Population Control: Alienating Mothers from Their Children

I got wind of a book review concerning the work of a woman going under the name of "Xinran", who used her media experience to scour the Chinese adoption system that produce so many Chinese girls for the Angelina Jolie wannabes of the West.

The book is called "Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Lessons About Loss and Love". And judging from the book review, the book is a heart-wrencher. It is a book about life under the most extensive population control regime in the world, with its attendant brutal one-child policy.



What struck me most was how this policy corrupted one of the most intimate relationships ever known to man; that bond between mother and child. And because these families tend to benefit more with a boy around (he gets more labor done, and won't disappear into another family after marrying, giving his parents a de facto pension policy), most of these children sundered from their mothers' affections are girls.

One of the testimonies here is by Na, a young woman engineer, now a US citizen. She had seduced one of her Shanghai university lecturers because she was curious about sex. After a week of passion the relationship ended, but she was pregnant. Na’s parents, both university teachers, entreated her to get rid of her baby, either by abortion or adoption. Her mother said:

If our only child lives as a single mother, how can your father and I go home to Shanghai? Never mind about passing our last years in peace and comfort, we simply couldn’t face our friends and family …We haven’t got longer to live, please give us a peaceful old age.

The mother added that if the baby went to America, some day Na might find her. Na agreed, learning only after she had moved to America that there were already 30,000 adopted Chinese children there. She had sent her baby to the orphanage with some keepsakes, so that some day ‘we’d always have this means of identifying each other’. Many mothers did this, and in every case the orphanage got rid of the pathetic clothes and objects.

It's not just the poor peasantry. This violation of the sacred occurs even in the middle class. The corruption touches on all of Chinese society, and Chinese society is all the more beggared than if they just decided to wing it. For there can be no greater loss than the loss of a people's soul.

After Robin Munro and others made public what they had seen and filmed in orphanages (some of them rightly termed ‘dying houses’), Beijing cracked down on those who had allowed such shameful practices to be discovered by foreigners. A furious official burst out to Xinran:

All these foreigners think about is making a ‘historical record’. They never consider Chinese people’s feelings. If I were a girl adopted abroad, I wouldn’t want people to know I had been picked up from some shambolic, godforsaken mountain village. It would be so humiliating.

The young woman, a university graduate, wasn’t finished:

Mother love is supposed to be such a great thing, but so many babies are abandoned, and it’s their mothers who do it. They’re ignorant. They feel differently about emotions from the way you do. Where I come from, people talk about smothering a baby girl or just throwing it[!]into a stream … to be eaten by dogs, as if it were a joke. How much do you think these women loved their babies?

So dark is the rot that what is punished is not the maltreatment of children, but the allowing of foreigners to glimpse their everlasting shame. This woman cannot even believe in a mother's love anymore. Quite hard when the most common thing you hear about mothers is how they feed their unwanted girls to dogs.

This is what population control does. So, next time some two-bit moron running out of political ideas (like Noynoy Aquino, or that king of myopic stupidity Edsel Lagman) like imposing a "two-child policy", think not about the short term, short time economic "benefit", but the sheer cost of a country's soul. You bargain with the devil, you give him everything, and he gives you nothing. Any attempt to force families to "design" themselves results in the destruction of everything that makes a family. (If the ideal is one girl and one boy, what happens to the excess girl or boy?) I do not want to live in a society where being born a second child (or a third) becomes an epithet. Or worse, a death sentence.