Contact: Jeff Sagnip, 202-225-3765; chrissmith.house.gov 

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30, 2015 /Standard Newswire/ -- In response to media stories reporting on China's plan to abolish the brutal 35-year-old "One-Child Policy," Congressman Chris Smith (NJ-04) issued the following statement:

"The headlines we see are misleading—no one should be applauding the Chinese government for its new policy," said Smith, chairman of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC). "It is not a major change. The 'One-Child Policy' has become a 'Two-Child Policy' while the coercive population control apparatus remains essentially unchanged. The government is still limiting the size of Chinese families and the coercive structure of fines, permits, pregnancy monitoring, and birth targets remains. Families who want a third child will still face the pressure to abort their child or pay exorbitant fines.

"The sad reality is that this policy change will likely have little effect on China's shrinking workforce, the social problems of a rapidly aging population, or the human trafficking problems exacerbated by China's massive sex-ratio imbalance—it is a matter of too little, too late," said Smith. "In the long line of Chinese Communist Party mistakes, the 'One-Child Policy' may be one of the deadliest and most hated. The new policy doesn't change the underlying brutality of China's population control policies nor does it offer justice to the victims of the horrific crimes of forced abortion or sterilizations. The international community, led by the U.S., must insist that China abolish all of its population control policies and permanently close a dark and deadly chapter in Chinese history."

Smith has been a vocal critic of the policy since 1983 and has held 55 hearings on human rights in China and led several fact-finding trips to the communist country. In April 2015, he chaired a hearing to discuss the disastrous economic, security, and demographic consequences of China's population control policies (April 30, 2015 CECC hearing). In a  speech given last year on the 34th anniversary of the "one-child policy," Congressman Smith called it "state-sponsored violence" and said that "forced abortion is a crime against humanity—nothing in human history compares to the magnitude of China's…assault on women and girls." Academics and demographic experts have come to similar conclusions about the policy, Wang Feng, the former director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center, said that "history will judge the 'One-Child Policy' as worse than the Cultural Revolution [as it] will influence more than one generation."

The bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) chaired by Smith and co-chaired by Senator Marco Rubio recently released its 2015 Annual Report which shows that Chinese provincial governments continued to coercively enforce birth restrictions and monitor family size in the past year.  The report also showed that population control policies created a sex ratio imbalance resulting in the birth of significantly more males, millions of whom will be unable to find wives.  The severe imbalance drives regional human trafficking throughout Asia for the purposes of forced marriage and sexual exploitation.  The CECC Annual Report can be found at www.cecc.gov.

The CECC consists of nine bi-partisan Senators, eight bi-partisan Members of the House of Representatives, and five senior Administration officials appointed by the President. The Annual Report was approved unanimously by all of the CECC's members.