SOUNDING like a cross between "summary execution" and "final solution", the term "summary resolution" made last night's Channel 4 documentary, Return to the Dying Rooms, one of the most contentious in years.
The original The Dying Rooms was screened last June and no one who saw it will ever forget the sight of Mei Ming (No Name), the baby girl left to starve to death in a Chinese orphanage. The film was dedicated to the dying Mei Ming, her disbelieving gaze staring out through the sores which encrusted her eyes. It was almost too painful, too shaming, to look back.
Mei Ming, who died four days after being filmed, stared out at us again last night. Her plight was no less horrific second time around but the context in which it had taken place had darkened beyond belief. This revised version of the original documentary alleged that there have been thousands of Mei Mings. Medical staff in state orphanages, the programme charged, sentenced thousands of abandoned Chinese babies to death by starvation. The practice is known in China as "summary resolution".
It may be invidious to distinguish between casual neglect and deliberate neglect in so far as the results of both are liable to be equally horrific. Yet, casual neglect can seem merely irresponsible beside the planned horrors of deliberate neglect mass manslaughter, perhaps, as opposed to mass murder. This latest trip to China's Dying Rooms accused the authorities up to state ruling level of deliberate mass murder. Mei Ming's was not an isolated case.
Most of the update in last night's story was based on a report by Human Rights Watch after a visit by some of its members to the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute. The group's report claimed that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as many as 90 per cent of orphans died, within one year of admission to the Shanghai orphanage. Nationally, the death toll was put at "at least 50 per cent".
Return to the Dying Rooms was astonishing television. Although most of it had been seen before, allegations that the starving to death of children was so widespread made it more than just an aftershock to the horrific original. It was horrific in its own right.
But, there are other contexts in which this documentary must be considered. China, with its new economic muscle, is not exactly flavour of the month in the West. Had you watched Bay watch on Network 2 on Sunday, you would have seen that the plot of this hugely popular nonsense preached a nasty little sermon against China's one child policy.
In China's defence, it clearly has to try to control its 1.2 billion population. Starving abandoned female babies to death cannot possibly be an acceptable way of attempting to do this. But with the world's population growing hugely the main fear which Return to the Dying Rooms generates is the prospect that China may be only the first country to adopt such barbarous human culling. Isolating China will help nobody least of all the unfortunates in its appalling orphanages.