Seeing Henry Kissinger at Wimbledon for the tennis (pictured) last Sunday prompted reflections which quite put me off the final.Richard Ehrman, director of Policy Exchange, a non-party-political think-tank, had written in The Times last Saturday about how shifts in the world population give a military advantage to "underdeveloped" countries. The problem, he said, is that “even for a power as mighty and sophisticated as the US, occupying a Third World country with a fast-growing population means putting an uncomfortably large number of boots on the ground”.
Curbing the growing population of third world countries was very much on the mind of Henry Kissinger back in 1974, the man of whom we caught a glimpse on TV last Sunday as he sat in the crowd at centre court to watch the Wimbledon final. As I mentioned in my post on abortion and racism two weeks ago Henry Kissinger, Nixon's Secretary of State, was the author of the infamous NSSM 200 (National Security Study Memorandum 200), which recommended that the United States should promote population control in the developing world in order to secure American interests.
Kissinger’s study set the stage for the Chinese to adopt a strict population control policy in co-operation with UN agencies in 1979. The belief that population growth, at home and/or or abroad, is bad for a country's economic and security interests rapidly became official dogma in America, China, the UK and many other countries.
How disturbing, then, to read in The Times on Sunday that Dr Baige Zhao, head of the national population and family planning commission of China, spoke at a conference in London last week about how 400 million fewer births in China saved 1.6 billion tones of carbon emissions. He argued: “The same principles of population management that have been applied in China can be applied in the UK. The UK could learn from the Chinese experience.”
This is the China where only two months ago, Zhang Minan, a law professor at Guangzhou's Sun Yat-sen University and an expert on the the government’s population policy, told Reuters: "'They (the authorities) do have the right (to force abortions) ... " The same report interviewed a young Chinese woman, pregnant with four-month-old twins, who last February had been dragged into a maternity ward and had her belly injected with a needle in forced abortion. This is the China whose forced abortion policy was backed by Barack Obama in one of his first actions as President by restoring funding to UNFPA (and other organisations promoting abortion overseas), whose involvement in the forced abortion regime in China and elsewhere is all too well documented.
