China's one-child policy, its cultural predilection for boys and the fact that there are tons of immigrant workers in the big industrial cities has created a problem that is just so unimaginable to any parent: children are being abducted and sold to other families who, in fact, love them and take good care of them.
Why? Because these kids are boys. And if you can reproduce your own male heir, you just go find one and take it.
The New York Times ran a piece over the weekend that makes you want to rend your garments, it's so frustrating and unfair and seemingly impossible to stop.
From the Times:
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.”
So abduction rings are snatching boys from the arms of their siblings
or luring them away by mangoes. Police claim they have to wait 24 hours before they can investigate a missing persons report, yet claim too much time has passed once they can officially look into it. They're also reluctant to open an investigation, since these cases are rarely resolved at that hurts their stats.
Girls aren't safe from abducation either, the leader of an ad hoc group for parents of abducted children, claims. He said they're sold to orphanages where they are later adopted out to families in the U.S. and Europe.
Even though the Communist Party helped change the old attitudes about gender, a male heir is still important, especially in rural areas where, if a resident's first child is a girl, she is allowed to have a second. However, a third child means fines of almost $6,000 and loss of the job. So buying a boy baby is cheap by comparison.
And sort of acceptable!
From the Times:
... authorities
may turn a blind eye if the child does not need to be registered as a
new birth in the locale.
In some cases, local officials may even
encourage people desperate for a son to buy one. After their
3-month-old son died, Zhou Xiuqin said, the village family planning
official went to her home and tried to comfort her and her husband, who
was compelled to have a vasectomy after the birth of the boy, their
second child. “He said, ‘Don’t cry, stop crying, you can always buy
another one,’ ” Ms. Zhou recalled.
Such complicity explains why boys as old as 5 don't raise any eyebrows when they suddenly show up in a village with their new family.
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Photo:NYTimes.com
