Word: ruralism
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Their marriage, and others of cousins and even siblings, is the latest consequence of China's profound shortage of females. For two decades, the government has tried to control population by limiting most rural families to one child, two if the first is a girl. Because boys are prized in rural areas--they can work the land and give more support to their families--this has led many couples to abort female fetuses, kill newborn daughters or neglect them to death. The result: China, according to the World Health Organization, is short 50 million females. The first wave of children...
...shortfall was 500,000. Some of that owes to parents giving up daughters for adoption without registering their birth. But population experts at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing estimate that up to one-third of the girls are missing because of gender-based abortions. Rural Chinese women also tend to breast-feed girls for shorter periods, providing less hope for survival. Chinese demographers estimate that in some rural areas, 80% of children from ages 5 to 10 are boys...
Last fall Golden LEAF (Long-Term Economic Advancement Foundation), a nonprofit organization established by the North Carolina General Assembly to distribute half the state's settlement revenues, spent $15,000 for a tobacco-history video. Perhaps more egregiously, it granted rural Nash County $400,000 for water and sewer engineering to attract a tobacco-processing plant. "The money is going in a circle here," says Don Carrington, vice president of the John Locke Foundation, a state-government watchdog group...
...Devils on the Doorstep, Jiang's second and, to date, last foray as a director, is set during the Japanese occupation of a rural Chinese village. It was shot in black-and-white with the stark sensibilities of Akira Kurosawa. It tells the tale of a hapless farmer who has two Japanese prisoners dumped on him by the Chinese resistance. He is ordered to interrogate them and deliver a report or face deadly consequences. Caught between fear of the rebels and fear of the Japanese, the farmer hatches a plan of self-preservation that proves disastrous. All the characters display...
...Prime Number 900 million rural Chinese will be covered by Beijing's ambitious health-care program, though the goal won't be met until 2010 at the earliest...