How Beijing 1995 threw me off orbit--into another....

 The voices could not be silenced.

I traveled to Beijing as a business woman with an education in economics, who believed that economic freedom was the first of all freedoms. In New York, I had been a volunteer for the Small Business Administration’s women entrepreneurial programs and watched as, in the USA, financial independence gave a woman the courage to leave an abusive marriage and, through Credit Union that lent micro loans, I learned that in an African village, a woman could realize her vision of educating her daughters while her sons grew up no longer view a woman’s role as subservient to a man.

               In Beijing, I led entrepreneurial workshops and participated in economic panels. On my second day, though, I was shocked to my core by accounts of clitoridectomy of tens of millions of Muslim and African women, and Indian “burning of the brides” over family dowry disputes. In the coming days I learned of Chinese gendercide—singling out baby girls for death—and about the way our US justice system betrayed molested children by giving custody to their molesters. I learned of mass rape as a tool of war to break a nation’s spirit, and of how the Japanese Imperial Army captured thousands of girls during WWII as “comfort” sex slaves to its soldiers, yet steadfastly refused to acknowledge this war crime.

               My world was shaken of its illusion that financial independence was the first independence, because I had taken for granted the real first freedom—the freedom from violence against women.

               Back home in New York, I closed my five-city marketing firm, canceled the multi-phone lines, and donated my business suits to charity. In the new silence I let the voices of courageous girls and women fill my head, channel into the tips of my fingers, and come out in the form of novels as I set out on the lonely and treacherous journey alongside one protagonist at a time. The stories were all around me. I now knew that skeletons were hiding in all corners of our society—all over the globe—often in plain sight. In the years it took me to write each novel, I heard the voices of the women in Beijing. Each time I finished a novel, the next one presented itself, taking hold of my head and heart, and compelling me to tell the truth about women’s lives.  

               Each of my five novels to date has a social issue behind it, each has launched my activism in that area, and four out of these five novels has had its seeds planted in Beijing in 1995.

               The voices of Beijing can no longer silence—nor should they.

Talia Carner

New York, July 2020

Published by HarperCollins, Talia Carner is the New York-based award-winning author of five novels and numerous articles and essays. Her historical and psychological suspense novels bring to the forefront indignities and atrocities long ignored. She was the publisher of Savvy Woman magazine and a lecturer at international women’s economic forums. A committed supporter of global human rights, she has keynoted or co-paneled over 350 civic, educational and cultural events, educating her audiences about the social issues behind her books.  www.TaliaCarner.com    

Wholesale Chinese Babies?

The recent news released by the Xinhua Chinese government’s news agency about the rescue of kidnapped children is repeated on the average of once a year. The rescued children are either old enough to be forced into slave labor, or worse, as victims of organ harvesting. In other cases, infant girls are sold to bachelor groups as sexual slaves.

But most disturbing perhaps is a system that has created a lucrative market of selling babies for adoption. Infant boys fetch a high price, but girls, too, are not spared. Besides the profitable foreign adoption industry, baby girls can be sold domestically to Chinese families seeking to raise future brides for their only sons.

The December 2006 announcement by the government of the People’s Republic of China of its tighter guidelines for foreign adoption was explained as the diminishing supply of available babies. The Chinese claimed that they could no longer meet the growing demand from foreigners wishing to adopt.

This supposed shortage contrasted the same government’s documented huge surplus of baby girls. Even stories in the censored Chinese press revealed that hundreds of thousands of them were abandoned—if not aborted in uterus or killed shortly after birth.

UNICEF 2008 study reported 17,374,000 births in China. The one-child policy established in 1979 clashed with the Chinese centuries-old tradition of favoring boys, resulting in a skewed boy-girl ratio: The Chinese government 2008 report, supported by Western sources such as the recent British Medical Journal, established the boy-girl ratio at birth as 124:100 and even higher in some regions. This figure translates to 1.75 million girls “missing” from the ledger for 2008, but fails to include thousands of male and female fetuses aborted by official coercion or family choice. It also ignores infants of later birth order—third, fourth or fifth in their families—who perish in the first week of life, but whose numbers cancels boys’ and girls’ deaths as reported in the 2004 issue of International Family Planning Perspective.

The foreign adoption, begun after the huge outcry of the mid 90s’ exposure of mass infanticide in Chinese orphanages, reared the corruption’s ugly head. Corruption in China is so entrenched that jobs are often being purchased openly because of the unofficial side benefits. Between 1997 and 2006, the flow of over 100 million dollars paid directly to orphanage directors has made keeping the fresh supply of “suitable” babies a lucrative business. According to one report, only 10% of the money Western adoptive parents leave behind services the babies in the institutions from which these babies are adopted. When the $3,000 to $5,000 per child is paid in crisp $100 bills in a country where the average monthly wage is about $50, the incentive is clear. Directors of orphanages designated for foreign adoptions have been tempted to purchase babies for $150. In turn, the operators supplying them have been buying babies from desperate parents for as low as $8. Or, as it has been reported, they just kidnap them.

The government of the People’s Republic of China is interested in China’s image in the world, and from its perspective, the mass availability of its infants doesn't look good. Rather than deal with the hundreds of thousands of abandoned babies, it denies their existence, and hence, there is “a shortage.”

Cracking down on babies- and children-trafficking rings and rescue between three to sixty children in a sea of millions of them missing—and then releasing this information to the media—helps the People’s Republic of China “save face.”

My novel, CHINA DOLL, the riveting rescue of a Chinese baby, was the platform for my 2007 presentation at the U.N. about infanticide (Gendercide) in China.