20,000 Yuan for a Human Life
I reprint a line item from Jay Nordlinger’s column, along with the link:
You may have been wondering: “Where are Chinese men going to get wives, what with female infanticide leaving such an imbalance between men and women?” One answer, as this article tells us, is Burma: Burmese girls are sold into slavery, or “marriage,” or whatever you wish to call how they end up.
Bear in mind that the U.S. vice president recently extolled the one-child policy on his visit to China. The White House’s backtracking cannot really efface that.
Here is the lede paragraphs from the linked article:
Aba was just 12-years-old when she left her hometown of Muse in Burma to visit Yunnan Province in China’s far southwest. When she crossed the border, she was expecting to spend only a few hours away from home.
But it would be three long years before Aba saw her family again. Like thousands of other young girls and women from Burma, she had been duped into coming to China so she could be sold into a forced marriage to one of the growing number of Chinese men who – because there are not enough girl babies born in China – cannot find wives any other way.
During her time in China, Aba endured routine beatings, while never being able to communicate with her family or even go outside on her own. Above all, she lived with the knowledge that she was destined to be married to the son of the family that had bought her – as if she was one of the pigs or chickens that ran around their farm.
“I was sold for 20,000 Yuan (£1,880),” said Aba.
And the article continues:
No one knows how many thousands of women are trafficked into China each year to be the wives of the men known as guang gun, or bare branches, the bachelors in rural areas who cannot find brides by conventional means.
[…]
Prices for the women range from 6,000 to 40,000 Yuan (£560-£3750), depending on their age and appearance. … around 25 per cent of the women sold in China are under 18.
[The young women are]… paraded in public in front of potential buyers, which is the fate of many trafficked women. It is a brutal and dehumanising experience.
“Sometimes they’ll be sold in markets that are held in parks. The traffickers will put the women in nice dresses and make-up. It’s very cruel, because the women are happy to be wearing nice clothes, which they’ve never had before, and then they are sold like vegetables.”
My comment: I challenge anyone who wishes to attempt it to put forward an argument, one that does not use any unspoken Christian assumptions about the innate and divine sanctity of the human life, but which instead is based on the secular humanist assumptions behind the philosophy of Communist China, to show any logical reason why women should not be enslaved to serve as brides to lonely Chinese men?
Again, is there any logical reason why, once we accept the logical implication of the one-child policy, including the implication that you life as well as your sex life rightfully may be curtailed and controlled by the collective, we are not likewise forced to accept the institution of the state-arranged marriages, coercive marriages, the harem, the slavemarket?
In other words, once we agree with the secular humanist premise that our lives, our work, and the reproduction of our children are legitimately controlled and owned by the state, why should not be abducting and coercing women into the marriage bed be not likewise legitimate?
If all men are already abject slaves of Caesar, why should not pretty young maidens become slaves of their husbands?
I will point out that, as a matter of historical fact, only in the Christian religion is it a doctrinal truth that marriage is a sacrament, is monogamous, and is voluntary on the part of the women.
Those who regard Christianity as repressive of the rights of women tend to forget that those rights do not exist anywhere outside Christianity: no bride of Asia nor Africa nor America before the coming of the Missionary could legally forestall a marriage arrangement by refusing to consent to it; nor could legally forestall the marriage by her husband of additional wives or concubines; nor could legally forestall a divorce.
It seems odd, in the days when all industrial nations are not reproducing at replacement rates, to continue fretting about overpopulation, but those of you who are true believers in Erlichism, riddle me this: if the threat of overpopulation gives Caesar the right to control your childbearing activities, saying when a man may and may not couple with his wife (which is what is done in China, so I have heard first hand) on what grounds can you deny Caesar the right to control your childbearer, that is, your bride?
If your babies belong to Caesar, then so does the rest of the body and mind and soul of the mother.
If you can coerce her into sterility when the population is high, and forbid childbearing, the same logic allows you to coerce her into fertility when the population is low, or young men need women.
There is no such thing in life as a moderate amount of tyranny or a little bit of inhumanity. Once you grant the inhuman premise of the secular humanists that men are merely beasts, or merely biomachines, you cannot reach the mystical conclusion of the Christians that all men are born equal, and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights.
If Albany can redefine marriage from the voluntary sexual union of man and wife to now be the voluntary pseudo-sexual union of man and man, nothing prevents Peking from redefining marriage to the involuntary union of man and concubine.
If rights are manmade, they can be man-unmade. If rights are evolved by nature, they can be ignored by men who conquer nature.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
