“I am convinced that in the province of Koang Tong the custom of drowning and suffocating the girl babies is common and that the rich as well as the poor are guilty. The poor pretend that, not having sufficient means of existence, they are not able to bring up their female children, while the rich declare that there is no object in bringing up children that occupy a purely ornamental position in the household.”
Ki then goes on to philosophize on the enormity of the crime and the folly of these reasons. Never, perhaps, did any single individual in China devote himself with more energy to trying to eradicate this evil than did Ki, both by verbal castigation of those who were guilty of the crime and by appealing to the sympathies of the inhabitants of his province. He distributed copies of the works of Ouang Ouan. He sent out advice and instructions to his subordinates that infanticide must be prevented; he enlisted the nobles and educated people in this fight and reiterated that those who were guilty of the crime would be seized, judged, and punished with sixty blows and a year’s banishment as the law directed. Throughout the province his efforts were regarded as extremely interesting, his proclamations as delightful literature, and there was no decrease in the number of murders.
In 1845 the Emperor Tao Kang himself published an edict condemning the practice and declaring that the extreme punishment permitted by the law would be meted out to the guilty. The edict had no effect.
In 1848 another endeavour was made by the chief magistrate of Canton, acting on the initiative of Ki, to eliminate the evil in that particular city, but neither in Canton or in the province of Koang Tong was there a cessation of the evil for eighteen years afterward. The Emperor Kong Tche listed both Canton and the province as among the places where infanticide was most common.
During the reign of Hien Fong, 1851–1862, little progress was made. In many parts of China during the following reign, that of Tong Tche, 1862–1875, attempts were made to check the evil.
During the minority of the Emperor the two Empress Regents issued a proclamation in which they appealed to the “nobles and rich of all villages to contribute for the erection of orphanages where there might be received abandoned children so that the poor will not be able to justify their abominable practice on the ground of poverty.”
The reign of Koang Siu began in 1875, and was marked with vigorous proclamations and warnings to the people to take their children to the orphan asylums that were being established rather than to throw them into the river.[94]
Of the conditions as they exist in modern times, travellers and writers are of one accord—infanticide is horribly prevalent. The conditions vary with different localities.