Dear The Economist

I was delighted - at first - to see you providing coverage of the dreadful pattern of female infanticide around the world. I found the opening three paragraphs naturally moving...

"XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see article), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’

Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two policemen [who had accompanied me] held my shoulders in a firm grip. ‘Don’t move, you can’t save it, it’s too late.’

‘But that’s...murder...and you’re the police!’ The little foot was still now. The policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. ‘Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here,’ [an] older woman said comfortingly. ‘That’s a living child,’ I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail. ‘It’s not a child,’ she corrected me. ‘It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it. Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son. Girl babies don’t count.’"

But do you seriously not understand what is wrong with paragraph four:

"In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don’t count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women—a figure unprecedented in a country at peace."

The worst consequence of female infanticide you can come up with is that male children won't have anything to marry? Quelle disastre!! What will they poke their penises in to? What will clean their toilets and prepare their dinner? Let's hope the robot-makers are prepared to work overtime... Vomit.

What Were We Expecting?

Very interesting article on Alternet about the parrallels between the octuplet-mum in the news recently and Angelina Jolie. Caught my eye because I'm currently on my hols in China and observing the one child policy in action. Aside from the use of resources issue* I have to say the one-child family does seem kind of peaceful. There is none of the focussing on one child to turn round and realise the other one has just broken some valuable porcelain and with two parents (assuming both are involved parents) both focussed on one child seems that the child soon realises it doesn't have to scream to get a bit of attention. I think in the past - gatherer/hunters time - women would most likely have had their children spaced out, the career-focussed trend for having two or three in quick succession seems to have obvious flaws. A modern solution is to just have one I think. Of course there are issues with running such a policy in a place where girls are widely not wanted. But then there's a straight-up problem with any place where girls are not wanted anyway. I'm up for a global programme of one-child incentives, there are too many people - especially on the Great Wall today, I could hardly move!

*And yes I know the smell of my carbon footprint coming out here to China is a resources issue in itself. In my defence I had work in Hong Kong last week. I got the train up to Beijing from there. Also in my defence I am, like Angelina Jolie and Nadya Suleman "33 years old, having been born in 1975", and I have NO children farting out greenhouse gases...