The Copenhagen Accord was ‘taken note of’, but not ‘adopted’, in a debate of all the participating countries, and it was not passed unanimously. The document recognised that climate change is one of the greatest challenges of the present, and that action should be taken to keep any temperature increase below 2°C, but fails to set any dates or percentage reductions on CO2 emissions.
One of the principal agents in this failure was China, whose main role during the negotiations was to block any proposal that threatened to cripple its expanding economy. With the support of other emerging countries like India, Brazil, and South America, the Peoples Republic of China shot down all attempts to make any cuts in greenhouse gas emissions legally binding or to set long term goals to reduce them.
However, it is not the Conference as such that interests me here, but the mentality inspiring the leaders of the most populated country in the world with regard to its own citizens, and especially its children – the most fragile sector of society.
A shocking survey conducted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has recently uncovered, for the first time in the country’s history, what can rightly be called a ‘slaughter of the innocents’. The statistics released by the Academy are enough to make one’s skin creep: in the last 10 years about 40 million baby-girls have been killed. Most of these babies were aborted, the rest were killed immediately after birth.
This ‘pogrom’ is the result of the infamous one-child policy established by Deng Xiaoping in 1979 to limit China’s population growth. Up until a few months ago any couple giving birth to more than one child was fined up to three times its annual salary. Many couples were content to use normal methods of contraception, accepting both male or female children, but a significant proportion opted for the barbarous method of ‘gender selection’.
China “must fight for its right for further development,” Premier Wen Jiabao declared at Copenhagen. This militant mindset goes hand in hand with the deeply entrenched idea in Chinese society that males are much more important than females. Where does this idea come from? It stems from the fact that males find work much more easily than females, and thus will be better able to provide for their parents in old age; it is also related to the fact that males do not need a dowry when they get married, and finally from the fact that only males can pass on the family name. As a result, the slaughter of baby-girls has continued unabated for years.
Now, however, that enlightened government, which frowns at the request to pollute less, is desperately trying to undo its deeds – it has finally dawned on the country’s leaders that the Chinese people may become extinct even earlier than the polar bear! How can this be?
In the last 30 years the number of people born in China has fallen by 400 million, and the average number of children per couple nose dived from 6 to 1.7 percent. What is worse, the natural ratio between males and females has been tampered with. Since 1999 the ‘gender selecting’ parents have given birth to 37 million males in excess of the number of female births, bringing the national average to 121 males to 100 females. The disproportion is an enormity when compared to the average in the rest of the world, which is of 104 to 100.
The Chinese government has come to realise, albeit it too late, that it has ‘generated’ a frightful situation in which many males are destined to grow old in solitude and not to reproduce. From the walls of China’s major cities billboards carrying messages such as Mother Earth Is Too Tired To Sustain More Children or One More Baby Means One More Tomb have been hastily removed, and substituted with equally crude messages inviting people to procreate. The one-child family rule has been suspended in a desperate, belated attempt to generate females that will save the country.
Besides the horror of all those murdered baby girls, what is appalling is the government’s blindness and arrogance in believing it had the wisdom to dominate nature and play God. To suppress the female sex, the only gender capable of motherhood, means to turn one’s back on the future.
Updated on October 06 2016