Unbelievable...

it's unnerving to think that something this culturally archaic exists side by side with all of the advances we enjoy in this day and age. and then something happens, the veil is lifted and the world glimpses something so horrible, so barbaric that some people flat-out refuse to believe it.

do the chinese devalue females this much? are chinese girls really so worthless? if girls are so easy to discard, then who are all of their precious, bratty "little emperor" sons going to marry when they come of age?

i wish i could adopt all orphaned girls everywhere.

Chinese Police Bust Ring Suspected of Murdering Females to Serve as Brides to Dead Bachelors


BEJING — A ring of gangsters who traded in the bodies of women they murdered, selling them as brides to keep dead bachelors happy in the afterlife, has been arrested in China.

The arrests have exposed a trade that places a higher value on women when they are dead than when they are alive.

Yang Dongyan, 35, was arrested on January 4 in Sha’anxi province as he played cards with his children. In his prison cell, Yang showed little remorse for committing two murders. He told a newspaper, “I just wanted to make money. It’s a quick way to make money. I was arrested too soon otherwise I had planned to do this business a few more times.”

Two accomplices, Liu Shengbao and Hui Haibao, were also arrested, as was Li Longsheng, a self-styled undertaker who traded the bodies to bereaved families.

Zhang Yanjun, chief of police in Yanchuan county, said: “It’s lucky that the case was cleared up in time or we don’t know how many women would have been killed by them. These people thought they had found a short cut to wealth.” Instead, they face the death penalty.

The men preyed on the superstitions of ill-educated farmers eager to ensure that a dead son was happy in the afterlife. It is not uncommon in rural parts of China for a family to seek out the body of a woman who has died to be buried alongside their son after the performance of a marriage ceremony for the deceased pair.

Ancestor worship is a tradition that runs through many aspects of Chinese life. One of the main Chinese festivals is Tomb Sweeping Day, when families visit graves of their forebears to clean them and burn incense. The spirit is believed to live on in the afterlife and at funerals families burn offerings of paper money and models of houses, cars and other little luxuries that the dead may need.Yang chanced upon the trade in dead bodies when he paid 12,000 yuan (£800) for a mentally handicapped woman whose family hoped to marry her off for a price. The trade in women as wives is a common practice in rural China and a woman may be sold several times by intermediaries before meeting her eventual husband.

Yang arranged for the woman to stay in a guesthouse in Yanchuan county where Liu offered him £666 for her. Yang refused, until Liu told him that the woman would be worth much more dead than alive. The next morning the two men set out across the Yellow River to meet “Old Li” in Xixian County, Shanxi province. Old Li agreed to buy the woman’s body for £1,050 and to complete the deal late at night on the Yanshuiguan bridge.

The next day Yang killed the woman and took her body by taxi to the bridge where Li was waiting and handed over £1,000 for her. For his part in the deal, Liu received £300 and Yang came away with a loss of £200 after his expenses.

Back at the guesthouse, Yang told an old acquaintance, Hui, that he had found an easy way to make money. The two men agreed to go into the body business together. Last November they sought out a prostitute they knew in nearby Yan’an — the city where Chairman Mao began his Communist revolution — but she threw them out after they said that they could not afford to pay her £20. They returned the next morning and killed her.

On December 3 they completed a similar body handover with Li on the bridge. This time they made only £530 because the buyer was unhappy with the quality of the body and, after costs, Yang and his two friends each earned £100 on that deal.

Old Li had made a name for himself in Xixian county by selling clothes to outfit the dead and by handing out cards that offered to help families in need of a spirit marriage. They want young and good-looking dead brides for their sons and regard the family of the girl as “in-laws”. Police discovered that Li paid between £530 and £660 for a body and sold it on for as much as £2,300.