Has China lost its humanity?

Clifford Coonan | Oct 23

The Independent - The death of Yue Yue has provoked a bout of anguished soul-searching. Has Beijing's obsession with growth created a people devoid of empathy? Clifford Coonan reports

A little girl left bleeding to death on the side of the street after being struck by two goods vehicles, while 18 people passed her by and did nothing to help her.

A woman, six months pregnant, who died during a forced abortion to meet the terms of the one child policy of population control. These two incidents this week have left many people in China wondering aloud if rampant economic growth has come at the cost of the country's humanity. Is China becoming more dehumanised as incomes increase?

On the social networks, the talk is collective responsibility for the scandals. "We are all passers-by," one recently posted message read. The question is how this message of civic responsibility will go down with a generation reared on the principle that "to get rich is glorious".

money corrupts the soul :(


Tina October 22, 2011 - 9:13pm
( categories: AgonistWire | China )

Can we expect, from a country that eats about everything that creeps, crawl or walk.including it's pets.
That is also one of the major actor in the destruction of rare species,that is about to empty the oceans of sharks only to get their fins.
That would kill tigers, bears, elephants and what have you for their testes, tusks etc.
If just 10% of China contributed to that, hell even 5 % that would count for 65 to 130 million people that wouldn't givee a damm about anything add to that the rest of the world population that are like that, makes quite a staggering number.

Jelco Cathlon October 22, 2011 - 10:27pm

but the desire for money probably is. In that regard, the Chinese are not unique.

Once a people begin to mistake 'standard of living' for 'quality of life', it's all downhill.
I think it happened to the USA after WWII.

While we have always had our ambition to escape poverty and better our lives, the great bulk of the people had limits on what they would do in order to prosper. Today, there seems to be a great increase in the percentage of people who would sell their souls for the Dollar.


"When you live on cash, you understand the limits of the world around which you navigate each day.
Credit leads into a desert with invisible boundaries."
- Anton Chekhov

steeleweed October 23, 2011 - 11:59am

from what we always heard about how the Chinese treated their children. I still wonder if the child was male would they have helped.

Tina October 23, 2011 - 12:42pm

If there can be comfort at all, though, is the number of chinese that where scandalized by those events, that might help to change the judges perceptions on ''good samaritains'' so that they can't be victimized by the people they help because of greed. Although, if 5 millions people in the US denounce something it probably has more weight than 5 millions in China. But will that save female newborns from drowning, that remains to be seen.

Jelco Cathlon October 23, 2011 - 1:19pm

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific/view/1161590/1/.html
Posted: 25 October 2011 1009 hrs

BEIJING: China's one-child policy has prevented almost half a billion births but has turned into a demographic time bomb as the population ages, storing up huge economic and social problems for the country.

As the world's population hits the seven billion mark, straining the earth's resources, China can claim to have curbed its birth rate to around 1.5 children per woman since the policy was introduced in 1979.

Without the birth limits, which no other country applies as rigorously or on such a scale, the world's most populous nation would have hundreds of millions more mouths to feed than the 1.34 billion it has now.

But from modern cities to remote villages, its implementation has involved abuses from mass sterilisation to abortions as late as eight months into the pregnancy. Baby girls have also been abandoned and killed.

Couples who defy the rule can face fines amounting to several years' salary, have access to social services cut and even go to prison. Their so-called "black children" have no legal status in China.

Ethnic minorities and farmers whose first child is a girl are exempt from the restriction and in some areas, couples where both parents are only children are also allowed to have a second baby.

But three decades on, demographers, sociologists and economists are warning of a looming crisis as China becomes the only developing country in the world to face growing old before it grows rich.

China's crisis is approaching "incomparably faster" than in Europe, where fertility has fallen very gradually over the last century, Paris-based demographer Christophe Guilmoto told AFP.

In the next five years the number of people in China over 60 will jump from 178 million to 221 million -- 13.3 per cent to 16 per cent of the population -- according to the People's Daily Online.

By 2050, a quarter of China's population will be over 65, the Commission for Population and Family Planning said, compared to just nine per cent today.

Already, half of China's over-60s live alone, a situation unthinkable before, when four generations would live under one roof.

The upside-down pyramid -- whereby a single child shoulders responsibility for two parents and four grandparents -- is a major headache for the government, particularly as unemployment rises, forcing more and more people to migrate to cities for work.

Liang Zhongtang, a demographer involved in family planning, said the pressure would grow as Chinese born between 1962 and 1972 retire.

"Nearly 30 million babies were born each year during that period, compared to six or seven million each year right now, you can imagine how big the burden on the government will be," he said.

China already lacks medical facilities for the elderly, retirement homes and qualified health care workers. The government plans to double the number of beds in specialised institutions to six million by 2015, but that only covers the existing shortfall.

China has barely begun to put in place a universal social security and retirement system, and over two-thirds of the rural population does not have a pension.

So, should China end, or at least relax its one-child rule?

"Of course!" said He Yafu, a Chinese demographer. "The reproductive right is a human right, whether and how many children a couple want to have has nothing to do with the government.

"Even if China relaxes the one-child policy, I believe there won't be many couples wanting too many children", He told AFP, as middle-class couples around the world opt increasingly for smaller families.

Guilmoto is hopeful that fertility might rise in the future, even if "this is very uncertain when we look at the most advanced regions where it comes close to one child per woman".

Women are increasingly deciding against having children at all, opting instead to pursue careers and enjoy their growing material wealth.

But the southern province of Guangdong -- the engine of China's economy with its 104 million residents -- this month decided against relaxing the policy.

China's most populous province ruled there would be "no major adjustments" to the policy in the next five years, said Zhang Feng, head of the Population and Family Planning Commission.

Tina October 26, 2011 - 12:09am

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