The remarkable story notes that “Since 1979, China’s family planning rules have barred nearly all urban families from having a second child in a bid to stem population growth. With no male heir competing for resources, parents have spent more on their daughters’ education and well-being.”

Only later in the piece do we learn the following:

With the arrival of sonogram technology in the 1980′s, some families no longer merely hoped for a boy, they were able to engineer a male heir by terminating pregnancies when the fetus was a girl.

“It is gendercide,” said Therese Hesketh, a University College London professor who has studied China‘s skewed sex ratio. “I don’t understand why China doesn’t just really penalize people who’ve had sex-selective abortions and the people who do them. The law exists but nobody enforces it.”

To combat the problem, China allows families in rural areas, where son preference is strongest, to have a second child if their first is a girl. The government has also launched education campaigns promoting girls and gives cash subsidies to rural families with daughters.

Still, 43 million girls have “disappeared” in China due to gender-selective abortion as well as neglect and inadequate access to health care and nutrition, the United Nations estimated in a report last year.

Yin Yin Nwe, UNICEF’s representative to China, puts it bluntly: The one-child policy brings many benefits for girls “but they have to be born first.”

As Science Magazine writer Mara Hvistendahl’s Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men documents, the U.N. Population Fund has provided funding such that, in total, 160 million Asian women have been aborted in recent decades.

My colleague Tom McClusky, Sr. Vice-President at FRC Action, has noted that “the Obama Administration not only reinstated funding for UNFPA, the UN agency that subsidizes and gives cover to China’s ‘repugnant’ policy but also increased said funding to $50 million a year.”

The result, in China, has been very simple if profoundly dangerous: As CBS News reports, China simply has “too many men.”  As noted on 60 Minutes, “The one-child policy is 25 years old, so the first generation is just now reaching marriage age, and for China that’s a big problem because it is estimated that as many as 40 million of its young men could spend their lives as bachelors.”

The aborted girls are persons, endowed by God with the right to life.  Killing them, either due to a desire for a male child or because the coercive policy of the Communist state demands it, is immoral, an offense against our Creator and our fellow human beings.   To suggest that the lives of the girls who have survived this slaughter have been improved is to lend an artifice of moral justification to gross evil.

Can we be glad some Chinese women now have college degrees?  Sure.  But not at the expense of millions of lives.

The hint was not lost on the Chinese leaders, who on February 8, 2009 arrested Gao Zhisheng.  He has been imprisoned, and unheard from, ever since.

Gao Zhisheng was once a darling of the Chinese Communists. A distinguished lawyer, he had a bright future ahead of him. He was named in 2001 as one of China’s sharpest legal talents. But Gao made a bad career move: He spoke out in defense of persecuted Christians in China.

That was enough to arouse Beijing’s party cadres against him. What made matters worse for Gao was the attention his extraordinary moral courage garnered for him in the West.  The New York Times even gave his story front-page coverage in 2005.

Last year, he was seized by authorities and is undergoing horrible torture, if he is even still alive. The New Yorker Magazine, to its great credit, has published stories by their Beijing correspondent, Evan Osnos, on Gao Zhisheng. Osnos related the stories coming out on Gao’s treament by the brutal guo bao, China’s euphemistically titled “Public Security Bureau.”  George Orwell’s “ministry of truth” couldn’t have said it better.  Here is part of what Osnos has written:

(One) account not only accused his captors of holding burning cigarettes to his eyes, beating and starving him, and applying electric shocks to his genitals, but it also revealed their warning that he would die if he told anyone about the ordeal. …It is time for the court of world opinion to insist: “Show us the prisoner and justify his detention.”

Gao’s case demonstrates once again a chilling truth: There is more persecution of Christians today than there has been in any century since the early martyrs. Dr. Paul Marshall, author of Their Blood Cries Out, has pointed to the two great sources of Christian persecution–Islamists and the remaining Communist regimes of North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, and China.

The Obama Administration’s silence resounds from the mid-Atlantic’s snowy streets to the fetid prisons of Beijing.  But there was a time when we had a President whose quiet, persistent and iron-strong advocacy for the persecuted spoke to America’s highest self and deepest convictions.

Barack Obama, heralded by some on the Left as “our Reagan” when it comes to his communication skills, speaks often with confidence and personal appeal.  So did Ronald Reagan.  But President Reagan didn’t just have skill with a teleprompter.  He spoke from a heart of profound belief in great ideas, one of which was religious liberty.

President Reagan spoke out publicly for the persecuted Christians in the USSR. He made a point–unlike Sec. Clinton–of always raising the issue of religious persecution with the Soviets. During his Presidency, the Siberian Seven–Pentecostal Christians who had sought refuge in the Spaso House, the American Embassy in Moscow–were finally freed to leave the Soviet Union. Jewish dissident Natan Scharansky famously described how he and his fellow refuseniks heard about the Evil Empire speech of Ronald Reagan. It was through coded messages tapped out on the plumbing pipes of their prison cells. Refuseniks were Russian Jews who wanted to emigrate to Israel, but whose right to depart was refused by Soviet dictators.

Reagan said that religion was “the Achilles’ heel of the Soviet system.” Surely it was.

Simply by giving their first allegiance to God, and not to the state, believers deny the premises of Communist atheism.

These are issues around the world. In Beijing, Gao Zhisheng undergoes torture for his beliefs. Here in the U.S.. the harassment usually takes the form of threats of violence, lawsuits, and job discrimination. Recently defeated Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley, for example, advised Massachusetts Catholics to stay out of Emergency Rooms, to find other employment since their conscientious objections to abortion-related services prevent them from participating in certain kinds of anti-life medical procedures. Rejected by the voters, Mrs. Coakley is still the Commonwealth’s Attorney General. Can believers be confident their rights will be respected by Bay state officials?

In the breach of an Administration willing to stand for those suffering, there are things we can all do: Go to www.freeGao.com on the Internet. Sign the petition and contact your elected Representatives. Write the Chinese Embassy and demand an accounting of Gao – and insist that he be released.  If this Administration will not speak out, we can. And we can pray.

I remember Irina Ratushinskaya. She was imprisoned 28 years ago by the Soviet secret police, the KGB. Her faith sustained her through four long years in the Gulag. We prayed for Irina. She was released on the eve of the Reykjavik Summit in 1986. She said she felt the prayers of believers, helping her to survive her ordeal.

Ronald Reagan wasn’t worried about offending the Soviet rulers. He spoke out time and again on behalf of those being persecuted for their faith.

History remembers him kindly. What will it say of Mao’s admirers and their hirers? God knows what Reagan did.  Will we follow in his bold, uncompromising steps?

When lit, the Empire State is a lovely sight.  Yet last night’s display cast a rather ugly glow.  Why?  Because given the nation it is honoring, we must ask the sponsors of this celebration which highlights of China’s history during those sixty years they especially want to honor.

Might it be the murder of Christian missionaries in the late 40s and 50s?  How about the killing of millions of Chinese during Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” campaign of the mid-fifties? During those years, Communist authorities pressed rural Chinese to modernize, demanding such insanities as backyard steel mills.

China enveloped Tibet in the late 50s. That ancient Buddhist land is still being suppressed and its unique culture eradicated fifty years later. The Dalai Lama and many other Tibetans still live in exile.

In the mid-60s, Chairman Mao initiated the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which left more millions dead. Fanatical Red Guards beat and brutalized anyone who had exposure to Western Culture—and even trashed China’s revered cultural heritage.

China scholar Simon Leys wrote in Chinese Shadows about the Little Red Book of Mao’s banal “thoughts.” Millions of Red Guards memorized, chanted, and used that book to beat their elders over the head. Leys—the nom de plume of a respected expert in Chinese antiquities—described the Cultural Revolution as an exercise in which people had their skulls opened, their brains scooped out, and their brain pans filled with Maoist concrete. He didn’t mean it literally; at least, I hope he didn’t.

When, in utter exhaustion and desperation, the rulers of China opened up to the West in the 1970s, Communist Party leader Teng Hsiao-p’ing charmed liberals here with his supposed reforms and rationality. But Teng also instituted one of the most brutal of population control programs in history.

Stanford University scholar Steven Mosher courageously exposed to the world the massive forced abortions that resulted from China’s One Child policy. An estimated 50 million forced abortions have occurred in China, almost all of them attributable to the Communist Party’s inflexible rule.

President Obama, in one of his first acts, revoked Ronald Reagan’s policy of preventing U.S. foreign aid from being used to fund abortion. Mr. Obama is once again giving our tax money to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which has been complicit in China’s One Child policy since its inception.

And let’s not forget Tienanmen Square.  In 1989, thousands of student demonstrators were brutalized by soldiers ostensibly given drugs and alcohol to inspire them to murder.  Tanks and armored vehicles rolled over young men and women.  Others were gunned down by order of the Communist rulers in Beijing.

Wang Wei-Lin was the lone demonstrator who stood up to a column of tanks from the People’s Liberation Army.  His unforgettable image was seen around the world. What the world did not see, but what Chinese democracy advocates told me ten years ago, was that Wang Wei-Lin was escorted into a nearby hotel and there strangled to death by the regime’s security forces. Also summarily executed, I was informed, was the tank driver. He was killed, they say, for not running right over Wang Wei-Lin.

Last year, China’s Communist rulers put on a brave face and invited the world to come to Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. Their factories had to be closed down, however, and motorists banned for weeks before the Olympic crowds arrived. That was to allow the deadly smog to clear so that the runners could be seen by the spectators and so that the archers could see their targets.

It’s one thing for Communists to do vicious and shameful things. It’s entirely something else for free people—at least people who think themselves free and who, presumably, would like for their children to remain free—to “honor” such an odious regime. Sixty years of inhuman tyranny is nothing to celebrate.

I’ve always been proud to be a New Yorker. I have an ornament of the Empire State Building on my Christmas tree every year. Not this year. I’m too red-faced—with shame, shame for my city.

The result is that “bride prices” are increasing dramatically.  To compensate, the article notes, “A study by Columbia University economist Shang-Jin Wei found that some areas in China with a high proportion of males have an above-average savings rate, even after accounting for factors such as education levels, income and life-expectancy rates. Areas with more men than women, the study notes, also have low spending rates — suggesting that many rural Chinese may be saving up for bride prices.”  Unsurprisingly, these increasingly lucrative bride prices are causing increasingly common bride graft by means of “runaway brides” pocketing the money and leaving their new husbands.

This is just the beginning of the myriad problems China will face in the coming generation due to its one-child policy and the resulting sex imbalance.  For more, see my article on the subject some years ago.

The earpiece-umbrella guys are indeed weird, but it’s a sign of the times that apparatchiki would be wearing shorts and alien T-shirts.

As The Washington Post notes this morning, Latin American caudillos are no novelty, but the silence of the United States (i.e., the Obama administration) in the face of such repression is a first.  Not a first, but similarly worrisome, is the news that Nancy Pelosi, fresh from accusing the C.I.A. of lying to Congress in private briefings, is off to Beijing with nary a word prior to her trip of criticism of China’s abusive human rights practices.  Time was, U.S. Democrats like former Rep. Dick Gephardt (Mo.) were among the leaders of efforts to hold the Chinese accountable for their abuses of workers, and other Democrats spoke of Chinese denial of religious freedom and its record of forced abortion and sterilization.  Pelosi instead wants to engage the oligarchs in Beijing only on climate change.   But it is the climate for political freedom that is turning adverse.