As U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping met over Friday and Saturday for two days of informal meetings an international coalition urged them to bring an end to China’s one-child policy. “This brutal policy causes more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on earth, and any official policy in the history of the world,” Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, wrote a letter addressed to the leaders of the world’s two biggest superpowers.
The group, which fights against sexual slavery and forced abortion in China, says it has over 200,000 signatures from people in 70 different countries that are raising awareness on what it calls China’s “barbaric population control program,” responsible for the deaths and exploitation of millions of girls. “China’s ‘population problem’ is not that it has too many people, but that it has too few young people. China will get old before it gets rich,” Littlejohn said.
China, the world’s most populated country, now at over 1.3 billion people, says that it implements the one-child policy, which restricts some families to only having one child, as a means for controlling its population. The WRWF president explained, however, that because parents often choose to keep sons over daughters, the Asian country now has the most skewed sex ratio in the world – 118 to 120 boys born for every 100 girls.
