President Xi Jinping's wife, Madam Peng Liyuan, is the special envoy for the advancement of girls and women's education at the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), whose mission is to build peace through international cooperation in education, sciences, and culture.
"Unfortunately she's kind of the wrong pick for this job," submits Jonathan Dingler of ChinaAid. "Even though she doesn't have any real responsibility, she is representing a cause that maybe she is not equipped to represent."
Dingler goes on to point out that forced abortions and sterilizations prevent male and female children from getting an education.
"Meanwhile, we have millions of Uyghurs in Xinjiang who are not receiving a quality education," he continues. "In fact, they're receiving quite the opposite; they're being held in vocational camps, which are really just concentration camps where they are facing torture, sexual assault, and forced labor."
Reggie Littlejohn of Women's Rights Without Frontiers tells American Family News there are a number of individuals and groups that want Peng removed from her post at UNESCO.
"There's a letter that's got over 410 signatures," she reports. "I'm a co-initiator of this and actually the lead signatory, and what we're calling for is for UNESCO to revoke Madam Peng's position as a special envoy for girls and women."
Littlejohn believes the person who holds that job should be passionate about the rights of women and girls, including those in China.
She also says China has some explaining to do regarding a woman who was found wearing insufficient clothing for the freezing temperatures and chained by the neck to the floor of a squalid hut with no door.
Since a photo of the woman, who reportedly has eight children, went viral, Littlejohn says Chinese officials have come up with conflicting explanations for it, and the truth has yet to be revealed.
"We don't know why she was chained. We don't know who the father is of her eight children or whether those children have many fathers. We don't know why the fathers in her village did nothing to help her, number one, not be chained and, number two, why they allowed her to have eight children under the one-child policy," Littlejohn says.
She suspects human trafficking is a legitimate explanation.
"China has women coming from many of the surrounding countries into China, trafficked from within China, and the authorities are not doing anything about it," she laments. "In my opinion, it's because they have 30 or 40 million frustrated men who will never have wives, and they're worried that if they clamp down on sex trafficking that they're going to have an insurrection on their hands."
Many female children are aborted or abandoned because Chinese couples prefer male babies, and that has caused an imbalance between the male and female populations.
