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This really took a turn at the end. You hear about all this and your reaction is to... support genital mutilations? Am I reading that correctly?

I get the impulse to want to do something, anything, but it is always possible for an ill-conceived plan to make things worse and not even address the original problem. I can't share this in good conscience.

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author

What solution would you suggest? Hmm, that sounded really argumentative. I don't mean it that way. I would really be open to any ideas about anything I can do to change the situation.

Bigger people than me have campaigned for decades for associated laws to be changed, and they've gotten nowhere. I've heard from CCP members themselves that it's deliberate because poor men with nothing to lose doomed to singleness is a much bigger societal problem than a couple thousand kidnap cases a year.

Rescue associations like Baby Come Home can only help children who were abducted and are now adults looking for their original family. In cases where they find grown adult women, they can't actually mount any rescue efforts, because the police consider it a civil case and won't offer any support. And if they try to do it by force, they're the ones breaking the law.

I'm already doing my best drawing attention to the case, but I doubt international condemnation is gonna do much. Not like the international community hasn't been condemning China for year.

No, like, sincerely, I feel very powerless and have no idea what I can do to help the actual victims who are still stuck in these hells right now, except to exploit existing legal loopholes, because it's not like China actually believes in self defense.

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The author could have clarified better, but in the context of the story it seems pretty obvious that the women cutting off men's penises were doing so as retaliation for being abducted, beaten and raped. Which strikes me as a highly effective way to "address the original problem" - to stop someone from raping you!

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Why did you stop posting after this post? Are you okay?

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author

? Um, I've been posting plenty--every day for the past year. Are you not seeing my newest posts for some reason?

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My mistake, Substack's interface is confusing and I was looking at your user profile and not your substack page.

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Ah, I had the same thought. It's just the pinned post, so it shows up on top.

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I had vaguely heard about this story. I wasn't aware the government was involved and lied so much but I'm not surprised

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The government is always involved—you need somebody to issue new IDs for a new identity after all. In a society with so many cameras on every street corner, it’s hard to imagine any abduction that doesn’t have the implicit help of the government

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Unfortunately I can imagine it because it seems to be the recurring tragedy of pervasive surveillance regimes. It's enough surveillance that a government agent with motive can often gather information on one target (guilty or not) and really make that target's life difficult - but not enough to consistently make people safer, because that requires them to consistently care and devote the resources for vigilance. And so the people supposedly trade liberty for security, but get neither.

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This is wild. Who are you? What’s your background?

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I’m from rural Shandong, China, the sort of generational dirt farmer family similar to Fengxian. A big international factory opened up in my village when I was little, and it brought the kind of opportunity to my family that we were able to go overseas when I wad 10. I live in America now, but most of my family is still in China and I visit every year

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