‘Rotten luck to get a daughter’: Chinese man angered at birth of baby girl blames wife, talks of divorce in controversial online rant
- A businessman in southwestern China rages in viral online posts after his wife gives birth to a daughter instead of a son
- The posts have triggered mass condemnation in a country trying to move past a history of femicide and gender discrimination against girls
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A man in China furious that his newborn baby was a girl instead of a boy has vented on social media, talking about divorce and how he could not be bothered naming his newborn daughter, causing outrage online.
The father, a businessman, surnamed Rao, from Chongqing in southwestern China, was furious and disappointed after his wife gave birth to a baby girl on Tuesday. He soon afterwards expressed his anger in a number of ranting posts on WeChat Moments.
“I can’t even bear staying at the hospital for a single minute. I must have committed evil in my last life, thus my rotten luck to get a daughter now,” he wrote.
Rao said in one post that he had been looking forward to what he assumed would be the birth of a baby boy for the last nine months. He also wrote that he was so disappointed, he couldn’t be bothered choosing a name for his newborn daughter.
He also said in one post that he would divorce his wife as punishment for giving birth to a daughter.
Reaction to the man’s rant went viral on mainland social media, where screenshots of his posts were shared online by one of his WeChat friends. At the time of writing, there were 27,556 comments and 809,684 likes on the Weibo post carrying the story.
Rao admitted to writing the comments, but said the post saying he would like to divorce his wife was from before his daughter was born. But he did not provide any evidence to refute the widely shared screenshots of the comment.
“I have quite an aggressive personality, I tend to go to extremes, but my posts were just a few words of complaint,” he told Jimu News.
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He said that having a son has been his dream, and when he made the posts he had just lost 70,000 yuan (US$10,400) in a scam and was under a lot of stress.
“In the future, I will certainly meet my responsibilities for raising and taking care of my family,” Rao said.
“I don’t have any siblings. Actually both my parents like having a baby girl, now they are looking after their daughter-in-law and granddaughter.”
A man who claimed to be a friend of Rao’s, identified only as Huang, defended him in an interview with Jimu News.
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Huang told the paper that the baby girl is Rao and his wife’s first child by way of explaining his behaviour. He also claimed that Rao’s parents had been angered by his comments and had reprimanded him as a result.
Local police and the Chongqing Women’s Federation have said they are aware of the incident, and the latter said it would offer support if the mother or daughter were at risk.
Public opinion online was swift to condemn Rao for his comments.
One person wrote on Weibo: “He was given birth to by a woman, did he feel unlucky for himself then?”
Another wrote: “When will the feudal idea of having a preference for male offspring over female ones die out?”
In the traditional marriage age range of 20 to 40 there were 20 million more men than women, the data also revealed.
In response to a growing concern at these population trends, the Chinese government last year initiated a three-child policy, replacing the previous two-child policy introduced in 2016. Before that, couples in China were restricted to having just one child for nearly 40 years.
