That woman shortage

[con's fly is open]

Male surplus a social time bomb

CBC News Viewpoint | March 3, 2006 | Sylvia Yu


I was visiting a foster home for orphans one day near Beijing when I felt overwhelmed by the sight of so many little girls. All of them had been abandoned beside a road, a doorstep, or under a bridge.

There are too many harrowing stories to tell of how they were found. Most had been cast away simply because of their gender. China's cultural traditions and stringent one-child policy that was enforced for about 25 years are to blame.

At the foster home, I met an elderly couple visiting from Portland, Ore. The grey-haired grandmother proudly showed me a photo of her adoptive granddaughter. As far as I can tell from the picture, she is a vibrant, rosy-cheeked 15-year-old Chinese girl. But I was astounded to find out that this girl, (I'll call her Maya), was left in a garbage can to die.

Maya is definitely one of the fortunate ones. She could have ended up begging for money in China, or worse, but her adoption has opened up opportunities before her.

It's no secret that more boys than girls are born in China.

However, the gender imbalance has become more pronounced since the 1980s when a tough state family-planning strategy was implemented, limiting families to just one child.

The aim was to keep the country's population at 1.2 billion by 2000.

But when forced to choose, parents ended up favouring boys.

Boys carry on the family name and are prized in rural areas because they could handle heavy labour. Chinese parents also expect that it's the sons who will shoulder the responsibility of caring for them as they age.

A national census in 2000 found that there were about 19 million more boys than girls under the age of 15 living across China. There are about 117 boys for every 100 girls nationwide and in some regions, there are as many as 130 men for every 100 women.

Officials say the one-child policy has prevented 300 million births over the past 25 years.

In 1994, it became illegal to abort a fetus on the basis of gender, but the official state Xinhua News Agency reports that doctors are still performing the procedure.

A 1994 United Nations report says there are currently about 60 million missing women in China.

Tragically, these women are missing because of what some call "gendercide" - parents who've aborted or killed their baby girls.

One UN official said the preference for boys in China could lead to an increase in prostitution, human trafficking and general social unrest.

With millions of men unable to find a life partner, they may resort to prostitution or to buying brides.

Child marriages and forced marriages are recurring again and will get worse if the sex ratio is not checked, says Tian Xueyuan of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in the Peoples Daily state media.

Researchers also say large-scale unemployment looms as the excess labour pool makes it more difficult for men to find jobs.

The gender imbalance is sending a chill down the very spines of government officials who fear social instability will rise and threaten China's rapid growth as an economic superpower.

They're calling for serious measures to deal with the issue by 2010.

"Some 30 to 40 million marriage-age men in China would live a single's life by 2020 if the practice of [pre-natal] screening in the embryo stage is not held in check," says Li Weixiong, a government family planning official. "Such serious gender disproportion poses a major threat to the healthy, harmonious and sustainable growth of the nation's population and would trigger such crimes and social problems as mercenary marriage, abduction of women and prostitution."

Some sad stories are already emerging about the impact the surplus of men is having, such as two brothers sharing a wife or first cousins marrying one another.

Bride trafficking is also quite rampant and women have been sold as brides for $60 Cdn to disabled farmers in rural areas.

One man in a village outside of Beijing had married a mentally challenged woman because he was too poor to afford a wedding and attract an eligible woman. His wife ran away and left him to fend for himself and his young daughter.

A Beijing resident also told me a few years ago about bachelor villages on the outskirts of the city that house hundreds of unmarried "undesirable" men. They are extremely poor, likely illiterate and unable to attract a wife.

Even finding a suitable marriage partner is more of a challenge today than it was 10 years ago and it's not going to get any easier, says Ms. An Qiu Yan, a professional matchmaker in Beijing.

She says that more girls from the countryside are moving to the cities hoping to attract a rich husband and find work.

These women don't want to be married to farmers. Besides, women and men alike are becoming more selective when it comes to choosing a spouse.

"Men have more choice, even married men have more women to choose from in the cities," says An. "So women are more worried about marriage. But in the countryside there are more men and so men are more worried about marriage."

There certainly aren't any concrete solutions to the problem of too many men in China. However, a nationwide "Care for Girls" campaign is trying to close the gender ratio gap and improve the quality of life for families with girls.

Some provinces promote free medical treatment for girls Textbooks in rural areas now include more teachings on gender equality and some counties also offer support funds of $260 Cdn, exemption from taxes and tuition fees.

Crackdowns on selective abortions are taking place. But is it too little, too late? And how do you change deep-rooted thinking?

I wonder what will become of the 40 million lonely bachelors in China. Will the government have to open the door to women from other countries so that they can marry these men?

And would these women be willing to marry bachelors who are largely uneducated and poor? More radical and creative measures are needed immediately.

[con's fly is open]

It occurs to me that laowai men dating local women could become a sensitive subject in the future. Perhaps it already is.

[Mr Nobody]

I have read a learned treatise that has actually checked it's figures and it states that there is no evidence that the suppositions such as found in the text above are supported in reality. Evidence suggests that these problems in no way change, in other societies that have had imbalances. They are no more likely to go to war, no increases in violence, prostitution etc doesn't change, things just go on.

The idea that "logically" there should be problems doesn't seem to actually happen in real life.

Oh, and more boys are born than girls IN EVERY BLOODY society. That is the way things are. It is biologically fixed. i think, from memory, about 51 to 49 percent

[Ruth]

It would be wonderful if all these awful social predictions didn't come true, Mr. N. I hope that learned treatise is accurate.

But the Chinese have created a much greater than 51/49 gender split by killing female babies before they are born or abandoning them afterward.

[Newbs]

When I think of the Chinese couples that I got to know, those with a girl seemed happy enough. Still, they were people in the cities, where folks may be more educated, have greater social mobility, yabba dah, yabba dah.

If I were Chinese, which I'm not, (Well, duh!) I'd be quite happy to father a girl. I know that she is going to, likely as not, have a far easier time of finding a suitable partner and will have quite a few to choose from.

This attitude to girls is probably another example of the rural/urban divide in China.

[Crippler]

daoding said:

Oh, and more boys are born than girls IN EVERY BLOODY society. That is the way things are. It is biologically fixed. i think, from memory, about 51 to 49 percent

True oh learned one! However, by the time they are young adults most of that is taken care of higher death rates due to violence in boys and of course the historical tadition of feeding young males to the guns of other lands. Of course as we send more women into the military we are helping to keep the gap!

[Steiner]

crippler said:

daoding said:

Oh, and more boys are born than girls IN EVERY BLOODY society. That is the way things are. It is biologically fixed. i think, from memory, about 51 to 49 percent

I was under the impression that it was the opposite - 51 to 49 in favor of girls. The article I've posted below states that nearly everywhere else, girls outnumber boys.

Anyway, here's an article from Foreign Policy about the same thing, also taking the doom and gloom view:

The Geopolitics of Sexual Frustration
By Martin Walker
March/April 2006

Asia has too many boys. They can’t find wives, but they just might find extreme nationalism instead. It’s a dangerous imbalance for a region already on edge.

The lost boys of Prof. Albert Macovski are upon us. Twenty years ago, the ultrasound scanning machine came into widespread use in Asia. The invention of Macovski, a Stanford University researcher, the device quickly gave pregnant women a cheap and readily available means to determine the sex of their unborn children. The results, by the million, are now coming to maturity in Bangladesh, China, India, and Taiwan. By choosing to give birth to males—and to abort females—millions of Asian parents have propelled the region into an extraordinary experiment in the social effects of gender imbalance.

Back in 1990, Nobel Prize-winning Indian economist Amartya Sen was one of the first to call attention to the phenomenon of an estimated 100 million “missing women” in Asia. Nearly everywhere else, women outnumber men, in Europe by 7 percent, and in North America by 3.4 percent. Concern now is shifting to the boys for whom these missing females might have provided mates as they reach the age that Shakespeare described as nothing but stealing and fighting and “getting of wenches with child.”

Now there are too few wenches. Thanks in large part to the introduction of the ultrasound machine, Mother Nature’s usual preference for about 105 males to 100 females has grown to around 120 male births for every 100 female births in China. The imbalance is even higher in some locales—136 males to 100 females on the island of Hainan, an increasingly prosperous tourist resort, and 135 males to 100 females in central China’s Hubei Province. Similar patterns can be found in Taiwan, with 119 boys to 100 girls; Singapore, 118 boys to 100 girls; South Korea, 112 boys to 100 girls; and parts of India, 120 boys to 100 girls.

China, India, and other nations have outlawed the use of prenatal diagnostic techniques to select the sex of an unborn child. But bribery and human ingenuity have made it easy for prospective parents to skirt the law; a suitably compensated ultrasound technician need only smile or frown at the expectant mother.

Many of the excess boys will be poor and rootless, a lumpenproletariat without the consolations of sexual partners and family. Prostitution, sex tourism, and homosexuality may ease their immediate urges, but Asian societies are witnessing far more dramatic solutions. Women now risk being kidnapped and forced not only into prostitution but wedlock. Chinese police statistics recorded 65,236 arrests for female trafficking in 1990–91 alone. Updated numbers are hard to come by, but it’s apparent that the problem remains severe. In September 2002, a Guangxi farmer was executed for abducting and selling more than 100 women for $120 to $360 each. Mass sexual frustration is thus adding a potent ingredient to an increasingly volatile regional cocktail of problems that include surging economic growth, urbanization, drug abuse, and environmental degradation.

Understanding the effect of the testosterone overload may be most important in China, the rising Asian superpower. Prompted by expert warnings, the Chinese authorities are already groping for answers. In 2004, President Hu Jintao asked 250 of the country’s senior demographers to study whether the country’s one-child policy—which sharply accentuates the preference for males—should be revised. Beijing expects that it may have as many as 40 million frustrated bachelors by 2020. The regime, always nervous about social control, fears that they might generate social and political instability.

Brigham Young University political scientist Valerie Hudson—the leading scholar on the phenomenon of male overpopulation in Asia—sees historical evidence for these concerns. In 19th-century northern China, drought, famine, and locust invasions apparently provoked a rash of female infanticide. According to Hudson, the region reached a ratio of 129 men to every 100 women. Roving young men organized themselves into bandit gangs, built forts, and eventually came to rule an area of some 6 million people in what was known as the Nien Rebellion. No modern-day rebellion appears to be on the horizon, but China watchers are already seeing signs of growing criminality.

The state’s response to crime and social unrest could prove to be a defining factor for China’s political future. The CIA asked Hudson to discuss her dramatic suggestion that “in 2020 it may seem to China that it would be worth it to have a very bloody battle in which a lot of their young men could die in some glorious cause.” Other experts aren’t so alarmed. Military observers point out that China is moving from a conscription army to a leaner, professional military. And other scholars contend that China’s population is now aging so fast that the elderly may well balance the surge of frustrated young males to form a calmer and more peaceful nation.

It would be reassuring to assume that China’s economic growth will itself solve the problem, as prosperity removes the traditional economic incentives for poor peasants to have sons who can work the land rather than daughters who might require costly dowries. But the numbers don’t support that theory. Indeed, the steepest imbalance between male and female infants is found in more prosperous regions, such as Hainan Island. And census data from India suggest that slum-dwellers and the very poor tend to raise a higher proportion of female children than more prosperous families.

The long-term implications of the gender imbalance are largely guesswork because there is no real precedent for imbalances on such a scale. Some Chinese experts speculate, off the record, that there might be a connection between the shortage of women and the spread of open gay life since 2001, when homosexuality was deleted from the official Classification of Mental Disorders. It is possible to dream up all kinds of scenarios: Mumbai and Shanghai may soon rival San Francisco as gay capitals. A Beijing power struggle between cautious old technocrats and aggressive young nationalists may be decided by mobs of rootless young men, demanding uniforms, rifles, and a chance to liberate Taiwan. More likely, the organized crime networks that traffic in women will shift their deliveries toward Asia and build a brothel culture large enough to satisfy millions of sexually frustrated young men.

Whatever the outcome, the consequences of Albert Macovski’s useful invention will be with us for some time. When they called him “the most inventive person at Stanford,” they didn’t know the half of it.

[Lotus Eater]

Will it make it easier for we women in China to find a nice guy??

[teleplayer]

steiner said:

crippler said:

daoding said:

Oh, and more boys are born than girls IN EVERY BLOODY society. That is the way things are. It is biologically fixed. i think, from memory, about 51 to 49 percent

I was under the impression that it was the opposite - 51 to 49 in favor of girls. The article I've posted below states that nearly everywhere else, girls outnumber boys.

Anyway, here's an article from Foreign Policy about the same thing, also taking the doom and gloom view:

The Geopolitics of Sexual Frustration
By Martin Walker
March/April 2006
.......
It would be reassuring to assume that China’s economic growth will itself solve the problem, as prosperity removes the traditional economic incentives for poor peasants to have sons who can work the land rather than daughters who might require costly dowries. But the numbers don’t support that theory. Indeed, the steepest imbalance between male and female infants is found in more prosperous regions, such as Hainan Island. And census data from India suggest that slum-dwellers and the very poor tend to raise a higher proportion of female children than more prosperous families.

One can see the male bias among Chinese doctoral students and postdocs in USANIA...especially the women. (Oh, and I'm in a School of Public Health where things like infanticide are topics de rigueur) While you/they note the son is preferred for work in the fields, yet it's noted the imbalance tends to be in urban areas, the words I hear are, "the son will take care of his mother. The daughter will be obligated to her husband." This from women with PhDs in highly technical fields, often with professional parents-women who are somewhat westernized. It's as if they don't value their own abilities to care for their future and to assist their parents. This too from those who are the lone child. This feudal bias goes far deeper than another swordsman on the wall and farmer in the field. This is somehow tied to what seems to be the number of women I've encountered who will leave their marriages as soon as that one child is in school; i.e., leave the disinterested/non-attentive husband with hopes of a son to care for them in their old age.

I know, unsubstantiated conjecture, but there's some weird current flowing down deep.

[con's fly is open]

I've heard the gender imbalance in the West, where there is little or no sex selection, and no significant culling via war, as coming from medical technology. Male infants tend to be more frail than females, and have a higher natural mortality rate in the first year. Science now prevents them from dying, so now we XY's outnumber the XX's.

[Lotus Eater]

So that means that the western gene pool is getting messed up? We'll end up creating more and more 'less than perfect' human beings?

[con's fly is open]

Poor people are having a high proportion of the children in Canada. Actually, overall we don't even replace ourselves. Canada is where family lines go to dwindle.

[teleplayer]

connell said:

Canada is where family lines go to dwindle.

Interesting phrase, Con, "...where family lines go to dwindle." There is a theory about "terminal genes. The sons don't seek mates to reproduce, essentially killing off the family line. My brother and I fit that description.
The thought goes that the genetic mix knows that it has timed out and can't make what's necessary for the coming changes. The glitch in this is when you have cultures which push reproduction as a "must" and an "obligation." If you don't need "cannon fodder" nor strong backs/weak minds in the field, that obligation to the family pack is a moot point. Dui ba?

[OZgronk]

During my 9 years spent in the airforce, in the late 60s and early 70s, everyone noticed and in fact took for granted, that only girls would be born within the married quarters. A boy coming along was a rarity indeed.

Now the general fitness, soundness of mind etc of the men was of a uniformly high level so we should have all had equal chances of siring a son, but we suspected that the high doses of electromagnetic radiation that we were all subject to was the cause.

When I say high levels of electromagnetic radiation I am talking for instance of my particular workplace, an early warning radar station, where any bird that happened to fly past would just drop to the ground dead.

Those working on planes and on the airfields had high powered radars and transmitters zapping around nearby, even though all these devices were supposed to be switched off when the planes were on the ground, but they can't test these things without switching them on.

Aircrew had the double whammy of having the radars and transmitters producing microwaves the equivalent of a 1,000 microwave ovens perched a few inches in front of their crotch, plus solar radiation unobstructed by the ionosphere.

The solar radiation I believe, also produces more baby girls within the civilian aviation fraternity too.

We waited 6 years after I left the RAAF before starting a family, and have a son, the only boy within our close circle of ex airforce mates who had started their families whilst still serving (seven families, 15 girls one boy).

What has this got to do with China's mix of kids? Probably nothing, but I think it is an interesting side story.

Does anyone know of any recent studies in this area?

[teleplayer]

You can google for RAF or USAF studies on radiation,when you have time. US Navy BUMED studied submarine sailors in 1970. Submariners have more female offspring than male. When I was in, the prevailing thought was the slighly lower oxygen contact when at sea resulted in this phenomenon. BUMEd in this article says not conclusive. They did find Sonar techs (electromagnetic radiation) had lower male to female ration offsring than rest of group. This study was on Nuke subs.

www.ingentaconnect.com/search/expand?pub=infobike://amsus/zmm/2004/00000169/00000011/art00020&unc=

You'll have to paste the link. I can't seem to make the whole string "hot." Even started a space below. Ideas on what I'm doing wrong IT gurus? Shenme??

[Lotus Eater]

Scuba divers seem to have more daughters than sons as well. No stats - just observations of my diving mates and their families.

[cheekygal]

Thats why one of the things I am interested in doing is sex equality advising. The equality of men and women is not only about women being able to speak out - there are still so many issues regarding the rights and situation of both men and women in the whole world and in China per se. Emancipation of women is only one side of the whole equality issue. I consider myself a moderate feminist - I guess *moderation* is coming from the very fact that I don't want to drive a bulldozer and I know that I need a man in my life not just for *breeding* but as a soul-companion Yet I believe in equality of men and women and it hurts me seeing how females at times are treated in various parts of the world for different reasons/traditions/perceptions

[Crippler]

Sometimes I think equality is the wrong word as it imposes a vision of sameness!. Different but equal is closer but still seems a bit of a misnomer. In general given rights, freedoms and opportunities we need to improve women's conditions. However, physiology, physical structure and even emotional and mental structure are different. While I believe strongly in equal and fair treatment, I have yet to see anyone devise a system that can actually attain that.

Take out the crying about past abuse and the emotional tirades about males abusing power, etc.., and then try to come up with a rational description of equality that works in the real world. It is difficult to do. Do we expect the exact same performance from both sexes? Where there are differences how do we measure the value of the difference? Too heavy a subject for me! I just try to treat all people with respect!

[Lotus Eater]

Do we expect the exact same performance from both sexes?

We don't expect the same performance from people within the one gender - why would we expect it from people of a different gender?

Therefore when we run the arguments about equality it is useful to take into account the differences within genders as well.

[cheekygal]

See a full definition of EQUALITY have just been given . Men and women are NOT the same. They can't be. But they are the same by spirit. And as it was mentioned already they have the same right for life, opportunities etc But they have different responsibilities and capacities and one can't be a substitute to another. That's what I believe in

[Lotus Eater]

I would still maintain that there is as much variation within genders as across genders and therefore basically the only ENDURING difference is the abilty to create and nourish children. All other responsibilities and capacities are highly variable.

[Non-Dave]

My 2 cents worth:

Stop focusing on what WE (male or female according to your biology) get and focus on what we give.

Try:
Respect - showing it to others
Support - help people get what they need to do what is important to them
An open mind to "differentness"
A bit of appreciation and acknowledgement expressed from time to time
A touch of self-esteem mixes in nicely too.

[Dr. Gonzo]

A shortage of women was never a problem for this laowai in China. Not a boast: I wasn't the only one to experience this.
Jealous reactions from local men were also common. Whether this had to do with the shortage or with racism, I'm not sure. Possibly the latter, imho.

[Quint]

I think Non Dave has a point.

From my personal understanding such problems cannot possibly be easily solved outwardly and by law.

Koreans have sometimes one-three abortions before giving birth to a son, its most important throughout Asia. If the mother firstly has a girl she sometimes is treated by the (husbands parents) as if she was a curse on the family.

doctors are not allowed to tell the sex to parents often, but for a few dollars more .. then a few dollars more..