Monday 21 February 2011

Breaching the wall of silence


There was a story on the main evening news broadcast here last week abut Lele, a six-year old Chinese boy kidnapped three years ago and now reunited with his family. I was moved to tears by the warmth of the reunion of the little boy with his parents and community, and by the sad tragedy that for every child found hundreds are still missing, many never to be recovered.

There is a combination of things at work here, things that have turned child kidnapping into an epidemic in China. As part of a scheme aimed at controlling a booming population the Chinese Communist government introduced a one child policy a number of years ago. This is all very well if the child is a boy; for by long-standing Confucian tradition there is a preference for male children, to carry on the family name, amongst other things.

So, in a country where children are at a premium, especially boys, a vicious black market has grown up, specialising in kidnapping. I read in the Sunday press that an estimated 70,000 children are sold by gangs every year, some fetching as much as £10,000.

It’s a terrible scandal; it would be a terrible scandal in any country but China. Why? Because it embarrasses the communist authorities, unwilling to lose face, unwilling to admit the scale of the problem. Parents of missing children often get only the most perfunctory assistance from the police. Worse than that: if they become too persistent in their quest they start to face official harassment. Peng Gaofeng, the father of Lele, was told to give up his campaign because it was disrupting ‘social harmony.’

In the end it wasn’t the police, the government or the party that found Lele; it was the ordinary people in a marvellous display of simple human solidarity. Twitter is banned in China but there are other microblogging sites, places that give the people a voice, empowering them in the way that they were never empowered before. With the help of Deng Fei, a journalist, Lele’s picture was tweeted to people all over the country. He was eventually spotted in Jiangsu province, some 2000 kilometres from his home.

Commenting on the power of the microblog (they are used by an estimated 100million people in the country) Deng said;

With this tool, everyone can express themselves immediately. Things can no longer be kept secret. Microblogs break the monopoly on information. They mean it can flow freely. A lot of things in China are caused by the lack of transparency here. So a lot of things will change now.

It truly is the breach of the Great Wall of Silence, a way around official complacency and unofficial corruption. Unfortunately this true voice of the people, so long gagged, exists only by the indulgence of the state. Like Twitter the microblogs could be closed at any time if they are perceived to threaten the monopoly of the party, or if they are found to disrupt a fictitious ‘social harmony’. I wish I could share Deng Fei’s optimism but the sound of silence is always to be feared.

19 comments:

  1. I don't often heard that many boys were kidnapped in China because I believe most of them were so well protected (I think the much worse situation is for "girls" - how many girls were deliberately dumped, or sold by their own parents?). But of course this is not the issue here, silence people's voice is. Yes, for the "sake" of "face", or "harmony", they better be quite!
    You know what Ana, Chinese people are so immune to silence. There are so many more things to enjoy other than just very boring "speaking out".
    Not only Chinese government, lots of Chinese people also support the wall of silence. You probably have no idea how many Chinese people felt angry about nobel peace price. Or you may know, probably even better than I do. But anyway, what I wanted to express is, The Great wall of Silence is going to live long... So same here, I WISH I could share the optimism of Deng Fei.

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  2. Sad for so many reasons, not least of all the entrenched tradition of devaluing women.

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  3. Yun yi, thanks. The thing I did not touch (it's covered in the Wikipedia article on the One Child Policy) is the problem you have partly alluded to- namely what happens to girls in a society that does not place a premium on females? Here female infanticide is the most awful dimension, that and the population imbalance that results. The truth is there are men in China who will never be able to find a partner, which, I suppose, my act as a spur for the kidnapping of girls.

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  4. "The truth is there are men in China who will never be able to find a partner,"

    especially many chinese women marry foreigners. within chinese oversea online communities, those women with foreign husbands usually received high amount of personal attacks, assumably from those single losers. lol

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  5. Yun yi, I also blog occasionally on a site called Retarius and Anastasia. I wrote a piece there called Heil Big Brother, published on 20 August of last year. Given what you have just touched on I think I'll post it here also. I think it will interest you. :-)

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  6. Thanks! It is very interesting! I will drop a comment if you post it here.

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  7. Japanese women are turning to Western men in large numbers, too. Modern girls are rejecting their traditional subservient roles. Information and opportunity are driving a revolution in behaviour.

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  8. Missing chlidren is somewhat of an issue in america as well, for various reasons. With the population of China the issues would be compounded.

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  9. Calvin, I was under the impression that most of the younger generation of Japanese women had rejected traditional roles long since.

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  10. Anthony, even looking it in proportional terms the Chinese problem is far greater.

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  11. But, apparently, the young Japanese men have not.

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  12. The book The Art of War was written in China over 2,500 years ago. Had it been written in more recent times, the chapter on intelligence sources and management and control of information might have have been sub-titled The Art of Governance.
    :-(

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  13. The problem stems from overpopulation and the reason that Asian women prefer western men is relevant to penis size.

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  14. it is great that the boy came back to his parents, thanks to a good journalist. A happy ending in a middle of a big national problem, one step to start. Mario.

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  15. Calvin, the chaps I know at college are decent enough, not too sexist in attitude, but they may very well be the exception. :-)

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  16. CI, yes indeed, and censorship is government by other means. :-)

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  17. Antony let me just crack another myth on the head: believe me, women in general do not have a thing about the size of a guy’s equipment!

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  18. Mario, yes it was a heart-warming story among a general catalogue of misery.

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