China one child policy leads to cultural distortions

Washington Times:

When Chinese officials created the country's one-child-per-couple policy in 1978, they intended to contain the country's burgeoning population for the sake of economic growth, national security and environmental preservation.

But Chinese boys now outnumber Chinese girls by the millions, and the impact of the lopsided sex imbalance is starting to spill beyond China's borders.

This phenomenon of "missing girls" has turned China into "a giant magnet" for human traffickers, who lure or kidnap women and sell them — even multiple times — into forced marriages or the commercial sex trade, says Ambassador Mark Lagon, who oversaw human rights issues at the State Department during the administration of President George W. Bush.

"The impact is obvious. It's creating a 'Wild West' sex industry in China," Mr. Lagon said.

In China, "an entire nation of women" is missing because they were aborted before they were born, said Reggie Littlejohn, founder of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, a nonprofit anti-sex slavery group. "This is gendercide."

To grasp the magnitude of the human-trafficking problem in China, it's important to have a reliable tally of the "missing girls."

Recently, the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Services (CASS) predicted that 24 million Chinese men might not be able to find brides in 2020. However, previous estimates put that number in the 30 million to 50 million range.

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"Sex-selective abortion accounts for almost all the excess males," said study authors Wei Xing Zhu, Li Lu and Therese Hesketh, who urged China to enforce its laws forbidding abortions based on gender.

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The massive population is "graying," which means there will be many elderly people with far fewer workers and family members to support them.

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There is much more.

The policy of aborting girl babies is disgusting, but it is also distorting the Chinese culture and some pretty ugly things are happening to deal with it. It will become an even bigger problem as the parents get older and there will not be enough people to take care of them. If they had Social Security they would be in an even greater bind.