-Caveat Lector-
Daily Mail, (UK)
Saturday, 3 July 1999
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"THE CULLING OF THE LITTLE EMPRESSES"
By
Leslie Ann Downs
Take a look at this picture.
Boys massively outnumber the girls - evidence of a society that is purging
despised female babies ... with chilling social consequences
[The photo mentioned is not included here, however, picture a school
classroom of 27, 10-year-old kids, of those 27 kids in view, only 3 are
readily identifiable as girls.]
There's something a little odd, and more than a little sinister, about
these serried ranks of eager, happy, healthy little Chinese boys in a Fu
Guang primary school in. southern China.
Where are all their sisters?
Answer: there aren't any. The lives of the sisters of these 'Little
Emperors' (as the Chinese call their beloved, and often thoroughly spoiled,
sons) were snuffed out long before they could join their brothers at school
Drowned at birth, stuffed into rubbish bins or suffocated - or, if the
parents could afford it aborted after an illegal sex-determination scan
showed that the foetus was a girl.
For two decades now, China, with a population of 1.3 billion has operated a
draconian 'one-child-one-family' policy. In theory, a good idea: China has
around one-quarter of the world's population, but only 7pc of the world's
arable land.
If the population grows too fast, then starvation might well result. But,
as so often in China, 'good ideas' executed with brutality and repression
and skewed by corruption, tend to backfire at great human cost. In this
case, it's at the cost of baby girls' lives.
Traditionally the Chinese have always wanted boy children. So, if you're
allowed only one child, every Chinese family is desperate to make sure that
it's a boy.
Leo, from prosperous Canton, is one such parent. While his wife was in
labour, he and his friends were drinking rice-wine toasts: 'This is for a
boy!'
As he drunkenly explained: 'We get one chance only. Any Chinese who says
that he does not want his child to be a son is a liar. Some blame their
wives, and some find a second wife and try again. A second wife is cheaper
than the fine.'
The fine for a second child in the city (rural families are allowed two if
the first is a girl) is now £9,000 - a fortune when the average rural wage
is less than £30 a month.
Leo's wife, however, was taking no chances on mere rice-wine toasts.
Without her husband's knowledge, she'd secretly paid a local doctor for an
illegal scan to make sure that her child was a boy, thereby saving her
marriage.
Within a week of the boy's birth, his delighted father was celebrating with
rice wine again, baby in tow, showing off his triumph to his friends.
'Zhong Le!' (Bingo) he shouted repeatedly. Of course, Leo s wife, a
city-dweller, could afford to bribe a doctor - poor rural women don't have
the money.
'The pressure for a boy is too much,' she says. 'Most of my friends pay a
doctor for a scan ... often they will stay with the doctor for an illegal
abortion. Ninety-seven per cent of all abortions (many of them brutally
enforced by the dreaded Birth Control Committees to prevent the
'unauthorised' birth of an extra child) are estimated to be of female babies.
When it comes to punishing those who break the 'one-child' rule the (often
corrupt) Birth Control committees appear to have untrammelled powers. Women
who break the rules are often forced to have an abortion (even up to the
moment of birth), forcibly sterilised and even imprisoned.
Neighbours are paid to 'snitch' on anyone who might be trying to get away
with an extra birth. It is no longer legal to destroy a famous house if a
wife has 'transgressed' the birth quota, but it happens anyway - unless the
bribe to the local Birth Control Committee is large enough.
So desperate are Chinese couples for a boy that, if they've aborted (or
murdered) a baby girl and now find that they cannot have a child, they turn
to kidnap gangs who will charge rural parents up to £1,000 for a stolen boy.
Even my family has been affected by the boy-kidnapping trade. My
sister-in-law, Nellie, is a Chinese Singaporean. Nellie and my brother's
son, Martin, looks sufficiently Chinese to tempt these ruthless gangs and,
while he was still of lucrative 'kidnappable' age, Nellie lived in terror
for him.
The kidnapping of boy babies for the Chinese market has even spread to
Singapore!' she told me.
In Shenzhen, a rich southern city during one two-month period last year, no
fewer than 56 advertisements appeared in the local Press from desperate
parents trying to find their stolen boy children.
One such couple, Yau Chau Chi and her husband Au Ming Chen, had their
two-year-old son, Kam Ching snatched from outside their home.
The kidnappers, after reading their appeal, clearly decided that - in
addition to selling the toddler to some rural family - they could make a
quick buck out of the heartbroken parents as well. They demanded a ransom
of £1,500. Kam Ching's parents, not rich by our standards, managed to
scrape the money together, paid it to an intermediary - and still, 18
months later, do not have their child.
In their view, the police have been dilatory and careless. "It's hopeless,"
says Kam Ching's despairing father. His wife is now too distraught to talk
about her vanished son any more.
Rural people (and 70pc of China's population is rural) cannot afford scans
and amniocentesis to determine a foetus's sex. And so they have the baby
girls murdered at birth, continuing the long feudal practice of female
infanticide.
As an ancient Chinese saying puts it: 'How sad it is to be a woman. Nothing
on earth is held so cheap.' A son can work in the fields, carry on the
family name and, most importantly, supply financial support for his parents
when they get old (there's virtually no pension or social security system
yet in China).
A girl, when she gets married becomes the property of her husband's family,
her own family's investment in her disappears. 'A married daughter is like
spilled water' (i.e. a complete waste).
Even those girls who are born get given names which emphasise their lower
status-names like 'Pandi' (expecting a boy), Yanan (second to a boy) and
Zhaodi (bring a brother).
But, if killing her baby daughter, however much of a 'waste' she would
prove to be on marriage, is something a heartbroken mother cannot bring
herself to do, she will abandon her - often well-wrapped, well-dressed and
with a note pinned to her clothing about her astrological sign, her name
and an appeal for someone to take her to a state-run 'orphanage'.
I was the first person in this country to write about the 'dying rooms' of
some of these 'orphanages' where sick and abandoned baby girls were left
alone in squalor to die of starvation. Deliberate death-by-starvation was,
I pointed out one of the kinder methods of girl-baby 'culling' being
practised, both officially and unofficially, in China today. I was, of
course, bitterly attacked by Chinese authorities.
And, reluctant though I am to give credit of any kind to this grotesque
regime, the Chinese authorities have improved the lot of their abandoned
baby girls. They've allowed outside charities to work with the babies, and
help the hard-pressed (and often loving, but untrained, poorly paid and
hopelessly ill-equipped) staff.
Besides, thanks to the uproar over the 'dying rooms' story, they've
discovered that there's money to be made out of these once 'disposable'
baby girls. Childless couples in the West clamoured for the chance to adopt
them - in exchange, of course, for 'donations'.
The Chinese do not allow healthy boys to be adopted and, in any ease,
healthy boys are rarely abandoned in the first place - they are far too
valuable. Which is why all those happy British families, who justifiably
show off their adopted Chinese children to the Press, are always showing
off little girls.
But even the Chinese are beginning to worry about whether the ferociously
enforced 'one-child' policy is having unforeseen repercussions. The 'good
idea' of population control has gone badly wrong.
The authorities boast that, without the harshness of their policy China
would have 300 million more people than it already has. But when you skew,
wittingly or unwittingly, the normal gender ratio of a population, you set
in train consequences that are socially devastating. I've already dealt
with the spate of boy-kidnapping crime. But there is also a staggering
growth in girl-kidnapping crime as well.
That's because the 'one-child' policy, which encourages the birth of boys
only, means that (according to one Chinese sociologist I met in Peking) 'a
whole generation of young men is growing up without hope of ever finding a
wife'.
'Having a wife and a family is a "civilising" influence on young men. If
they can't find wives, they resort to prostitution - which is why we have
such an increase in Aids and sexually transmitted diseases. And, I'm afraid
to say, it also leads to wife kidnapping, which is something we thought had
vanished with the communist liberation and the end of the feudal era.'
Ethnic Chinese girls from Vietnam are the prime targets for gangs who steal
them, smuggle them across the border and sell them in rural China.
And last year, when I was investigating the famine in North Korea, I was
astonished to find that even North Korean women who escaped across the
Tumen river border were also being captured, or willingly selling
themselves, to gangs who sold them on to local ethnic-Korean Chinese men in
search of a wife.
There are now at least 111 million more men than women in China, a
grotesque gender distortion, which is unique in the world.
And those men, those 'Little Emperors', those 'Little Suns' upon whom their
parents' love has been so lavished have become spoiled, self-indulgent
softies, according to some deeply alarmed Chinese commentators.
In big cities, such as Peking Shanghai and Canton, I'm constantly
astonished to see so many of these fat little demanding butterballs, gorged
on expensive fast food, bullying their besotted mothers in a way which is
totally at odds with Confucian 'respect your elders' philosophy.
One leading journal, the Peking Review, interviewed university teachers who
noted with dismay that many of the 'Little Emperors' now arriving at
university are unable to tie their laces, peel a boiled egg, or do anything
practical for themselves.
'I think we have now produced the most spoiled, selfish generation in
Chinese history. It is a tragedy for the future of our society,' one of
their interviewees lamented.
And, oddly enough, this 'spoiled, selfish generation' of city-dwellers
looks like being a largely childless generation after all. Children require
some kind of sacrifice, the whims and needs of parents can no longer come
first. But if you have been indulged all your life as a 'Little Emperor',
why should you want to breed another 'Little Emperor' to take precedence
over you?
Perhaps, as far as the cities are concerned, China need never have enforced
its 'one-child' policy so brutally. Rising prosperity - and selfish
consumerism - might have (as in most of the developed world) cut the
population growth anyway. But then China has never chosen the least brutal
way on offer in order to achieve its ends.
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