The staff at a Beijing Family Planning Clinic provides a briefing to the delegation of religious leaders.

The Chinese UNFPA staff briefs the delegation on their operations and funding.

Meg Riley (far right) participating in a press conference on the trip to China, Beijing, Sept. 17, 2003.

UUA Staff Member Returns From Fact-Finding Tour of China

The Rev. Meg A. Riley, Director of Advocacy and Witness Programs for the UUA, recently returned from a fact-finding tour of China with a delegation of nine prominent religious leaders

The group, assembled by Catholics for a Free Choice , spent September 6-13 in China to investigate the role that the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) plays in family planning programs there. The group made the trip in the wake of the Bush Administration’s decision to deny a $34 million Congressional appropriation for 2002 to the UNFPA. The Administration’s rationale for this refusal to fund UNFPA was that the UNFPA is complicit in coercive practices in China’s family planning program.

Because much of the impetus for de-funding UNFPA has come from religious groups such as Focus on the Family , Human Life International , and the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute , Catholics for Free Choice (CFFC) felt that religious leaders with more progressive viewpoints ought to enter into the debate as well. CFFC funded the trip to China privately.

Following extensive briefing by the State Department, members of Congress, and U.N. officials, delegates flew to Beijing and visited with representatives of the UNFPA, Chinese religious leaders, Chinese government officials responsible for health and family planning. Then the delegation divided up into three smaller groups and traveled to disparate parts of the country.

Riley was part of a group to visit the Ningxia Autonomous Region , in the Chinese Midwest, and "not,"according to Riley, "a common tourist destination." In two counties in Ningxia, Riley visited Family Planning clinic staff, local villagers in a number of communities, and other civic and religious groups.

"One fascinating aspect of the Ningxia Autonomous Region is the prevalence of Hui people, who are Muslims.  We visited a mosque where the ahong (Chinese equivalent of imam) preached about birth control and sexuality. One of the most amazing things to me is that women are permitted to become ahong! There are even all-female mosques!"

Wherever she went, said Riley, people were comfortable and interested in talking about birth control and abortion.  "Imagine a bunch of Chinese people showing up unannounced in your neighborhood, knocking on doors to ask very personal questions!  And yet, everywhere we went, people greeted us eagerly, offered us food or tea, and talked with us at length."

When the three subgroups of the delegation reconvened in Beijing to compare notes, they discovered that they had all experienced similar discussions.  "The birth rate is falling in China, dramatically, and it has nothing to do with coersion or forced sterilization," Riley explained.  "The Hui people are allowed to have two children, because they are a minority, and their birth rate is 1.38.  This is about education and economics:  all the parents we spoke with said that they wanted their child to get a good education, and they could not afford to educate two children as well as one."

Riley continued, "Talking with the women in remote villages, I heard the same kind of thinking going on that I have with my friends in Washington DC about family size.  How will I have time to work and parent?  How will I afford the costs of raising a child or children?  Will I be able to enjoy life or will it become an unstoppable grind?  The Chinese people, even in remote villages, have entered the twenty first century."

Riley saw the role of the UNFPA as a highly positive one.  "Local programs are vying for the privilege of working with UNFPA—they have many more applicants than they can serve in their programs," she said.  "This is especially impressive because, in order to work with them, the programs have to agree to phase out the social compensation fee altogether."  In some areas, families who have more children than they are allowed must pay social compensation fees, which the Bush Administration charges force women to have unwanted abortions.  The UNFPA has strongly opposed this practice, and the religious delegation condemned it as well. 

"Rather than supporting this highly effective campaign of international pressure and slow-but-steady transformation, the Bush Administration is proclaiming that there’s only one right way to act," Riley observed.  "It’s a tragedy. The U.N. is embodying a global commitment to justice and good health for women, and the current US administration is attempting to act as the voice of righteous judgment and condemnation about it.  I hope in some small way that what I learned can empower Unitarian Universalists to speak up in defense of the United Nations," she said.

Report of an Interfaith Delegation to China, from Catholics for a Free Choice

Reflections from the Rev. Meg Riley on her journey to China

Media Coverage

ChannelNewsAsia: "Bush must ignore"
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