China

 

Twisting “art” to justify China’s brutally repressive One-Child Policy

By Dave Andrusko
We’re out of our home for a few days so we wind up reading the newspaper a day or two late.

But I about choked on my apple crunch muffin this morning when I read a book review by Steven Moore that appeared earlier this week in the Washington Post.

The title of the book under review (in English) is “Frogs,” written by Mo Yan, which was published in 2009 but just translated into English by Howard Gold blatt.
To be completely clear, I have not read the book, only multiple reviews, including the one we published today by Marcus Roberts which quotes extensively from the New York Times review written by Julia Lovell. And with good reason.
Lowell says of “Frogs”

It is an anarchic, brutal book about the inhumanity of servants of the Communist state, the inadequacy of Chinese men and the moral vacuum at the heart of post-Mao China.

Understand the novel is about the nightmarish, even surreal world of China’s one-child policy that is undergirded by human rights violations of the most grotesque kind, including forced abortion, coerced sterilization, and (as a result of the limitation on children) infanticide, almost always of baby girls.
But to Moore, who we are told is a novelist, this amounts to a “social experiment.” He trivializes the abuses in the first couple of paragraphs–

Mo Yan dramatizes the pain and exasperation felt by villagers who decry the policy as unnatural and are especially frustrated if their first and only child is a girl

–only to tell us

But he also gives equal time to justifications of the policy.

(No other reviewer that I’ve read came to that conclusion.)

But in Moore’s review it is the justifications that get far, far more time than the inhuman treatment of the Chinese in general, and women and female babies in particular: Too many people, environmental degradation, even a kind of second cousin to the familiar argument that hoodlums will proliferate if the “wrong” people do not abort in sufficient numbers.
The nephew (Tadpole) of Gugu, the midwife turned cold-blooded abortionist, chastises Westerners for not understanding how necessary the one-child policy was/is. Moore writes

Tadpole’s case is strengthened years later when he is almost killed by a teenage hoodlum who turns out to be one of the few fetuses that Gugu, in a moment of weakness, decided against terminating.

And on and on, rationalization after excuse after justification.
Lowell was much, much closer to the truth when she concluded (that along with another book published in 2012)

“Both describe a country that has lost its way, a land in which a repressive state has rendered individuals incapable of making independent moral judgments about political, economic and social behavior and in which women continue to suffer at the hands of reckless male politicians and son-fixated husbands.”

Source: NRLC News