# China's stolen children



## Purple (9 Oct 2007)

Did anyone see  last night on Channel 4?
70'000 children kidnapped in China each year. Less than 1% of them found.


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## pat127 (9 Oct 2007)

Purple said:


> Did anyone see  last night on Channel 4?
> 70'000 children kidnapped in China each year. Less than 1% of them found.



So?


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## so-crates (9 Oct 2007)

> So?


 
your response made me smile given purple's strapline....

I didn't see it - seems like shocking figures though - what are the kidnapped for?


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## Jock04 (10 Oct 2007)

so-crates said:


> your response made me smile given purple's strapline....


 It made me wince.


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## Purple (10 Oct 2007)

so-crates said:


> what are the kidnapped for?


They are stolen and sold. Young children are sold to couples that have no children or want a second and can afford to pay the second child fine that the Chinese government has in place. Because of the one child policy there is a huge shortage of girls in China (since girls go to live with their husbands family parents are left with no-one to care for them in old age). This shortage occurs because of the high proportion of abortions carried out on female foetuses. The net result is that many men cannot get a wife and so there is a thriving trade in kidnapping teenaged girls and selling them to the highest bidder in another province.  
The interviews with parents whose small children had been kidnapped were harrowing and for me it put the Maddie McCann case into context.
This is just one more mark against a country that executes criminals to order so that their organs can be sold for transplant and remains a vicious and un-reconstructed police state.


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## Caveat (10 Oct 2007)

pat127 said:


> So?


 
What kind of a petulant comment is this anyway?



Purple said:


> They are stolen and sold. Young children are sold to couples that have no children or want a second and can afford to pay the second child fine that the Chinese government has in place. Because of the one child policy there is a huge shortage of girls in China (since girls go to live with their husbands family parents are left with no-one to care for them in old age). This shortage occurs because of the high proportion of abortions carried out on female foetuses. The net result is that many men cannot get a wife and so there is a thriving trade in kidnapping teenaged girls and selling them to the highest bidder in another province.
> The interviews with parents whose small children had been kidnapped were harrowing and for me it put the Maddie McCann case into context.
> This is just one more mark against a country that executes criminals to order so that their organs can be sold for transplant and remains a vicious and un-reconstructed police state.


 
That's a huge amount of kids - even for somewhere as populous as China.

Not only is it heartbreaking that this can happen but the pitiful recovery rate just indicates the lack of interest & effort by the authorities - and of course the average Chinese man or woman dare not complain about this.

The tragedy is that it seems that the West's concerns with Chinese human rights abuse have decreased in direct proportion to the freeing up of the Chinese market.


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## car (10 Oct 2007)

Thats all going to be fixed soon,  didnt they agree to improve on their human rights "digressions" if they were given the Olympics? 

for china human rights olympics promises to see how thats going, or not as the case may be.


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## pat127 (10 Oct 2007)

Caveat said:


> What kind of a petulant comment is this anyway?
> 
> 
> 
> That's a huge amount of kids - even for somewhere as populous as China.



It's actually .006%


Interesting how you can infer ‘petulant’ (meaning cranky: peevish: rude) from a 2-letter word followed by a question mark! I’m not for a moment condoning what’s happening in China but I find it hard to get exercised about it in the context of the following:-

* AIDS caused 3.1 million deaths in 2004, 510,000 among children under 15.

* By 2010, it’s predicted that 25 million children will have lost one or both parents due to HIV/AIDS.

* 5 million African children under age 5 died last year — 40 percent of deaths worldwide — and malnutrition was a major contributor to half of those deaths.

* At least 180,000 people may have died in Sudan's Darfur region over the past 18 months, according to the United Nations' top emergency relief official. Jan Egeland said the figure refers to victims of illness and malnutrition and excludes those who have been killed in the ethnic violence. 


* The Washington Post according to a recent Pat Buchanan column reports a minimum of 250,000 children dead of starvation and disease in Iraq.  John McLaughlin on NBC news reported up to 700,000,

* During the past week, dozens of women in southwest China have been forced to have abortions even as late as nine months into the pregnancy, according to evidence uncovered by NPR. Chinese Ministry of Health statistics recorded a peak of 14 million abortions in 1990. The latest numbers, for 2005, showed 7.1 million abortion cases in that year. The United States, by comparison, had 1.29 million abortions in 2002, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

* Worldwide, the number of people killed in road traffic crashes each year is estimated to be almost 1.2 million. The number injured in road traffic accidents is estimated to be as high as 50 million.According to World Health Organisation data, deaths from road traffic injuries account for around 25% of all deaths from injury. It is expected that, without efforts and new initiatives to tackle the causes of road traffic injuries and deaths, they will rise by some 65% between 2000 and 2020. Over 50% of deaths are among young adults in the age range of 15-44 years. For men aged 15-44 road traffic injuries rank second (behind HIV/AIDS) as the leading cause of premature death and ill health worldwide

*In 2004, there were 16,137 cases of murder or non-negligent manslaughter in the United States (pop. 300 million). 


And the above is just a very very small example of the violence (officially-approved and otherwise) that permeates our world….


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## Caveat (10 Oct 2007)

Well researched Pat - interesting figures.

There are always plenty of shocking and/or surprising statistics to be found. 0.006% would still represent around 240 kids 'stolen' in Ireland every year or around 3500 in the UK.

To me, the Chinese figures above seemed worthy of comment too.
I wouldn't have thought that the existence of more jaw dropping examples should  be reason to be dismissive/scornful/blasé...? 

I'm not sure - only you know what we were supposed to have inferred by your "so?" post.


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## MrMan (11 Oct 2007)

> So?





> Interesting how you can infer ‘petulant’ (meaning cranky: peevish: rude) from a 2-letter word followed by a question mark! I’m not for a moment condoning what’s happening in China but I find it hard to get exercised about it in the context of the following:-



To a cynical mind it would seem that the original two letter response was intended to provoke reply so that you could rattle off the vast figures regarding death in the world and try put people in their place, but maybe thats just me being cynical.


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## efm (11 Oct 2007)

MrMan said:


> To a cynical mind it would seem that the original two letter response was intended to provoke reply so that you could rattle off the vast figures regarding death in the world and try put people in their place, but maybe thats just me being cynical.


 
Nah! you're just being petulant!


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## daveco23 (11 Oct 2007)

Pat,
Spare us all the my-cause-is-better-than-your-cause cr*p.
A truly shameful initial comment. OP was getting a discussion going about a particularly harrowing tv programme, one which anyone who doesn`t have kids would have found very upsetting, one which anyone who does have kids probably even more so.
Just because the issue doesn`t make your all-time list of human/governemnt induced afflictions does not mean it should be stymied or dismissed as unimportant comapared to what else is wrong in the world.
Pathetic.
OP - saw it and it had an impact - interesting to see what China's response will be given the numerous promises wrt human rights/olympics.


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## pat127 (11 Oct 2007)

MrMan said:


> To a cynical mind it would seem that the original two letter response was intended to provoke reply so that you could rattle off the vast figures regarding death in the world and try put people in their place, but maybe thats just me being cynical.



I'm afraid not! I do believe however that the indignation expressed here is misplaced and here's why:-

In my opinion it’s a totally futile exercise to critically assess the human rights policies or indeed any other aspect of the culture of countries which are as ‘foreign’ to us as China is, which has never been a democracy and which was up to comparatively recently a feudal society. Context is all. To draw any inference from the fact that 70,000 missing Chinese children equates to 240 in Ireland is misguided, as such a scenario could not in any conceivable situation exist in a modern democratic state such as ours. 

We cannot hope to fully understand the enormous challenges faced by China. Their response to them, logical as they see it, has led to for example the one-child family policy which in theory should curb China’s population, and so reduce the associated gigantic burden of trying to feed its people. Unfortunate as the outcomes from such practices may be in our eyes, it may well be that making an omelette cannot be done without breaking eggs. Similarly, huge numbers of people (probably at major human cost) had to be compulsorily displaced in order to instal hydro-electric power systems. 


To condemn such practices from the perspective of comfortable, modern western democracies and worse, to attempt to do something about them, as in Iraq for example, leads to the kinds of solutions attempted there. How many people have died there in what will inevitably prove to be a failed strategy? To go further, how many millions around the world have died in our efforts to democratise or ‘christianise’ them? We see parallel situations in Africa where apparently beneficial but enormously costly strategies attempt, for example, to  curb the spread of AIDs,  but are doomed to failure because of endemic corruption, superstition and custom. Worse, we seem unable to grasp that ugly reality, that we cannot make them see the world as we do and so cause them to rush to embrace our perceived solutions to their problems.

Unfortunately this line of thinking does not fit well with the objectives of the so-called ‘media’, which are to sell their products and provide good careers for those who work in the business. There is nothing like a little bit of shock and horror to turn the paying customers on, particularly when children are the subject matter. There is nothing like the self-satified buzz produced by righteous but futile indignation!


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## efm (11 Oct 2007)

pat127 said:


> Unfortunate as the outcomes from such practices may be in our eyes, it may well be that making an omelette cannot be done without breaking eggs.


 
Ah....so you are saying that the abduction of 70,000 children per year in China is just an unfortunate outcome and that it is no big deal?


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## Purple (11 Oct 2007)

pat127 said:


> I'm afraid not! I do believe however that the indignation expressed here is misplaced and here's why:-
> 
> In my opinion it’s a totally futile exercise to critically assess the human rights policies or indeed any other aspect of the culture of countries which are as ‘foreign’ to us as China is, which has never been a democracy and which was up to comparatively recently a feudal society. Context is all. To draw any inference from the fact that 70,000 missing Chinese children equates to 240 in Ireland is misguided, as such a scenario could not in any conceivable situation exist in a modern democratic state such as ours.
> 
> ...



In the mid thirteenth century Kublai Khan established the Yuan dynasty in Northern China, conquering Southern China over the next number of years. He abolished the death penalty for almost all crimes, abolished torture, introduced universal free education and allowed freedom of religious worship. 
To suggest or imply that China is unable to allow its citizens to enjoy basic human rights because of some nebulous historical tradition of barbarism is utterly bogus. The reason that it’s citizens live like they do is because they are ruled by a dictatorial cabal who have long since jettisoned any real pretence of communist ideals and are simply unwilling to surrender power. 
The reason that Africa is in the state it is now is to a large part due to colonialism, postcolonial interference and the cold war being fought by proxy as a hot war with the USSR, USA and China up to their necks in it.
Most of Africa is still not economically independent and those few countries that are have only been so since the early 1990’s.
Your arguments are sweeping, your comparisons are misleading and your conclusion that in effect we should just leave them at it ignores the culpability of most if not all developed countries in the mess that Africa finds itself in.
Your whole point reminds me of the sort of think I used to hear in school debates in the 1980’s.
Nobody here is suggesting that China, of any other country should be “Christianised” just that no one is suggesting that we should try to make them “see the world as we do”.


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## Deirdra (11 Oct 2007)

I suspect pat127 has some China experience? Unless you see China first hand, it's quite hard to understand it and utterly pointless to compare it to Ireland.


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## pat127 (11 Oct 2007)

Purple said:


> In the mid thirteenth century Kublai Khan established the Yuan dynasty in Northern China, conquering Southern China over the next number of years. He abolished the death penalty for almost all crimes, abolished torture, introduced universal free education and allowed freedom of religious worship.



And they all lived happily ever after, in peace and harmony? You make it sound like Shangri-La. I’m surprised at you Purple that you, obviously knowing something of China’s history, choose to gloss over the Qing dynasty and the enormously turbulent period from approx 1911 to the present day, the period which above all shaped the modern China.





Purple said:


> To suggest or imply that China is unable to allow its citizens to enjoy basic human rights because of some nebulous historical tradition of barbarism is utterly bogus. The reason that it’s citizens live like they do is because they are ruled by a dictatorial cabal who have long since jettisoned any real pretence of communist ideals and are simply unwilling to surrender power.



Did they in fact ever actually practice ‘communist ideals’? Also is it not the case that the process of democratisation is still in its infancy, beginning as recently as the 1970s? That was my contention. I did not use the term ‘barbarism’, but rather ‘feudalism’ which is an entirely different matter. You do of course know that warlordism was still being practiced up to WWII? 

Let me set the record straight at this point. I deplore all crimes against humanity, whether it’s the murder of a 17-year-old student in Galway or the mass slaughter caused by Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin or any other despot. I stand over my view however that attempting to change a country’s practices without taking cognisance of the underlying culture and history inevitably leads to a lot more damage being done. I categorically did not suggest that they be ‘left get on with it’ but rather that the process of influencing change is a highly complex matter and should not simply a knee-jerk reaction on the part of the international community, more especially when the real reasons why it chooses to become involved are generally far more self-serving (think middle-eastern oil for example). 





Purple said:


> The reason that Africa is in the state it is now is to a large part due to colonialism, postcolonial interference and the cold war being fought by proxy as a hot war with the USSR, USA and China up to their necks in it. Most of Africa is still not economically independent and those few countries that are have only been so since the early 1990’s.



I fail to understand what relevance this has. You seem to miss my point about AIDS or the severe consequences of evangelization (however unintended). It has nothing to do with why Africa is in its current state. It was once again an example of how well-meaning people’s attempts to resolve problems in the way they do, can go so drastically wrong. 





Purple said:


> Your arguments are sweeping, your comparisons are misleading.



Your opinion of course and as Voltaire said: ‘'I may not agree with what you say, but I will fight to the death your right to say it'. Well, maybe not quite to the death….. 




Purple said:


> and your conclusion that in effect we should just leave them at it ignores the culpability of most if not all developed countries in the mess that Africa finds itself in.



I have just addressed this.





Purple said:


> Nobody here is suggesting that China, of any other country should be “Christianised” just that no one is suggesting that we should try to make them “see the world as we do”.



Nor did I, nor did I. I used the first as an example of how meddling can have unfortunate consequences and the second is what I was cautioning against!

Let me also say that I remain extremely sensitive to the fact that behind all the sound and fury this thread is about unfortunate children being abducted in China and that I have significant family reasons why it’s a matter that’s very close to my heart. I do take it very seriously indeed.


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## Purple (12 Oct 2007)

pat127 said:


> And they all lived happily ever after, in peace and harmony? You make it sound like Shangri-La. I’m surprised at you Purple that you, obviously knowing something of China’s history, choose to gloss over the Qing dynasty and the enormously turbulent period from approx 1911 to the present day, the period which above all shaped the modern China.


Every country has periods of discord and periods of peace. I do not think that democracy is the be all and end all. A sovereign constitution, a civil police force and a independent supreme court all need to be in place or else democracy will just elect the next dictator. My point is that there is nothing inevitable about Chinas current situation. It could be worse but it could be a whole lot better. Even within it's current political and economic constraints there is no good reason why the level of human rights abuses there should be so high. Dismissing or minimising what it does to it's own people on the grounds that we just don't understand the complexity of the situation is utter rubbish?




pat127 said:


> Did they in fact ever actually practice ‘communist ideals’? Also is it not the case that the process of democratisation is still in its infancy, beginning as recently as the 1970s? That was my contention. I did not use the term ‘barbarism’, but rather ‘feudalism’ which is an entirely different matter. You do of course know that warlordism was still being practiced up to WWII?


 No communist country ever practiced communist ideals but China doesn't even offer a pretence any more. Yes, I am aware of China's recent history.



pat127 said:


> Let me set the record straight at this point. I deplore all crimes against humanity, whether it’s the murder of a 17-year-old student in Galway or the mass slaughter caused by Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin or any other despot. I stand over my view however that attempting to change a country’s practices without taking cognisance of the underlying culture and history inevitably leads to a lot more damage being done. I categorically did not suggest that they be ‘left get on with it’ but rather that the process of influencing change is a highly complex matter and should not simply a knee-jerk reaction on the part of the international community, more especially when the real reasons why it chooses to become involved are generally far more self-serving (think middle-eastern oil for example).


These are two different points. The first is valid but still doesn't explain why the kidnap of 70'000 children should be dismissed with "So?" because, as was pointed out, is does not make it into the current top ten list of overwhelming human tragedies in the world.
No one is suggesting that the process of influencing change is anything other than a highly complex matter. That doesn't mean that we should not attempt to help sort out problems that we have played a large part in creating. I still don't see what this has to do with why we should in any way limit our condemnation of a government that does very little in the face of 70'000 of it's children being kidnapped and sold each year.



pat127 said:


> I fail to understand what relevance this has. You seem to miss my point about AIDS or the severe consequences of evangelization (however unintended). It has nothing to do with why Africa is in its current state. It was once again an example of how well-meaning people’s attempts to resolve problems in the way they do, can go so drastically wrong.


 So evangelising by, for the most part US backed Baptist, churches in Africa is reason not to engage and try to help Africa sort out it's AIDS problem? Is that the point you are making? Are you using this as an example of where the West has screwed up and extrapolating that we should therefore keep out of it? If that's not what you are saying then what is your point? Did you just feel a compulsion to state the obvious?
By the way much of Africa is Muslim, especially the areas like Sudan where AIDS infection is highest. There is also a strong resistance to contraception in traditional tribal areas. So blaming Western evangelists on that is to ignore most of the picture. 



pat127 said:


> I have just addressed this.


 No you didn't, you didn't even touch on it.



pat127 said:


> Nor did I, nor did I. I used the first as an example of how meddling can have unfortunate consequences and the second is what I was cautioning against!


 So they were just off topic comments that again stated the obvious?



pat127 said:


> Let me also say that I remain extremely sensitive to the fact that behind all the sound and fury this thread is about unfortunate children being abducted in China and that I have significant family reasons why it’s a matter that’s very close to my heart. I do take it very seriously indeed.


 So why the first comment and the subsequent "wall of sound" type post that does nothing to answer why you posted your first comment?


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## Caveat (12 Oct 2007)

pat127 said:


> Context is all. To draw any inference from the fact that 70,000 missing Chinese children equates to 240 in Ireland is misguided, as such a scenario could not in any conceivable situation exist in a modern democratic state such as ours.


 
I don't see how it is misguided.  It is unlikely that children would be kidnapped and sold in Ireland (or other western democracies) for the same _reasons_ as in China - but that doesn't mean that it is inconceivable that children in Europe can be 'stolen'.

I would have thought that at least some of the children exploited in pornography are presumably acquired via kidnap/trade.


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