Chinese Hunger for Sons Fuels Boys’ Abductions

[Coventina]

Source: New York Times

SHENZHEN, China — The thieves often strike at dusk, when children are playing outside and their parents are distracted by exhaustion.

(snip)

These and thousands of other children stolen from the teeming industrial hubs of China’s Pearl River Delta have never been recovered by their parents or by the police. But anecdotal evidence suggests the children do not travel far. Although some are sold to buyers in Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam, most of the boys are purchased domestically by families desperate for a male heir, parents of abducted children and some law enforcement officials who have investigated the matter say.

The demand is especially strong in rural areas of south China, where a tradition of favoring boys over girls and the country’s strict family planning policies have turned the sale of stolen children into a thriving business.

Su Qingcai, a tea farmer from the mountainous coast of Fujian Province, explained why he spent $3,500 last year on a 5-year-old boy. “A girl is just not as good as a son,” said Mr. Su, 38, who has a 14-year-old daughter but whose biological son died at 3 months. “It doesn’t matter how much money you have. If you don’t have a son, you are not as good as other people who have one.”



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/world/asia/05kidnap.html?_r=1&hpw

---

Yikes!

The law of unintended consequences strikes again!

[Hello_Kitty]

1. No, the Patriarchy strikes again.

The one-child policy didn't cause the misogyny and son-preference in China.

[Coventina]

2. Oh ITA, Patriarchy is at the root of this problem.

All I meant was that I don't think the thinkers behind the "One Child" policy anticipated the massive abduction and selling of little boys.

[wickerwoman]

5. It's not an either/or.

Patriarchy caused misogyny; the one-child policy produced tens of thousands of desperate parents who couldn't have sons of their own. Both led to the epidemic of kidnapping.

The one-child policy has also led to an epidemic of underreporting kidnappings because many second children in China are off the books. When I used to go for walks behind my apartment in Shanghai I would see literally dozens of mothers pushing strollers around in the dark and talking with each other while their kids stayed tied up in the stroller to keep them from wandering too far. The alarm would go up that a policeman was coming and they would all race down the street back to their apartments to hide their undocumented children.

I'd be willing to bet that a lot of kidnapped sons come from this vulnerable population and that the mothers have to choose between reporting the kidnapping and being thrown in jail or never seeing their child again.

[Liberal_in_LA]

10. It's has nothing to do with loving a boy more than a girl, it's about concern for old age support

The girl moves in with the husband's family, the son stays to support the parents. So a son is equivalent to our SSI.

[treestar]

12. Strange in a communist country - they are communists but

don't take care of people in old age. And it should occur to them by now, especially with their one child policy, that they have to address that for the cases of couples who have daughters.

[wickerwoman]

14. They do provide old age homes in China

but most Chinese people would rather die than admit they put their parents in one. There's also a very strong cultural bias towards families taking care of their aging parents themselves which predates communism by thousands of years. (Of course, the way it usually works is grandma raises the grandkids and the parents both work insane hours to provide shelter, food and medicine for the whole family.) There's also a sense that only the very poor can't afford to take care of their aging parents so you would lose a lot of face in front of your neighbors if you admitted you put your parents in a rest home.

Most girls work in modern China and are capable of taking care of their parents even when they remain single. The bias towards boys is a tradition in rural China which doesn't have much relevance in modern terms since a well-educated child of either sex could take care of their parents. It's lingering misogyny rather than a problem that the government needs to address.

The more vital problem, I think, is families that lose their only child through illness or natural disaster. In the cities, the relatively wealthy are allowed to use birth control on the honor system after their first child (and if they pay a fine equivalent to a few months wages they can have a second child). In the countryside, women are forcibly sterilized after their first child so even if he/she dies in an earthquake, that couple can never have a second child. I think that creates a lot more desperation and inequality than simply preference for boys over girls.

I don't absolutely have a problem with population control but I think a huge number of problems would be avoided by letting people have two children, keeping the system whereby wealthy couples who want to have more children can pay a fine (and maybe have to contribute more in taxes) and keeping a consistent, humane policy for people who have already had their two children.

[treestar]

17. Interesting information, thank you

To be a little judgmental, but here goes - why not in modern times get over the "face" thing - modern science should tell the Chinese that people are not to blame for not having sons. The Chinese have so many well educated people - or is it that those people can't penetrate rural people's minds? It's true in the US and people are people.

It just seems so sad, when in the modern world a daughter can do as much as a son - and the daughters can hardly take care of their parents by staying single - with all the efforts they've made, the Chinese have too many men to fight over too few women.

[wickerwoman]

18. Look how much trouble we have convincing people not to buy SUVs

when they don't need them. And SUVs are only twenty years old, cars less than one hundred. Most Americans just want cars, even when they don't need them, and they are attracted to the biggest, most expensive ones they can get.

There's a big campaign in Chinese education to "get over face" because most people now recognize that being terrified of making mistakes and looking bad just doesn't lead to a successful learning style. But it's also a deeply engrained cultural trait. Imagine someone asking you to "get over covering up your breasts". Logically you know that breasts are just breasts but logic doesn't dictate most people's actions.

Misogyny in China is rooted in Buddhism (men are higher on the karmic chain than women; being born a woman is a punishment for your past karmic sins) and Confucianism (the husband is higher than the wife; the father is higher than the children). Both of them are thousands of years old and were both banned by the government under Mao. They're both making strong comebacks in China (along with, of all things, Christianity) as a way of sticking it to the government. Nothing makes people cling to beliefs like telling them they aren't allowed to believe them and in the countryside in China Buddhism, Confucianism and superstition never really went away. Now that the government is slowly becoming more liberal, people are more open about expressing these beliefs.

The biggest shock to me was that Christianity was a major fad among academics in China (who were also persecuted by Mao). From my perspective strong belief is antithetical to good research, but many of the smartest and best educated in China are actually the ones embracing many of the traditions that were banned by the communists.

As a side note, most rural Chinese people are incredibly poor. They don't have TVs or access to the internet. They go to one room schoolrooms that don't have textbooks, can't afford chalk and are taught by relics of the cultural revolution (farmers who Mao promoted to be teachers, doctors, judges, etc. so that they can pass their native wisdom to the people... they can't get rid of them now.) Most teachers in rural China don't even have what we would consider a standard middle school education. So it's less a problem of "penetrating the rural mind" and more a question of how to communicate with people in these very rural areas when they aren't well educated and don't have access to things like TVs and the internet.

[kiva]

16. And the son-preference seems stronger than blood ties.

From the article: "Their love for their new son was boundless. They bought him new clothing and had their daughter drop out of middle school to take care of him."

[acmavm]

3. I sincerely hope that some day the find a cure for Testosterone driven

ignorance.

[Cirque du So-What]

4. China is sowing the sees of its own societal destruction

Placing restrictions on the number of children people may have - coupled with a societal preference for male offspring - will ensure a generation of young men in pursuit of too few females. In the large cities, these young men may well divert their sexual frustrations toward other societal ills. If governmental policies become the target of their ire, the central government could end up facing armies of angry young men with nothing better to do than foment trouble for them. No government on earth relishes such a prospect.

[dysfunctional press]

6. they'll have to turn to immigration to solve the problem.

or- become an aggressor nation in the region, and get them by force.

[wickerwoman]

7. And the girls left all want to marry Westerners so they can get the hell out of China.

I can't even count how many young Chinese girls I know who have absolutely thrown themselves at old/fat/ugly/mean/misogynistic and/or stupid white men just so they can get visas and then divorce them a few years and a couple of kids in. And in 99% of the cases the main reason they did it was to have more than one kid.

I'm pretty good friends with about ten couples like this and only one lasted longer than it took the ink to dry on the green-card. They were the only ones who were honest about it going in: he couldn't get laid in America and she wanted the hell out of China. The other nine mostly involved misogyny/fetishism on one side and desire for more than one kid on the other. They all ended in divorce, wife-beating, scamming money for sick relatives, cheating, etc.

More power to the happy couples, but in my experience a hell of a lot of unhappy bicultural marriages and spousal abuse cases have their roots in the one child policy too.

[Occam Bandage]

8. They're already facing this problem, and have been for at least a decade.

They're engaged in a very delicate balancing game between engineering outlets for an angry young male population, and preventing the expressions of that anger from sparking an uncontrollable nationwide wildfire.

[lolly]

13. Isn't this already happening?

The 1-child policy has been in effect for a generation.

A few years ago, I remember reading stories about young women in neighboring countries being kidnapped or "bought" to serve as wives.

[wickerwoman]

15. Even creepier:

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9558423

In Shaanxi, it's tradition that a dead man must always be buried with a dead women. Not enough women? Apparently not a problem.

:puke:

[Liberal_in_LA]

9. It's all about the social safety net & who will support you in old age.The boy is an economic slave

From the article:

"The centuries-old tradition of cherishing boys — and a custom that dictates that a married woman moves in with her husband’s family — is reinforced by a modern reality: Without a real social safety net in China, many parents fear they will be left to fend for themselves in old age."

[Mari333]

11. Its still misogyny in the culture when boys are considered more valuable

wage earners then girls and are given the jobs instead of the girls.
on that note, the elderly need to get their shit together and not depend on their kids.
talk about co dependent! sheesh!