Atrocities in Chinese orphanages: skeletons of children and nauseating smells | News from El Salvador

A decadent room, dark, silent, and filled with an unbearable odor hid a terrible image. Between those four walls there was a wooden bed and on it something that seemed to be a wrapped child. When Kate Blewett, journalist and documentarian, began to unwrap the package and unfold the yellow blanket, horror boiled over.

“He saw a bunch of bones with eyes. Eyes full of scabs, and wide open, in a look of delivery, she empty of any hope. Eyes that illuminated the idea that this little person had never been loved, cradled or comforted. Eyes that knew very well that crying was useless. When he finished removing her clothes, he confirmed it: she was a woman, like almost all the other children in Chinese orphanages. He just moved his head from side to side, making no sound. His emaciated legs and protruding ribs revealed fatal malnutrition. Her name was Mei Ming, which they say means nameless in Chinese, and her uncertain age was around two years old,” says an Infobae publication.

“The rooms of death”, is a creepy documentary that premiered 26 years ago, produced by Lauderdale Productions and broadcast by the British Channel Four. This documentary showed the atrocities that children lived in orphanages in China.

Mei Ming is just one of the many faces that died in that black space, left unfed and uncared for. This little girl had been there for days, alone and just waiting for the kiss of death. He died four days later from starvation in that same room.

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The sad truth was revealed by Kate Blewett, Brian Woods and Peter Hugh, who after a year of hearing rumors about atrocities taking place in orphanages in China decided to travel and document the horror.

Investigators pretended to be workers from North American orphanages, they arrived in the country separately. Each one carried different pieces of cameras, with wide angles and with which they filmed the documentary. They had to avoid being discovered because they knew they were at risk of going to jail, the faces of the people who collaborated were hidden and their names were not revealed. They also did not identify the hospices they visited, but this did not prevent them from recording everything they observed.

Atrocities

On June 12, 1995, the nearly 38-minute film managed to show part of the sad reality of those “discarded” children in China. Investigators' cameras captured dozens of babies strapped: wrists to armrests and ankles to the legs of tall bamboo chairs. Hours and hours passed like this.

The documentary shows a row of chairs with a row of plastic basins located just at the height of the seat, the function was to collect the pee and excrement that fell from the hole in the center.

The babies had their hair cut short, were dressed in unisex clothing, and no one touched or talked to them. In the video you can see a little boy walking through the place, he goes to a baby who is sitting and hits her head hard against hers. So, over and over again, the surprising thing is that neither of them cries or says anything.

Children died in orphanages and no one asked for them, nor did they realize it until days later. An employee reported that a year before the recordings, 20% of the babies had died due to the heat, the summer of that year registered 37 degrees.

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Another of the findings revealed by the documentary was that most of the internees were girls, the minority were boys, and those found had some type of disability.

“Kate wanted to know the sex of the boarding schools. Whenever she could, she would undress them and verify the gender. It was not an easy task, it was very cold and they were covered from head to toe by thick blankets and, in turn, wrapped in various items of clothing. All the ones he could check turned out to be women. The males he found were, instead, children with disabilities."

“In the hospices visited, dirty and starving babies constituted an absolute majority. They were lying in their cribs with bottles that were not held by a mother, or a caregiver, or any human being… Actually, they were leaning on some pile of something. If the teat, by chance, came out of the baby's mouth because he moved, no one was going to take care of putting it back in place. Children crawled or crawled in the corridors, without any hygiene. No adults were seen supervising either. In one sequence, a squatting woman is seen bathing a baby as if it were a rag doll. She shakes him from side to side and, while she is in that position wringing out a towel, she squeezes the naked child between her thigh and her elbow so that he does not land on the frozen floor, ”the Infobae publication detailed.

How did you get to this level of abuse?

To get into context and understand a bit about the origin of the tremendous child abuse and crimes committed in orphanages, it is necessary to go back years and see the Chinese policies that were established to prevent overpopulation and famine.

Hunger and chaos in China came with the economic, social and political plan called the Great Leap Forward, between 1958 and 1961.

The objective of the plan was collectivization, the destruction of private property and a transformation of the traditional agrarian economy towards rapid industrialization. But the formula failed miserably: in that period it is estimated that between 15 and 55 million people died as a result of severe food shortages among Chinese peasants.

It was the worst famine in history. Although around 1961 the population decreased as a result of these deaths, from 1963 to 1966 the authorities resumed some of the measures to control population growth. It was, then, that they began to promote the so-called "late marriages" and managed to lower the birth rate by half.

In 1972 the communist party decided that it was a national priority to limit births, for this reason it began to distribute contraceptives among the inhabitants on a massive scale, they established controls on the number of children that each family could have: urban areas two, rural areas three and four. But the measures did not work.

In 1979 the crucial decision was made, Deng Xiaoping was the one who took the drastic and controversial measure: The one-child policy. No one could father more than one in the entire country, except for ethnic minorities. In this context, the State says when to get married and how many children to have.

Anything could happen to those who disobeyed, from a fine, power cuts to homes, putting the father in jail to ensure that the pregnant woman had an abortion or the woman was sterilized; Newborns were also taken from women or given a lethal injection. They also encouraged denunciation: the neighbors had to denounce if they knew that someone was breaking the law. Terror reigned.

Couples who respected the rules received a special “glorious” certification; they had benefits such as longer maternity leave, a priority housing allowance, and financial assistance.

In 1980 the controls were relaxed and determined that in rural areas if "unfortunately" the first child was a girl or a baby with a disability, it was allowed to have the second. Previous procedure that certifies that all this was rigorously true.

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Since then, disabled or female babies have been discarded. In rural areas it was seen as a misfortune to have a female daughter or a child with a health disorder because strong hands were needed to work in the fields and retirement depended on that only male child.

“Babies who came into the world without meeting the requirements, if they were “lucky” ended up in an orphanage. The rest was discarded. Some were drowned in their own homes; others were thrown into a water course, a sewer, toilets or a dump. At least in the orphanages there was a slim chance of survival, although mortality was very high. According to reports by Human Rights Watch, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, 90% of those housed in these places died. From what has been reported, infanticide and abandonment were two of the disastrous consequences of the one-child policy," the Argentine media outlet read.

This documentary showed only a part of all the disastrous consequences that the Chinese regime's policies had at that time and that to this day continue to take their toll on the Asian giant.

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