The Patriot Post® · Olympic Rings Hollow for Missing Generations
Heading into Wednesday’s competition, China was a distant 11th in the medal count. For this year’s Olympic host — and the world’s largest population — the ranking must come as a disappointment. If it is, President Xi Jinping isn’t about to let on. “I don’t care how many gold medals Chinese athletes win this time,” he claimed. But there have to be moments when even he must wonder how much they could have accomplished with the generations China destroyed. How many future medalists were lost to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) one-child policy? How many once-in-a-lifetime athletes never got to stand on a podium because the CCP treated life so callously? The world will never know.
To most people, the number 400 million is too much to comprehend. And yet, that’s how many innocent children were annihilated under the communist party’s ruthless population control program. From 1979-2015, the body count was so astronomical that it was higher than America and the United Kingdom’s populace combined. And those are just the physical casualties. It says nothing of the other victims — the traumatized mothers, fathers, grandparents, and would-be brothers and sisters. To them, the nightmares are forever.
Every one of those 400 million children had a story. For some parents, even remembering is too much. The policy has been gone for six years, but the shadows it left behind still haunts them. “They grabbed my wife’s body like they were grabbing a pig,” one man said emotionally, “four or five people holding her hands and legs and head and injected a shot into her belly.” She was seven months pregnant — far enough along to have a healthy, vibrant child. Ten hours later, the baby she delivered, a boy, was dead. They dropped him in a plastic bag, refusing to let the mother hold him, and ordered the father to bury him on the nearby slope.
Millions of parents have his same bad dreams — mothers who ran for the hills, only to be caught by government officials, thrown in vans, and transported to clinics where they’re tied down to abortion tables. Asked about the day authorities brought her in, Ah-Li flinched. “It crippled me,” she said. “I couldn’t stand up straight for weeks afterwards. I had to spend hundreds of yuan on painkillers.” But for some women, there is no other option. In villages and rural suburbs, where government officials kept blackboards of the number of children per family, mothers who were tempted to keep their second pregnancies were threatened. “They told me they would peel the skin off my relatives, and I would only see their corpses if I didn’t come back,” Feng Zhongxia remembered. “My aunts, uncles, cousins, my pregnant younger sister, my in-laws, they were all taken to the family planning office,” she said. “Many of them didn’t get food or water, and all of them were severely beaten.”
Now, after 35 years of this violence, the Chinese government is desperately trying to course-correct. Faced with a population in surprising decline, and a gender imbalance from decades of viewing girls as “maggots in the rice,” the regime backed off the one-child policy in 2016. When that didn’t work, the government announced a three-child policy last spring. But it wasn’t, as FRC’s Mary Szoch points out, because they suddenly valued human life.
“When China began their one-child policy in the late 1970s, what we saw was a lot of propaganda about how only having one child would make China a prosperous and powerful nation. Well, what China has realized is that a nation without children is a nation without hope. And there’s not hope for the future in China.” She points to the unintended side effects — the increased suicide rate among women and the older population, for starters. Parents who’ve lost their only child have no one to care for them, leading couples like Xu Mina and his wife to live a life of grief and despondence.
“He spends his days on the couch in front of a TV, trying to block out memories of his dead son. He blames fate for the car accident that killed the 23-year-old in September. But for the loneliness that will haunt him and his wife the rest of their lives, Xu blames the Chinese government,” the Washington Post explains in a story about the fallout. “China told the couple that they could have only one child and threatened to take away everything if they didn’t listen. They were good citizens, Xu said, ‘so for 20 years, we put our whole future and hope into our son.’ Now, the couple have no one…”
And while it’s easy for the West to point the finger, the sad reality is that America isn’t too far behind. For the better part of 50 years, we’ve suffered from a bloody legacy of unlimited abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. “We need to be very cautious [assigning blame to China],” Szoch agreed, “because we certainly can see here that we have allowed our culture to do the same thing that the Chinese government has done. We have allowed our culture to tell women: if you don’t have children, you will be prosperous. If you don’t have children, you will advance your career. If you don’t have children, you will succeed. That’s what the Chinese government has said since the 1980s, and that’s what American culture has said since 1973.”
One thing Americans need to realize, she went on, is that abortion was first legalized by a communist nation — Russia — as a tool to dismantle the family. Of course, the far-Left might not be quite so open about its intentions, but when we try to make the family serve the economy instead of the other way around, we’re no better than a communist country. Unlike China, we still have the courage and conviction to confront that reality. Let’s hope — for the sake of our future — we do.
Originally published here.
If at First You Don’t Succeed, Pay for More Failure
It’s one thing to assume a Leftist policy is bad — and another thing to know for sure it is. That’s the interesting situation the White House finds itself in now that another study has just blown an enormous hole in Biden’s government-run pre-K plan. The $390 billion dollar proposal is based on a failed model, experts keep saying. Now, after a study of 3,000 students, we’ll see if the Democrats are listening. If they don’t, it’s because they have one thing on their minds — and it’s not education. It’s indoctrination.
Psychology Today’s Hara Estroff Marano took one look at the paper from Vanderbilt and was convinced, “If President Biden’s plan for universal state-run preschool for three- and four-year-olds is approved, the results could be disastrous.” That’s not news to the education community, who had a front-row seat for the disastrous years of Head Start — an early education program that was such a failure even Barack Obama’s HHS admitted it.
Now, a decade later, Joe Biden wants to reboot the idea under the American Families Plan, a “free” daycare system that would give radical Leftists an even earlier grip on our children. But for a party who supposedly cares so much about “the science,” they certainly don’t give a fig here. After years of government-run Pre-K attempts, 2022 data says it’s a bust. It’s certainly no comparison to an institution that costs taxpayers nothing: the intact family.
Still, certain states have been game to try it, launching pre-K programs with the best of intentions. In Tennessee, a lot of effort went into creating a program that would give underprivileged kids a jump-start on their schooling. “The National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) evaluated the curriculum early on and judged it to be among the best,” Marano explained. It included five and a half hours of “instructional time” from highly-qualified teachers five days a week. Researchers decided the idea was so well constructed that they would study the idea’s impact.
Years later, Marano says, if their findings don’t “put a nail in the coffin of academic training to little children, it’s hard to imagine what will.” Although the pre-K group performed better than their control group peers (who weren’t sitting through hours of classes every day) in kindergarten, “the control group soon caught up and, by the third grade, the control group performed better on all academic measures than the pre-K group.” Worse, the Vanderbilt team found, by the third grade, the kids in the pre-K group were “significantly more likely to have been diagnosed with a learning disorder and [unruly conduct]…” And that gulf only continued to widen.
Dr. Katharine Stevens, founder and CEO of the Center on Child and Family Policy, argues that no one should be surprised. These findings, she explained on “Washington Watch,” “are consistent with what we would expect given what we know about early human development — which is that a school environment, a group institutional setting is not optimal for early childhood development.” Not only did the program not help these pre-K children in their later educational experience, Stevens argues, “it seems to have hurt them.”
“There’s nothing in developmental science that suggests putting four-year-olds or three-year-olds or even younger children in group institutional settings is what they need to develop.” In fact, she points out, “up until the mid-1960s, the public schools were [where] kids went to learn basic skills… reading, writing, arithmetic.” It was all very intentional. “Lyndon Johnson was the first to suggest that the public schools would be the vehicle for upward mobility in our society, that public schools would solve poverty.” Now, Stevens says, we’ve come to “equate human development with schooling. We never used to think that — not for all of human history. And that’s become such a binding way of thinking.” At the end of the day, “we are confusing early development with early school — and the outcome of that could be disastrous for the children and for the nation.”
And yet, Democrats like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and so many others continue to call proposals like Biden’s a “win-win-win.” Maybe that’s true for the far-Left crowd, who’s been successfully passing off radical agendas like “education” to younger and younger children for years. Only now, parents have caught on — and most of them probably aren’t eager to put their kids in the state’s indoctrination any sooner.
If there’s one thing remote-learning families have figured out, it’s that the government isn’t interested in teaching your child — it’s interested in brainwashing them on history, race, gender, and sexuality. So while Biden may say he wants to make a “once-in-a-generation investment” into our children, more families will see it for what the program really is: a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get more kids away from parents and into a government-controlled environment.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.