Vice President Joe Biden is in a fix: he criticized China’s one-child policy, but then found himself in trouble for *not* criticizing it.
The trouble began on Sunday, when Biden was delivering a speech at a Chinese university. Discussing a possibly looming entitlements crisis, he told the crowd: “You have no safety net. Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family. The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people. Not sustainable.”
Right now, Biden’s office is engaged in stating the obvious: that this was a criticism of the policy. Despite the polite diplomatic throat-clearing that preceded his attack, he was still, as his spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff states, “point[ing] out, in China, that the policy is, as a practical matter, unsustainable.”
However, conservative critics seized on quite a different part of the remarks: they lathed onto the word, “second-guessing.”
“Really, Mr. Vice President? You’re not second-guessing a policy that has resulted in untold numbers of forced abortions, forced sterilizations, outrageous fines or even jail time for families that dare to defy the law, and a gender imbalance crisis?” read an initial attack on the Susan B. Anthony List site.
Pretty soon the other usual suspects were piling on. House Speaker John Boehner issued a statement saying he was “deeply troubled” by the remarks. The GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney said “acquiescence to such a policy should shock the conscience of every American.” Not to be outdone, his nearest competitor, Rick Perry, said Biden’s “refusal to ‘second-guess’ this horrendous policy demonstrates great moral indifference on the part of the Obama administration.”
The flap revealed a gulf over the nature of the criticism. Though Biden turned on the economic sustainability of the policy, his comments did gloss over the human impact… and, indeed, the authoritarian nature of the whole principle.
Biden’s spokeswoman touched on this late Tuesday, releasing a statement that read: “The Obama administration strongly opposes all aspects of China’s coercive birth limitation policies, including forced abortion and sterilization.”
To be fair to conservatives, whatever Biden’s reasons for glossing over the moral argument against the policy, his remarks would have been unlikely to come from the mouth of — say — former President George W. Bush. Early in his administration he had a run-in with China over putting his money where his mouth was… Or, rather, not putting his money where his mouth wasn’t.
Get the day’s best political analysis, news and reporting from the TPM team delivered to your inbox every day with DayBreaker. Sign up here, it takes just a few seconds.
Thomas Lane
Thomas Lane is an associate editor at Talking Points Memo. He previously produced and reported for the BBC from its UN Bureau in New York. He is a dual citizen of the US and the UK.
Facebook Conversations
Questions about commenting with non-Facebook accounts like Yahoo, or other concerns? Click here to read the TPM Commenting FAQ.