The world needs to know that Communist China imposes population control upon Tibetans. The Dalai Lama said yesterday that “cultural genocide” is taking place in Tibet. And on Wednesday, it was reported that 36 Tibetan women (pictured) protested at the Chinese embassy in the Indian capital, New Delhi, demanding that the one-child policy in Tibet be stopped.
SPUC has for many years helped to voice the opposition of Tibetans to coercive birth control in Tibet, and the complicity of the UK government in its imposition:
“What is the UK doing helping to fund birth control policies in Tibet, an occupied country? With Tibetans a rapidly shrinking minority in their own land, rigid birth control - especially in conjunction with China's inhumane policies of enforced sterilisation and abortion - amounts to genocide. How is it possible that the UK can support a system where Han Chinese in Tibet are allowed more children than Tibetans? It's time the UK government behaved ethically.” (Tibet Vigil press release, 24 August 2000, quoted by SPUC 16 November 2005)
The UK government gives millions of pounds every year to UNFPA (the United Nations Population Fund) and IPPF (the International Planned Parenthood Federation), who in turn help the Chinese Communist regime to manage its population control programme, the main feature of which is a one-child-per-woman policy, brutally implemented by both the threat and the practice of forced abortion.
The BBC has been airing a programme recently entitled “A year in Tibet”. The Independent Tibet Network has launched a petition which, among other things, accuses the programme’s producers of bias for claiming that the one-child policy has never been applied to ethnic Tibetans. I would add that the BBC’s reported claim would not be the first time that an attempt has been made to present a false picture about population issues in Tibet or in China-proper. (N.b. The Independent Tibet Network is strictly concerned with human rights and supporting independence for the Tibetan people. They hold no position on the issue of abortion
per se, and do not endorse or oppose either side of that debate. They are concerned, however, with coercive birth control as a major human rights violation against women in Tibet, East Turkestan and China.)
