China Works to Avoid New Rise in Infanticide

Infanticide is known to have been used in China for centuries as a means of family control, if not fertility control. In the early days of the one-child policy, before the advent of sex-selective abortion (not legal, but done nonetheless), it was a way for parents to deal with the unwanted birth a daughter. According to CNN, there seems now to be a new threat to children in China--being abandoned by your parents if you are disabled. The government has responded with "baby hatches," which are places where parents can leave their children, so that they will be taken care of by the state. This hearkens back to practices of the Catholic Church in 19th century Italy, designed then as well to save unwanted children.

The first pilot hatch was introduced in 2011. Now there are 32 across the country, according to the official Xinhua news agency. "We had to find a more humane way to take in abandoned babies," said Dr. Wang Zhenyao, one of the founders for China's child welfare policy and a retired Ministry of Civil Affairs official. "In reality, children were being thrown into trash cans, on the side of roads, in front of hospitals, or in front of the Ministry of Civil Affairs so we had to standardize it and regulate it."

According to UNICEF, there were around 712,000 orphans in China in 2010, but child welfare groups believe that the number could be in the millions if you account for children in non-government orphanages and foster homes. Unlike in the 1980s and 90s, when most abandoned babies were girls, now most suffer from a range of disabilities and medical conditions, such as cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, congenital heart disease, club feet and cleft lips.

In a country with no welfare program to help parents with disabled children, and where the one-child policy dictates that this may well be the parents' only child, some parents are obviously driven to extreme measures. This is a reminder, yet again, that the one-child policy has many unintended human rights consequences.

Urbanization Seems to Have Lowered Suicide Rates in China

Urban living is a recent phenomenon in human history and so there is still a lot of nostalgia for life in rural villages. Generally, though, the rural nostalgia is like an urban legend--it really wasn't like that. Over the years I have had fewer and fewer students who say they grew up in rural areas, but I don't remember even one of them ever preferring that life to being in the city. For this reason, I was less surprised than was this week's Economist about the news of a decline in China's suicide rate.

IN THE 1990s China had one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Young rural women in particular were killing themselves at an alarming rate. In recent years, however, China’s suicides have declined to among the lowest rates in the world.

In 2002 the Lancet, a British medical journal, said there were 23.2 suicides per 100,000 people annually from 1995 to 1999. This year a report by a group of researchers from the University of Hong Kong found that had declined to an average annual rate of 9.8 per 100,000 for the years 2009-11, a 58% drop.

The most dramatic shift has been in the figures for rural women under 35. Their suicide rate appears to have dropped by as much as 90%.

And why? Because life for young rural women was miserable.

Two intertwined social forces are driving the reduction: migration and the rise of an urban middle class. Moving to the cities to work, even if to be treated as second-class citizens when they get there, has been the salvation of many rural young women, liberating them from parental pressures, bad marriages, overbearing mothers-in-law and other stresses of poor, rural life. Migrants have also distanced themselves from the easiest form of rural suicide, swallowing pesticides, the chosen method in nearly 60% of rural cases, and often done impulsively. The reduction in toxicity of pesticides has helped as well.

Although the Economist contrasts these patterns with the theories of French sociologist Émile Durkheim in the 19th century, more recent research shows that beyond a few demographic regularities, patterns of suicide tend to be culturally variable. One to the regularities, however, is that suicide rates are highest among teens and the elderly. China has increasingly fewer teens and increasingly more older people, so we can anticipate a future rise in suicide rates in China, as the Economist does point out:

The urbanisation and atomisation of the extended family, which led to a decline in suicides among younger generations, have left the elderly with fewer caretakers in the countryside and with few familiar faces in apartment blocks in the cities. The one-child policy has compounded this effect and will only make the burden heavier for the elderly and their children, just as the stresses of modern life are becoming more pronounced. Twenty years from now, the story of China’s suicide rate could be grimmer than it is today. But rates seem unlikely to return to the levels of the 1990s.

We Can Expect More Iraqi Chaldean Refugees in the US

For the first three years after the passage of the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act (2008-2010), there were more refugees from Iraq arriving in the US than from any other country. Since then, Burma and Bhutan have generated more refugees into the US than Iraq, but that may be about to change as a result of the ISIS offensive in Iraq. Letta Taylor, writing for CNN, reminds us that as one the numerically smallest minority groups in Iraq, the Chaldean Christian population is being seriously squeezed. 

"The country will be divided, it is clear,” Sako [Chaldean patriarch Louis Sako, the leader of Iraqi Christians] said, referring to proposals to carve up Iraq into three separate political entities for Sunni, Shia, and Kurds. “Where does that leave the Christians?"

The answer seems to be that "leaving" is the option that most Christians are taking. Foreign Policy notes that:

In 2003, it was estimated that some 1.5 million Iraqis were Christians, about 5 percent of the population. Since then, the overwhelming majority has reacted to widening sectarian conflict and a series of terrorist attacks by leaving the country.

Emil Shimoun Nona, the archbishop of the Chaldean Catholics of Mosul, has told news agencies that the few Christians remaining in the city prior to the ISIS invasion have abandoned the city. Since the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003, he estimates, Mosul's Christian population dwindled from 35,000 to some 3,000. "Now there is no one left," he said. Most of them have joined the estimated 500,000 refugees who have fled the ISIS advance; many of the Christians, including the archbishop, have opted for the relative security of Iraqi Kurdistan.

For their sake, we can hope that most of them will find refuge and safety in Kurdistan, but this renewed violence will almost certainly increase the number of refugee applications to the US among Iraqi Christians, who already comprise more than 40 percent of all Iraqi-origin people currently living in the US. A disproportionate share of them will almost certainly follow the previous arrivals to Michigan and California.

World Cup Offers its Migration Lessons

If you've watched this or any previous FIFA World Cup, you know that players on many, if not most, national teams, actually live and play professionally in some other country than their national team. This is especially true for the American team since the best professional teams are outside the US. This is true, for example, of Jozy Altidore of the US team, whose parents are migrants to the US from Haiti, and although he was born and raised in the US, he plays professionally in the UK. It turns out that there are also important migration lessons from the host nation Brazil, as pointed out on "All Things Considered" today on NPR.

Right now, we're going to head into two Brazilian neighborhoods. Since the Portuguese landed in the 1500, successive waves of people from all over the world have landed on Brazil's shores. The Italian and Japanese communities are two of the strongest. And as luck would have it, both Japan and Italy were playing in the World Cup on the same day this week. NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro set out in Sao Paulo to check out how fans from very different backgrounds were celebrating.

Italians started coming to Brazil during the late 1800s when the home country was riven with the wars of unification. Many went into agriculture, and the Brazilian government gave some land grants. Successive waves joined them, and now they're one of the biggest European ethnic groups here.

The first ship of Japanese came to Brazil in 1908. The Japanese government was facing overpopulation and encouraged people to move overseas. They were used as cheap labor here in agriculture. Later, during World War II, it was forbidden to even speak Japanese, as Brazil was on the side of the Allies.

More Japanese immigrants moved here at the end of the war. These days, Japanese culture in Brazil is widely celebrated, adding one more facet to this complicated country. And the fact is that almost everyone everywhere here told me the same thing. It didn't matter where their fore-bearers had come from, the team they really want to win the World Cup is Brazil.

Since the US obviously is a nation of immigrants, the "split" loyalties are bound to be numerous, but my sense is that here, too, everyone wants the American team to win, no matter what their migration roots. Of course, the US lost to Germany today, which would seem like a bad thing, but we're moving on anyway, which is a good thing. This is clearly why soccer is the "beautiful game."

Youth Bulge Going to Waste in Gaza

Youth bulges can be used for good or evil, as Debbie Fugate and I have pointed out. But sometimes it is just wasted. That is what seems to be happening in the Palestinian territory of Gaza, according to a report by al-Monitor.

According to a report by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 30,000 students graduate each year from Palestinian institutions of higher learning. The bureau and a Sharek Youth Forum report indicate that people between 15 and 29 years of age constitute 29.9% of the total population of 4.42 million in Palestine. The unemployment rate among graduates was 52.5% in the first quarter of 2013, and 37% of graduates are economically active. The report also showed a positive correlation between the rise in education levels and the increase in the unemployment rate.

The feelings of frustration among young people are hard to escape, with so many remaining pessimistic about the future of the Gaza Strip despite the reconciliation deal. Mohammad Mansour and Ousid al-Masri, both 18, have both recently graduated from an American school and are waiting for an opportunity to travel and study at Istanbul University. The two young men agreed that they would leave Gaza City, which they consider a city that has chased its youth away. Sitting on the edge of a fountain in a park, they said, “The new government will be no different than former governments in ignoring us and the youth."

This is exactly the opposite direction that things should be going. A better educated workforce should promote economic development, rather than produce more unemployment and discouragement. Of course, this was the same exact problem that Egypt faced and which helped to promote the Arab Spring--although that hasn't worked out as well as expected....