Spilt water -- the girls of China

Longtime readers of my 'blog know where I stand when it comes to China's so-called "one child" policy. Initially hailed as the panacea for a burgeoning population some 30 years ago, the horrendous results of this well-intentioned but terribly shortsighted strategy are just now coming to light.

Below, are excerpts from the 4.10.10 UK's Daily Mail newspaper article by Peter Hitchens:

"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.

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.

There is an ugly new word for this mass slaughter: gendercide.

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.

The Chinese state, never having intended this result and increasingly alarmed by it, is now using all its huge propaganda resources to try to stop the slaughter of unborn girls.

But it will be hard to fight against the cold hard prejudice in favour of sons and against daughters, rooted in a prehistoric belief that sons will care for their aged parents while daughters will cost money in dowries, and desert to the families into which they marry. "

Hitchens then goes on to talk about his visits to several rural Chinese villages where he witnesses for himself the incredible imbalance between the numbers of girls and boys in community schools. Then he and his team head for the Chinese city of Kunming (pop. 6 million) where they enlist the help of a female friend. They ask her to visit various abortion clinics to find out the current thought on girls vs. boys.

"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.'

Once you know more about China's attitude to girls, it is surprising that so many survive. Yuan Quan told me of her own experience: 'When I was a little girl my grandparents doted on me, and gave me generous presents. I was their first and only grandchild. But when my aunt had a son, it all stopped.

'The presents got much smaller and the fuss died away. My male cousin got all the attention. There was no pretence about it. They would always have much preferred a boy, and now they had one.

'They said to me, "You are only a girl. You are spilt water."' This cold, dismissive expression is universally used about unwanted daughters - and to their faces.

These were educated, urban people. Imagine, then, how much coarser and more brutal the attitude is in the villages or among the sweatshops where the poor and uneducated gather.

Only a century ago, historians recorded that such sayings as 'There is no thief like a family with five daughters' and 'Daughters are goods which lose you money' were common among Chinese peasants.

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.

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 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.