Despite Communist China’s nightmare one-child policy and record of repressing women, CNN joins in resounding Mao Zedong’s Women’s workers slogan, “Women Hold Up Half the Sky.”
Aaron Dykes
Infowars.com
March 4, 2010
In an astounding piece about the status of women in China, CNN commentators tell viewers that, “If the statistics are any indication, Communism has been good for women.” This claim is outrageous. Communism itself has done everything to reduce the individual and elevate the State. Have women been “liberated” or compelled to enter the workplace under a system known for exploitation?
China has been widely criticized for Human Rights abuses, particularly towards the treatment of women and religious minorities, and their One-Child Policy has caused outrage, backlash and a deficit in the number of women compared with men. Further, state control over the conditions of reproduction, marriage and “equal” access to labor are typically seen as a negative, not positive, talking point.
CNN reports:
“Chen Zhili president of the all-China women’s federation, one of the top ranking women in the Chinese government and is witness to the major changes in women’s status since the Communist revolution. Among the first laws passed by Chairman Mao’s government were statutes banning foot binding, bride selling, dowries, polygamy and concubines. Women were invited to leave the home and join the labor force. Mao spoke those famous words: ‘women hold up half the sky.’ If the statistics are any indication, communism has been good for women.“
The woman mentioned in the CNN piece is Chen Zhili, president of the All-China Women’s Federation, who also holds a high level government position as vice-chair of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. She notes the progress of women’s cause in China.
“Chinese women and the women’s cause have also gone through 60 years with the nation. One word to describe the changes of women’s status in the past 60 years is “world-shaking.” The founding of the New China has liberated women from the unprivileged level to the master of their country, of the society, and of themselves. The 30 years’ implementation of the Reform and Opening up policy has remarkably pushed forward the process of gender equality. Women’s status has been improved and they have been able to better reach their full potential.”
“Chairman Mao used to say “women hold up half the sky.” It was his expectation, but also a reflection of women’s status and function in the past 60 years. Chinese women actively participate in the national construction and become a vital force in promoting economic development, social progress, and family harmony. Women have dedicated their talents and efforts to China’s revolution, construction, reform, and other causes. Women, accounting for half of the Chinese population, are a mighty force that uphold half of the sky in economic and social development.”
China has blossomed over the past 60 years into a repressive state where women and life itself, in many aspects, are treated as a negative. The celebrated fact of women joining the workplace was itself part of the Family Planning program in China. It was all part of regulating women’s lives, not just their reproduction. However, the One-Child Policy takes primacy in that critique because it was imposed in a country ripe for systematic degradation of women under that policy.
How then is it any wonder that in China, where cultural traditions favor males, that males outnumber females by 30 million, that the abortion rate is high, or that women go “missing” or are sold to the sex trade, abused, neglected and otherwise treated poorly? The stringent policy makes the other extremes inevitable.
Kate Harding, of Salon, writes: “Despite women normally having a longer life expectancy than men, suggesting the numbers should be on their side, males outnumber females in countries like China and India: ‘In places where girls have a deeply unequal status, they vanish.’ ”
Promoting the “Half the Sky” concept and a book with the same name, United Nations head Ban Ki Moon decried abuse of women:
“Violence against women stands against everything in the United Nations Charter. Whichever form it takes, it is an abomination. Human trafficking, sex slavery, domestic violence, institutionalized discrimination – all of these must end. So must the silence that is so prevalent and that serves only to shield the perpetrators and perpetuate their crimes,” said Secretary-General Ban.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was also caught using Mao’s phrase to brand her Women’s Rights trip to China. An official State Dept. blog promoting Clinton’s Chinese 2009 trip displays the headline: “Ancient Chinese Proverb: ‘Women Hold Up Half the Sky’.” However the Chinese people know the words in association with Mao.
A commenter on the State Dept. blog corrects the posting, stating, “Actually, it’s Mao Zedong who said it in 1968, and lots of Chinese know about that.” [archived below]. The blog’s author, Kelley Osterthaler, responds:
@ B.H. in China — Thank you for your comment. The proverb “Women Hold up Half the Sky” is variously attributed to Confucius and Mao Zedong, among others. I respectfully note that this proverb could or could not indeed be “ancient.” Thank you again for bringing this to my attention.
So why is Sec. Clinton utilizing the slogan of a Communist dictator to promote women’s rights in the very place they are so downtrodden? Likewise, why is this CNN piece praising Communism and quoting Mao’s statement that “Women Hold Up Half the Sky”?
Simply, it’s a propaganda line to promote “women’s rights” at the price of centralized state control, where the ultimate authority over even the family falls on that controlling state.
COERCIVE FAMILY PLANNING & THE IMPACT ON WOMEN
A RAND Corp. study, entitled “The Origins and Evolution of Family Planning Programs in Developing Countries” [pdf] evaluates that the countries with the most centralized, authoritarian governments were “matched up” with the most harsh family planning policies, as they were most likely to adopt policies restricting individual liberties. Though the nationally-implemented Family Planning Commission in China did not at first officially require a strict one child policy, it was encouraged and phased in. Long before it was officially implemented under Deng circa 1978, controlling family “size and spacing” was emphasized under Mao’s regime. Despite what was “officially” in place, hindsight shows that the worst abuses in coercive population control in the Third World countries was centralized in authoritarian police states with runaway population growth, with China and India as two of the worst cases.
Women in the workforce was partially a plank out of the nationally-coordinated Family Planning Program in China (see also: Barefoot Doctors of Rural China [in above video]). It was ascertained that, on the one hand, keeping women busy and giving them independent pay and status would lower births, while at the same time, factory supervisors could distribute birth control pills and other contraceptives to the women in an organized and timely manner.
Above all, the RAND Corp. study shows that Family Planning emphasis has long declared its validation of Women and Human Rights (as defined by the UN charter) and emphasized the “quality” of care at all family planning, birth control, health and/or abortion clinics (depending on what country and in what time span). The “guarantee” to universal access to family planning means a de facto forced entry of policies & practices funded by Western philanthropies (Rockefeller’s Population Council in particular) and pushed by globalist ideologues in cooperation with Third World governments.
Outrageously, these organizations weren’t passively ‘available’, but rather instituted “targets” for population reduction and pressured governments to meet those numbers in spite of the traditional reproductive practices of the women & families of the region. Though abuses in countries like India and China included coercive sterilization (sometimes without even informing the patient) and forced abortion, the “right” to access to family planning services was damned-sure guaranteed and upheld as a priority.
A United Nations study for UNESCO titled “Mass Media, Family Planning and Development” from 1973 outlines specific strategies designed to sell their policies, matching up budget and population with the degree of cultural acceptance of birth control and the types of media to be used. The study further notes the “Government Attitude with regard to family planning” and noting when there is the presence of a ’strong central government’ who could implement reproduction policies from the top-down.
Mao identified China’s need for population restriction as early as 1957, stating:
“The number of births, 30 million each year, is a sign of great progress made in medical science and the general rise in living standards, especially in the countryside, and of the faith people have in the future. But this figure must also be of great concern to us all. I will quote two other figures. The increase in grain harvest for the last two years has been 10 million tons a year. This is barely sufficient to cover the needs of our growing population. The second figure concerns the problem of education. It is estimated that at present 40% of our youth have not been placed in primary schools. Steps must therefore be taken to keep our population for a long time at a stable level, say of 600 million. A wide campaign of explanation and proper help must be undertaken to achieve this aim.”
Though the slogan then was “While one child is fine and two are good, three is enough and four is too many,” we know how that policy contracted and progressed. At the same time, sexual activity was theoretically regulated by the state– homosexuality and other deviance was not acceptable, sex was only to be between a married couple. While marriage is legally allowable at 18 or 20 years old, the “recommended” age for marriage is pegged at 25 years for women, and 27 or 28 years for men. Births should be spaced at four years between children (further discouraging a high-birth rate).
This policy on sexual behavior effectively puts the State in your bedroom, and that is not freedom nor do I wager is it progress.
In some senses, the “right to choose” (as defined by the policies of UNESCO, Population Council and RAND Corp., not by typical feminists) is the right to be targeted by a United Nations eugenics policy or to have a Communist state monitor one’s fertility clock. How that is women getting credit for their “half of the sky” I don’t quite grasp.
However necessary or noble it may be argued that controlling population is, the price of doing so through a centralized government (in hindsight) includes the death of millions under Mao’s great leap forward, a dearth in female births, and the repression and abuse of many more. The total deaths under Mao’s regime are estimated at roughly 40-80 million (the tallies vary, go read them for yourself). Consider the AFP totals, by no means the most extreme:
Agence France Press (25 Sept. 1999) citing at length from Courtois, Stephane, Le Livre Noir du Communism:
• Rural purges, 1946-49: 2-5M deaths
• Urban purges, 1950-57: 1M
• Great Leap Forward: 20-43M
• Cultural Revolution: 2-7M
• Labor Camps: 20M
• Tibet: 0.6-1.2M
• TOTAL: 44.5 to 72M
Communism was founded & funded by Wall Street Bankers
Researcher and author Antony Sutton has detailed how Wall Street financed the Bolshevik revolution. He has documented how manganese, oil and steel production was facilitated in the Soviet Union via Wall Street money and personnel. He has traced and meticulously detailed the deep ties of finance families influence in Soviet Russia. Isaacson & Thomas’ The Wise Men details how Skull & Bones financier Averell Harriman was not only involved bankrolling the regime, but as U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, influenced our relations during and after WWII and is credited with spending more time with Joseph Stalin than any other non-Russian. Harriman negotiated and traded with Stalin on numerous important issues without the official sanction from Washington. Harriman, Rockefeller and other related interests flourished in Soviet Russia despite the fact that the market was legally closed to U.S. business.
Shortly after Nixon and Kissinger began negotiating with China, we see again signs of Wall Street flourishing under Communism. “Proud Internationalist” David Rockefeller wrote to the New York Times August 10, 1973:
“Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution it has obviously succeeded… in fostering high morale and community purpose. General social and economic progress is no less impressive….The enormous social advances of China have benefited greatly form the singleness of ideology and purpose…. The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in history.”
David Rockefeller is not merely a top banker from America’s foremost “Robber Baron” family, who notoriously monopolized the oil business in the late 19th Century. The Rockefeller family and their related foundations were & are at the forefront of Family Planning and Population Control philanthropy worldwide. Before that, they led the Eugenics movement in America. They sponsored “birth control” and “women’s rights activist” Margaret Sanger (who believed eugenics was only one arm in reducing worldwide population, particularly of lesser races and stocks). They funded the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in 1927, the core base of Nazi Eugenics. In 1952, Rockefeller brother John D. III founded the Population Council which reached into nearly every conceivable country, with special emphasis on the undeveloped & overpopulated category countries, and has undertaken much action in China.
The late Aaron Russo discussed in his final interview with Infowars.com the things told to him by Nicholas Rockefeller. Russo says he was told that the Rockefeller family financed Women’s Lib to break up the family, to put women in the work force, and make women taxable.
Aaron Russo: Rockefeller’s view of Women’s Liberation
A similar strategy was admittedly used by ‘Father of Propaganda’ Edward Bernays on behalf of his cigarette company clients. Up until that point in the 1920s, there was a taboo on women smoking, limiting the potential market for cigarette manufacturers. In order to claim “the other half of the sky,” Bernays latched onto the suffragette movement, and paid rebellious women to smoke triumphantly at large public protests, branding their cigarettes (tied psychologically to the male phallic symbol) as “torches of freedom.” BBC filmmaker Adam Curtis documents this story in “The Century of the Self.”
The whole technique of making lemonade out of genocide is revolting to me. There are far too many 20th Century nations who’ve fallen into the pattern of authoritarian repression to let the connection slide. The globalists are duplicitious and our being fooled is no help. How many Nazi connected members of royalty congregate in groups like Bilderberg? How many times have CIA or IMF been caught sponsoring genocidal dictators while their counterparts in the White House or in the United Nations praise and glorify “Human Rights” and “democracy” and other empty phrases?
