When one attempts to forcibly remake society, it’s almost impossible to guess how the Law of Unintended Consequences is going to cause things to go awry. But it will always strike somehow:
These and thousands of other children stolen from the teeming industrial hubs of China’s Pearl River Delta have never been recovered by their parents or by the police. But anecdotal evidence suggests the children do not travel far. Although some are sold to buyers in Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam, most of the boys are purchased domestically by families desperate for a male heir, parents of abducted children and some law enforcement officials who have investigated the matter say.
I don’t have much that’s positive to say about the Chinese Communists. But I rather doubt that they anticipated, or desired, mass kidnappings as a result of their literally inhuman One Child policy. Since we’ve already seen some bizarre behavior of this type in the West, particularly among women, it will be interesting to see if children become more of a commodity as they become less common outside the religious communities.