oyuki

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Now This is Sick

Communist Chinese police have arrested three men in the murder of two women.

What makes this case sick is the 'reason' for these two killings. They were killed for money and to provide young men who died unmarried wives in the afterlife. You heard me right. It is an ancient Chinese custom that if a man dies unmarried then he should be provided a bride in the afterlife.

Chinese culture, even as it reaches for being a First World country under communist control, vast stretches of its terrritory is still mired in a China several hundred years in the past. Where boys are more valuable than girls because boys can work and provide for their parents old age while girls are merely sold/traded to another family to marry their son. This a country of over 1.4 billion people who live under the draconian "One Child" law. So in the coming years there will be an estimated 15 to 30 million Chinese men who will never find a wife. One has to wonder how ghost brides will fit into this? Will more Chinese girls be sold for money and then killed to provide ghost brides in the future?

What a sad and grim future lays in wait for Chinese women if the culture of the Middle Kingdom does not itself modernize.

2 comments:

Dionne said...

To be a woman living in China has to be almost comparable to hell, at the very least its like living in prison (in another country, not a cushy U.S. prison).

Anna said...

Dee, it is a viewpoint best suited for an agricultural society, not a modern society. And that it persists in communist China proves how shallow Mao's Cultural Revolution has been. One could argue since they have adopted some capitalistic modes, Mao's revolution has failed.