I recently saw a movie called Blind Mountain and it talks about a college graduate who was offered a job, but when they took her into a rural area, they just left her there and she coudn’t even escape. She was sold to a rural farmer, because it’s hard for them to get married there. I heard this happens often in China, and it really surprised me, because I didn’t know anything about it.
Here’s a clearer blurb:
Blind Mountain follows young woman, Bai Xuemei, in the early 1990s who attempts to find work to help pay for her college education. In the process, she is drugged, kidnapped and sold as a bride to a villager in the Qinling Mountains of China’s Shaanxi province. Trapped in the fiercely traditional town, the young woman finds that her avenues of escape are all blocked. As she searches for allies, including a young boy, a school teacher and a mailman, she suffers from being raped by her “husband” and continued beatings at the hands of the villagers, her husband, and her husbands’ parents.
Has anyone ever seen this movie? What did you think about it? It saddens me there are so many human rights problems in this world, i.e. North Korea, China, Tibet, etc.
Well, stealing kiddies for sale is actually one area where China’s law is doing quite well. The government are hard up against this practice. But for all out brutailty to your fellow human, there’s lots of tears in China. Try Blind shaft 盲井 (Mang jing). Also based on true events.
[quote]BLIND SHAFT tells the story of two itinerant miners (Song Jinming and Tang Chaoyang) who risk their lives under dangerous working conditions and develop questionable morals in order to survive.
In the dark caves of one of the many illegal Chinese coal mines, Song and Tang murder a co-worker whom they have convinced to pose as Tang’s brother. By forcing the mine’s collapse upon their deceased colleague, and thereby making his death seem accidental, Tang and Song use their colleague’s death to extort money from the mine’s management. Pressured to cover up an accident which they believe to be the result of improper working conditions, the mine’s owners give in to the two workers’ blackmailing.
After leaving with their hush money, Tang and Song hit a nearby town and soon come upon another potential “relative,” this time an innocent 16-year-old boy named Yuan Fengming who has been forced to quit school due to his father’s disappearance. Tang agrees to help Yuan find a job at a coal mine, but only under one condition - he must agree to pretend to be Song’s nephew.[/quote]
I recently saw a documentary on two very poor villages in the mountains of Shaanxi, one where the women far outnumber the men and the other the reverse.
The men in the former village left for better jobs in larger towns so they can support their families, leaving wives and children behind. These men may make it home once every few years.
In the other village, the men far outnumber the women because it is considered to be the poorest of the poor villages in the area; hence, making it an unattractive destination for prospective brides. As a result, one family “bought” a young lady from the big city and tricked her into coming to their village. Once there, there are really no good ways of getting out yourself. The roads are poor and the only mode of transportation is by foot. Surprisingly, when the documentary crew asked if she wanted to leave, she said that of course she wanted to get out intially, but after having lived in the village for six years, she feels she’s settled here and don’t see a need to leave. She was recently able to communicate to her parents by mail and that was good enough for her.
The marriages-by-abduction in Shaanxi and Yunnan had been getting quite a bit of press in China these past few years and the gov’t went on a hunt for those abducted. They did rescue quite a few women but a small number of them refused to leave having made a life (with children) for themselves in those villages.
Following up on HGC’s mention of Blind Shaft, the irony in all of this is that the money to buy these “brides” often came earnings from working in those illegal coal mines.
Also bearing in mind the recent findings of slavery in Chinese brick kilns, how do you suppose all this Chinese to Chinese bastardry compares to say trashing the Summer Palace? I think it’s high time we stood up to the China nationalist with a list of that country’s protracted internal debauchery and make them start wishing we really did colonise them!
No, I’m not joking, but I do thnk it’s kind of funny.
Also bearing in mind the recent findings of slavery in Chinese brick kilns, how do you suppose all this Chinese to Chinese bastardry compares to say trashing the Summer Palace? I think it’s high time we stood up to the China nationalist with a list of that country’s protracted internal debauchery and make them start wishing we really did colonise them!
No, I’m not joking, but I do thnk it’s kind of funny.
HG[/quote]
It’s a common pattern for people to demonize outsiders who abuse natives, but being indifferent to abuses committed by fellow-countrymen. True though China is a more prominent example.
Yeah that’s what the movie I saw was about…it made me so angry! I couldn’t believe that a college-educated woman, for dire need of money, became part of such a horrible scam. I don’t know how the people who tricked her sleep at night, knowing they ruined a family’s life. I bet her family was depending on the kidnapped girl’s income. That is so horrible…How do we stop this kind of thing? It’s outrageous. What solution, what solution…
It’s probably too late to conquer, colonize, and civilize them, so there’s nothing we can really do at this piont. It’s up to the Chinese government. Perhaps draconian measures are necessary. For instance, the government could implement the death penalty for anyone involved in the abductions/imprisonments.
And I know this sounds cruel, but perhaps the victims should not be given the option of staying in the village once the perpetrators have been caught. Allowing them to stay only legitimizes the original crimes.
Forced marriage is a form of slavery. Don’t kid yourselves, modern day slavery is a global problem. Its root cause is economic in nature. The US State Dept. estimates 20,000 to 80,000 will be trafficked into the United States in 2007 (80% will be female; 70% of them will be sold for commercial sex). This number does not include those who are bought and sold inside of the US. There’s also a direct correlation between the wealth of a nation and its slavery trade problem. Even with the tremendous wealth of the US, slavery continues. With China having a much larger and much poorer population, it is not surprising that the slavery estimates for China is pretty bad.
Even within China itself, the “hot spots” for such activities are concentrated in Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Yunnan. Not surprisingly, these are very poor provinces with a good concentration of people.
The short term solution may be harsher penalties, but I believe that will only have some, but limited, effectiveness. Much like the death penalty won’t stop an inner city kid from killing another one for his shoes, draconian laws for slavery will not work. Only economic policies that reduce poverty and close the economic gap between the rich and the poor can truly deliver lasting results.
