Gendercide in CHINA

China: The world's new superpower is beginning the century of its supremacy with an alarming surplus of males | Mail Online

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.

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

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.
A classroom full of boys in Dangzhou City

A Danzhou classroom where the boys far outnumber girls

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.

The nearest we can come to it is the sad shortage of men after the First World War in Britain, France, Russia and Germany, and the many women denied the chance of family life and motherhood as a result.

It is possible that the effects of that imbalance are still with us, in the shape of the radical feminist movement which found ready recruits among the husbandless teachers and other professionals of the Twenties and Thirties.

But men without women are altogether more troublesome than women without men, especially when they are young.

All kinds of speculation is now seething about what might happen; a war to cull the surplus males, a rise in crime, a huge expansion in the prostitution that is already a major industry in every Chinese city, a rise in homosexuality.
Peter Hitchens

Girl talk: Peter Hitchens in a suburb of Kunming which is a hot-spot for child abductions in China

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.

These problems were starkly obvious when I visited the country districts around the medium-sized city of Danzhou, among the rubber and sugar plantations of sub-tropical Hainan Island.

I visited several state comprehensive schools, primary and secondary, in Danzhou and in the nearby countryside.

These were not official visits, nothing had been prearranged, and European foreigners are so rare in this part of China that the children (and often their friendly teachers too) were enthralled to see that the Europeans they call 'long-noses' really do live up to the name.

But as the children stared and chattered and giggled - and pulled at their own little noses to make fun of my enormous one - I quietly counted them, while my colleague Richard photographed them.

And in every cheerful classroom there was a slightly sinister shortage of girls, as if we had wandered into some sort of science fiction fantasy.

We had come to this region because of rumours that it has the most startling ratio of boys to girls in the country. One academic source has suggested there could be a ratio of 168 males for every 100 girls in Danzhou.

Parents tie their children to posts to stop them being stolen

Something is clearly out of kilter. In one class of ten-year-olds, only 20 out of 80 were girls. In another classroom, it was 25 out of 63.

It is possible that some girls were being kept away from school because their parents did not think it worth sending them, but even so, the inequality was enormous and perplexing.

What made it more disturbing was the way teachers accepted there was a mismatch, but refused to talk about how this could have come about. One school principal simply would not discuss the matter. There was a strong sense that I was breaking a taboo by asking.

In a village primary school outside Danzhou, so remote that the staff live behind the school building in a dormitory and keep their own chickens, the gap was not quite so obvious.

But an unusually talkative teacher reckoned that in this small place there was a 60-40 ratio of boys to girls. He laughed and said: 'The state is always taking measures to try to persuade people to have daughters. But the people have their own countermeasures.'