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Thursday, October 24, 2013

Chinese Couple Arrested for Selling Their Baby, Buying iPhone With Proceeds



An unemployed Chinese couple in Shanghai will stand trial for selling their baby for the equivalent of about $2500 and using the proceeds to go on an online shopping spree where they bought an iPhone, fancy gym shoes, and other high-end things.  According to the Telegraph, the couple tried to justify their actions by saying that they were just trying to find a good home for their child where the new parents could afford to get it could get an education.  This may be true, but is belied by the immediate shopping spree. Theoretically, there was the option of legal adoption as well, though that would not have come with an iPhone.


According to The TelegraphProsecutors also allege that the couple attempted to disguise Ms Zhang’s pregnancy in order to hide their crime. In order to explain her bump, neighbours were told she was suffering from a tumour.  

This comes on the heels of the US State Department shutting down international adoptions between the US and Vietnam based on the belief that there was widespread, systematic corruption in Vietnamese adoptions where children were being sold for profit into the country’s adoption system:  As reported in Foreign Policy: The State Department was confident it had discovered systemic nationwide corruption in Vietnam -- a network of adoption agency representatives, village officials, orphanage directors, nurses, hospital administrators, police officers, and government officials who were profiting by paying for, defrauding, coercing, or even simply stealing Vietnamese children from their families to sell them to unsuspecting Americans. And yet, as these documents reveal, U.S. officials in Hanoi did not have the right tools to shut down the infant peddlers while allowing the truly needed adoptions to continue.  (See Article in Foreign Policy http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/09/07/anatomy_of_an_adoption_crisis, for more background). 

Selling children for profit is deplorable, no matter the motive. Selling them for an iPhone is clearly not the type of consumer publicity Apple wants as it tries to build a consumer base in China.

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