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What 5 dead boys in a dumpster tell us about our social values
By Wan Lixin |
November 23, 2012, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
IN the freezing cold morning of November 16, five boys aged 9 to 12 were found dead in Bijie City, Guizhou Province, in a garbage dumpster.
Autopsies showed they died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
They probably suffocated while trying to keep warm by burning charcoal in that cramped refuge measuring 1.5 meters long and 1.3 meters wide. That morning the mercury sank to 7 degrees Celsius.
Yang Gengshen, a columnist, wondered in a commentary in Monday's Beijing News: "When the five kids began to lose their consciousness as oxygen was depleted, were they consoled by the dream of the 'Little Match Girl'?"
At the end of "The Little Match Girl" (1845) fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, the little match seller is dying from the cold on the street.
As she strikes her last matches, she sees her loving grandmother who smiles, hugs her and takes her to a place where there is no cold or hunger.
Where were the five boys' grandmothers? More important, where were their mothers? Where were their "father-mother officials" (fu mu guan), the traditional term for county magistrate?
For a decently brief interval, the tragedy of the five dead children in the dumpster will impress the case on the national consciousness, generating proactive, crisis-management stunts.
Some grassroots officials have been made the scapegoat for the pervasive social apathy that allowed this to happen.
Preliminary investigation showed that four of the five children were school dropouts, their parents either migrant workers living elsewhere, or divorced.
Awkward niche
Children in these circumstances represent a awkward niche in China's global success story: they are too young to man the assembly lines, yet too old to receive tender care from their parents who are eager to answer the call of the assembly lines.
I was reminded of a report titled "The Left-behind Generation" (Wenhui Daily, November 1), which portrayed the plight of left-behind children in Dishuipu Primary School in Ningxiang, Shaanxi Province. Of the 88 children at the school, 80 percent of them have been left behind by their working-age parents who are seeking their a better life in cities.
Divorces, rarely heard of in rural China two decades ago, are now quite common, with one in every 10 at that school coming from a single-parent family.
According to the Ministry of Education this September, in September there were around 22 million "left behind" children who are of the age to receive the benefits of compulsory education.
In a tragic way, the dumpster-death of the five children suggests the hidden social costs of heady growth.
Ignored costs
These costs can sometimes be ignored because they - the children and, in a sense, their parents - can be made invisible.
There is more tolerance of adult migrants in cities because they are so ready to minister to the needs of urbanites, doing all the dirty work, from collecting trash to laboring on construction sites.
In so doing, they have to suffer year-long separation from their children, spouses, parents and other relatives. Still, they have little chance of erasing the stigma of "migrant" in their adopted cities.
Writing about the health of the nation, Han Yu (768 AD-824) wrote that "a good doctor will not judge the health of the patient by his corpulence, but by his pulse. Similarly, in diagnosing a state, a good statesman will not be deluded by the facade of peace, but will examine whether the ethical principles are still there."
As instant material gratification becomes the sure path to enlightenment for many, we are entering a more permissive society where ethical principles are often lost to profits.
Shanghai Daily reported on Monday ("Outrages as little girls don bikinis at auto show") that at an auto show a five-year-old girl wearing only bikini and wig was ogling potential buyers. She was one of the three child models hired to strike sexy poses for the occasion.
The new paradigm of the market has obliterated the division of mind and body, by showing that the flesh is the royal path to spiritual awakening.
When money prevails, it dominates our policy, news, gossip.
In the consumerist ideology, those with the greatest consumption power become the icons. The solidarity of cyberspace is also being elevated as a steady source of explicit sensual pleasures.
Where are those guardian angels who are supposed to minister to our spiritual welfare?
And where are the mothers and grandmothers who should be able to pause for a while from roaring assembly lines to hug their left-behind children?
Autopsies showed they died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
They probably suffocated while trying to keep warm by burning charcoal in that cramped refuge measuring 1.5 meters long and 1.3 meters wide. That morning the mercury sank to 7 degrees Celsius.
Yang Gengshen, a columnist, wondered in a commentary in Monday's Beijing News: "When the five kids began to lose their consciousness as oxygen was depleted, were they consoled by the dream of the 'Little Match Girl'?"
At the end of "The Little Match Girl" (1845) fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, the little match seller is dying from the cold on the street.
As she strikes her last matches, she sees her loving grandmother who smiles, hugs her and takes her to a place where there is no cold or hunger.
Where were the five boys' grandmothers? More important, where were their mothers? Where were their "father-mother officials" (fu mu guan), the traditional term for county magistrate?
For a decently brief interval, the tragedy of the five dead children in the dumpster will impress the case on the national consciousness, generating proactive, crisis-management stunts.
Some grassroots officials have been made the scapegoat for the pervasive social apathy that allowed this to happen.
Preliminary investigation showed that four of the five children were school dropouts, their parents either migrant workers living elsewhere, or divorced.
Awkward niche
Children in these circumstances represent a awkward niche in China's global success story: they are too young to man the assembly lines, yet too old to receive tender care from their parents who are eager to answer the call of the assembly lines.
I was reminded of a report titled "The Left-behind Generation" (Wenhui Daily, November 1), which portrayed the plight of left-behind children in Dishuipu Primary School in Ningxiang, Shaanxi Province. Of the 88 children at the school, 80 percent of them have been left behind by their working-age parents who are seeking their a better life in cities.
Divorces, rarely heard of in rural China two decades ago, are now quite common, with one in every 10 at that school coming from a single-parent family.
According to the Ministry of Education this September, in September there were around 22 million "left behind" children who are of the age to receive the benefits of compulsory education.
In a tragic way, the dumpster-death of the five children suggests the hidden social costs of heady growth.
Ignored costs
These costs can sometimes be ignored because they - the children and, in a sense, their parents - can be made invisible.
There is more tolerance of adult migrants in cities because they are so ready to minister to the needs of urbanites, doing all the dirty work, from collecting trash to laboring on construction sites.
In so doing, they have to suffer year-long separation from their children, spouses, parents and other relatives. Still, they have little chance of erasing the stigma of "migrant" in their adopted cities.
Writing about the health of the nation, Han Yu (768 AD-824) wrote that "a good doctor will not judge the health of the patient by his corpulence, but by his pulse. Similarly, in diagnosing a state, a good statesman will not be deluded by the facade of peace, but will examine whether the ethical principles are still there."
As instant material gratification becomes the sure path to enlightenment for many, we are entering a more permissive society where ethical principles are often lost to profits.
Shanghai Daily reported on Monday ("Outrages as little girls don bikinis at auto show") that at an auto show a five-year-old girl wearing only bikini and wig was ogling potential buyers. She was one of the three child models hired to strike sexy poses for the occasion.
The new paradigm of the market has obliterated the division of mind and body, by showing that the flesh is the royal path to spiritual awakening.
When money prevails, it dominates our policy, news, gossip.
In the consumerist ideology, those with the greatest consumption power become the icons. The solidarity of cyberspace is also being elevated as a steady source of explicit sensual pleasures.
Where are those guardian angels who are supposed to minister to our spiritual welfare?
And where are the mothers and grandmothers who should be able to pause for a while from roaring assembly lines to hug their left-behind children?
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