cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/50241630
On a sweltering summer night 30 years ago, infant Li Yuanpeng was finally fast asleep, nestled between his parents, when a group of men burst into their home in southern China’s Guangdong province.
They beat Chen Mingxia and her husband and tied them up as baby Li, in his pale green gown and whorl of dark hair, wailed from the bed.
It was the last time they would ever see their son.
They “took my child away”, Chen told AFP between sobs.
Baby Li was kidnapped in 1995 when China’s one-child policy was in force and child-trafficking was rampant.
While no official data is publicly available, Li is one of thousands of children that experts estimate went missing in China during the 1980s and 90s.
[…]
During the one-child era, the trafficking of young boys was fuelled by parents seeking a son to carry on the family line, experts say. Unwanted girls were often abandoned or sold into sex work, forced marriage or labour.
“Only a male heir was seen as a legitimate vessel for the family line,” [says] Jingxian Wang, a researcher at King’s College London’s Lau China Institute.
The Communist Party introduced the strict population planning initiative in 1979 to address poverty and overpopulation, and maintained it for decades despite demographers’ warnings.
While the policy ended in 2016, its effects still linger, with the drop in children and ensuing sex imbalance contributing to a demographic bottleneck.
Last year, the country’s birth rate plunged to its lowest level since records began in 1949.
The legacy of the kidnappings is also apparent, with social media platforms like Xiaohongshu and Douyin awash with “missing person” photos, including some posted by families still searching for their sons.
Xu Guihua hopes crowd-sourcing among China’s one billion internet users could help locate her nephew, who disappeared the same year as baby Li.
[…]
“sons”.
“Only a male heir was seen as a legitimate vessel for the family line,”
The daughters were often killed, in order that the father have a son.
The most-fundamental racism.
India displays it, too, something like 63,000,000 women who SHOULD exist, don’t.
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/news/2024/4/why_are_millions_of_women_missing_in_india/
there are 2 consequences of such murderous-rabidity: swing to the right, & extra wars.
Some research, years ago, identified that an abnormally-male population-balance was an absolutely-solid predictor of war.
China & India both have produced it, & … are testing the waters, in Ladakh, iirc…
The fact that women lose civilrights when they become “property” to be managed by the ones who extinguished so many of their lives also is significant.
So, humankind’s voting, hard, for rampaging ideological-totalitarianism.
& has been since the 1800’s.
It gets hard to have sympathy for a species which WON’T TOLERATE right to be done.
Letting the universe corner our species into self-enforced-extinguishment might actually be the wisest, kindest, most altruistic, thing our species could do, for the galaxy…
Depends, on whether there’s enough growing-up drive in any of humankind to earn that needed transformation, but if not, then … really, we’d only be pathogens, with our ideological/prejudice “rabies”, wouldn’t we?
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