Making All Girls Allowed
On June 4, 1989, thousands of civilians—mostly made up of students and intellectuals—gathered in Tiananmen Square in a protest inspired by the death of Hu Yaobang, an official known for tolerating dissent. The government responded by sending in the military, leading to the deaths of an estimated 3,000 people—including both military and civilians. Chai Ling was a student leader in the protest, and went into hiding for months afterward. Now a successful businesswoman who became a Christian last year, she is working to restore dignity to China’s women and children through her organization All Girls Allowed.
We spoke to her about China’s one-child policy, the driving force behind All Girls Allowed and how her experience with Tiananmen Square affected her life’s work.
After years spent working in the business world, what inspired you to found All Girls Allowed? I had come of faith last December 4 ... so the transformation started taking place around May. I have a group of brothers from Texas—I call them “Christian brothers”—and they’re the board members and president of ChinaAid. They help support persecuted churches in China. So I invited them over to Boston [in May] to help them establish a ministry to really address this one-child policy issue.
After spending the weekend with the chairman of the board, the founder and their vice president, they concluded [I was] the person called. I didn’t quite understand what they meant, so that evening when they left, I was given a tape that said, “Make Your Calling Truth” and I listened to that and the beginning said, “When God calls you, you better step out.” It also said basically you had to change whatever you were doing to answer the calling, including your career, your family and everything else. So that’s where All Girls Allowed was born, as a result of that.
Can you tell me a bit about the work All Girls Allowed does and its ultimate goals? All Girls Allowed has a mission to restore life, value and dignity to girls and mothers in China, and also to reveal the injustice of the one-child policy. Each day, over 35,000 babies’ lives are taken. Five hundred women commit suicide as a result of the trauma, so [over] the past 30 years, over 400 million lives were taken. Today in China there are over 25 million young men [without any] women they can marry. By 2020 there will be another 40 million men who will not have ... women to marry. Just in comparison, that’s the equivalent of the entire youth population of America.'
