when people talk about EATING babies, I start to warm up to the CCPs philosophy of forced sterilizations.
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By that they just mean killing excess babies they could track down, and then they don’t even eat it. What a waste.
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can’t argue with that logic.
but, how sure are you?
about what happens to excess babies or about them not eating it?
Killing female babies has been a thing since the Warring States period, without having the government mandating an one child policy.
From Legalist Han Fei (韓非子)
且父母之於子也，產男則相賀，產女則殺之。此俱出父母之懷衽，然男子受賀，女子殺之者，慮其後便，計之長利也。
Parents often congratulate each other when a boy is born, and kill the baby if it’s a girl. Regardless of the gender, the baby came through the parents’ loving care during pregnancy, but a boy is celebrated, but a girl is killed. It’s about considering usefulness down the road, and the benefit in the long run.
Records of this practice continued through out history. The Song dynasty tried to enact laws to end the practice, but the practice was also recorded in the Ming and Qing dynasties.
So, the CCP didn’t actually facilitate the practice of killing off female babies, they just made it more prevalent with their one child policy.
As for eating babies for fun or for medicinal purposes, there are too many gruesome records of those.
I mean eating people isn’t exactly considered unacceptable behavior. Li Shi-zhen’s Compendium of Materia Medica is considered a triumph in Chinese medicine history, and it has this for an entry:
https://zh.m.wikisource.org/zh-hant/本草綱目/人部#人勢
人勢
【釋名】
陰莖。時珍曰︰人陰莖，非藥物也。陶九成《輟耕錄》載︰杭州沈生犯奸事露，引刀自割其勢，流血經月不合。或令尋所割勢，搗粉酒服，不數日而愈。觀此則下蠶室者，不可不知此法也。故附於此雲。
【主治】
下蠶室，創口不合（時珍）。
I’m not even gonna translate that one.
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Hard to imagine still being alive after that…
Cocktail, anyone?
I imagine the newly fledged eunuchs hanging out together in the warm silkworm room sipping their penis daiquiris
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ya, about eating them. excess babies is fairly well known and established
the eating aspect is more of a curiosity, though I am starting to feel a gagging sensation just discussing it via text…
What exquisitely disturbing images! Almost like a Francis Bacon painting - but felicitously wronger.
Segueing back to the wholesome theme of baby-munching in feudal China, I wonder whether the notorious “baby towers” in which dead and soon-to-be dead babies were deposited were not actually an early example of drive-thru take away?
I tried craion… and sure enough came up with some truly weird images. Like this one of an autofellating butcher-angel
爸爸說我小嬰儿時候大便很可愛，不臭氣。直到我1歲的時候第一次有了固體便便。
I love Forumosa. The only place where a topic about whether Asian babies are cute eventually devolves into a debate of whether baby shit stinks or how tasty a baby is. 
never change
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We are simply discussing the Chinese’s historical view on babies. There are too many descriptions of baby eating in Chinese historical records that I’m comfortable with. There was one dude by the name of Gao Zan (高瓚) by the end of the Sui dynasty who cooked his twin sons to feed his guests and called it the feast of the twins. To one up the host, one of his guest, named Zhuge Ang (諸葛昂) then cooked one of his wives for Gao the next day in return.
These were supposed to be the civilized people…
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I wasn’t criticizing, just found it quite funny how far off topic threads go
How dare you apply your degenerate modern standards to China’s glorious imperial past… 
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O a tyrannical gourmet was Gao —
He served up twin kiddies as the choicest of chow —
His guest Herr Ang
Levelled his gun bang bang:
Zum Nachtisch essen wir Frau!
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The account doesn’t actually say he cooked his own twins. And they were tastily ten, not babies. Zhuge and Gao were baddies who, with poetic justice, ended up getting roasted themselves.
Also not wanting to put a dampener on the Sinophobia that is Forumosa’s style de rigeur, but China’s history of cannibalism hardly makes it unique. Europeans were consuming bits of mummy into the 19th century and Crusaders munched on Mohammedans. Japanese soldiers in WW2 were also known to partake, and not because they were starving. And so on and so forth.
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Did they also name the flesh though? The Chinese named flesh of young woman “tastier than lamb (不羨羊)” and called flesh of young kids as “even the bones are tender (和骨爛)”, and in general referred to human meat as “two legged lamb (兩腳羊)”.
As mentioned in this old thread:
The practice of Han Chinese eating captured Indigenous people because they believe it would keep malaria away could be found as late as 1921 in Japanese records.
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