Over the past week, China has been convulsed by a video that shows a little girl — 2 years old — clad in pink trousers, struck by two vans and then ignored by over a dozen passers-by, who cavalierly stepped around her broken, bleeding body:
Little Yue Yue has since died, but China, in an embarrassed way, is trying to come to terms with what her death means. The MSM helpfully hints that the problem is China’s burgeoning capitalism:
China’s economic boom and the growing disparity between the rich and poor have made changing social values a contentious topic, with some lamenting what they see as materialism replacing morals.
The same article gets a little closer to the mark, in the last paragraph, when it suggests that China’s willingness to impose severe punishment on people makes them disinclined to get involved:
Many people in China are hesitant to help people who appear to be in distress for fear that they will be blamed. High-profile lawsuits have ended with good Samaritans ordered to pay hefty fines to individuals they sought to help.
I’d like to suggest another possible societal paradigm: China’s one child policy. This policy says that urban, married couples may have only one child. Approximately 40% of China’s population is subject to this policy. The government takes it very seriously, going so far as to force abortions of full term babies on unwilling women:
During the past week, dozens of women in southwest China have been forced to have abortions even as late as nine months into the pregnancy, according to evidence uncovered by NPR.
China’s strict family planning laws permit urban married couples to have only one child each, but in some of the recent cases — in Guangxi Province — women say they were forced to abort what would have been their first child because they were unmarried. The forced abortions are all the more shocking because family planning laws have generally been relaxed in China, with many families having two children.
Liang Yage and his wife Wei Linrong had one child and believed that — like many other couples — they could pay a fine and keep their second baby. Wei was 7 months pregnant when 10 family planning officials visited her at home on April 16.
Liang describes how they told her that she would have to have an abortion, “You don’t have any more room for maneuver,” he says they told her. “If you don’t go [to the hospital], we’ll carry you.” The couple was then driven to Youjiang district maternity hospital in Baise city.
“I was scared,” Wei told NPR. “The hospital was full of women who’d been brought in forcibly. There wasn’t a single spare bed. The family planning people said forced abortions and forced sterilizations were both being carried out. We saw women being pulled in one by one.”
The couple was given a consent agreement to sign. When Liang refused, family planning officials signed it for him. He and his wife are devout Christians — he is a pastor — and they don’t agree with abortion.
The officials gave Wei three injections in the lower abdomen. Contractions started the next afternoon, and continued for almost 16 hours. Her child was stillborn.
The above story is from a few years ago, but it could have happened last year too:
A pregnant woman in China was detained, beaten and forced to have an abortion just a month before her due date because the baby would have violated the country’s one-child limit, her husband said today.
Luo Yanquan, a construction worker, said his wife was taken kicking and screaming from their home by more than a dozen people on 10 October and detained in a clinic for three days by family planning officials, then taken to a hospital and injected with a drug that killed her baby.
Usually it doesn’t come to actual government coercion. Why not? Because the Chinese people themselves, knowing that they’re limited to one baby, and rejoicing in a culture that values only boys, take matters into their own hands, routinely aborting female babies, a disgusting practice that has earned it’s own name of “gendercide“:
By the year 2020, there will be 30 million more men than women of marriageable age in this giant empire, so large and so different (its current population is 1,336,410,000) that it often feels more like a separate planet than just another country. Nothing like this has ever happened to any civilisation before.
Yuan Quan slipped into a busy down-market establishment in a grim and basic part of town, with a flourishing market for stolen bicycles just outside, and the police looking the other way.
She asked the abortionist if he ever aborted boys. He gaped. ‘Are you mad?’ he almost shouted, ‘Nobody aborts boys unless they are deformed. Girls are what we abort.’
This cheap and squalid storefront business offers abortions from around £10. Scans, which reveal a baby’s sex, cost a fiver. True, this is a rough neighbourhood, but similar businesses flourish in more respectable districts as well.
They usually start from £20, while supposedly painless procedures can go up to about £200.
The authorities, who have no moral objection to abortion itself, have been known to force women to have abortions in their ninth month of pregnancy to keep to the one-child policy.
They cannot really complain about the huge numbers of legal, commercial abortionists. Nor can they do much to ban the cheap portable scanning machines which detect the sex of the baby and condemn so many unborn girls to death.
Once you know more about China’s attitude to girls, it is surprising that so many survive.
You damn dirty commies! (to paraphrase a movie). Will there be a one-child policy on those 50 square miles in Idaho bought by China? And if they value the lives of their children so little, what of the lives of others? Of those not Chinese? Power and control via dehumanization are the only goal. A bit like Islamists, who devalue women as well. Makes me retch.
My question is, where were the parents, that this little girl wandered into the street long enough to be hit by two cars and stepped over by uncaring passers-by?
The father and mother were working in their shop when she wandered off.
i read the mother was doing laundry when she looked away for a plit second the little girl was gone
I doubt the parents care. After all, the child was only a girl. Not really even human, huh?
barely even human is a Korean girl adopted by White folks in the states and got “run over” by one of family’s biological sons. Incident was dismissed as an accident, and nothing more was said about how the toddler’s death was treated as though she were a family pet.
“High-profile lawsuits have ended with good Samaritans ordered to pay hefty fines to individuals they sought to help.”
We have the same problem here in California, welcome to the ‘Land of the Trial Lawyers.’
You make out that the authorities are the villains here for aborting children.
That is untrue, everyone knows the rules, the risks and the punishments.
The parents who forced the authorities to abort their children but breaking the law are to blame here for the abortion, and not ‘society’.
Regards the gendercide — this is self-limiting and in a few years’ time, women will be valued a lot more than they are now, simply because there are not going to be enough women to go round and the Chinese ladies are quite emancipated people, so the men will have to make an effort or lose out to a better suitor.
And if you find this depressing, remember that this mess is probably the only way of changing the deeply rooted thinking about gender in China, reality usually does a much better job than theory here.
“….parents who forced the authorities to abort thier children.”
LovelyEarth? Thats a good one!
Okay, okay. I’m sorry, but I *have* to answer this howler.
The authorities are very much the villains for enacting that law in the first place. The citizens are not “criminals” for exercising their rights as human beings. You say “everyone knows the risks” like it’s some natural disaster that is no one’s fault in particular. This is an act of thoroughgoing tyranny, an act you would never tolerate in the US. You take it as a given that the government should be allowed to violate the citizenry at will, to for their some ideological end.
As for the gendercide, you want to fight patriarchy by…killing innocent girls. You want to “change deeply rooted thinking about gender in China” by turning China into the Honeycomb Hideout, where no girls are allowed. Here I thought feminists were pro-woman. Your little plan, to make Chinese women more “valuable” by killing off surpluses, exposes feminism for the power-hungry greed that it is. Like so much feminist thinking, it’s dead wrong.
This is misogyny, distilled to its purest form. No civilized person should find the treatment of baby girls in China to be good.
Not producing more than one child is a Chinese law.
Whether the law is good or not is another point, but, fact is, it’s been the law for a long while and that’s for the Chinese to change. We can say we don’t like it and that’s a valid opinion, but blaming the cops because a perp breaks the laws and the cops have to uphold it (otherwise they’d be breaking the law) is a non-starter.
Personally I think that the people should be allowed (and compelled) to carry their unborn to full term and the baby should be given to an eligible married couple that cannot conceive. That way the overpopulation law is upheld in spirit, the child is alive and someone else is helped and the parents don’t get rewarded for breaking the laws by paying a fine.
It’s sad we need such laws, but take a look at Egypt and you’ll see why the Chinese thought they need to legislate this way: it’s the lesser evil.
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Regards women being chattles, the difference between the countries that people mentioned is that in China, people have only one child, or perhaps 2. So each child is a huge emotional investment as well as a financial one and thus valuable.
In the countries you guys mentioned there is polygamy and women have many children each from a young age onwards, and there is also a tradition to ‘trade’ children into indentured service and marriages. Boys and girls in those settings don’t amount to much ‘value’ (Don’t forget about the boys, they often have it as hard as the girls, if not tougher).
Chinese people have a very different culture here, nor do they have the tribal setup where individuals cannot escape the clan, nor is there the sharia law that declares every women to be the property of some male.
There are plenty of professional women in China (unlike the countries you mentioned) and so they have a very different lobbying and power base too. Remember, emancipation always begins at the top strata of society before moving downwards the ranks and classes.
I think that we will soon see polyandry in China on a regular basis accepted in society soon along with people who indulge in serial monogamy without commitment.
And we will see other things, such as women selling their reproductive rights as a pension investment to the highest bidder (and look for a child-free love marriage later on).
Women’s overall value to society will rise (not always in good ways), and the smart money right on is on producing a girl, because in 20 year’s time, she is almost guaranteed a rich husband, and he will make enough to keep both sets of ancestors afloat in their old age.
Either way, the future is going to be ‘interesting’ (unfortunately).
Like I said, power-hungry greed. Thanks for making the point so beautifully.
They’re killing little girls in the womb not because they think women are awesome, but because they think women are disposable — that’s a low opinion of women, not a high one. While China isn’t democratic, more males than females will produce a political environment conducive to men. Secondly, large numbers of unattached young men have caused increased crime and increased aggression towards women. Third, most men are sexually invisible to most women, and as women gain the ability to provide for themselves, they will increasingly choose sexy, dominant men (the type of men most women like) over hardworking but meek provider-types, as has happened in the Western world, increasing the incentive for men to behave antisocially.
Plus, maintaining the illusory “high status” of women means killing girl children to keep the supply low. If you truly believe that women will be more empowered if you reduce their numbers, then logically, you would have no problem with the murder of adult women or already-born girls — after all, they’re reducing the prestige of their sisters just by being alive. Think about it this way: if an American politician started mass-murdering his fellow countrymen so as to increase wages for the average worker (by reducing supply), would you be cheerleading for him?
I’ll say it again: the Chinese government is the villain for enacting this barbaric policy. I can’t change your opinion on female infanticide, but this kind of thinking exposes the vast gulf between our ways of thought. How can women practice all their other rights if they don’t even have the right to be alive? They can’t.
(Apologies for the double post.)
Like I said, power-hungry greed. Thanks for making the point so beautifully.
They’re killing little girls in the womb not because they think women are awesome, but because they think women are disposable — that’s a low opinion of women, not a high one. While China isn’t democratic, more males than females will produce a political environment conducive to men. Secondly, large numbers of unattached young men have caused increased crime and increased aggression towards women. Third, most men are sexually invisible to most women, and as women gain the ability to provide for themselves, they will increasingly choose sexy, dominant men (the type of men most women like) over hardworking but meek provider-types, as has happened in the Western world, increasing the incentive for men to behave antisocially.
Plus, maintaining the illusory “high status” of women means killing girl children to keep the supply low. If you truly believe that women will be more empowered if you reduce their numbers, then logically, you would have no problem with the murder of adult women or already-born girls — after all, they’re reducing the prestige of their sisters just by being alive. Think about it this way: if an American politician started mass-murdering his fellow countrymen so as to increase wages for the average worker (by reducing supply), would you be cheerleading for him?
I’ll say it again: the Chinese government is the villain for enacting this barbaric policy. I can’t change your opinion on female infanticide, but this kind of thinking exposes the vast gulf between our ways of thought. How can women practice all their other rights if they don’t even have the right to be alive? They can’t.
“They’re killing little girls in the womb not because they think women are awesome, but because they think women are disposable”
But in their world, women are disposable, that’s an economic fact. It’s not because they are female, but because women and children right now are a cost without much return in that society.
However, at least those people are having children and still a concept of wedlock, which is more than can be said of the West, where having a child is also only an expense (or a meal ticket for a scrounger) and it’s more logical for working people to invest in a pension than a child.
And I think your assumption that the Chinese government is ‘evil’ is somewhat overemotional, I do not think that *anyone* on this planet likes the situation we’re talking about, people are merely trying to make the best of a bad scene. No-one really thinks that the cops who have to drag stressed pregnant women for a forced abortion enjoy their job or celebrate their sad achievement(…) or that the politicians who made the one-child policy were simply evil — think for a moment, would another model be acceptable to you if you agreed that population needed to be reduced ethically? And would that model really be fairer than the current one? We actually discussed this one in our house not long ago and in the end conceded that this is the most equitable and easiest to police fairly way if it is done at all. Maybe you can do better and should post your results?
Regards women’s lib: there will be a broad range of behaviours in China. You will find enslaved women as well as successful women, unlike in many other places where you just find slaves. And it’s not only a problem for women btw, men are in just the same trouble here, and if you think about the long-term implications, homosexuality could become far more accepted(or practiced) in Chinese society as it is in other societies where women are scarce for whatever reason.
But forget ‘womens lib’, it’s not quite applicable to China, because this is a western cultural thing that simply won’t happen in _that_ way in any other culture. (see Tacitus’ “Germania”[1] for historical and cultural reasons as to why that is so in anglo-saxon societies)
As a side note, I am somewhat offended that you assume that I have a favorable opinion of any kind of infanticide. I’ve discussed the facts as I see them, it does not mean I like what is going on at all. And no, I don’t think I need to waste space to keep stating how gross I think the situation is, I kind of had hoped that this is obvious…
[1] http://librivox.org/germania_tacitus/
The double post happened because when I looked at the thread, I didn’t see my response. Delete the extra one if you want, administrators.
“Women’s overall value to society will rise (not always in good ways), and the smart money right on is on producing a girl, because in 20 year’s time, she is almost guaranteed a rich husband” So what you’re saying is that China will “evolve” from a misogynistic tyranny into a materialistic oligarchy? You are also arguing that material wealth translates into the emancipation of women. Since China has had the one child policy in place since 1978 and is currently the most materially prosperous nation, you’d think the above story would never have happened.
According to this article, women do not benefit from being thin on the ground. (Also see here — I’ll need to read Hvistendahl’s book, though.)
When you say things like:
“You make out that the authorities are the villains here for aborting children.
That is untrue, everyone knows the rules, the risks and the punishments.”
…you should forgive me for being rather agitated. With that sentence, you justify the governmental abuse of the citizenry as if it’s just like writing a ticket for speeding. Might does not make right; just because the bully can beat you up for not doing what he says doesn’t mean the bully is right to be beating people (Imagine telling a runaway slave, “Hey, it’s your fault you got beaten black and blue — everyone knows the rules, the risks, and the punishments of leaving the plantation. Besides, by doing that, you’re destroying the Southern economy.”)
If you can’t live free, what’s the point? To be jerked around on a string? No. There have been a lot of apologias for dictatorship floating around the news lately, and Americans have been losing more and more of their freedom in the name of stopping terrorism or stopping “hurt feelings” or preventing bullying.
Besides, thanks to the policy, China will grow old before it gets rich.
A number of points are glaringly obvious throughout your apologia to the mainland Chinese. I will address them in no particular order…
- Perhaps you don’t label yourself as a socialist per se, but you have unquestionably adopted the diseased socialist mindset of seeing every problem in the world through the distorted single lens of economic analysis, with any cultural aspects simply being some perverse-but-unfortunate fallout effect of the imposed economic “solution”.
- You display the same mental blinders by trying to propose a skewed moral equivalence of China with Mideastern countries. This is laughable, given that at the outset those countries represent nothing more than the tyrannies of typical Sharia-based Islamic toilets foisting themselves off as valid societies.
- You thereby also completely overlook better comparators consisting of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, where no such one-child policy was ever required, yet their culturally Chinese-based societies are far richer and freer than the mainland.
- You wax eloquently with supposition and projection about the economic outcomes of these policies, but are deafeningly silent on directly addressing the tyranny and moral evil of the policies themselves. To state that you “do not think that anybody on this planet likes the situation we are talking about” is just another cute mental trick to sidestep the issue of evil, coyly attempting to downplay the whole topic as if we were discussing whether we should choose a pink dress or a blue one. Your use of the word “likes” is particularly revealing, as it glaringly displays your moral obtuseness more clearly than anything else you might say.
- Your tie-in of “a broad range of behaviors in China” to the topic of women’s lib also reveals the repugnant moral equivalence underlying the womens’ movements in the West, and their absurd subjective rationalizations about the barbaric practices of cultures that (dare I say it?) have been and will continue to be inferior to traditional conservative Western civilization. But of course in your world of leftist narratives and memes, hierarchies and mental distinctions are so declasse, so intellectually frowned upon by the cognoscenti such that we are never allowed to make comparisons with the somehow superior Other.
- Since the mainland communist government is by no stretch of the imagination based on the bottom-up representative will of the people, you deliberately mistake the average citizen’s acquiescence for support. This would be laughable if only its effects were not so destructive to individual lives in actual practice.
- Finally, I have no idea what you intend by your moniker of ‘RightWingHippieChick’, but I strongly suggest it denotes your state of mental confusion, and should be shortened to just ‘Hippie’. It truly pains me that I have to waste my time and energy on refuting yet one more leftist and their repugnant ideas that saturate this world. Your general cluelessness and associated obfuscation is either by design or via a degraded mental state, but the evil outcomes to the rest of us are still the same.
Investorcs that was awesome. Wow.
“this is self-limiting and in a few years’ time, women will be valued a lot more than they are now, simply because there are not going to be enough women to go round”
Really? Ya think? China is not the only place on Earth that practices “Gendercide.” Afghanistan and Pakistan are known to practice it as well. It has a cultural basis there not a legal one. Throw in multiple wives and you get a woman shortage. Neither country is known for treating women well. Female infanticide was also practiced in ancient Athens and Rome. Look up how they treated their women (for fun contrast Athens with Sparta). These should give you a clue that, as the number of women drop, they are more likely to be treated as property.
This is sarcasm, right? Please tell me you were joking. Or trolling, I won’t even hold it against you. Trolling would be better than believing what you wrote.
Well, I’m glad to hear it’ll all work out for the best. A few million dead baby girls is certainly a reasonable price to pay for geniune societal change. Progress marches on!
In the cultures where the “people” have caused a shortage of females, the remaining females are treated as property, to be bought, sold and used. Females from other countries are kidnapped and sold. They are not valued as precious human beings, but as a scarce commodity. Only evil can come from evil, which is what this cultural misogyny is.
I’m not even going to address your hideous and despicable attempt to shift blame here. What I will point out is that, historically, societies have always had one very effective means of equalizing gender imbalance when there are too many surplus men: start a war.
I don’t think that would be good for anybody, do you?
Well, here’s a new China story : A truck driver backed over and killed a boy he had hit, supposedly because the driver figured paying for killing the boy would be cheaper than paying hospital expenses ( witnesses claim the driver reversed and backed up over the 5 year old ; the driver denies this allegation):
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2052815/Xiong-Maoke-5-dies-latest-horrific-Chinese-traffic-accident.html
China really, really needs a “Good Samaritan” law.
The video is heartbreaking. Such a precious little girl. China has evolved into a country that doesn’t value human life.
It’s heartbreaking, alright. A human tragedy both tiny and far away, but huge and in our face at the same time.
It’s disgusting that some Lefty paper has put this spin on it: “the growing disparity between the rich and poor….” See an eye-catching tragedy, spin the blame onto our political enemies – very Lefty. (Plus, capitalism has REDUCED the prosperity gap between governors and the governed in that country.)
By the same token, I think it mistaken to blame this on the abortion culture in China.
Don’t get me wrong – that culture is awful. RightwingHippieChick above knows nothing of China, nothing of history, and nothing of human nature to write what she does.
A western adage goes “A man is a man until he takes a wife./A daughter is a daughter all of her life.” The Chinese fervently believe the opposite of that, and their family structure has been set that way since prehistoric times. The Communists haven’t been able to wipe it, but they’ve warped it, huh? It’s a brand new problem, and none of us know how it will shake out.
But this little video tragedy could have happened anywhere, in any culture. There have been stories from NYC of people not reporting screams of victims, and walking away from witnessing rapes in progress. Hit-and-run is hardly an unheard of crime in any civilization that uses cars or even cart-horses.
I suspect this “turning a blind eye” (a very old expression, and what does that tell us?) happens more in big cities, “communities” that aren’t really communities because neighbors don’t know each other. I also suspect that it happens more often in nanny-states, but that could be my own political prejudice speaking.
Human evil is common. Conscience is fragile and malleable. Man is a fallen creature. We should celebrate the neighbor who came to help the girl at the end (human good is precious and rare!), but we don’t even know her name.
Oh, and quit blaming the parents. Chinese people are people, and they love their daughters. What, should the authorities come stomping in and breathalyze them while they’re in shock and guilt? Some people just want to change one police state for another.
Oops – those staves run like this, of course:
A son is a son
Until he takes a wife.
A daughter’s a daughter
All of her life.
Taking a wife is manly, indeed.
i agree with forced abortion..
i mean how else will the chinese abide to the one baby law?
its wrong, in a sense, but considering their HUGE population and the limited resources in the world, they should cut down on having babies…
Yet Japan, most of Europe, and even Russia have managed to get to that level without forced abortions. They did so by liberalizing their economies, causing more people to move into cities (where the jobs are.) Raising a child in a city is inherently more expensive, so the birth rate limits itself. Don’t forget that Mao Zedong was exhorting Chinese to have large numbers of children.
Once again, you display the tyrannical tendencies inherent in the leftist mind. All you need to do is come up with some “crisis” to justify destroying liberty so you could create some false utopia — that’s what all dictators do. The crisis could be anything — terrorism, climate change, obesity, bullying. A free world isn’t a perfect or painless world, but freedom isn’t free.
Next, I want to hear your apologia for American slavery.
“i agree with forced abortion..
i mean how else will the chinese abide to the one baby law?”
How else? Have you never heard of adoption? If you can countenance stormtrooper thugs goose-stepping a gravid woman to an abortion mill, then you’ll have no problem with stealing a second or third baby and giving it to a childless couple to raise.
Couples who want to adopt a healthy newborns in America have to wait more than two years. There’s even a wait list for people who want to adopt babies with severe birth defects like spinal bifida.
That’s just America, Lisa. Millions of childless couples in China and Europe and across six continents ACHE for newborn babies. There’s NO NEED to kill them.
(And if it’s just killing you like, Lisa, get yourself a rifle and a hunting license – if the herds aren’t thinned, Bambi will starve this winter!)
But why is it that the Chinese must “abide the one baby law”? It’s an idiot law that assures China’s return to dominance after a long slide (they were just beginning to recover from Genghis Khan when Stalin and Truman helped install Mao) will be a very short-run thing. It’s to keep the population from getting unruly, not to save resources or any of that new-age crap twixt your ears.
Which “resources in the world” are “limited”, Lisa? Water falls from the sky, you know. But if you’re so worried about beings drinking it, can’t we kill all the dogs and cats before we start in on the Chinese babies?
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