Gendercide: The Worldwide War on Baby Girls
March 9th, 2010Via: Economist:
XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see article), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’
“Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two policemen [who had accompanied me] held my shoulders in a firm grip. ‘Don’t move, you can’t save it, it’s too late.’
“‘But that’s…murder…and you’re the police!’ The little foot was still now. The policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. ‘Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here,’ [an] older woman said comfortingly. ‘That’s a living child,’ I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail. ‘It’s not a child,’ she corrected me. ‘It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it. Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son. Girl babies don’t count.’”
In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don’t count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women—a figure unprecedented in a country at peace.
The number is based on the sexual discrepancy among people aged 19 and below. According to CASS, China in 2020 will have 30m-40m more men of this age than young women. For comparison, there are 23m boys below the age of 20 in Germany, France and Britain combined and around 40m American boys and young men. So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe’s three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.
Gendercide—to borrow the title of a 1985 book by Mary Anne Warren—is often seen as an unintended consequence of China’s one-child policy, or as a product of poverty or ignorance. But that cannot be the whole story. The surplus of bachelors—called in China guanggun, or “bare branches”— seems to have accelerated between 1990 and 2005, in ways not obviously linked to the one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979. And, as is becoming clear, the war against baby girls is not confined to China.
Parts of India have sex ratios as skewed as anything in its northern neighbour. Other East Asian countries—South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan—have peculiarly high numbers of male births. So, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, have former communist countries in the Caucasus and the western Balkans. Even subsets of America’s population are following suit, though not the population as a whole.
The real cause, argues Nick Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, is not any country’s particular policy but “the fateful collision between overweening son preference, the use of rapidly spreading prenatal sex-determination technology and declining fertility.” These are global trends. And the selective destruction of baby girls is global, too.
Boys are slightly more likely to die in infancy than girls. To compensate, more boys are born than girls so there will be equal numbers of young men and women at puberty. In all societies that record births, between 103 and 106 boys are normally born for every 100 girls. The ratio has been so stable over time that it appears to be the natural order of things.
That order has changed fundamentally in the past 25 years. In China the sex ratio for the generation born between 1985 and 1989 was 108, already just outside the natural range. For the generation born in 2000-04, it was 124 (ie, 124 boys were born in those years for every 100 girls). According to CASS the ratio today is 123 boys per 100 girls. These rates are biologically impossible without human intervention.
The national averages hide astonishing figures at the provincial level. According to an analysis of Chinese household data carried out in late 2005 and reported in the British Medical Journal*, only one region, Tibet, has a sex ratio within the bounds of nature. Fourteen provinces—mostly in the east and south—have sex ratios at birth of 120 and above, and three have unprecedented levels of more than 130. As CASS says, “the gender imbalance has been growing wider year after year.”
Cultures that experience an abundance of one gender over the other typically engage in polygamy to handle the condition for as long as it lasts. Look for the phenomenon of one woman/multiple husbands to arise in China. No doubt it is already going on in the most heavily affected areas. You can’t fool Mother Nature. You try to stack the deck against women and women end up with multiple admirers for life.
i don’t agree that polyandry will emerge. Fraternal polyandry has in the past really only be prevalent in nomadic societies with scarce resources. Hunter-gatherer societies are more likely to be matriarchal, possibly owing to shamanistic practices that serve to decrease jeallousy among males.
i think that the sex-ratio imbalances cited with ultimately cause a massive population crash as women are pressured to only have sons. higher female suicide and women leaving the society (emigration) will make the impalance worse in a vicious cycle. escalating violence and social breakdown will cause societies to implode. if there are no girl babies, there are no women to give birth in 20-30 years time. nature wins. twisted human logic loses.
why this longish article doesn’t address the endgame is a mystery to me…but then again, i hold The Economist in the highest contempt. everything one reads in The Economist needs to be viewed through a special lens 😉
I could see rampant homosexuality, probably undercover but accepted, kind of like what some Muslim sects practice in Afg, and whatnot, being a result…not critisizing homosexuality, but these guys will want to get laid at some point and if all the girls are taken, well, young son there will look mighty appealing…having been to Afg and seen how common-place these customs are, I speak from knowledge and without judgement. Culture is culture….
over the past few thousand years, many highly evolved human societies have featured significant levels of same-sex relationships. but the sex-ratio imbalance talked about in the article is a whole new game. if anything, loss of young males though war and other violence, as well as “winner takes all” type patriarchy led to polygyny. but this extreme lack of eligible women sort of turn whole countries into deep-sea oil rigs, or galleons with no R&R port on the horizon. forever. it will not end well. (did someone mention US prisons? oh sh.t)