Little victims of the free market

Yesterday D and I went downtown (a part of Zhuhai called Gongbei) to do some shopping. Gongbei is kind of like Atlantic City -- a tourist attraction filled with lots of vice for sale (ex., fake designer handbags, fake designer fashion of all stripes, sex, illegal copies of DVD's, fake money -- you name it, it's sold down there). We typically go to Gongbei to stock up on Jim Beam (which is available at one of the legit department stores) and DVDs (illegal copies, of course, since I don't think that there is anywhere on the mainland where one can buy legit DVDs).

Gongbei is probably the most modern part of Zhuhai, but it's also my least favorite part. It's usually crowded and there are lots of pickpockets and other shady characters about. It's also typically overrun by wealthy expats -- annoying old white guys (usually British or Australian in this part of China) with their 20-year old Chinese wives. Anyway.

Yesterday D and I saw something in Gongbei that made it seem more sordid than usual: child beggars.

The Internet is rife with first-hand and journalistic accounts of child beggars in China. A lot of these kids are sold into this life by their parents. Child poverty is an increasing problem here, as many country kids are abandoned by parents who migrate to the city in hopes of finding work:

As China's cities continue to develop, the government expects the migrant-worker population -- and the numbers of left-behind children -- will rise. The State Council Research Office reported in April that the 200 million people in nation's rural migrant-labor force make an average of about $60 to $100 a month. Many of these workers were just getting by on subsistence farming before leaving.

But we hadn't seen any children begging until last night*, probably because we're living in a smallish town in a relatively wealthy part of China.

The scene we saw was this: a little girl (maybe 5 yrs. old) and a boy (maybe 10) were working the street together. Rather than simply asking for money, the girl was performing acrobatics for the passersby. A plastic bowl sat on the ground in front of here so that viewers could leave a donation. The boy sat a small distance away, keeping an eye on her.

The girl had two tricks that she would perform. First she did some backwards tumbling (like continuous back-walkovers). Second, she balanced herself upside down on a tripod, used her mouth to anchor herself to the tripod, and contorted her body into an impossible shape. Then, while balanced upside down by her mouth, set herself spinning -- the tripod allowed her to spin around and around and around.

Both the little girl and the little boy were tiny, but the girl seemed especially small (or perhaps she was younger than I thought). When we walked past her, we could see that her face and clothes were dirty -- the kind of dirty that you see on the faces and clothes of homeless people. Even though it was cold out (the temps have been low here this last week -- around 40 degrees Fahrenheit), she only had on slacks, an acrylic sweater, and a piece of cloth tied around her head (instead of a hat). She had no gloves. The boy wasn't really dressed much better.

A young man and his wife/girlfriend stopped to talk to the little girl. The man knelt down to talk to the child, and the wife/girlfriend tried to pull him away. The Chinese, as a rule, don't interfere with strangers. Even if they see someone they don't know being pick-pocketed or something, they'll usually just look the other way. Also, I've never seen a local give money to any beggar here. So, the fact that the man stopped to talk to this girl was out of the ordinary. Anyway, the man appeared to be asking the little girl questions, but whatever he was asking her was making her cry (I don't think out of cruelty, though). The wife/girlfriend continued to try to pull him away, and she finally succeeded. They both went on their way.

What does one do in a situation like this? What is the appropriate response when you're a foreigner in a county where you don't speak the language and don't understand the culture?


*Note: We have seen lots of kids involved in begging, just not kids begging on their own. For example, we see lots of adults, usually women, who will sit on the sidewalk and beg for money while holding a small child or baby on the lap.