by the Chinese Government
Tibetan women struggle against China's male-dominated state, characterise by deeply held racist convictions that operate a system of apartheid, reducing them to second-class citizenship in their own land. A commonly used Chinese term describing occupied people is shung-nu - 'barbarian slave'. It is within China's notorious population programme that women in Tibet face the most widespread human rights violations. Reports of this programme began emerging from Tibet in the early 1960s. It has resulted in unimaginable suffering for women across Tibet and China. Denied freedom of choice or control over their own bodies, women are forced, through a series of financial penalties, intimidation and other oppressive measures, to submit to population control.
Tashi Dolma was a former health worker from Amdo in Eastern Tibet. In 1988 she became pregnant for the second time. Resisting initial pressures from family planning officials to have an abortion, she was fined 1500 Yuan (an enormous amount of money for most Tibetans). On hearing of her pregnancy, a Chinese doctor at the hospital in which she worked, pressurised her by saying: "If you insist on having the child, the financial punishment is a small matter compared with the political crime you are committing. From now on, you will only get 30 per cent of your salary. Your salary will never increase. Your child will not have the right to claim his ration card and will not be admitted to school."
Some four months into the pregnancy, Tashi collapsed under incessant pressure and submitted to 'menstrual termination of pregnancy (MTP)'. Tashi Dolma says about her operation: "The complications and pain I suffered in the course of this operation were so terrible that I can't talk about it. However, it was nothing compared to what women suffer when they are operated on during their sixth and seventh months of pregnancy, which happens quite often at this hospital. In such cases, 0.2 ml of a solution called le xun nur is injected into the foetal bag by using a 12-inch syringe. The foetus loses its blood and stops breathing. About 72 hours later the dead foetus is delivered. I know at least twelve women who underwent such operations."
(Testimony of Tashi Dolma, Tibetan Review, 1990).
As she recalled, the operation left serious emotional and physical damage. "My menstrual flow is erratic. I have constant pain in my back and intestines. My health is such that I am ignorant if I shall ever be a mother again."
(Testimony of Tashi Dolma, 27 April 1990, cited in Moss, 1992).
Tashi Dolma, a Tibetan woman whose baby was forcibly aborted by the Chinese.
No anaesthetic was given and she has been in constant pain ever since.
Scores of thousands of Tibetan women have shared a similar fate and have also been forcibly sterilised.
Chinese government policy in Tibet is one of cultural genocide which aims to eliminate them as people.
There are also numerous detailed accounts of physical force being used against women who are dragged from their homes and beaten in preparation for 'birth control operations'. A disturbing account, 'China's wanted children' (Yin, 1991) was compiled by Liu Yin, a Chinese who was allowed to accompany a birth control 'task force'. Liu Yin's report documents a raid on a village in which houses are stormed and women carried out in blankets to be taken for sterilisations and abortions. Liu Yin comments on conditions at the temporary clinic: "I could not believe what I saw. Hundreds of women, some more than six months pregnant, were packed into dark corridors and makeshift tents, waiting to be operated on." She describes toilets filled with blood-soaked toilet paper and waste bins full of aborted babies.
In a report presented to the United States Congressional Delegation, two Buddhist monks from Amdo (Eastern Tibet) gave a harrowing account of a mobile birth control team who arrived in their village during the autumn of 1987. They reported that all women in the area were ordered to have sterilisations and abortions and those who resisted were taken by force. According to the monks, all women of childbearing age were sterilised, and 30 to 40 women a day were operated on. When they finished, team members moved on to the next village. The monks described women crying as they awaited their turn for the operation, heard their screams and watched a growing pile of foetuses outside the tent (Testimony, 20 October 1988, cited in Moss, 1992).
It is such atrocities that have gained the attention of human rights groups such as Independent Tibet Network (formerly Campaign Free Tibet) and Optimus. More recently, Amnesty International has condemned the human rights abuse within China's population policies and has recommended that China "ensure that women are not detained, restricted or otherwise physically coerced in order to force them to have abortions or to be sterilised" (Al Index, 1995).
It is not only Tibetans who have seen women taken by force. Valda Harding, an English nurse, describes how, during a visit to Tibet in 1987, she witnessed Tibetan women caged like animals in wicker baskets in the back of a truck. When she enquired what their crime was, she was informed they were "being taken away because they were having too many children". She recalls having the impression that "it sounds strange, but in Tibet you get used to seeing people kicked, beaten and abused" (Tibetan Bulletin, September-October 1991).
Recent television documentaries have highlighted the human rights violations caused by China's population policies. Terrified at the brutal fate ahead of her, Bai was escorted to the local family planning clinic. Strapped onto a medical table, she was yet another 'volunteer' in China's birth control programme. In pain and crying for an anaesthetic, Bai was ordered by the surgeon to "put up with it". Immediately after the operation, traumatised, and in obvious agony, she was left unattended in a grimy dormitory. These harrowing scenes were documented in the film Women of the Yellow Earth (Bulmer, 1994) which revealed the coercive nature of China's population programme. But these images were eclipsed by those of the documentaries The Dying Rooms (Woods and Blewitt, 1995) and Return to the Dying Rooms (Woods and Blewitt, 1996). Both films recorded the inhuman treatment of baby girls left to die in China's state orphanages as a result of China's one-child policy and Chinese traditional preference for boys. The misery and suffering recorded in the films resulted in public outrage in Europe and the US and an intense public debate in the British national media.
In the drive to implement China's population programme, such gross violations have the approval and support of the Chinese government who urge regional and local family planning officers to meet birth control quotas. In 1981 Deng Xiaoping advised family planning officers: "In order to control the population use whatever means you must, but do it" (China's Spring Digest, 1987). In 1992 Cheng Bangzhu, Deputy Governor of Hunan province, ordered birth control teams: "In the autumn family planning drive, urban and rural areas must closely co-operate with one another, and must comb every household for unscheduled pregnancies, for which remedial measures should be taken" (Human Peoples Broadcasting Station, 14 September 1992).
