| Printed From Acorn-Online.com Ridgefield Press
One
million girls “One million girls go missing in China
each year,” Ms. Carner told her audience, quoting the Chinese
government’s own statistics. Many of these girls live hidden lives,
their existence unreported to authorities. Others are abandoned or
sold at birth. And more are “aborted after a sonogram determines
their gender. Or they are murdered at birth,” Ms. Carner said. She
described “The Dying Rooms,” a BBC documentary aired in February
1995. The film was shot by a small camera crew who, under cover as
orphanage workers, gained access to a few Chinese state orphanages.
The crew took horrific pictures in so-called “dying rooms” where
infants and children, mostly girls, were perishing of neglect. The
documentary caused a worldwide outcry in the months before the
Beijing International Women’s Conference in September 1995.Ms. Carner, who attended the conference, traveled for a month afterward in China with a study group. Through an interpreter she interviewed women “from peasants to professors.” When she asked about infanticide, she got the impression that this drastic option was felt to be necessary through so many generations that “nobody made a big deal out of it until the world said, ‘This is wrong!’ ” To put the gendercide into a historical framework, Ms. Carner pointed out that boys have traditionally been more highly valued than girls in China because males are expected to support parents in their old age. “It’s an economic issue,” she said, in a society with “no social services or medical care for aging people.” In eras before birth control, infanticide was a solution in a poor, overpopulated agrarian country. (Today, 1.3 billion Chinese — 22% of the world’s people, live on only 7% of the world’s arable land.) “A woman may have had 15 babies over a lifetime,” Ms. Carner said. Under conditions where it was impossible to feed so many children, a mother giving birth might, if she saw her child was a girl, “put a pillow over her head,” Ms. Carner said. Lively discussion Ms.
Carner’s remarks stimulated a lively discussion during the
question-and-answer session. Her activist viewpoint — she considers
the Chinese government “very cynical” in its attitude toward its
million missing daughters, clashes with opinions held by parents
like Ridgefielder Cynthia Corn who have adopted Chinese girls. Ms.
Corn doesn’t dispute China’s human rights abuses, which, in addition
to discrimination against females, include harvesting of human
organs and excessive executions. But China is making progress in
difficult circumstances, and from a parent’s perspective, Ms. Corn
thinks her daughter’s homeland should be given the benefit of the
doubt.“I’m not an apologist for China,” she said, but “the Chinese government is trying to change things, and there are new laws going into effect all the time.” As a subscriber to China Daily, a Chinese government news service, Ms. Corn follows developments in the country closely. She told about a “Care for Girls” campaign to promote girls’ status. And currently in China, there’s a bestseller that offers alternatives to placing the entire burden of filial responsibility on male children. “It’s true that Confucian traditions have given the Chinese a different way of looking at human life. But they are aware that they have this problem and they’re trying to deal with it. They know the whole world is watching,” Ms. Corn said. Extreme measures In 1979
China implemented an extreme measure to control population by
restricting most couples — with a number of exceptions — to one
child only. As a concept, Ms. Carner believes the one-child policy
is a good idea. “It had to take place to help China avoid famine and
move the country forward.” But she deplores the coercive
birth-control methods, sex-selective abortions, and fatal
abandonments that ensued. “I object to the collateral damage — the
devaluation of girls’ lives,” she said.In Ms. Corn’s opinion, Ms. Carner unfairly assumes that “the Chinese people as a whole believe infanticide is an acceptable way to control the population.” In rural areas of the country, where people still survive by subsistence farming, “ignorance, severe poverty, and the one-child policy come into play to distort common human values. But educated people do not abandon babies in the street,” she said. “I don’t want to paint the Chinese people as callous baby-killers. They are trying to get a handle on this situation. They’re doing the best they can.” After “The Dying Rooms” exposé, “the Chinese were embarrassed and upset,” Ms. Corn said. Her own adoption was held up two years while the Chinese government revamped adoption procedures. One-child
policy Introducing a one-child policy into a
male-supremacist society has led to a serious shortage of women in
China today. By some estimates, the policy has created a surplus of
sixty million bachelors. Scarcity of females creates further crimes.
Kidnapping and trafficking in women is spreading through Southeast
Asia. In an effort to redress the imbalance, the Chinese government
is offering financial aid, medical benefits and other incentives to
raise daughters that both Ms. Carner and Ms. Corn find
encouraging.But Ms. Corn fears that activists like Ms. Carner are “writing off the Chinese culture.” The Corns and many other adoptive parents want their daughters to learn Chinese and to appreciate the rich history of their native land. They emphasize the positive aspects of their children’s heritage and give China credit for the rate at which it is “galloping into the 21st century,” Ms. Corn said. Ms. Carner agreed that China is changing and “moving forward at full speed.” She praised adoptive parents like the Corns, calling it “wonderful” that they have rescued abandoned Chinese children (Americans have adopted about 40,000 Chinese youngsters) and filled those children’s lives with affection and comfort. Ms. Carner said that while China Doll focuses on a fraught socio-economic situation, there are characters in the novel who admire and respect Chinese culture. An image of common humanity is rendered in the first chapter with the heartbreak of the mother who gives her child to the singer. Ms. Carner describes herself, however, as first and foremost an advocate for China’s one million missing girls. She noted that budgets for orphanages and abandoned children remain grossly inadequate. And she’s convinced that unless the Chinese government is prodded by other governments, non-governmental organizations, and activists like her, “They won’t do the job. They won’t take care of those babies.” © Copyright by Hersam Acorn newspapers |
