Gendercide in China: the Grief and the Sadness

Peter Hitchens has a fascinating and thought-provoking article in The Daily Mail entitled: "Gendercide: China's shameful massacre of unborn girls means there will soon be 30m more men than women." In the society Thomas Friedman admires so much, hatred of girls is widespread, state sanctioned and acted on with deadly ferocity. I guess that is why he is a feminist.

A few snippets follow. But read it all for yourself. It is well-worth while.

In the cruel old China, baby girls were often left to die in the gutters. In the cruel modern China, they are aborted by the tens of millions, using all the latest technology. [Aren't you glad they have modern, scientific socialism now?]

There is an ugly new word for this mass slaughter: gendercide. [Which no major feminist groups is willing to fight. How do they hold on to that name, I wonder?]

Thanks to a state policy which has limited many families to one child since 1979, combined with an ancient and ruthless prejudice in favour of sons, the world's new superpower is beginning the century of its supremacy with an alarming surplus of males.

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. [Did you catch that? Nothing like this has ever happened before, ever.]

The nearest we can come to it is the sad shortage of men after the First World War in Britain, France, Russia and Germany, and the many women denied the chance of family life and motherhood as a result.

It is possible that the effects of that imbalance are still with us, in the shape of the radical feminist movement which found ready recruits among the husbandless teachers and other professionals of the Twenties and Thirties.

But men without women are altogether more troublesome than women without men, especially when they are young.

All kinds of speculation is now seething about what might happen; a war to cull the surplus males, a rise in crime, a huge expansion in the prostitution that is already a major industry in every Chinese city, a rise in homosexuality.

Three things are for sure. It cannot now be prevented, and it is already beginning to be obvious in the schools. It is also stimulating a miserable trade in stolen children. [Government policies that mess with human reproduction do not produce disaster right away; it can take a generation.]

All over this district, the evidence of government concern is on display. A 20-yard-long propaganda poster in one tiny hamlet dwells sternly and very frankly on the problem, declaring: 'Our current family planning policy is this, "Pay attention to the issue of gender imbalance."' [How lame! They obviously have no clue what to do now.]

It quotes a recent national census showing a growing imbalance and predicts: 'In 2040 there will be 300million men and 250 million women under 40. At least 30million men will have difficulty getting married.

This will cause "elements of instability" and hinder economic growth. The harm caused by this imbalance could include disintegration of families, high divorce rates, "sex offences" and distortion of the birth rate.'

The poster, astonishingly candid in a country where critical journalism and dissent are still suppressed with all the force of the state, is sadly lame when it comes to suggesting what to do.

It calls for 'action to care for girls' and then sets out four vague and wordy slogans which can be summed up as 'girls are good'. And so they keep saying. - - snip - -

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.' [Think about this the next time you hear about "a woman's right to choose."]

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 have no moral authority left.]

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. - - snip - -

In Kunming I saw another of China's harsh faces. You may have seen pictures of children in cages, or tethered to posts, and gasped at the cruelty. But you did not know the half of it.

Their seemingly brutal parents are in fact trying to prevent their children from being stolen. [!]

Boys are kidnapped by families who want a male heir and do not care where they get him. Girls are taken to be brought up as child brides for cherished, spoiled boys, who will not have to worry about the increasing shortage of girls. - - snip - -

On June 1 last year, International Children's Day, dozens of Kunming parents held up posters in a central square, advertising their missing children. City officials told them to take down the posters and disperse because they were 'defacing the city with unsightly material'.

Here are the stories of the parents who talked to me. Xiong Fu Ping, (like all the men I spoke to, he is 36) lost his son Xiong Ting-Lei when the boy was 16 months old: 'One minute he was playing outside our house and the next he was gone.' [Every parent's nightmare.]

Neighbours said a woman had driven the child away in her car. Xiong Fu Ping has already spent nearly half the family's income, which is just £80 a month, on posters and advertisements for the missing boy. - - snip - -

What lingers in the mind, in the midst of this surging economic and political titan with its dozens of vast, ultra-modern cities, its advanced plans to land men on the Moon, its utopian schemes to control population [let this phrase roll around in your mind for a while; this is pure evil] and its unstoppable power over the rest of the world, is the inconsolable misery of the bereft parents, the pinched squalor of the places where they must try to live a happy life, the jaunty wickedness of the cheap abortion clinics and the classrooms full of the ghosts of all those girls who were never born.

Whatever we have been used to and thought of as normal is coming to an end.

Read it all here. Word don't seem to be enough to express the grief.

HT: ProWoman Prolife