[Author's note: Emily thinks this whole topic isn't even worth posting on because it is so incredibly stupid, and the idea that anyone would believe that Chinese people eat babies is a testament to the gullibility of the netizens of the world. However, too many people apparently seem to believe it (if our incoming hits stats are any indication), so we'll try to debunk this fallacy once and for all. Here begins the last baby soup post.]

A couple of weeks ago the urban myth (and I hesitate to use such an innocuous term) that Chinese people eat babies was reborn. This time, it was run by a WeeklyWorldNews-esque rag out of Taiwan called Next Weekly. The story got picked up by the pro-FG, anti-government muck machine, The Epoch Times. Then Jill Stanek, an anti-abortion activist, reported it on her website. The article was even reported on in ESWN [#037] because it led to Next Weekly’s article being classified as obscene.

Jill Stanek had discovered a video of stills. They were the same pictures we linked to in our last post on the topic. We’re not going to relink them here. You can find them at corkscrew-balloon (naughty) or lolnigga (pornographic).

The resurrection of the story has led to an increase in traffic to our post on urban myths, Korean Fan Death and Baby Soup. One reader even branded me pretentious and accused me of ethnocentricity for my unwillingness to believe that Chinese eat babies. If that’s what has brought YOU here, know that it’s outcome I’m pleased with, as I have the opportunity to address the absurdity of the notion that anybody is feasting on fetus.

Obviously, I can’t state with certainty that the photos themselves have been doctored, despite the jpeg fuzziness around the edges of the fetus. Or the fact that the final image in the complete series appears several shades darker and with more developed facial features than the other stills. Or the fact that half of the shots are being obscured by agitated water.

No, I can’t prove that the manikin in the images was photoshopped…er…gimped in. I also can’t prove it’s a doll, though that’s what happened last time. But I can assure you that if that fetus really was boiled up into a soup, the whole gig was done to shock you. And in the case of Jill Staneks of the world, it’s worked. By the way, am I the only person who thinks it laughably ironic that this myth is perpetuated by outraged Christians like Jill Stanek and John W. Whitehead? Why so surprised by cannibalism, my too-delicate co-religionists? Our religion is predicated on eating human flesh. Literally.

So supposing they’re real, why were they made? Is some chef putting together a cookbook of traditional baby eating cuisine? If so, where can I buy a copy? They’re pretty clearly staged for that purpose. For those “pouring liquids into a basin” shots, someone would have had to look down over the chef’s shoulder to take the picture. And the knife is placed just so for maximum effect. There are multiple washing shots; is the chef trying to tell the budding baby boiler cookbook readers that babies are really, really dirty?

And if there is no cookbook forthcoming, did somebody talk his way into the kitchen and ask to take some pictures? If even reporting this dreck as true will get you slapped with obscenity charges, just think what actually doing it would result in. What chef is going to be willing to do that for the cameras? What hungry customer is going to want a step-by-step photo essay of it? I know, back in the day, when Emily and I were running a meth lab in our Washington, DC basement, we were always pretty suspicious whenever clients wanted to bring their Nikons into the cook room.

And if you did take these photos, why would you release them to the public? That’s taking quite a risk. If you wanted to call attention to it as an independent, civic-minded citizen who just can’t put up with the local restaurants boiling babies, why not put your name on it? Or are you working undercover, trying to bust up the Chinese baby eating underground by ordering more and more baby soup and carefully documenting the recipe which you then leak to the world-at-large via free porn sites? Brilliant, sir! Well played! They’ll never suspect!

And then there is the story. Gilley’s article from 1995 had one doctor in Shenzhen giving the stuff away for free and private dealers selling foeti for as much as HK $300. It was also a very secretive business.

When a Ms. Yang, the head nurse, was asked for fetuses, she looked anxious and asked other staff to leave. After closing the door, she asked the undercover buyer in a low voice: “Where did you (get to) know that we sell fetuses?”
The reporter answered: “A doctor friend in Hong Kong told me.”
“Who? What is his/her name?”
The reporter was not prepared for this line of questioning and could not come up with a name. Yang told him that fetuses were only for sale within the hospital, and were not for public purchase.

How things have changed! According to the recent Next Weekly excerpt at ESWN, nowadays fetus is so popular that you have to wait in line to get it.

Our special correspondent begged Sister Lau to go to witness the occasion. Sister Lau said, “Nowadays everybody has enough money to pay. But the supply is controlled by the hospital and you have to get in line. Fortunately, I have relatives working there and she will put some good stuff aside for me.” The good stuff refers to older fetuses which have more flesh; furthermore, males are better stuff than females.
One month later, Sister Lau was told that the merchandise had arrived and frozen in the icebox. So the special correspondent went to Liaoning with Sister Lau and they proceeded to the place of the cook, who is a rural woman experienced in the process. When they got there, the cook took out a small paper box which contained some frozen meat. When the wrapping was removed, a 30cm long baby fetus with eyes closed appeared. The cook then defrosted the fetus under running water while murmuring: “The body is big. It seemed to five or six months old …” Then she exclaimed: “Oh, it’s a boy. It’s a boy. That is rare.” Sister Lau explained: “We got this because of the hospital contact. Otherwise, you cannot buy this with any amount of money. The mother of this baby is a university student who was forced to abort by the school.”

BOOM! Can you hear the crash of several notions intended to shock you smashing each other into implausibility? Let’s enumerate the assumptions.

1. Women can only have one child and the government forces women to have abortions if they already have a child.

2. Schools force abortions of co-eds.

3. Most aborted foeti are female – presumably because married couples want to have a boy and use ultrasounds to determine the gender in order to abort girls.

4. Male aborted foeti are remarkably rare.

5. A five to six month old aborted fetus is also uncommon.

THERE IS NO WAY THAT ALL OF THE ABOVE CAN BE TRUE. If you don’t recognize that, stare at those assumptions again until you do.

Population is a tricky thing in China. By one account the national census’ margin of error is larger than the entire population of France. Any estimate you read of the number abortions in China was probably made using the Dartboard Method. What of the babies who make it to term? How do they affect the supply of baby soup?

Recently, the PRC raised the bar for foreigners looking to adopt babies born in China. We japed it in our post “Single Asian Female Seeks Spanking”. One editorial in the New York Times suggested that the Chinese government is embarrassed by its citizens’ unwillingness or inability to adopt. It speculates that the baby supply is being cut off from the West, and all of those unadopted children, mostly girls, will be raised in orphanages run by the state. Maybe. But this Time magazine article from 2001 suggests something different. It’s a trade in underground children that is causing a baby scarcity. Richer Chinese living on the eastern seaboard are looking to find newborns without jumping through the bureaucratic hoops of the adoption process. According to the article:

[Women], from the most desperately poor villages, have turned into full-time baby machines, squeezing out children-for-sale in the shadows of their dirt-floor shacks. “Before, we made money by raising pigs,” says a 23-year-old woman who sold two children just days after they were born. “But it takes a year to raise a pig and it’s expensive to feed. A baby takes only nine months and doesn’t cost any money.” …Girls, two-week-old bundles with shocks of black hair, cost $25 each. Boys, traditionally favored, sell for $50… The babies spend a few weeks in makeshift foster homes as the smugglers scour the mountains for enough children to take to market… After the gangs gather enough babies, they take them to villages like Chicken Street, Cow Street or Pig Street. There, experienced smugglers pick through the day’s offerings: babies with high noses and long earlobes are the most prized, while those with small eyes and dark skin sell for less. According to a statement made by an arrested gang member last year, the smugglers pay about $180 for a girl and $290 for a boy…New parents spend up to $500 for their illegal child, a markup of at least 900% from the original price.

Now, I’m VERY dubious of most of the claims in the Time Magazine article, but it is - on its worst day - still a more credible source than Next Magazine or the Epoch Times.

At $25 a pop, selling a baby hardly seems like a profitable institution. But when you consider that, according to that bastion of truthiness – The World Bank, 150 million Chinese live on less than $1 a day, $25 seems like a lot. Whether you believe value is created by demand or by labor [disclosure: all puns intended], live babies must be more expensive than foeti, right? If that’s the case, the version of the story at this website is clearly false, as it sets the price at 3,000 RMB - significantly more than the 200 RMB than the Time magazine women are getting for their living infants. The Chinese are nothing if not industrious when it comes to running a side business. If the markup on fetus for soup was that high, those women wouldn’t bother carrying to full term.

So, for a moment, let’s assume that a foetus costs less than $25 (200 RMB). 200 RMB might not be loose change, but it is certainly affordable. Sister Lau’s claim, “you cannot buy this with any amount of money” wouldn’t make any sense. In addition, it would be absurd to believe that a hospital can control the supply of aborted fetuses while women whelp paychecks “in the shadows of their dirt floor shacks.”

So 1. Next Weekly is wrong, or 2. Time Magazine is wrong, or (as I suspect) 3. both are wrong.

Another giveaway that the stories are bogus: the only person actually witnessing the eating or trade in fetus goes unnamed. In Gilley’s story it was “reporters from EastWeek - a sister publication”. In the most recent version, the eyewitness to the baby eating is listed as “our special correspondent”.

Other people’s stupidity gives me a headache. I wonder what the traditional Chinese medicinal cure for that is.

When you get right down to it, most Chinese people don’t seem to have opinions regarding human gestation that are very different from most pro-choice Americans I know. Here’s the WHO on the subject:

The Chinese belief is that human life begins with birth, not the instance when the sperm penetrates the ovum; thus a human embryo or fetus has not become a person yet, although they should enjoy certain respect, such as that afforded a human corpse.

Have a little faith in the scientific community. If there were baby-eating going on in China, there would be a constant stream of articles about it in every anthropologically-minded, peer-reviewed journal in the world. You wouldn’t have to read about it on peer-see.com.

OK. That’s it. That’s all I want to do. Obviously, I can’t prove a negative. Fortunately, I don’t have to. I don’t have to prove that there has never been a baby eater in China (in fact, I give an example of it at the end of this post.) All I’m saying is that it doesn’t happen now. People don’t stand in line at hospitals waiting to get the morning’s supply of aborted foeti. If it were as common as the reports make out, I’d at least know somebody who knows somebody, and I don’t. Believe me, I’ve asked.

And even if…IF…some nutcase had eaten a human embryo or fetus to make her skin silkier (or save her nephew’s life), that still wouldn’t mean Chinese people eat babies. Hell, even if 100 people of the 1.3 billion had boiled up some fetus soup, it still wouldn’t be as common as cannibalism in the United States. Whether due to starvation (Donner Party) or psychosis (Dahmer), America has a healthy history of people eatin’ people.

I haven’t met a Chinese who has asked me how it tastes.

This year is the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, the first successful (insofar as it survived) English colony in what is now the United States. George Percy, President of the Jamestown council, wrote the following account of one of the most heinous acts that occurred during the famine there:

And now famin begineinge to Looke gastely and pale in every face thatt notheinge was spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe those things wch seame incredible As to digge up dead corpses outt of graves and to eate them and some have Licked upp the Bloode wch hathe fallen from their weake fellowes And amongste the reste this was moste Lamentable Thatt one of our Colline murdered his wyfe Ripped the childe outt of her woambe and threw itt into the River and after chopped the Mother in pieces and salted her for his foode The same not beinge discovered before he had eaten Pte thereof

-from George Percy, A Trewe Relacyon…

So there you go; if there’s one thing you can say about cannibals in the West, at least they don’t eat fetuses. Right?

In country, it’s a different matter. The following ghastly account is from Hong Kong, 1913.

Years ago I had for dinner a big kind of lizard called an iguana, with his head and tail cut off; he was boiled whole in a big pot, and when he was dished up lying on his back with his little arms and legs sticking up he looked exactly like a baby, and when we ate him he tasted just like one, too!

You know what a baby would taste like, don’t you ? Very soft chicken flavoured with violet powder-that’s what my iguana tasted like.

That mouthwatering morsel was written by Sir Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the World Scout Movement, Chief Scout of the World.

There’s your proof. It’s not the Chinese - it’s the Boy Scouts that eat babies.

(Update 2008: Indisputable photo evidence of baby-eating in China. A peer-see exclusive!)