One hundred and ninety children are abducted in China every day. Nearly 70,000 per year.
Take a moment, stare up at the ceiling, and ponder that number. Need some perspective? In the entire year of 2005 my home of Canada had 31 kidnapped kids[1]. The UK weighs in at the 60-70 mark[2] and even the horribly high number of 3-5,000 in the US[3] is dwarfed by this statistic.
The cause, according to a documentary set to air on Channel 4 in the UK on October 8th, is China’s One Child Policy. The country’s strict family planning policy causes a tough gamble for parents who are under an enormous amount of family and cultural pressure to have a male child – it’s a gamble some people happily pay to avoid.
The film, China’s Stolen Children (trailer), is billed as follows:
Beautiful, haunting and deeply tragic, this film takes us into the heart of modern China. A place where girl babies are being sold for as little as £200; detectives specialise in finding kidnapped children and child traffickers are so relaxed about the trade they ply, they allow the film-makers to record them buying and selling tiny human lives. This film provides an intimate portrait of the crisis this stringent government policy has created among China’s poorest people.
Unsurprisingly the [*chingov*] is not pleased about the producers of the film sneaking into China’s impoverished countryside and coming out with a picture that paints the country in a less-than-Olympic light.
Zhao Shangsen, press counselor to the Chinese embassy in London, wrote the producers saying: “The programme is deeply flawed, ignorant and simplistic.” Additionally, he stated that there was no link between China’s one-child policy and child trafficking in China.
The film makers, True Vision, are no strangers to being on the Communist-led country’s bad side, as 10 years ago they also produced The Dying Rooms, an equally powerful film that explored what happened to China’s unwanted second-born children – often left to die in State-run orphanages.
This time up True Vision returns to China, again undercover, and speaks directly to devastated parents desperately searching for their stolen son; a man who brokers the deals and has sold his own offspring and prospective parents grappling with giving up their soon-to-be-born daughter.
The documentary puts form to a horrible formula: Impoverished families + opportunistic monsters + enforced family planning with cultural emphasis on male children + loose legal recourse = children as nothing more than a commodity.
Additional Resources:
- More clips from the film – Channel4.com
- Has anyone seen our child? – Guardian Unlimited
- Chinese bid to stop ‘kids for sale’ film – Times Online
- True Vision Productions
While China’s family planning policy no doubt exasperates the need to have a son, and likely also the demand for kidnapped children, you can’t fault the policy nor the government for all of the trafficing. China’s Family Planning Policy is the cause of a laundry list of social problems for China today, and also will be for the next half century. However, the Family Planning Policy will prevent China from experiencing a large-scale catastrophe which will be worse than the effects of all these problems combined…and that is the continued overpopulation to the point where China’s carrying capacity is eclipsed. It is easy for western filmmakers to sit back and criticize the Chinese government for all the problems that are generated when you are trying to govern one fifth of the world’s population, and I have many grievances myself…but the One Child Policy is not one of them.
A hugely emotive subject, which I find rather difficult to look at objectively, and thus a most thought provoking post.
However, I am minded to agree with the last comment where Ben says that the population problem is a regular time bomb here, which we should not detonate.
On the other hand, there was a period in the not too distant past when the population was encouraged to grow, under the belief that you had to have the manpower to build the new China. This may in part have led to the current population problem. A friend of mine is one of many children born to the same mother in that period. She was heself adopted by an Aunt.
I believe the trafficers are slavers at heart. They do not care a jot about human life, and their ilk exists in every continent. A fair chunk of the population of America are there because my ancestors did the same thing. The slave trade dies in one place and flourishes in another, sometimes in the most unexpected places
So it is that the rich rule over the poor.
@Ben: I think the difference is between defining “fault” versus “responsibility”. It may not be the “fault” of the government or policy, but it is the responsibility of both to rectify the problem.
I agree with Philip that traffickers are nothing but slavers. People who see other people as a commodity and nothing more.
I think it takes some extraordinary circumstances to create even a few of these people, never mind the manpower needed to oil this abduction machine.
That is created by a demand on a scale that is simply not present in other countries (giving pretty solid proof that it is because of family planning policy) coupled with extreme poverty and the promotion of disconnect between groups outside your family unit.
I don’t think there’s any one specific thing that causes any of the problems in the world, but it’s hard to ignore something that so directly points at a flaw.
These are deep rooted problems. When did it become ok to think we need to tell people when, how and how many children they can have.
As it relates to overpopulation, country-wide or world-wide, perhaps I have a naive view that the Earth itself has checks and balances to control such things. As for putting that power in the hands of humans, that’s a dangerous dangerous slope to tread. What’s the final solution?
After seeing the documentary I just don’t have words to express my sadness for these children, taken from their families or sold and ending up who knows where. I can’t get out of my mind this little baby girl face, so beautiful and vulnerable… as well as Chen Jie’s eyes… I feel deeply moved and very sad for their destiny. Life is not fair for them, I wish I can do something to help them and I will pray everyday for their souls. I hope they will be with people who will treat them right and they are happy wherever they are.
It isn’t really a “less-than-Olympic light”. According to the legend, the first Olympics were held by Pelops. Pelops was the son of Tantalus. Tantalus was having the gods over for chow but didn’t have anything appropriate to serve, so he ground up the only thing he was proud of – his son, Pelops. The gods were disgusted, set up a special punishment for Tantalus (see tantalize) and brought Pelops back to life and gave him some really cool stuff. One of the gifts was a team of horses he’d eventually use to…anyway…the gods once ate a kid who would go on to become the first gold-medalist. That’s an Olympic story. Baby-napping has nothing on that. Baby soup, though…
Also – Puppy mills are awful and should be shut down! All of them! Nobody should buy puppies from puppy mills! If you think you may be adopting a puppy from a puppy mill, don’t. That’ll teach the puppy mills to stop…er…milling puppies. In fact, to make sure your puppy doesn’t come from a puppy mill, you should only buy a puppy from an AKC-registered, licensed breeder of puppies.
Remember, kids: NO puppy from a puppy mill can expect to live a happy life – no matter how much you love it. They should never have been brought into this world, and they should be dispatched from it as quickly as possible.
Also – the “final solution” is taken. Try, “what’s the best solution?” And I truly hope you aren’t trying to draw comparisons between the two.
Also – don’t steal my baby!
p.s. that check you’re referring to is called a die off. I don’t know how dangerous the slope is, but it is pretty gooey.
@Josh!: Been a while. Baby keeping you busy I guess eh? If she’s too much for you… I’ve got a potential buyer – and I am near certain they won’t grind her up and attempt to feed her to the gods. 😉
The “final solution” reference was most definitely intentional. What I’m trying to illustrate is that if we start letting any group of people decide for us what we are allowed to do and not to do to ourselves, we restrict one of the most basic human freedoms. In giving someone such power, for the good of the people/country/race/planet, we most definitely push ourselves closer to a brave new world.
PS: Where’d the puppy mill thing come from? Just general (good) advice?
I am a mother of a 5 years old beautiful girl. I saw a girl of 4 or 5 naked on the street with blood dripping from her lip and legs spread wide apart in TaiShan, China with over three digit temperature begging for money. It is NOT by choice she was there. She was kidnapped and forced to beg for monies for these inhuman creatures!
Something I do not understand people like Ben, who is so cold and heartless! Ben, what if you were the bleeding naked child left every morning on a cold or hot days to beg for money. I think your comments will be different.
I praise you Ryan!!! I wish I am in a position to help these kids find their parents!
I just saw the movie, “Stolen Life”, about a young man who scams young women into believing he loves them, impregnants them, and sells the babies. Don’t mothers have any rights in the PRC?? I was shocked, if it is close to the truth, that no court was invloved in determining who would get custody of the child?? I realize that China is more conservative than most of the US, but children can just be taken away from the natural mother, without her consent??In the US, the child’s biological family, esp. on the mother’s side, has the first rights to the child, and it takes a while for those rights to be terminated. My own dear little niece, just 3 years old, is the product of a love affair between my sister and her one-time boyfriend. They never married, thank God, but I and my brother, as aunt and uncle, have rights where the child is concerned, if anything were to happen to my sister. I can’t imagine a country where the courts aren’t involved in these very serious matters.
Hi Beverly, I am sure there are legal rights for mothers, but I’m not entirely sure what they are. However, family is very much through the male’s side here. Though a woman will rarely take her husband’s family name, the children always do. The father’s parents are the “real” grandparents, and the mother’s parents are somewhat second-class. Additionally, when a woman marries (at least traditionally), she is considered to have left her original family and joined her husband’s family.
Of course, in modern urban families, this is rather loose. However, for the masses of very traditional rural population, I would suspect this is still very much so.