Standing up to tyranny is not easy. I know. When I spoke out against China’s One Child Policy and other injustices, I was persecuted, beaten, sent to prison, and put under house arrest by the Chinese Communist Party – the CCP. In April 2012, I escaped and was given shelter in the American Embassy in Beijing. I am forever grateful to the American people for welcoming me and my family to the United States where we are now free.
The CCP is an enemy of humanity. It is terrorizing its own people, and it is threatening the well-being of the world. In China expressing beliefs or ideas not approved by the CCP – religion, democracy, human rights – can lead to prison. The nation lives under mass surveillance and censorship. The United States must use its values of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law to gather a coalition of other democracies to stop CCP’s aggression. President Trump has led on this, and we need the other countries to join him in this fight – a fight for our future.
Standing up to fight unfairness isn’t easy. I know. So does President Trump. But he has shown the courage to lead that fight. We need to support, vote, and fight for President Trump for the sake of the world.
Reggie advocates for Chen Guangcheng at a Congressional Hearing in 2012
Dear Friends,
I just heard that my dear friend, blind activist Chen Guangcheng, will address the nation at the Republican National Convention tonight!! Chen Guangcheng, and his wife, Yuan Weijing, are people of towering heroism. They risked everything to expose the horrific brutality of forced abortion and sterilization in China in 2005. For this, Guangcheng was jailed for years, then confined under house arrest, where he and his wife were tortured. He dramatically escaped house arrest and, after a standoff between the Chinese Communist Party and the U.S. government, was finally allowed to come to the United States with his family.
Reggie and Guangcheng together after his arrival in the United States
Those of you who have followed my work from the beginning know that I worked tirelessly for years, building an international movement and advocating at the U.S. Congress, the European Parliament, the British Parliament and the Irish Parliament, and many times on Voice of America, for China to release Chen Guangcheng. When I first met Guangcheng in the U.S., he gave me a hug that lifted me off the floor – despite the fact that his foot was broken! It was the most emotional meeting of my life.
Guangcheng and Reggie interviewed together by Huchen Zhang of Voice of America
When Guangcheng was languishing under house arrest, the rumor had gone out that he had died of malnutrition. I went onto Voice of America to ask the Chinese people to pray for Guangcheng. Never did I imagine that he and I would one day be interviewed together on Voice of America in D.C. And never in my wildest dreams did I think that he would be addressing the nation at the RNC.
Guangcheng is thoroughly despised by the Chinese Communist Party, because he shamed them before the world by exposing their late-term forced abortion practices. Having Guangcheng speak at the RNC sends a bold message to China: The U.S. will no longer put up with China’s egregious human rights atrocities, but will hold accountable those responsible.
Please join me in watching my dear friend Chen Guangcheng’s speech HERE.
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“Ming Mei” (Her name has been changed to protect her identity)
August 25th is the Qixi Festival — China’s Valentine’s Day — an important day for young Chinese girls. Will you “Save a Girl” – a girl like Ming Mei — for China’s Valentine’s Day?
Look at beautiful baby Ming Mei! She may never know that because she is an illegal third child of a very poor family, her mother was planning to “give her away.”
Ming Mei’s parents already had two children – the limit under the Two-Child Policy – when Ming Mei was born. They did not intend to have a third, but her mother got pregnant by accident. If they wanted to, the Family Planning Officials could impose a large fine on the family.
Ming Mei’s mother is a Christian and believes that children are a gift from God.
Ming Mei’s father is the only healthy man in his family. He is a truck driver, transporting vegetables to market. The coronavirus shut down his business and he had not worked for five months when Ming Mei was born. His younger brother has epilepsy, and his father has been bedridden for two years. Ming Mei’s father was responsible to care for them by himself. In addition, he is supporting his wife and two children. Ming Mei, a third child, was more than her family could bear financially.
Ming Mei’s mother did not know what to do. She loved Ming Mei but could not afford a third child. With a heavy heart, she planned to give Ming Mei away, because of the severe poverty in her family.
Thankfully, our Fieldworker learned about Ming Mei’s family and went to see them. She congratulated Ming Mei’s mother on her beautiful, newborn daughter, saying “Girls are as good as boys.” She offered the family a monthly stipend of $25 for a year to help them keep Ming Mei.
When Ming Mei’s mother heard that with our help, she could keep Ming Mei, she began to cry, saying that our helping hand was building up her faith.
This Chinese Valentine’s Day, will you show love for a girl child and become a GirlSaver?
Any donation is welcome, including a one-time donation. But would you consider becoming a monthly donor, a “GirlSaver?” For only $25 per month or $300 per year, our GirlSavers have helped WRWF save at-risk babies in China, babies like Ming Mei, who might not be alive if one of our undercover fieldworkers had not met her mother and assured her that little girls are just as special as boys. Because of your generosity, we can continue to save girls in China.
YES, I WANT TO HELP END GENDERCIDE AND FORCED ABORTION IN CHINA!
Your donation enables WRWF to continue to be a voice for the voiceless women and children of China. This huge effort comes at a cost. We need your support. Please give as generously as you can. Every donation makes a difference! Thank you for your generosity!
Seng Moon, from Myanmar’s Kachin State, was lured by her sister-in-law to go to China for a well paying job as a cook. In the car, her sister-in-law gave her something she said was for motion sickness. When Seng Moon woke up in China, her hands were tied behind her back. After several months, she was moved to a Chinese family where she was tied up in a room for another one to two months. “Each time when the Chinese man brought me meals, he raped me,” she said. “After two months, they dragged me out of the room. The father of the Chinese man said, ‘Here is your husband. Now you are a married couple.’” Seng Moon soon gave birth to a son. When she asked to return home, the husband said, “No one plans to stop you. If you want to go back home, you can. But you can’t take my baby.”
Through determination and luck, she was able to escape her captors and return to Myanmar, with her son. They hide in a camp for Internally Displaced Persons. Her horrific experience of being a forced bride will never leave her. She says, “I’m afraid the Chinese family will try to find me.” All this, according to a detailed and devastating report by Human Rights Watch: “Give Us a Baby and We’ll Let You Go.”
July 30 marked World Day against Trafficking in Persons. The State Department’s 2020 Trafficking in Persons Report, lists China as one of the world’s worst offenders. China is a “Tier 3” Nation – a status it shares with North Korea and South Sudan.
According to the TIP report, China trafficks women and girls from within China, from the surrounding countries, and from as far away as Africa for “forced concubinism leading to forced childbearing and sex trafficking via forced and fraudulent marriage to Chinese men.” Not only is China an insatiable market for sexual slavery, but China also is a major purveyor of sexual slavery around the world: “Traffickers subject PRC national men, women and children to forced labor and sex trafficking in at least 60 other countries.”
All too often, these crimes are committed with the assistance of Chinese officials: “Despite continued reports of law enforcement officials benefiting from, permitting, or directly facilitating sex trafficking and forced labor, the government did not report any investigations, prosecutions or convictions of law enforcement officials allegedly involved in the crime.”
Reggie Littlejohn, Founder and President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, stated, “The reports of sexual slavery in China are heartbreaking. They are the inexorable legacy of the One Child Policy. Because of the fatal combination of son preference with a coercive low birth limit, baby girls have been selectively aborted, abandoned, and medically neglected to the extent that there are now 30 to 40 million more males living in China than females. The resulting collapse in the marriage market is perhaps the reason the Chinese government turns a blind eye to sex trafficking – and in some instances, even facilitates it.
Littlejohn continued: “We cannot forget the tremendous atrocities the CCP is committing against the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorites in Xinjiang, also known as East Turkistan, including forced labor, forced abortion and involuntary sterilization. We call upon the Chinese government immediately to prosecute officials who are colluding with sex traffickers, to stop prosecuting victims of sex trafficking as criminals, to end all coercive population control, and to take effective measures to protect the lives of baby girls. We also call upon them to end their heinous crimes against the Uyghurs.”
Dr. James Dobson interviews Reggie. Credit: Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk Radio
Dear Friend,
I am grateful to Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk for interviewing me about our work “Saving Women in China.” The conversation was so rich that one interview became two. In this second interview, we discuss in detail our “Save a Girl” campaign in which we are saving baby girls in China from sex-selective abortion, abandonment and grinding poverty. We talk about our “Save a Widow” campaign, in which we are reaching out to support destitute, abandoned widows in rural China. We speak about the two girls we rescued from China at ages 10 and 19, the daughters of a persecuted dissident. The younger one we are raising in our own home. And we speak about the faith that gives me, and our fieldworkers in China, the strength to carry out this work. Click HERE to listen to a powerful interview!
Uyghur women attending the livestock market (2017). (iStockphoto-Credit: rweisswald)
Gulnar Omirzakh is the impoverished wife of a detained vegetable trader. After the birth of their third child, the Chinese government ordered her to get an IUD. She complied. Nevertheless, two years later, four military officials came to her door and gave her three days to pay a fine of $2,685 for having more than two children. If she could not pay, she would join her husband and a million others, locked in internment camps for having “too many children.”
“God bequeaths children on you. To prevent people from having children is wrong,” said Omirzakh, an ethnic minority Kazakh. “They [the Chinese Communist government] want to destroy us as a people,” she stated, according to a compelling, investigative report by the Associated Press.
The Chinese Communist Party regards Omirzakh and people who share her views as religious extremists. CCP-backed scholars have identified “as a key obstacle [to the CCP’s goals in Xinjiang] the religious belief that ‘the fetus is a gift from God,’” according the AP Report. The CCP locks up these religious believers, mostly Muslim, in internment camps, where they will receive political and religious re-education, in an attempt “to purge them of their faith.”
“The state [Chinese government] regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forced intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands,” the AP Report continues.
“Hundreds of thousands might be an understatement, because there are 15 million Turkic minorities in Xinjiang,” said German researcher Adrian Zenz, according to an ABC News analysis. Zenz released his own, heavily documented investigative report this week, published by the Jamestown Foundation think tank.
At the same time as it is forcibly aborting, sterilizing and detaining the Uyghur and Kazakh population, the CCP is encouraging births among the Han Chinese, including Han Chinese who have settled in Xinjiang. This practice may amount to “Han settler colonialism” or even cultural and ethnic genocide.
According to some of the ex-detainees interviewed by the AP:
· Women were given repeated health examinations in the internment camps. If they were found pregnant, they were forced to abort.
· A pregnant woman disappeared from the camp.
· Two others, terrified of the consequences of being pregnant in the camp, “got rid of their children on their own.”
· Another witness saw “a new mother, still leaking breast milk, who did not know what had happened to her infant.”
Forced sterilizations are also common:
Another former detainee said she was injected until she stopped having her period, and kicked repeatedly in the lower stomach during interrogations. She now can’t have children and often doubles over in pain, bleeding from her womb.
Those who have too many children are not only interned in camps, but their children can be taken away and placed in an orphanage.
Regarding forced sterilization, the Zenz Report states: “In 2018, 80 percent of all new IUD placements in China were performed in Xinjiang, despite the fact that the region only makes up 1.8 percent of the nation’s population.”
Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, stated, “The CCP’s brutal use of forced abortion, involuntary sterilization and internment of families who have ‘too many children’ is shocking, heartbreaking, and outrageous. The targeting of those who believe that children are a gift from God constitutes religious persecution as well. No legitimate government would perpetrate such monstrous barbarism.
Littlejohn continued, “These reports demonstrate conclusively what I have been saying for years: coercive population control has continued under the Two Child Policy. What happened to the Han Chinese under the One Child Policy is happening to the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang now. I believe these atrocities constitute both genocide and crimes against humanity.
“The CCP must be held accountable,” Littlejohn said. “We applaud Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s swift condemnation of these abhorrent practices and join in his demand that the CCP end these horrific practices in Xinjiang. We also demand the end of all coercive population control in China. Forced abortion and sterilization constitute savage violence against women.”
Sterilizations, IUDs, and Mandatory Birth Control: The CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Uyghur Birthrates in Xinjiang. Adrian Zenz, The Jamestown Foundation. June, 2020
Reggie with Dr. James Dobson (Credit: Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk)
Dear
Friend,
I
am grateful to Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk for interviewing me about our
work “Saving Women in China.” The
conversation was so rich that one interview became two. This first interview is very personal, in
which we speak about my faith journey from being an atheist to faithful
Christian. I speak about, as an
attorney, how my first asylum client was forcibly sterilized in China —
without anesthetic! – and about how a serious illness that left me disabled for
years was the key to turning me from a materialistic life as a litigator to
using all those legal skills to advocate on behalf of the women and babies of
China. Click HERE to listen to a powerful interview!
One of many widows helped by our “Save a Widow” campaign
A Catholic widow in Fuzhou city, Jiangxi province, has had her pension revoked because she refused to renounce her faith.
According
to a report in Bitter Winter, the
elderly woman had been receiving a small subsidy since her husband died in
2018. At the end of 2019, local officials threatened that her subsidy
would be stopped unless she would remove images of Jesus from her home.
“Because the Communist Party feeds you, you must only believe in it, not God,”
they told her. When she refused to remove the images of Jesus, they
canceled her subsidy. “It has become difficult to maintain belief in God
because of religious persecution,” she told Bitter
Winter.
Reggie
Littlejohn, founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, stated, “It is
a heartbreak and an outrage that widows and other elderly are forced to
renounce their faith in order to receive stipends. For many, they may
need these funds to survive. It a
pathetic act of cowardice to force desperate widows to choose between their
survival and their God. This widow, who refused to renounce her
faith potentially in the face of abject poverty, is heroic.
“This form
of religious persecution,” Littlejohn continued, “is on the rise in the area of
China where we have our Save a Widow Campaign.
I was just informed that in our area, a government official has instructed our
widows to stay home on Sundays and not to go to church. He also ridiculed
Jesus, saying, ‘The Chinese government gives you 160 RMB (about $23). How
much money does Jesus Christ give you?’
“Fortunately
for the widows in our area, they have a ready answer,” Littlejohn added.
“Our fieldworkers bring love and compassion to widows, along with practical
help: a $25 monthly stipend that makes a huge difference in their lives,
providing food and warmth. Our fieldworkers encourage these widows in
their faith, and many have found new hope that there is a God who loves them.”
China also
has a skyrocketing rate of senior suicide. The One Child Policy has destroyed
the family structure in China. In the past, the Chinese enjoyed large families
and it was not a burden for children and grandchildren to support the elderly.
Now many elderly are completely abandoned and destitute, especially elderly
widows. And the sad solution for many is to end their lives. “We are
extending a lifeline to abandoned widows, who are eternally grateful for the
help,” Littlejohn said.
To
watch our powerful “Save a Widow” video, click HERE.
To learn more about the Save a Widow Campaign,
click HERE.
Women’s Rights Without Frontiers is helping desperate widows in China. Our fieldworkers visits them every month to let them know that we care for then, even if everyone else has abandoned them. With our help, they knows they are loved. With the $25 a month we give them, they have the funds to eat better and perhaps can heat her little room in the winter.
Uyghur women wearing traditional attire. Istockphoto credit: reisswald
Last Wednesday, President Trump signed into law the Uyghur
Human Rights Policy Act. The Uyghurs
(pronounced WEE-gurs) are an ethnic and religious minority living in the East
Turkistan (referred to as Xinjiang) area of China. Credible reports have emerged that the
Chinese Communist Party has been committing egregious human rights atrocities against
the Uyghurs: detaining one to three
million in internment camps, raping and forcibly sterilizing women, forcing
women to marry Han Chinese men, subjecting men and women to intense religious
persecution. The Act received overwhelming
bi-partisan support. Read this article
for my further comments:
Reggie Littlejohn Addresses the 30th Anniversary Tiananmen Commemoration Rally on the West Lawn of the United States Capitol, June 4, 2019
Dear Friends,
I was honored to be among the speakers at the June 4 Rally on the West Lawn of the United States Capitol in 2019. There will be no Rally in DC this year, because of the coronavirus. More important, for the first time in 30 years, the Chinese Communist Party will not allow the annual June 4 candlelight vigil in Hong Kong. Chinese Government sources say that they are concerned about the spread of the coronavirus. Critics say that the Chinese government is using the pandemic as an excuse to stop the vigil.
Below is the link to my speech, which is
equally true this year as it was last year. I said that the Chinese
Communist Party is still brutally crushing innocent people, through the One
Child, now Two Child Policy. The CCP is the greatest mass murderer in the
history of the world!
And now, they are crushing dissent in Hong Kong as well. Could Hong Kong become another Tiananmen? I hope and pray that it will not. If, however, the Chinese Communist Party feels that it is fighting for its survival, there is no telling what it might do. A top Chinese general recently threatened that China will attack Taiwan to stop independence. If this brutal regime is willing to attack Taiwan to stop independence, why would we imagine that it would not be willing to do so to Hong Kong?
