Father tried to kill daughter

Press, 14 December 1985, Page 11

Father tried to kill daughter

NZPA-Reuter Peking China is spotlighting a father’s attempted murder of his three-month-old daughter in a fresh drive to ignite public opinion against female infanticide. - The official national “China Health News” reports the case of a carpenter, Guo Shiqing, who wanted to get rid of the baby? girl so his wife could try to have a son. Guo had tried to kill his babyi Guo Hong, in October by sticking pins and bamboo slivers into her head, stomach and buttocks, the paper said. She is still in hospital, where doctors are trying to remove a pin from her

; head. i Thousands of people and • hundreds of firms and I offices had written demand- • ing harsh punishment for ;' Guo, the paper said. - - Foreign diplomats said that giving publicity to individual cases was a common method for the Government to focus concern on more widespread problems. Chinese officials say that female infanticide is now very rare and confined to remote villages, where, they say, it is the result of an age-old attitude and not the one-child policy imposed in 1979. But Guo, now being held up as an example of the

problem, is a young urban worker in the city of Kaifeng, central China, who tried to dodge the policy. The paper reported that 10 days after the baby was born, in July, Guo told his wife: “Let’s give her away, then we can have a boy in the future.” A few months after his wife walked out on him to live with her mother, Guo visited their house and tried to kill the child. “This case shows that the mentality which ‘honours males and despises females’ is deeply rooted in the minds of a minority, especially some men,” the paper said in a commentary. “This

male chauvinist mentality kills people. “Most people cannot tolerate the phenomenon of looking down on girls and killing them,” it said, calling for improved family-plan-ning propaganda aimed at men.

The Chinese Government says that its policy limiting most couples to only one child is vital for economic development. Some conservative groups in the United States have blamed China’s population policy for)what they say is a recent increase in coerced abortions and female infanticide. The Chinese Government denies that.