Human breast milk has become a new luxury for China’s rich, with some firms offering wet-nurse services, a report said, provoking outrage and disgust among Web users yesterday.
Xinxinyu, a domestic staff agency in the booming city of Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong, provided wet nurses for newborns, the sick and other adults who pay high prices for the milk’s fine nutrition, the Southern Metropolis Daily said.
“Adult [clients] can drink it directly through breastfeeding, or they can always drink it from a breast pump if they feel embarrassed,” the report quoted company owner Lin Jun as saying.
Wet nurses serving adults are paid about 16,000 yuan (US$2,610) a month — more than four times the Chinese average — and those who are “healthy and good looking” can earn even more, the report said.
Traditional beliefs in some parts of China hold that human breast milk has the best and most easily digestible nutrition for people who are ill.
However, the report sparked heated debate in the media and on Chinese social media, with most users condemning the service as unethical.
“This adds to China’s problem of treating women as consumer goods and the moral degradation of China’s rich,” Cao Baoyin, a writer and regular commentator in various Chinese media, said on his blog.
Xinxinyu has been ordered to suspend its operations and had its business license revoked for multiple reasons, including missing three years of annual checks, regulators in Shenzhen said on Thursday, although the wet-nurse service was not among the factors they cited.
Company officials could not be reached for comment.
There were nearly 140,000 postings on Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblog, on the topic by yesterday afternoon.
In an online poll, almost 90 percent of participants voted against the service, saying it “violated ethical values,” while a fraction over 10 percent deemed it a “normal business practice.”
“People become perverts when they are too rich and tired of other forms of entertainment. This is disguised pornography,” a user with the online handle ricky_gao said.
White Lotus, another weibo writer, said: “Please do not force motherhood to lose its grace and become ridiculous.”
Other postings voiced cynical approval.
“It’s just a business, nothing to blame it for,” A Xiao Shuai said. “People are insensitive about ethics when there is money on the table.”
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS