A rchive Date
[ 25-08-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ China ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/goodden.html
One-child policy no laughing matter
Herman Goodden, London Free Press
2003-08-25
Every day Reuters news service publishes on its Web site a short item under the heading, Oddly Enough.
Quirky comic briefs of this kind are a long-standing journalistic tradition, and used to appear more frequently in the precomputerized age when editors used them to fill in left-over spaces on a page once the news stories and ads had all been pieced into place. Throwaway items of no great significance, these stories, never more than 10 sentences long, sought only to raise a smile at the wacky foibles of human beings or some improbable event -- or chain of events -- that had happened.
I remember combing through The Free Press as a kid, ignoring stories about politics or crime but fastening onto these unlikely little items, collecting the best ones to take into class when it was my day to present something for show-and-tell. "Widow leaves half-million-dollar estate to her cats." "Iowa farmer collects world's biggest ball of string." "Lost wedding ring turns up inside homegrown turnip." That sort of thing.
Reflective perhaps of the pervasive cynicism and irony of our current age, quite often the note that Reuters strikes in its Oddly Enough briefs is not so much heartwarming as heartless; not so much amusing as appalling. Way too often, the stories don't pivot on mere mishaps or coincidences but on far more serious misfortunes and injuries. Even accidental deaths have been played for laughs in these items.
Reuters' clangorous insensitivity to human suffering was in particularly obnoxious evidence in last Tuesday's Oddly Enough, which appeared under the headline: "Doctor Arrested for Selling Patients as Wives."
Datelined Beijing, the eight-sentence story tells of the director of a Chinese psychiatric hospital who was arrested last week for injecting more than 20 of his female patients with enough sedatives to make them passive and thus mask the more superficial symptoms of mental illness. Over the last five years, this doctor had been selling off these women, one at a time, to lonely men.
Even though some of these women must have emitted all the vitality of zombies at the moment when money changed hands, they were sold as sexual slaves to would-be husbands/owners who were none too fussy about such niceties as an outgoing personality or a perky demeanour. Some cheesed-off customers even had the audacity to return to the doctor and try to demand a refund once the drugs had worn off and their new wives weren't quite so malleable and quiet. One shudders to imagine the shabbiness and negligence of a health-care facility where so many patients could just disappear in this way and no one noticed.
There is, of course, a much larger tragedy underlying this story, which Reuters scarcely alludes to in the final two sentences of this brief: "China has 70 million bachelors unable to find wives."
The large and still growing numerical disparity of men to women in modern China is directly attributable to the tyrannical
one-child policy in that country where mothers surreptitiously incubating a second child have been physically dragged into government-run clinics and forced to undergo abortions. Limited to one child in a society that actively promotes abortion any time, anywhere, and for any reason, millions and millions of parents routinely elect to have female fetuses aborted, deciding that if they're only going to be allowed one child, they'd better make it a son.
One can't help being a little incredulous that Chinese authorities didn't see this crisis coming. For a culture that has historically exhibited social stability on a scale, and for a duration, without parallel anywhere on the globe, this is going to be a disaster of gargantuan proportions. Contrary to the thinking of Reuters' editorial wizards, there's nothing remotely funny about the chaos that lies ahead for China. An approximately equal balance between the sexes is a social stabilizer. A large surfeit of unattached men with no hope of finding a mate is a certain recipe for trouble.
Herman Goodden is a London freelance writer. His column appears in Monday's and Thursday's Opinion pages. It no longer appears in Sunday's A&E section. He can be e-mailed at herman.goodden@sympatico.ca Copyright © The London Free Press 2001,2002,2003
 World Fact Book (CIA)]]
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