but rather relying on collusion between government and business and the malicious repurposing of public finances to gain wealth. Second, dishonesty in market trading: backing out of promises and gaining wealth through swindles. So we can see that the market economy in China has brought out a group of "freaks": day and night they ceaselessly seek personal profit through lies and harm. Naturally, this kind of market economy has a exorbitant cost. And naturally, what causes the exorbitant cost of these market operations is the widespread lack of self-restraint among Chinese people.

These days Chinese people do not believe in anything. They don't believe in god, they don't believe in the devil, they don't believe in providence, they don't believe in the last judgment, to say nothing about heaven. A person who believes in nothing ultimately can only believe in himself. And self-belief implies that anything is possible — what do lies, cheating, harm, and swindling matter? . . .

Market economies with churches are different in another respect from those without: in the former, it is much easier to establish a commonly respected system. The reason is simple: a people that share a faith, compared to people who only believe in themselves, find it easier to establish mutual trust, and through that to conclude agreements.

Xiao believes that Christianity is a major contributor to the success and well-being of Western culture. In a recent PBS interview Xiao reveals that although he was not a Christian in 2002 when he wrote the above article, he has since become a believer. When asked if he was optimistic if the Chinese Communist Party would be open to increased Christianity in China, he said:

We know that China’s constitution allows freedom of religion, so it should be said that the constitution has enough space for all kinds of beliefs, including Christianity. We also know that the Chinese Communist Party makes a point to seek truth from the facts and advance with the times. Within Marxist theory, the Communist Party is supposed to be the vanguard of the proletariat. But in China we really lack a mass of proletarians because, in those early years, the country did not undergo a phase of industrialization. And today, they are not only non-p roletarians ; they are the propertied classes.

So it is no longer a political party that is filled with revolutionary characteristics but rather one that has transformed into a ruling political party with widespread representation, advanced culture and advanced forces of production. This transformation comes from permitting these rich people, these propertied classes, and even, we can say, the bourgeoisie to join the party. We see that the Communist parties of the Soviet Union and all of Eastern Europe have collapsed, and their countries have collapsed with them. But the Chinese Communist Party survives precisely because it continues to change. That is why it is a great political party. And I believe that, on the matter of whether or not to permit those with religious beliefs to enter the Communist Party, I believe there will be a historical change in the future.

He also states the he has been surprised by the support he has been receiving from Chinese elites for his argument that Chinese society requires a foundation for morality and that Christianity could provide that foundation. When asked about his own journey, this is what he said:

From this point, I started to study the Bible. But my initial motivation for studying the Bible is not really pure. My purpose for studying the Bible was not to prove that there was a God. . . But after reading it for over three months, I admitted defeat. I discovered that this kind of book China does not have. China does have morality books. For instance, the Analects of Confucius teaches people morality. China also has very philosophical works, for example, Laozi. China also has many intelligent writings, for instance, the Buddhist texts. But China does not have a book like the Bible. The Bible is a book that claims inspiration from the will of God. It talks about the history of the relationship between God and human beings, and this kind of book does not exist in China.

What Xiao raises here is the connection between cultural health and economic success and morality and the necessity of religion as the foundation of morality. It all comes down to God. It seems very strange that Chinese communists can see what Western, liberal elites cannot see.

Chinese Communists Up to Their Old Tricks Enforcing the "One Boy Policy"

The communist thugs that seized control of the Chinese government in 1949 are on another of their periodic rampages that shame and discredit an ancient and proud people. Here is a report of a forced sterilization campaign from the Times of London. I'll try to get some corroboration on this story, so watch the updates. In the meantime assume that the actual truth is likely even worse than anything the Times would have the stomach to report (although this is horrifying).

"Family planning authorities have detained hundreds of people against their will in a campaign to sterilise 10,000 men and women suspected of trying to violate China’s strict birth control policies.

About 1,300 people were being held in cramped and poor conditions in offices throughout the small town of Puning in southern Guangdong Province and are forced to listen to “lectures” on state rules limiting the size of families, the Nanfang Countryside Daily said.

In the years after China launched its strict “one couple, one child” family planning policy in the late 1970s, abuses such as forced later-term abortions, sterilisations and even the killing of newborn babies were widely reported.

But such practices have fallen sharply in recent years as the policy has become quite widely accepted and exceptions have been introduced.

However, officials in Puning launched a 20-day campaign on April 7 since so many couples have left the area in search of factory jobs and have found it easier to have children outside the government-set quotas.

The county intends to sterilise 9,559 women or their husbands who are suspected of planning to have a second or third child. So far about half that number have agreed to comply, the newspaper said.

Officials have detained the elderly parents of those who do not submit voluntarily to the surgery or who try to evade the authorities to force them to comply, the newspaper said. It reported that on April 10 some 100 people, mostly elderly, were seen inside a damp 200 square metre building at a township family planning centre.

Read it all here.

Later in the article, a Chinese official of the Puning Population and Family Planning Bureau is quoted as saying blandly: "“It’s not uncommon for family planning authorities to adopt some tough tactics.” To which, one can only reply: "In civilized countries it is!"

I wonder if Thomas Friedman would call this one of the "drawbacks" or one of the "advantages" of the "one party autocracy led by enlightened people in China," as he puts it.