Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Solutions to the Women Shortage in China

The Economist reports that gangs are kidnapping Vietnamese women and smuggling them into China to be brides:
The kidnapping has been going on for some time, and locals talk of a number of cases so far this year. The abductions follow a pattern: a Hmong girl is wooed by an out-of-towner—whether from Vietnam or China is not clear—who speaks her language. She is lured to a rendezvous to be drugged and smuggled into China, probably near Lao Cai, about an hour’s drive from Sapa. Tall, pretty girls are said to be particular targets.

One 18-year-old recently managed to get back home to tell her tale after a four-day ordeal. Held captive in China, she escaped through a window and contacted the Chinese police, who returned her to Vietnam. Most do not escape. One of those kidnapped last month was a married woman with a son; friends fear her family may never see her again.

The most ambitious and possibly the most disastrous social engineering policy in the history of humanity was China's "One Child" policy. Because of the preference for male children there is now a shortage of women. There is a reason that nature divides us 50-50 between men and women. Tinkering with that balance is going to cause more and more problems.

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