The 20th Century’s Hidden Holocaust…
A Worse Human Tragedy than Bosnia…?
In some ways, yes – in today’s China.
Perhaps 15 million female babies have ‘gone missing’ since China’s
‘one child policy’ was introduced in 1979.
A group of American charity fund-raisers with concealed cameras
has uncovered ‘silent slaughter’ on a massive scale – in China’s
‘dying rooms’. The following are excerpts from ‘The Dying Rooms’
by Tom Hilditch, in the HK Sunday Morning Post Magazine, June 25,
1995, pp. 16-20:
‘The aim of the documentary team, funded by Britain’s Channel
Four, was to explore persistent reports that some state-run
Chinese orphanages leave baby girls to die of starvation and
neglect… [Two years ago an investigation by SMP Magazine
uncovered evidence in one orphanage] ‘in Guangxi province… It
was freely admitted [by staff and regular visitors] that 90 per
cent of the 50 to 60 baby girls who arrived in the orphanage each
month would end their lives there.
‘The birth of a baby girl has never been a cause for celebration
in China. In general, an infant boy will be greeted with firework
displays and parties, a girl with silence. According to records
there are currently six million women in China named Lai Di. The
name means “a son follows quickly.”
‘…Stories of peasant farmers drowning new-born girls in a bucket
of water have been commonplace for centuries. Now, however, as a
direct result of the one-child policy there are growing reports of
infanticide all across China, including its towns and cities…
[In China] ‘a child is born every 1.5 seconds, 2,400 every hour,
21 million a year. In March 1995 President Jiang Zemin was forced
to set new, tougher population controls and tougher punishments
for those who ignore them. Couples who attempt to have more than
one child will be dealt with brutally…
‘Coerced abortions, sometimes just days before the baby is due,
are now commonplace…
‘In one orphanage… the infant inmates sit in bamboo benches in
the middle of a courtyard. Their wrists and ankles are tied to the
armrests and legs of the bench. They have been there all day
unable to move. A row of plastic buckets is lined up beneath holes
in their seats to catch their urine and excrement. The children
will not be moved again until night when their benches will be
carried back into their cot room and they will be lifted out and
tied to their beds…
‘They had no stimulation, nothing to play with, no one else to
touch them. They have never known affection…’
And so on.
I have a friend who has visited one of these places. Children
there are left without any clothing below the waist, in freezing
temperatures. A mentally ill child was found sitting naked in a
room in the freezing cold.
My friend was allowed to hold a few babies while they died…
Shalom!
Rowland Croucher
Two years ago, the Sunday Morning Post reported on the outrage of
healthy baby girls left to die in China’s orphanages, victims of the
one-child policy. Now, as a British documentary team has discovered,
the problem is getting worse. TOM HILDITCH reports.
MEI-MING has lain this way for 10 days now: tied up in urine-soaked
blankets, scabs of dried mucus growing across her eyes, her face
shrinking to a skull, malnutrition slowly shrivelling her two-year-old
body.
Each morning a fellow inmate at her Guangdong orphanage goes into the
dark fetid room where she lies alone to see if she is dead. The
orphanage staff, paid to look after her, do not visit. They call her
room the “dying room” and they have abandoned her there for the same
reason her parents abandoned her shortly after she was born. Her
problem is simple and tragic: she has a condition which in modern China
makes her next to useless, a burden on the state with an almost zero
chance of adoption. She is a girl.
When she dies in four days later it will not be of some terminal,
incurable illness. It will be of sheer neglect. Afterwards the
orphanage will dispose of her desiccated corpse and deny she ever
existed. She will be just another invisible victim of the collision
between China’s one-child policy and its traditional preference for
male heirs. The name the orphanage gave her articulates precisely the
futility of struggle to survive in a society that holds no value for
her. In Putonghua, Mei-ming means ‘no name’.
She is one of perhaps 15 million female babies who have gone missing
from China’s demographics since the one child per family policy was
introduced in 1979. Another tiny bag of bones in what some sinologists
claim is the 20th century’s hidden holocaust.
Yet her brief and miserable life may not have been in vain. Before she
died she was discovered by a British documentary team who entered her
orphanage posing as American charity fund-raisers. The footage they
shot, through a concealed camera, would provide the first video
evidence of the existence of dying rooms. And when their documentary
was shown 13 days ago, against the protestations of China’s London
embassy, little Mei-ming’s dying cries for help were heard around the
world.
The aim of the documentary team, funded by Britain’s Channel Four, was
to explore persistent reports that some state-run Chinese orphanages
leave baby girls to die of starvation and neglect. Their starting
point was the Sunday Morning Post’s award-winning investigation of two
years ago which gave the world the first eye-witness and photographic
evidence of dying rooms at Nanning orphanage, in Guangxi province.
Then the dying room was spoken of openly by staff and regular visitors.
It was freely admitted that 90 per cent of the 50 to 60 baby girls who
arrived at the orphanage each month would end their lives there. Since
the outrage provoked by our report, however, Nanning orphanage has been
overhauled. Money raised by Hong Kong celebrities has upgraded
facilities and the quality of care. The dying rooms there have ceased
to exist.
Sadly, after touring and filming in orphanages in four provinces, the
British documentary team’s harrowing report suggests that the attitudes
towards baby girls so prevalent at Nanning two years ago are rife
elsewhere.
The birth of a baby girl has never been a cause for celebration in
China. In general, an infant boy will be greeted with firework
displays and parties; a girl with silence. According to records there
are currently six million women in China christened Lai Di. The name
means “a son follows quickly”.
Tradition dictates that when a daughter marries she will join her
husband’s family, her children will take his family name and she must
support his parents in their old age. In rural areas, female infants
are simply a drain on resources. They are referred to as “maggots in
the rice”. Stories of peasant farmers drowning new-born girls in a
bucket of water have been commonplace for centuries. Now, however, as
a direct result of the one-child policy there are growing reports of
infanticide all across China, including its towns and cities. The
numbers of baby girls being abandoned, aborted or dumped on orphanage
steps is unprecedented.
It is impossible to understate both how crucial the one-child policy is
to China’s stability and how rigidly it is enforced. Everyone – the
World Bank, the United Nations, China’s own statisticians – agrees that
if the population, already at 1.2 billion, is allowed to grow, China
will be unable to support itself, let alone develop. The result would
be economic collapse, environmental ruin, famine.
But while most Chinese can accept the mathematics of the problem, many
cannot accept the draconian mechanics of the solution. The population
continues to rise. A child is born every 1.5 seconds, 2,400 every
hour, 21 million a year. In March 1995 President Jiang Zemin was
forced to set new, tougher population controls and tougher punishments
for those who ignore them. Couples who attempt to have more than one
child will be dealt with brutally.
According to Steven Mosher, the author of A Mother’s Ordeal, coerced
abortions, sometimes just days before the baby is due, are now
commonplace. As are reports of enforced sterilisation and of hospitals
fatally injecting second babies shortly after their birth. “It means
tremendous coercion,” he says, “on women to submit to abortion and
sterilisation. It also means that however overcrowded China’s
orphanages are now with baby girls, the problem is going to get worse.
Very much worse.”
For Kate Blewett, producer of the Channel Four documentary The Dying
Rooms, the investigation was a journey into the heart of darkness. “I
did not know that human beings could treat children with such contempt,
such cruelty. It is not so much a problem of the orphanages being
underfunded as it is a problem of attitude towards unwanted babies.
Some of the orphanages we visited were little more than death camps.
We filmed treatment that amounted to torture, conscious neglect that
amounted to murder.”
Travelling in China with hidden cameras and under false pretences meant
Blewett and her team were in danger of being arrested every step of the
way. The risk for local Chinese who helped them gain access to
orphanages and those she interviewed, unwittingly or otherwise, was
even greater. For that reason the documentary does not name any of the
orphanages or identify mainland interviewees. Nonetheless, the
harrowing squalor of conditions is there for all to see.
In one orphanage a dozen or so baby girls are supervised by an
adolescent girl in a white coat. As the team walk in she ignores them
and goes out of the room, leaving a mentally handicapped child to show
them around. The infant inmates sit in bamboo benches in the middle of
a courtyard. Their wrists and ankles are tied to the armrests and legs
of the bench. They have been there all day unable to move. A row of
plastic buckets is lined up beneath holes in their seats to catch their
urine and excrement. The children will not be moved again until night
when their benches will be carried back into their cot room and they
will be lifted out and tied to their beds.
“It was heart-breaking,” said Blewett. “They had no stimulation,
nothing to play with, no one to touch them. They have never known
affection. In one scene shown in the documentary one of the
handicapped older boys walks up to one of the girls tied to a bench and
begins head-butting her. He butts her relentlessly. It goes on and
on. But the girl doesn’t move or make a sound. Such is the lack of
stimulation for the children that the one thing they all have in common
is an endless rocking. They sit tied to their potty chairs rocking
backwards and forwards and screaming. Few of them will ever learn to
speak and the rocking is the only exercise, the only stimulation, the
only pleasure in their lives.”
Presently the teenager in the white coat returns with an official of
the orphanage. He buys Blewett’s cover story and, seduced by the
suggestion of foreign funds, he agrees to by interviewed. His
monologue is chilling. Last year, he says, the orphanage had some 400
inmates. They were all kept five to a bed in one airless room. The
summer temperatures soared above 37 degrees Celsius. Disease swept
throught the room. In a couple of weeks 20 per cent of the babies
died.
Later, Blewett trains her camera on another of the assistants. “If 80
children died last summer, there should be 320 left,” Blewett says,
“but there don’t appear to be more than a couple of dozen children
here. Where are the others?”
“They disappear,” the girl replies. “If I ask where they go, I am just
told they die. That’s all. I am afraid to ask any more.”
Brutal neglect is the common theme of many of the orphanage scenes. In
one sequence a lame child sits on a bench near the orphanage pharmacy.
It is stocked full of medicines but none of the staff can be bothered
to administer them. The child rocks listlessly back and forth as staff
wander. The camera focuses on her vacant face, trails down her skinny
body and settles on her leg… it is swollen with gangrene.
Such institutionalised cruelty and neglect was in no way limited to
rural areas. The worst orphanage, the brief home of Mei-ming, was in
Guangdong, one of the richest provinces in China. When they arrived
the documentary makers wondered at first whether they had made a
mistake. There were no children to be seen or heard. Then from under
one of the blankets laid over a cot, as if left to dry out, there was
the sound of crying. Lifting the blanket and unwrapping a tied bundle
of cloth, Blewett found a baby girl. The last layer of her swaddling
was a plastic bag filled with urine and faeces. The next cot was the
same, and the next and the next. Many of the children had deep lesions
where the string they were tied with had cut into their bodies. One
child, described by staff as “normal”, was suffering from vitamin B and
C deficiency, acute liver failure and severe impetigo on her scalp. As
always, Blewett made a point of checking the babies’ gender. As
always, all the non-handicapped children were girls.
The Chinese Government was approached several times both in Beijing and
at its London embassy to provide comment or an interview for inclusion
in the film. The Government was given a three-month deadline but
remained silent. Then it was given a 10-day extension. On the ninth
day Channel Four received a two-page letter from the London embassy.
It became the final sequence of the film.
“The so-called ‘dying rooms’ do not exist in China at all”, read the
statement’s penultimate paragraph. “Our investigations confirm that
those reports are vicious fabrications made out of ulterior motives.
The contemptible lie about China’s welfare work in orphanages cannot
but arouse the indignation of the Chinese people, especially the great
numbers of social workers who are working hard for children’s welfare.”
The statement was followed by diplomatic representations to have the
station drop the documentary. Channel Four refused. The programme
which was transmitted on June 12 and dedicated to Mei-ming created
enormous publicity.
The following day questions were raised in the House of Commons about
China’s one-child policy and its dying rooms. Efforts are now being
made by, among others, MP Anne Winterton, to bring about diplomatic
pressure to halt China’s one-child policy. Predictably, however, no
one has raised the subject of providing massive aid for a collapsed and
famine-ridden China in the event of its population rising to, say, 2.4
billion if this generation is allowed to have two children per family.
More practically, however, Blewett and her team have set up a fund, The
Dying Rooms Trust, to make contributions to international charities
working with Chinese orphanages, to help purchase and distribute milk
powder, play-pens and basic medicines to the orphanages featured in the
documentary and establish sponsorship systems for their inmates.
“We don’t want to criticise the one-child policy,” says Blewett. “But
we do want to focus on the problems it is causing which can be solved.”
The documentary features a tour of a privately-run, locally funded
orphanage where the children are happy, healthy and loved. “We were
very keen to show what can be done with the right attitude,” said
Blewett. “No child should suffer the kind of neglect we filmed. Maybe
we can help that happen. Maybe then, Mei-ming’s life might have had
some purpose.”
The programme is unlikely to be shown in Hong Kong. For more
information contact: The Dying Room Trust, 68 Thames Road, London W4
3RE. Cheques should be made payable to The Dying Rooms.
Sunday Morning Post Magazine, June 25, 1995.