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Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother

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A book about the effect of the one child policy in China. Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother, Stories of Loss and Love, by Xinran. A quote, as cited in the March 6th version of The Economist:

At the tiny restaurant where Xinran eats lunch, the waitress tries to kill herself twice, each time after a little girl’s birthday party. The woman is tortured by the happy faces because, thinking it her duty to produce a male heir, she had smothered her baby daughters. She survives because, as well as the bottle of agricultural fertiliser she swallowed, she drank one of the waching-up liquid, thinking that any chemical in a bottle was poison. The detergent diluted the fertiliser’s fatal dose.

We don’t pay enough attention to China’s one child policy. Neither do we pay enough attention to women who have aborted here at home, and the grief they suffer.

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Brigitte can’t help but wonder: Think this is related?

Scrambling in the propaganda ministry

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I wonder how to nuance this message? From Shanghai, China: Have more children, but only have one child. Good luck with that.

A birth rate that has crashed to .88 children per woman and a population ageing fast have led officials in the Chinese coastal city of Shanghai to start knocking on doors to get couples to have more children. But they are still straight-jacketed by the national one-child policy, so only certain “eligible” couples can expect a visit along with counselling and financial advice.

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Brigitte wonders: How exactly does the first activity (city officials knocking on doors) encourage the, er, desired activity (couples doing, ah, what’s needed to have more children)?

Earthquakes and family policy

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Stories like this highlight the injustice of Communist China’s one child policy. We forget about the horrible nature of this repressive regime–and extreme family planners in North America are so keen on curbing population growth that they almost never comment on the substantial injustice and curtailing of freedom that tells parents they can’t have as many kids as they want. (They also respond to natural disasters with condoms, but that deserves a post of its own.) Folks–Malthus is dead, literally and figuratively.

The May 12 quake was particularly painful to many Chinese because it killed so many only children. …

If the couple’s legally born child is killed and the couple is left with an illegally born child under the age of 18, that child can be registered as the legal child — an important move that gives the child previously denied rights including free nine years of compulsory education.

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