[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 10 (Thursday, January 25, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E87-E88]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                THE OFFICIAL MURDER OF ORPHANS IN CHINA

                                 ______


                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, January 25, 1996

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, a few days ago, the world was shocked with 
the recent release of a detailed report by Human Rights Watch which 
documented the fact that a majority of children who entered a Shanghai 
orphanage during the late 1980's and early 1990's died within a year. 
The report suggests that there has been a deliberate policy of starving 
these orphans rather than caring for them. This deliberate and 
unimaginable treatment of one of the most vulnerable groups of Chinese 
society is both stunning and reprehensible. Tragically, this is 
consistent with Chinese human rights policies that we have seen far too 
often in the recent past.
  Mr. Speaker, an excellent article appeared in the Washington Post 
yesterday--Wednesday, January 24, 1996--by Dr. Walter Reich, a 
physician who is the director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and 
the chairman of the Committee on Human Rights of the American 
Psychiatric Association. Dr. Reich draws chilling parallels between the 
practices that have been observed in China and the horrors of the 
Holocaust.
  I urge my colleagues to read Dr. Reich's most thoughtful article and 
consider the somber implications of China's appalling human rights 
record.

                     Holocaust: The China Parallel

                           (By Walter Reich)

       On rare occasions, historical parallels of contemporary 
     events are so sharp that they pierce decades of time to 
     penetrate our minds and skewer our souls. Accusations of the 
     deaths, by deliberate neglect, of disabled children in 
     Chinese orphanages, made by a credible human rights 
     organization, summon up memories of the deaths, by both 
     deliberate neglect and direct killing, of disabled children 
     in Nazi German institutions. Those memories impose on us a 
     powerful obligation to respond to the accusations against the 
     Chinese orphanages by calling for an international 
     investigation--and, if the accusations are confirmed, to take 
     decisive action to end the medicalized killing of helpless 
     innocents.
       Human Rights Watch has reported that a majority of 
     children, who entered a Shanghai orphanage in the late 1980s 
     and early 1990s died within a year; that this high death rate 
     was typical of orphanages throughout China, and that it was a 
     result of a policy, euphemistically called ``summary 
     resolution,'' which selected children for death by 
     starvation, sometimes aided by the administration of sedating 
     drugs. These deaths, the report noted, were attributed to 
     such causes 

[[Page E88]]
     as ``congenital malformations of the brain'' and ``mental deficiency.''
       Critics have cited a number of reasons for the deliberate 
     starving of these Chinese children. Many of the children 
     admitted to the orphanages were abandoned because they were 
     born disabled. In a country that has an official policy 
     limiting families to one child, some couples abandon disabled 
     children so that they can try again for a healthy child; 
     others may do so to shift to the state a caretaking burden 
     they are unable to bear.
       In the Chinese orphanages, according to these critics, it 
     is these disabled children who tend to be subjected to 
     ``summary resolution''--deliberately starved, not treated 
     when they develop easily treatable medical conditions, 
     sometimes medicated to keep them quiet as they starve, and 
     confined to ``dying rooms.'' Chinese orphanages realize 
     significant income from adoptions of healthy babies by 
     childless Western couples; disabled babies are not only 
     unlikely candidates for adoption but also no less burdensome 
     for their institutional caretakers than they would have been 
     for the parents who abandoned them.
       The parallels with the treatment of disabled children in 
     German institutions during the Nazi era are haunting. 
     Although the vast bulk of Nazi killing was, of course, 
     eventually focused on Jews and became what we now know as the 
     Holocaust, it was heralded, before the start of the Second 
     World War, by the systematic, government-sponsored killing of 
     children and adults who were disabled--a practice that 
     continued after the war began. The killing methods, 
     especially in the cases of children, often involved 
     starvation and the administration of lethal doses of 
     medications. In the cases of disabled adults, direct killing 
     using gas was common--a method that, once refined, was used 
     on a mass scale against Jews after the German armies rolled 
     into Poland.
       The German killing of disabled children and adults was 
     justified on the grounds that these persons constituted 
     ``life unworthy of life.'' After 1934, mental hospitals were 
     urged to neglect their patients. In 1935, Hitler was 
     confident that a war would require healthy people, and that 
     during a war it would be possible to easily eliminate the 
     ``incurably ill.''
       According to the reports provided by Human Rights Watch, 
     the starved children in the Chinese orphanages look very much 
     like the starved children in the German ``Children's 
     Specialty Institutions''; the Chinese institutions, too, 
     administer sedatives to some children selected for death; 
     they, too, use false diagnoses as coverups; they, too, 
     cremate the remains of starved children; and they, too, 
     employ physicians, many of whom probably tell themselves that 
     the children dying under their care would have died anyway, 
     and in any case are useless eaters in a country challenged by 
     scarce resources.
       It should be clear; even if the existence of the ``dying 
     rooms'' in Chinese orphanages were confirmed, it would not 
     amount to the Holocaust, or even a semblance of it. Unlike 
     Nazi Germany, China has not developed a systematic racial 
     ideology, particularly one that requires all members of 
     certain groups to be killed because of ethnic origin. Chinese 
     leaders, as contemptuous of human rights as they have been, 
     have not promulgated any such ideology; nor is it known that 
     they have promulgated national or regional programs aimed at 
     killing disabled children.
       But if the report by Human Rights Watch is correct, it 
     seems clear that the general circumstances in China, 
     including the lack of individual human rights, have enabled 
     at least some Chinese orphanages to engage secretly in 
     practices that parallel some of the practices, particularly 
     death by starvation, that were carried out by Nazi Germany 
     against disabled children and adults.
       If the Human Rights Watch report can be verified by 
     international inspections, the parallels between the Chinese 
     orphanages and the Nazi programs to kill disabled children 
     are alarming. These parallels remind us that human beings, 
     including physicians and other caregivers, are 
     extraordinarily vulnerable to inhuman acts and 
     extraordinarily capable of justifying their behavior on what 
     they see as rational grounds. And they remind us that 
     countries in which democratic institutions are forcibly 
     forbidden and human rights systematically quashed are ones in 
     which human life becomes, quite simply, expendable.
       The experience of the Holocaust, and the world's silence in 
     response to it, have taught us that we must never shut our 
     ears to reports of evil acts. We must investigate such 
     reports and respond vigorously if they are confirmed. We have 
     an obligation to do that--to ourselves, to the most 
     defenseless of our fellow human beings, and to memory.

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