(Yesterday ... actually still today in some parts of the world ... 27 January, has been designated by the UN as Holocaust Memorial Day.

I won't use up this space to rant over the fact that genocide is happening at this very moment while the UN scratches its collective butt and tries to come up with yet another snappy slogan instead of doing anything that would stop mass killings and horrendous suffering, but I will publish a blog I've been working on for a while.)

Fellow blogger, Grant, over on the China Adoption Blog posted the other day a reaction to my blog on China's changing adoption rules and the country's claim that they're running out of orphans, mentioning that he doesn't, "exactly buy the idea of so many girls disappearing" and suggesting other reasons for the demographic imbalance that's reported to have China now having a population that skews so far to the male that millions of men are going to have more than just problems getting a date.

This had me thinking, and reading, once again about my original post and wondering if I'm too quick to assume the worst ... the worst being female infanticide.

I went to Brian Stuy's blog that Grant inserted a link for, where he writes that the idea that it's a shortage of 'paper-ready' children at issue is disproved by the process itself. He then cites his take on the Hague and its implied impact on Chinese adoptions as support.

Running on the assumption that all is as it appears in China is further out on a limb that I'm willing to scramble, especially when I find items like this, published as a tag to a disturbing excerpt from the South China Morning Post in 1995.

An earlier article, published in 1993, had led to a British TV crew filming The Dying Rooms in southern China. The Chinese Embassy in London responded to the film with a statement whose final paragraph read: "The so-called 'dying rooms' do not exist in China at all. Our investigations show that those reports are vicious fabrications made out of ulterior motives. The contemptible lie about China's welfare work cannot but arouse the indignation of the Chinese people, especially the great numbers of social workers who are working hard for children's welfare."

Continued ...