We've been looking at China, the county's new requirements for adoption, and the idea that they're running out of adoptable children.

In addition to China wanting to give the impression that all is so well within their vast borders that very few children are in need of families, this is also a country with a population of 1.3+ billion people with an average annual per capita rural income of US $ 356, that by the year 2025 will have 40 million adult bachelors for whom no wives will exist, but that continues to consider girl babies not only less a blessing than boys, but a regrettable burden.

Given the present trend, there's no question that eventually girls will be at a premium in China, although that's no guarantee that they will be valued for themselves and not considered commodities. An increase in 'bride price', no matter how substantial, does most often not translate to a better life for the bride. In fact, it often brings just the opposite, as everyone in on the deal is going to go for the most bang for the buck ... so to speak. Pity the poor girl who has gone to the highest bidder, bringing a small ... or perhaps even not so small ... fortune to her family, but isn't able to start popping out babies right away, or has sick babies that fail to thrive, or has the unmitigated gall to go and get herself ill.

Although it sounds a lot, but the figure of 12,000 that gets tossed about as the number of abandoned girl babies adopted out of China per year is nothing more than a one grain of rice in an acre of paddy field.

Brian Stuy himself reports in a blog from May that Jiangxi Province, the area providing the most children for international adoption in China, had only 67.6 children per million inhabitants in 2005, while others had only 13.

If this sounds like I'm refuting my own point about there being more adoptable kids that we're being led to believe, keep in mind that the 2004 population from Jiangxi was almost 43 million, which would bring the official number of abandoned children for that one province to almost 3,000. There are twenty-two provinces in China, five special administrative regions and four municipalities, and you can bet that all contribute to the populations of orphanages.

I would love to believe that China is jumping ahead in human rights, in development that cares for people, in building a country in which citizens have hope and health and happiness available, and where all children are cherished. I'm afraid, however, that that China seems a very long way off.

In the meantime, the world has the real China. The China that, amongst many other practices questionable under any perspective that includes the well-being of humans, supports genocide in Sudan because the instability makes for less competition and keeps other investors out.

This China, the China that's building at an amazing rate, has neither the time nor the inclination to put the needs of its millions of children at the top of any agenda. There do, however, expend a whole lot of energy constructing an image they would like the rest of the world to accept as fact.

One interesting aside to the pockets of new affluence that are very real in China? People are getting fat.