The Sky is Falling

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Villagers say they've had little help from the police, and they suspect local officials may be complicit in the abductions. After an elderly activist named Zhang Xisheng spoke to the local media about the epidemic of missing girls, he was suddenly jailed and is now serving a seven-year sentence for subverting state security. Despite villagers drawing up a list of likely traffickers, only one suspected kidnapper has been arrested—and he was later released. In Hu Lixia's one exchange with a local police officer, she says he dismissed her entreaties for justice and then asked her to service him. When Hu's father spoke to the local press about the incident earlier this year, officials from both the provincial- and national-level security bureaus showed up at his door, promising violence if he talked again. Yet when contacted about the kidnappings, a local police spokesperson at first professed no knowledge of the case, then added that it was too sensitive to talk about. Like other locals, Zhou Ruwen, a farmer whose granddaughter was abducted, claims cops turn a blind eye because they've been paid off by traffickers: "The police don't make money if they stop the kidnappers," says Zhou. "They only make money if the kidnapping continues. We have to accept that we will keep losing girls from our homes."

But even the girls who have been able to stay at home are losing out. One of Mao's proudest accomplishments was increasing the number of girls in school. A century ago, barely 2% of women were literate. By the 1990s, village-committee leaders had seen to it that most girls had attended at least a few years of grade school. But over the past decade, China's cash-strapped Education Ministry has started allowing schools to increase their fees to make up for financial shortfalls. In some rural school districts, the fees are half a peasant's yearly income. The first ones to drop out, naturally, are girls whose families cling to the feudal notion that only boys need an education. Last year in rural areas, girls were 11 times more likely than boys to drop out of primary school. Unsurprisingly, there are also fewer women going to college: since 1995, the number of female university students has declined every year, to one-third of the student body today, according to the State Education Commission.

Yang Li was a fifth-grade bookworm who was always reading ahead of her class in the mountains of Jiangxi province. True, the kids were often forced to make fireworks during class time, but at least she was getting in a little learning. Then her brother stopped sending money from his job as a construction worker, so Yang had to drop out of school. She had been one of only two girls left in her class of 30-odd kids. Now, Yang lives in the teeming southern metropolis of Guangzhou, selling roses for a living. The 14-year-old shares a cramped eight-square-meter room with nine other girls from Yangfang village who pool their earnings for rent. As the oldest, Yang cooks turnip rice for the younger ones and dispenses hugs to the lonely new arrivals. In a way, they're lucky: a worker who helps care for Guangzhou's homeless estimates that two-thirds of the city's 10,000-plus street children are girls.

Last year, Yang's 11-year-old sister arrived to start work in the big city, but Yang wasn't around to greet her. The day before, she had been arrested for loitering and was dumped in a cell with drug dealers and other miscreants. "To make it less scary, I closed my eyes and thought of the happy endings in books I read in school," says Yang. "But I don't know if I will have a happy ending or not." For many women in China, happy endings are becoming ever harder to find.