"Responsibility and Collaboration in China's Population Programme" by Martin Moss & Jeffrey Bowe.
(Independent Tibet Network UK. New Millennium Edition. £8 or $10 including p+p.
Orders to 12 Beaumont Court, Worthing Road, East Preston, BN16 1BE, UK).

Extracts from Review/Article by Paul Ingram (OPTIMUS)

This timely report exposes the harrowing truth behind Communist China's coercive birth control policy, which denies a woman's right to choose. According to CHINESE statistics there have been 400 million 'birth control surgeries' (1971—'85) , and at least 100 million were coercive, including forced abortions and forced sterilisations. (See 'Slaughter of the Innocents' Dr. J.S. Aird AEI 1990).

This represents measureless human misery, when women are rounded up, strapped to slabs and are operated on, often without an anaesthetic. Many have been traumatised and others have committed suicide. Scores of millions more such operations have taken place since 1985, not only in mainland China, but in occupied areas, such as Tibet and E. Turkestan, (Xinjiang). Because of this coercive birth control policy Tibetans are facing cultural genocide and the question has been asked why it is that Tibetans should be subjected to such policies, reminiscent of Nazi Eugenics, when they number 6 million at the most, in an area roughly the size of Western Europe? This formerly Buddhist culture has been virtually wiped out by Communist China and one recalls the plaintive words of a Tibetan woman, "We have no rights, not even our bodies". Speaking at Westminster in 1996 the Dalai Lama said that the position in Tibet is "very serious and that matters were getting worse". Since 1950 over a million Tibetans have died at Chinese hands.

'Orders of the State', written by Martin Moss and Jeffrey Bowe of the Independent Tibet Network, focuses on a question which is increasingly being asked by people of all shades of the political spectrum. Namely, why is it that the Department of International Development (DID), formerly Overseas Development Administration, helps fund the activities in China, of the international Planned Parent Federation (IPPF London), and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (New York)? China uses their involvement to legitimise internationally its coercive policies and the long suffering British tax payer is helping to finance human misery. Both the International Planned Parent Federation and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities deny that the programme is coercive, even when presented with conclusive evidence, in the form of authentic firsthand testimonies and reports issued by Amnesty International, who have interviewed former 'birth control officers', who were active in Tibet and China.

The answer seems to be that, in general, the Department of International Development takes its orders from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). This vastly over-budgeted organisation has always displayed a fixation with China, bordering on obsession. Its terrified that the issue of coercive birth control might catch fire and offend Communist China, with consequent loss of trade prospects. There is a 'Foreign Office Establishment' which radiates across the many groups concerned with Tibet and China, in Britain, often attempting to smother or defuse various criticisms of China and, according to some accounts, buying silence, in various ways.

'Orders of the State', deals with the above questions and also criticises a report to the ODA (now the Department for International Development). This Report is entitled 'A Review of the Role of the International Planned Parent Federation in China and the Work of the Chinese Family Planning Association' (1997) and was written by Professor John Hobcraft of the London School of Economics and Dr. Neil Price of the University of Wales (Swansea). Neither the personal nor professional integrity of Professor Hobcraft or Dr. Price is questioned in 'Orders of the State', but readers' attention is drawn to glaring deficiencies in their Report. Hobcraft and Price were unable to give a single example of how the presence of the International Planned Parent Federation has moderated the Chinese policies, or to indicate how it ever could. Another central problem for Hobcraft and Price is the fact that the Chinese Family Planning Association is an Organ of the State and is implicated to the hilt in the suffering caused by coercive birth control. In order to justify its involvement with Chinese Family Planning Association, both the International Planned Parent Federation and the UNFPA are compelled to maintain the fiction that the CFPA is, in some degree, independent of the Government and is untainted by collusion in coercion. This is rather like asserting that the Gestapo had little or nothing to do with the Reich Central Office.

In fact there are no independent organisations in Communist China and the CFPA is as bloody handed in coercion as is the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development, through their funding of this abhorrent programme. Hobcraft and Price circle uneasily around these facts like moths around a flame. Both are burned and their arguments reduced to ashes by Moss and Bowe.

It is correct to say that the issue of coercive birth control in Tibet and China has become far better known after the appearance of 'Children of Despair' (1992). But the necessity of a counterblast to Professor Hobcraft and Dr. Price's report is surely demonstrated by the fact that silence is still maintained by those who should know better. However, a new Millennium is upon us, and perhaps 'Orders of the State' will help turn the tables upon those who have remained dishonourably silent.